Academic literature on the topic 'Childhood, India, Raj, Colonialism'

Many colonial regimes appropriate traditional symbols of power to enhance authority. In many cases this appropriation results in the hardening of more transitory political divisions among subject people into ethnic, national, or tribal ones. Colonialism often, in essence, creates different identities for subject peoples. For example, the East India Company (E.I.C.) and royal colonial government in India manipulated caste and religion to carry out a policy of divide and rule. Moreover, the E.I.C. and later the Raj attempted to create a European-style landed elite that could promote development of agriculture, maintain social control in the countryside and, perhaps most important, collect taxes owed to the government. The Raj attempted to place the structures of power that evolved within the framework of the symbols of Moghul legitimacy, going so far as to create a hybrid traditional style of architecture used in many public buildings that mixed elements from both Hindu and Muslim buildings. In South Africa, colonial legislation, as seen in the process begun by the Glen Gray Act of 1894, resulted in the proletarianization of the African population by creating tribal reservations without enough resources to support all the people often arbitrarily defined as members of a particular tribe. And, as seen in studies of mine labor, coloniallegislation also defined a distinctive legal status for workers.

Dalit conversion to Christianity has a long history, predating Dr Ambedkar’s call for conversion in 1935. The contexts of conversion are many; however, the strong urge among Dalits to escape the oppressive, dehumanizing socio-spiritual condition remains the chief motive. The colonial administration, and even before that, the missionaries, were the first to make interventions in the lives of the Dalits, providing access to education, employment, healthcare, and mobility. Consequently many Dalits converted to Christianity en masse. However, post conversion, they became “doubly marginalized” (Omvedt, 2009) both in terms of caste and religion. Several attacks on Dalit Christians in colonial as well as post-independence India illustrate these two bases of victimization. A few writers, such as Bama, Imayam, and Raj Gouthaman, have attempted to explore the lived experience of Dalit Christians with a focus on caste within the Catholic Church. Kalyan Rao’s Telugu novel Antarani vasantham ( Untouchable Spring) is the first novel that seriously engages with the complex of Dalit conversions and in an epic fashion explores the lived experience and struggle of Telugu Dalits and Dalit Christians in history from the colonial times to the present. The primary focus of this article is to explore Kalyan Rao’s representation of Dalit experience using the optics of mission history and liberation and Dalit theologies, which I argue, enable us to contextualize the novel’s representation of Dalit habitus.

This paper will examine literary representations of children as earning members of society against the history of child labour in India, as a means of understanding the relationship between class, labour, nationalism and childhood. It is part of my ongoing attempt to examine formulations of childhood in the Global South as a way of engaging with the concept of ‘multiple childhoods’ and examining their position vis-à-vis global, universal (and, according to scholars like Emer O' Sullivan, Western) paradigms of childhood. In the wake of The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2016, the historical and constitutional journey India embarks on is examined, beginning with the Indian Factory Act, 1881, along the path of its nascent nationhood, to The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986 and the subsequent Amendment. The focus is on Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie and Anita Desai's The Village by the Sea as texts which portray two different modes of thinking about labouring children. Applying Viviana Zelizer's definitions of the ‘uselessness’ and ‘usefulness’ of children, my paper studies these two literary representations of useful childhood in India, published at different points in India's journey as a nation, in a political and historical continuum within which the futurity of a young country is embodied by the willing labour of youth.

Given their sheer numbers, it is hardly surprising that the fate of peasants during British Rule in India should have become a principal index for evaluating its successes and failures. Since the Raj was much more than another effete political superimposition on supposedly timeless villages, the question of agrarian growth or stagnation during its currency is intertwined with more general issues. In so far as colonialism meant a sizable expansion of trade to and from the rural areas, its impact on village social structure in India bears comparison with that of a modern market on peasantries in other parts of the world. Perhaps, the classic case of a peasantry coming face to face with a growing market happened in Russia between 1860 and 1930. The history of that period has generated conceptual discussion about the dynamics of peasant society. The possibility of some of those ideas shedding light on the situation in India has prompted Indo-Russian contrasts and comparisons in agrarian history on more than one occasion (Charlesworth: 1979; Stein: 1984). As a sequel to these writings the Russian debate is considered here briefly in order to suggest some ways in which it might be useful in the Indian context.

