Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Hindi texts on the family, household, and education to explore the creation of new social, political and religious identities in 19th c. North India.

Paper long abstract:

Many scholars have focused on education initiatives beginning with late nineteenth-century reform movements, but analyses of what Sudhir Kakar famously designated the 'inner world' of the family, and the changing social, political and cultural meanings of childhood in India, have been comparatively few. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the decline of certain household-based apprenticeship schemes and older patronage networks forced aspiring families to make radical changes to the ways in which they invested in their children's education. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries movements to promote female education and to press for the rights of adult sons in the context of the extended family household also affected how childhood and adulthood were viewed in a larger social context. Through an analysis of new educational, religious and social ideas emerging in Hindi texts across the nineteenth century, I will explore how legal reform and the diffusion of new parenting ideals became closely tied to the reproduction of certain gendered caste and class values, and thus to the creation of new experiences of family relationships and social networks.