Childhood and Youth in India: Engagements with Modernity (Studies in Childhood and Youth) 3031318196, 9783031318191

Table of contents :
Praise for Childhood and Youth in India
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Children, Youth, and Modernity in the ‘Everyday Urban’
Modernity, Development, and ‘Being Modern’
Young People in Cities: The ‘Everyday Urban’ Approach
Politics and Problems of Knowledge Production for the South
Thematic Explorations
References
Part I: Shaping Modern Subjects
Chapter 2: Development Discourses and Psychosocial Interventions: The Discursive Construction of ‘Risky’ and ‘Resilient’ Childhoods and Youth
Introduction
Methodology
Modernity, Disciplinary Developments and Psycho-economic Regulation of the Child
Teaching Young People to Manage Life’s Risks Through a Set of Skills
Life Skilling Youth in India: Cultivating Resilience and Conformity among Disadvantaged Youth
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Conceptualisation of Development and Learning in Indian Early Childhood Curriculum
Background
Modernity and Theorising Children’s Development
Methodological Frame
Conceptualisation of Learning and Development in the Preschool Curriculum Document
Theoretical Framing Guiding Preschool Curriculum
Discussion
Cultural-Historical Conceptualisation of Children’s Development and Learning
Conclusion: Synthesising Key Arguments
References
Chapter 4: Mediated Childhoods: Newspapers and the Modern Malayali Child
Introduction
Media Panic and Modern Childhoods
Entanglement of Dystopic and Utopic Childhoods
The Bhasha Press and Modern Childhoods
Nalla Paadam: A Kerala Scripted by Children
The Dystopic Malayali Child: Middle-Class Parenting Gone Awry
The Utopic Malayali Child: Regeneration of Kerala Through Children
Modern Schooling and Nalla Paadam
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Clean Bodies in School Uniform: Childhood and Media Discourses of Cleanliness in Tamil Nadu, India
School Uniforms, Childhood, and a Hygienic Future
Methodology and Context
School Uniforms in Display
Public Health Sanitation Campaigns and the Agential Child
Selling Cleanliness, Capitalizing Reproduction
Claiming Shared Futures, Obscuring Difference
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: The Trumpet and the Drum: Music and Reclaiming the Delinquent Child
Reforming Children
Reinforcing Imperial Power
Producing Modern Citizens
Children’s Everyday Negotiations of Colonial Modernity
Visualising Childhood
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Identifying Child Labor: Revisiting State’s Craft in Bombay Textile Mills (1880–1911)
Introduction
The Implementation of Indian Factory Acts
Complexities in the Processes of Certification: Marginal Children Encounter with Colonial Modernity and Chronological Age
Colonial Modernity and Disciplinary Practices of Factory Schools
Conclusion
References
Secondary Sources
Primary Sources
Part II: Being Modern Subjects
Chapter 8: Examining Shifting Us-Them Binaries: The Experiences of Disabled Children in After-School Programs
Theorizing the Everyday Lives of Disabled Children
Methodology
What Makes for an Inclusive After-School Environment?
Waiting to Be Included
Explicit Independence, Implicit Interdependence
Learning and Ability During the Pandemic
Countering Commonplace Ableist Narratives Within and Beyond After-School Programs
References
Chapter 9: “Youth Must Keep Upvaluing Themselves”: Of Personality Development and Modern Selves in Contemporary Delhi
Methodology
The Modern Self in a Post-liberalised India
Personality Development at Mrs Batra’s
Communication Skills
Grooming
The Category of the ‘Ungroomed’
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: “Nobody Wants to Be the Behenji-Type”: Young People Managing Romance, Work and Violence in the Urban Slums of Kolkata
Introduction
Methodology
Contextualising Youth Romance Culture
“Nobody Wants to Be the Behenji-Type”
The “Dump n Dull” Type
A Changing Arranged Marriage Terrain: Love, Violence and Settling
Young, Female, Worker
Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: Producing Modern Subjects of Change: Reeducation and Empowerment for Migrant Working Children in Bangalore
Migrant Working Children in the Silicon Valley of India
Building New Child Subjectivities Through Empowerment and Participation
Challenging Tradition Through Child Governance and Participation
The Challenges and Complexities of Crafting New Subjectivities
Final Remarks
References
Chapter 12: Family Life, Schooling, and Modernity: Examining the ‘Everyday’ Experiences of Elite Adolescence in India
Introduction
Parenting and Modern Childhood
Schooling and Modernity
Modernity and the Case of Transnationally Mobile Adolescents
Research Methodology
Research Participants: Description of Interviewees
‘Everyday’ Experiences of Elite Adolescence
Cultivating Intercultural Competences: Trips Abroad and Multinational Classmates
Learning to Lead: The Value of Internships and School Leadership Positions
Lessons in Wielding Privilege: Adolescents’ Engagement in Social Service Work
College Preparation: Family Support and School Resources
Parental Support in the College Preparation Process
Schools’ College Preparation Support
Conclusion
References
Correction to: Childhood and Youth in India
Correction to:
Index

