Introduction: Children’s lives and the Indian context

Abstract

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), IndiaIt would be safe by now to assume that the idea of 'multiple childhoods' is not something that researchers within the field of childhood studies require to be convinced about. Multiple childhoods was an exciting epistemic shift precisely because its social constructionist lens released the concept of 'childhood' from its normative moorings, thereby making it available as an object of historical, sociological and ethnographic study. This has helped produce substantial research that has denaturalized the assumed universality of concepts like biological age, adult-child differentiation, notions of child-care, children's work as well as the affective investment that adults make in children. More than 20 years on, I seek to define a broad outline for 'childhood studies' in the Indian context. The contours of this definition engage with the tension that continues to haunt the discipline of 'childhood studies': namely that between an emphasis on a singular 'ideal' child as a normative index or what has been variously referred to as childhood 'essentialism' (Nieuwenhuys, 2010) or its 'enduring structural form' (Qvortrup, 2009), on the one hand, and on the other the apparent expansiveness of the concept 'multiple childhoods'. This tension assumes greater moral resonance when its material form is that of the poor non-Western child. Theorists on Indian modernity have been engaged in debating for more than several decades now the broader issues that this tension raises. While the figure of the child has not necessarily been part of their debates, existing writing on Indian modernity can inform a creative re-articulation of this tension, thereby expanding our theoretical lens in understanding non-Western childhoods.The landscape of 'childhood studies' contends with this tension primarily because its rise as a discipline parallels the growing hegemony of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) within international policy discourse (Burman and Stacey, 2010), producing a complex inter-relationship between the open-endedness of academic interrogation and determinate policy concerns. The CRC phenomenally expanded the global focus on children and set in place a new vocabulary with which to represent these lives. Located within this emergent framework, childhood studies has produced research that situates itself within this new discourse of rights, while simultaneously generating some of the most trenchant and insightful critiques of the bourgeois hegemony that underlies the

A “snapshot” of physical activity and food habits among private school children in India

“…Many have emphasized children’s right to speak about their own lives but urge caution in interpreting participatory research as inherently authentic or generalizable (Balagopalan, 2011; Wickenden and Kembhavi-Tam, 2014). …”

“…Childhood experiences vary considerably across India with factors such as religion, caste and class, gender, and location (Balagopalan, 2011; Nieuwenhuys, 2009). Our sample was not designed to be representative of Indian children; we collected data in one city and included only private school students, who are typically from wealthier families, more connected to global markets, and at higher risk of overweight than other children (Misra et al, 2011; Swaminathan and Vaz, 2013).…”

‘Listen to the Child’: Law, Sex, and the Child Wife in Indian Historiography

“…Feminist scholarship certainly helps complicate one of the key concepts generated through the interdisciplinary study of childhoodthe lens of "multiple childhoods"which has been credited with making it possible to explore the "historically located and socially dense canvas" of children's lives, to challenge a singular normative understanding of childhood, to acknowledge differences in childhood as ideology and experience, and to grant children agency. 29 In her comprehensive appraisal of multiple childhoods (as also in her excellent work on child labor in postcolonial India) Sarada Balagopalan points out that while the idea creates a space for the conceptualization of "other"(third world/indigenous) childhoods, it has certain limitations, of which I draw attention to a few here. "Other" childhoods appear to be deviations or derivations from a singular or universal childhood, which allows for the bourgeois western construct of childhood to reign as the "civilized ideal."…”

“… Balagopalan, ‘Introduction’, 294. For an excellent sample of recent interdisciplinary scholarship on children (not surveyed here), see the other articles in this volume on childhoods in India.…”

Whose Values? Young People's Aspirations and Experiences of Schooling in Andhra Pradesh, India

“…The a‐historical, context‐free stance of human capabilities approaches can be challenged by a political economy perspective that locates the experiences of children caught in the tensions between new opportunities created by increased formal education, yet uneven economic growth and development (Pells, ). Furthermore, as Balagopalan (, p. 295) reminds us, the situation of children in India cannot be understood simply as a snapshot in time. It must be embedded not only in an understanding of questions of ‘caste, religion, class and gender that frame children's everyday lives’, but also in relation to (post‐colonial) histories, economy and politics.…”