AbstractWithin a year of Indian independence, the Communist Party of India declared independence to be a false dawn and the whole Socialist bloc within the ruling Indian National Congress cut its ties with the national government. The speed with which the left disengaged from what had been a patriotic alliance under colonialism surprised many at the time and has perplexed historians ever since. Some have looked to the wider context of the Cold War to explain the onset of dissent within the Indian left. This paper points instead to the neglected domestic context, examining the lines of inclusion and exclusion that were drawn up in the process of the making of the new Indian constitution. Once in power, Congress leaders recalibrated their relationship with their former friends at the radical end of the political spectrum. Despite some of the well-known differences among leading Congress personalities, they spoke as one on industrial labour and the illegitimacy of strikes as a political weapon in the first year of national rule and declared advocates of class politics to be enemies of the Indian state. Congress thus attempted to sideline the Socialists and Communists and brand them as unacceptable in the new regime. This paper focuses on this first year of independence, emphasizing how rapidly the limits of Indian democracy were set in place.

Measles is one of the disease which is amenable to eradication, but in India measles isstill a major cause of morbidity and significant contributor to childhood mortality. Inthe present study. Infectious disease hospital records for a period of five & half yearswere analysed. It was found that 253 measles cases were diagnosed & underwenttreatment. Out of 253, 179 ( 70.7%) were males and 74 ( 29.2%) were females. Fourtyeight (18.9%) were between 7-12 months of age. Maximum cases i.e. 166 ( 65.6%)were registered during months of March, April, May, & June. A significant proportionof cases i.e. 54 (21%) developed measles, inspite of immunization.measles still remain endemic with most casesoccuring in young children & infants.3In India,measles vaccine was first made available in 1978and has been reccommended for children aged 9-15 months. Vaccination against measlesPoliomyelitis, Diphtheria , Tetanus, Pertussis andtuberculosis is provided free to all infants in India,through the National Health Services and thecoverage rate is >85%.41. S.M.S. Medical College, Jaipur, India.2. Directorate of Medical & Health Services, Govt. of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India.Address for correspondence : Dr. Monika Rathore46, Shiv Raj Niketen ColonyVaishali Nagar, Jaipur, (Rajasthan),IndiaEmail: rathoremonika@rediffmail.comKey Words: Measles, Immunised Children, India.

The authors begin the book with „Who “we” are‟….which puts them in the context of their childhood and young age which was influenced by the Nationalist Movement, Charisma od Gandhiji, Alexander Dumas, Maxim Gorky, Mulk Raj Anand, and many other worlds and national phenomena. They also talk about their detachment for the first-hand experiences of the troubled and tortured as they were coming from the upper middle class Hindu savarna families. In the process of narrowing down the whole idea of movements related to women‟s issues, the authors have selected four major areas namely sexual violence, health, work, and legal campaigns. They also excluded the collection of case studies form their preview. By 1984, they came up with their first office with the name” the Women‟s Decade Research Collective- WDRC. In 1985, they got a grant from the ISS Holland. By 1986 their struggle started in the various parts of India to collect the stories/ data/ cases and documents. Their train journey from Assam to Benaras to Madhya Pradesh taught them to be a part of the daily struggle put up by the women across India. The action program got strengthened by the little surveys they took and the information and advice they picked up during the journey. The women‟s movement has no beginning or “origin”. It exists as an emotion, anger deep within us. The women‟s movement history also is like notes in a cycle of rhythm; each is a eparate piece, yet a part of the whole.

The article is devoted to the study of the process of I. Gandhi personally development as a politician, characteristics and features of her worldview formation. Indira Nehru’s entourage had a decisive role in becoming her as a politician and a leader of the nation continuing her father’s “Nehru course”. The cornerstone of I. Gandhi foreign policy concept and activity was the doctrine of “Great India” which took shape in the conditions of the 20th century world shocks which radically changed the political map of the world. Colonialism contributed to the emergence of a heightened sense of national dignity among many Indian politicians and intellectuals including I. Gandhi. J. Nehru views played an important educational role in I. Gandhi worldview formation. His scientific, philosophical and political views became the foundation that would subsequently develop and strengthen in her mind and form the future politician with certain beliefs and ideas about “Great India.” For her people she was not just a female politician, but a symbol, because even after the resignation from the post of prime minister, I. Gandhi presence in the government was seen as maintaining fidelity to the commandments of the largest national leader by the people. The spiritual appearance formed in her childhood helped her overcome all the difficulties that she would encounter on her political path. She would endure all the ups and downs with dignity and even the awareness of the impending assassination attempt did not make her hide but meet her opponents.