Citation preview

STUDIES IN CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Childhood and Youth in India Engagements with Modernity Edited by

Anandini Dar Divya Kannan

Studies in Childhood and Youth Series Editors

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh University of Bristol Bristol, UK Nigel Patrick Thomas University of Central Lancashire Preston, UK Spyros Spyrou European University Cyprus Nicosia, Cyprus Anandini Dar School of Education Studies Ambedkar University Delhi New Delhi, India

This well-established series embraces global and multi-disciplinary scholarship on childhood and youth as social, historical, cultural and material phenomena. With the rapid expansion of childhood and youth studies in recent decades, the series encourages diverse and emerging theoretical and methodological approaches. We welcome proposals which explore the diversities and complexities of children’s and young people’s lives and which address gaps in the current literature relating to childhoods and youth in space, place and time. We are particularly keen to encourage writing that advances theory or that engages with contemporary global challenges. Studies in Childhood and Youth will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of areas, including Childhood Studies, Youth Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Politics, Psychology, Education, Health, Social Work and Social Policy.

Anandini Dar  •  Divya Kannan Editors

Childhood and Youth in India Engagements with Modernity

Editors Anandini Dar School of Liberal Studies BML Munjal University Haryana, India

Divya Kannan Department of History and Archaeology Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence Dadri, India

ISSN 2731-6467     ISSN 2731-6475 (electronic) Studies in Childhood and Youth ISBN 978-3-031-31819-1    ISBN 978-3-031-31820-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The original version of the book was revised: The affiliation details were incorrectly used in the FM and the chapter titled “Childhood and Youth in India: Engagements with Modernity” by Anandini Dar and Divya Kannan. An correction to this book can be found at https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_13.

Praise for Childhood and Youth in India “Childhood and Youth in India: Engagements with Modernity powerfully explores the “everyday urban” as a new conceptual and constructively critical approach to studying young peoples’ complex engagements with modernity in the Indian context. The original contributions made by the cross-disciplinary set of essays persuasively confirm the significance of children and childhoods to postcolonial theorizations of modern citizenship, national development, urbanization, and mediatized subjectivities.” —Sarada Balagopalan, Associate Professor of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University, USA “This volume brings together contemporary scholarship in the area of childhood and youth studies in the Indian context. Spanning historical essays to contemporary accounts, the volume responds to the need for critical analysis of existing frameworks in childhood studies and emerging questions of childhood and youth within neoliberal times. Using the “everyday urban” as an analytical grid, the essays bring in themes related to education, social identities, and power, opening up new questions of experience, accommodation and resistance. It is an extremely significant contribution to the field and will undoubtedly soon find itself on reference lists of childhood/youth studies courses across universities.” —Nandini Manjrekar, Professor and Dean, School of Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India “Invigorated by interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary debates in childhood and youth studies, this collection illuminates the quotidian workings of modernity and globalization in the lives of children and youth. The book contains excellent analysis that renders intelligible not just how young lives encounter, negotiate, and transform their social and material world but also adds new theoretical provocations on the affects that media, technology, education, skilling, and the project of nation-building engender on what it means to be a young person in modern urban India.” —Tatek Abebe, Professor in Childhood Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

