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.