Paper long abstract:

In late nineteenth and early twentieth century-Bengal the prescriptive discourses on child rearing and children's education, written mostly by men like Shibnath Shastri, Satishchandra Chakravarti and others, dealt with character building and focused only on sons. Most of these authors felt that people have little control over the outside world because of their colonized status but they have control over home and family and the child's character should be built by the family or the parents. As mothers, women became very important to formulate and influence male children's character. Pratapchandra Majumdar, one of the male authors, wrote about the responsibility of a mother that because of the flaws of the mother, the child is ruined. When the child is ruined, the family is ruined; when the family life crumbles, society decays, when the society is polluted, no nation can advance. Although the normative literature emphasized taking care of male children and their education, but there were some Bengali women who wrote about raising female children and girls' education. Krishnobhabini Das, Kamini Roy, Swarnalata Devi, and Nirupama Devi, are some of the authors who wrote about raising children and Bengali girls' education. This paper briefly examines the writings of these authors to show how these female authors rebelled against the traditional beliefs of raising female children and their visions of proper education of Bengali girls and women.

Paper short abstract:

The paper analyzes Bengali children's magazines as a nationalist pedagogy that contested ideologies defining colonial educational practices. It examines the idiom of body deployed by the magazines to dispel anxieties of masculinity and undertake nationalist projects of remasculinizing native youths

Paper long abstract:

By late nineteenth-century in colonial Bengal the processes of educating children were not simply limited within the colonial school. Rather, it had extended into domestic spaces which emerged as sites for reform and nationalism. I examine popular Bengali children's magazines as a parallel nationalist pedagogy that acted as active catalysts for reimagining the nation and its history. I argue that children's magazines became a contested site to politicize and expose children to nationalist ideas that challenged powerful colonial categories, myths and ultimately colonial power itself. One such colonial category promulgated through colonial school textbooks and challenged by the magazines, through a glorification of native masculinity, was the Macaulayan stereotype of "Bengali effeminacy." This paper investigates how the native male body was evoked in the nationalist imaginations of the children's magazines as a signifier and metaphor of the nation. For the Bengali middle-class, the main creators of the children's literary genre, the male child embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their project of remasculinizing the youth through a revival of indigenous martial sports such as wrestling, sword fighting and stick-fighting. The Indian child's body thus became a site of nation-building and reclaiming what was lost-- freedom, the "motherland" and, in the case of colonial Bengal, masculinity. My analysis highlights firstly, the native male child's body as a political site and secondly, corporeality of colonialism in India.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents an analysis of the covers of Stree, a Marathi women's magazine, from 1931 through 1985, centering around the question: what are unmarried girls shown doing? My goal is to explore what representations of adolescent girls tell us about fantasies of childhood across this period. By tracking changes in visual symbols, appearance and activities, I will also comment on shifts in the age boundaries of childhood.

Paper long abstract:

The Marathi magazine Stree was published continuously on a monthly

basis from 1931-1986, and was an iconic publication that influenced

the lifeworlds of several successive generations of middle class

women. It was the first exclusively women's magazine in its region,

and at the peak of its circulation in the 1950s, it had more than

30,000 subscribers and could be found across urban and semi urban

settings. The magazine included reports and opinions on news events,

memoir and travel writing, advice columns and fiction. It clearly

serves as an important archive for anyone interested in 'women?s

culture' (in the sense used by historians) in a non-English,

non-national, semi urban context. My goal in this paper is to ask,

what kind of an archive can Stree serve for understanding the category

of the girl, and specifically, the unmarried adolescent girl? What do

representations of adolescent girls tell us about fantasies of

childhood in this region and for a specific social class? I present an analysis of magazine covers from 1931 through 1985 asking the question, what are unmarried girls shown doing, and what distinguishes their appearance? I focus especially on the visual symbols that mark figures as

unmarried, in order to understand how transitions from childhood to

womanhood were framed.

Paper short abstract:

An analysis of medical and legal discussions of sexual violence against children in late nineteenth-century India, which simultaneously produced a new definition of 'the child'; a humanitarian narrative focused on the body; and a racialized discourse on the ubiquity of child-rape in India.

Paper long abstract:

In 1889, a child-wife in Bengal died of "injuries inflicted on her on her wedding night." The autopsy formed the centerpiece in the hectic discussions in the colonial legislative assembly that preceded the passage of the Age of Consent Act of 1891. The details of her case were cited and re-cited in the ongoing discussions to raise the age of consent in colonial India, or to reform child-marriage. The inquest into her death relied on medical expertise to determine her age at the time of death, her physical development, and the cause of her demise. The sensational case entered textbooks on medical jurisprudence in the following decades. Drawing on cultural historians' engagement with the body in the "the humanitarian narrative," this paper returns to the well-known case, and its ramifications for the law, to understand the relationship between medical expertise and humanitarian discourse on the child in the late nineteenth century.

Through a close reading of classis works on medical jurisprudence and by scrutinizing the role of experts in rape cases, especially those involving children, this paper seeks to provide insights into a few entwined histories: the use of medical expertise to define the 'child'; problems with determining the age of victims and perpetrators of sexual crimes in courts; the centrality of the medical expertise in the humanitarian narrative on child marriage, and its racist underside.