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Contents

1 Introduction:  Children, Youth, and Modernity in the ‘Everyday Urban’  1 Anandini Dar and Divya Kannan Part I Shaping Modern Subjects  31 2 Development  Discourses and Psychosocial Interventions: The Discursive Construction of ‘Risky’ and ‘Resilient’ Childhoods and Youth 33 R. Maithreyi 3 Conceptualisation  of Development and Learning in Indian Early Childhood Curriculum 53 Prabhat Rai and Prachi Vashishtha 4 Mediated  Childhoods: Newspapers and the Modern Malayali Child 77 Mary Ann Chacko 5 Clean  Bodies in School Uniform: Childhood and Media Discourses of Cleanliness in Tamil Nadu, India101 Smruthi Bala Kannan

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6 The  Trumpet and the Drum: Music and Reclaiming the Delinquent Child123 Catriona Ellis 7 Identifying  Child Labor: Revisiting State’s Craft in Bombay Textile Mills (1880–1911)149 Palak Vashist Part II Being Modern Subjects 177 8 Examining  Shifting Us-Them Binaries: The Experiences of Disabled Children in After-School Programs179 Kim Fernandes 9 “Youth  Must Keep Upvaluing Themselves”: Of Personality Development and Modern Selves in Contemporary Delhi201 Suchismita Chattopadhyay 10 “Nobody  Wants to Be the Behenji-Type”: Young People Managing Romance, Work and Violence in the Urban Slums of Kolkata223 Kabita Chakraborty 11 Producing  Modern Subjects of Change: Reeducation and Empowerment for Migrant Working Children in Bangalore243 Valentina Glockner 12 Family  Life, Schooling, and Modernity: Examining the ‘Everyday’ Experiences of Elite Adolescence in India269 Adrienne Lee Atterberry  Correction to: Childhood and Youth in India  C1 Anandini Dar and Divya Kannan Index291

Notes on Contributors

Adrienne Lee Atterberry  is a US-based sociologist. Her research interests include international migration, parenting, school choice, and teachers’ work. She recently published the co-edited volume, Children and Youths’ Migration in a Global Context. Her work has appeared in Current Sociology and Contemporary Education Dialogue. She is also the author of several book chapters including “Optimizing the Benefits from Schooling: School-switching Behaviour Among Return Migrants in India” (Springer) and “Pathways to US Higher Education: Capital, Citizenship, and Indian Women MBA Studies” (Springer). Currently, she is working on a book project that examines parenting practices among transnationally mobile Indians and Indian Americans living in Bangalore, India. Mary Ann Chacko  is assistant professor in the Social Sciences division at the School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University. She is an educational researcher deeply interested in critical childhood and youth studies. Her ongoing research examines the unfolding relationship between police and children in Kerala. She has a Doctorate in Education from the Department of Curriculum and Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University. Kabita Chakraborty  is an associate professor in the Children, Childhood and Youth Program at York University. She is a child and youth studies scholar, with a specialization in youth cultures in slum communities across India. Her current research examines how violence intersects with young people’s experiences of romantic relationships in poor, urban India. She xi