We all claim to ‘know’, in some manner, what a child is and what the term ‘child’ means. As adults we designate how and when children should develop and decide what is ‘good’ for them. Worries that childhood is ‘disappearing’ in the global North but not ‘developing’ sufficiently in the South propel broader discussions about what ‘normal’ development, individual and national, local and global, should mean. The child is also associated across artistic and cultural forms with innocence, immediacy, and simplicity: in short with our modern sense of ‘interiority’, as Carolyn Steedman has shown. The child is a figure of the self and the future that also connotes what is prior to ‘civilised’ society: the animal, the ‘primitive’ or simply the unknown. The child is, according to Jacqueline Rose, the means by which we work out our relationship to language and to the world and, as Chris Jenks expresses it, ‘the very index of civilization’. In this study I begin with the question that Karin Lesnik-Oberstein asks: ‘why is the child so often portrayed as ‘discovered’, rather than “invented” or “constructed”?’. I am concerned with how the child is implicated as ‘knowable’ and with asking what we may lose or gain by applying paradigms of childhood innocence or development to the nation as it is imagined in British and Indian literature at the ‘zenith’ of the British Raj. In order to unpick the knot of factors that link the child to the nation I combine cultural constructivist approaches to the child with the resources of postcolonial theory as it has addressed subalternity, hybridity and what Elleke Boehmer calls ‘nation narratives’. In the period that I concentrate on, the 1880s-1930s, British and Indian discourses rely upon the child as both an anchor and a jumping off point for narratives of self and nation, as displayed in the versatile and varied children and childhoods in the writers that I focus on: Rudyard Kipling, Flora Annie Steel and Mulk Raj Anand. Chapter 1 begins with what have been called sentimental portrayals of the child in Kipling’s early work before critiquing the notion that his ‘imperial boys’, Mowgli and Kim, are brokers of inter-cultural compromise that anticipate a postcolonial concern with hybridity. I argue that these boys figure colonial relations as complicated and compelling but are caught in a static spectacle of empire in which growing up is not a possibility. Chapter 2 turns to the work of Flora Annie Steel, a celebrated author in her time and, I argue, an impressive negotiator between the positions of the memsahib (thought of as both frivolous and under threat) and the woman writer determined to stake her claim to ‘knowledge’ of India across genres. From Steel’s domestic manual, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, to her ‘historical’ novel of the Indian Mutiny, the child both enables the British woman to define her importance to the nation and connotes a weakness against which the imperial feminist defines her active role. In Chapter 3 I discuss the work of Mulk Raj Anand, a ‘founding father’ of the Indian-English novel, who worked to unite his vision of an international humanism with the Gandhian ideal of a harmonious, spiritually inflected Indian nation. I look at Anand’s use of the child as an aesthetic position taken by the writer from the colonies in relation to the Bloomsbury avant-garde; a means of chronicling suffering and inequality and a resource for an idiosyncratic modernist method that has much to say to current theoretical concerns both with cosmopolitanism and materiality.

The long tradition of Hindu philosophy in India had several distinct peaks of systematic thought. The apogee of its political theory developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a response to the British imperial authority, commonly known as the Raj. This article describes modern Hindu political philosophy's admixture of its classical tradition with contemporary Indian nationalism as it encountered British theories of freedom, equality, power, and social or political change. The result was an original and cogent system of ideas that at once responded to the British intellectual challenge and reconstituted key elements of the classical Indian philosophical tradition. The leading formulators of this formidable project were four major Hindu theorists: Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mohandas K. Gandhi. These four are intricately connected by a logical nexus of concepts derived from their common religion, their interpretative intellectual project of reforming Hinduism in the face of British colonialism, and their significant commitment to the cause of Indian independence.

This chapter highlights Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan (Land Tax, 2001). An epic essay on cricket, the British Empire, and the collective will of a group of village farmers, the film joined the ranks of an elite group of Indian films to be nominated for an Academy Award. Lagaan quickly acquired the label of a contemporary classic and revived the career of film star Aamir Khan. The chapter offers a detailed and critically engaged study of the film. It covers areas such as the audience response to the film; representations of the British Raj; colonialism and imperialism; song and dance as narrative storytelling; the ideological value of religion; and the sports film as a vehicle for exploring national concerns.