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also continues to work on young people’s experiences of migration across Asia-Pacific, with an emphasis on participatory methods in understanding their lives. Her book Young Muslim Women in India: Bollywood, Identity and Changing Youth Culture was published in 2016. Suchismita  Chattopadhyay obtained her PhD in Anthropology and Sociology from The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, in September 2022. Suchismita’s doctoral research was an ethnography of the grooming and self-improvement industry in Delhi. Her research interests include body and self-fashioning, immaterial labor, and gender and youth studies. Anandini  Dar  is associate professor in School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University, India. She is the co-founder and co-convenor of The Critical Childhoods and Youth Studies Collective (CCYSC) and serves as an advisory board member of The Childism Institute, at the Rutgers University, USA. Her research is in childhood studies, youth geographies, migration and diasporas, feminist pedagogy, and ethnographic research methods for young subjects. She recently co-edited a special issue “Southern Theories and De-colonial Childhood Studies” (2022) for the journal, Childhood by SAGE, along with Tatek Abebe and Ida M Lysa. Her recent chapters and articles include “De-colonizing Children’s Suffrage,” “Childhood Youth and Identity: A roundtable conversation from the Global South,” and “Co-designing Urban Play Spaces to Improve Migrant Children’s Wellbeing.” Catriona Ellis  is a teaching associate at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Catriona specializes in the history of children and childhood in late colonial India and is particularly interested in the expansion of welfare policies by state and civil society actors in the fields of education, juvenile justice, health and age of consent, and the impact of dyarchy and constitutional change on this process. In addition, her work interrogates the agency and lived experience of children through autobiographies, court statements, and the material culture of play. Her publications focus on children’s nutrition, history of education, and autobiographies, and her monograph Imagining Childhood, Improving Children: The Emergence of an ‘Avuncular’ State in Late Colonial South India is due for publication in early 2023.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Valentina Glockner Fagetti  is a Mexican anthropologist working at the Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas at CINVESTAV, Mexico. Her work focuses on child migration, child labor, the anthropology of the state and humanitarianism in Mexico, the United States, and India. Her research also explores reflexive and participatory methodologies, and ethnographic self-representation through art, ethnography, and visual media. She has directed and co-directed multiple research projects funded by the National Science Foundation USA, National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT, Mexico), and the National Geographic Society. She has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, the Matias Romero Program at LLILAS-UT Austin, and the Edmundo O’Gorman at ILAS-Columbia University. Kim  Fernandes is a joint doctoral candidate in Anthropology and Human Development at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. They are interested in questions of disability, data, and governance in South Asia. Their dissertation is focused on the processes and practices of identifying and enumerating disability in Delhi, India. Divya  Kannan is assistant professor, Department of History and Archaeology, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Uttar Pradesh, India. Her research interests include colonial South Asia, gender, childhood studies, and labor. She recently co-edited a special issue on “Modernity, Schooling, and Childhood in India: Trajectories of Exclusion” (2022) for Children’s Geographies, along with R. Maithreyi. She is also the co-founder and co-convenor of The Critical Childhoods and Youth Studies Collective (CCYSC). She is working on a book manuscript exploring the politics of Christian missionary education in colonial Kerala. Smruthi  Bala  Kannan  completed her PhD from the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University–Camden. Her doctoral dissertation explores cleanliness discourses in and around schools in Tamil Nadu, India, centering on children’s relational experiences. She is now a postdoctoral scholar with the Public Health Sciences department at the University of Chicago, with a team studying bicycling use, access, and barriers in urban areas in low- and middle-income countries. Her broader research interest is in spatial-material dimensions of children’s lifeworlds understood through qualitative and humanistic research methodologies. Her current work focuses on how environmental and human health are entangled in young people’s lived experiences and negotiations in postcolonial contexts.

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R.  Maithreyi  is the strategic lead of Adolescent Health at Karnataka Health Promotion Trust (KHPT). Her work spans the areas of childhood and youth studies, education, skilling, early childhood education, and girls’ empowerment programs. She has an interdisciplinary PhD in social sciences from the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, and a Master’s in Child Development and Guidance. She has several publications in leading international journals such as Childhood, Children’s Geographies, Comparative Education and Compare. She has also published a book titled Educating Youth: Regulation Through Psychosocial Skilling (2021) and has co-edited a special issue on “Modernity, Schooling, and Childhood in India: Trajectories of Exclusion” (2022) for Children’s Geographies. Maithreyi has over 10 years of experience as a child psychologist. Prabhat Rai  is senior research fellow at the Conceptual PlayLab, Monash University, where he leads research on children’s concept formation in early years in family and community settings. After completing his doctorate from the University of Oxford as a Felix scholar, he has subsequently worked in academic and leadership positions in Druk Gyalpo Institute (Bhutan), CBSE, and Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi (India), and now at Monash University (Australia). He is also an associate editor for Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, a leading journal in culturalhistorical theory. His fields of expertise are play-pedagogy, cultural-historical theory, educational experiment methodology, and assessment. Prachi  Vashishtha is an associate professor at O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), Sonipat. Prior to joining JGU, Prachi worked as an assistant professor and senior fellow at Jamia Millia Islamia and taught at Monash University, Australia. Her academic and research interests are in the area of early childhood pedagogy, developmentalism and teacher education in early years. Palak Vashist  is a PhD student at the Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey. She did her undergrad in History at the University of Delhi. She then received her Master’s degree in Modern Indian History and her M. Phil from the University of Delhi. In this volume, she explores the assertions of colonial authority and legal regulations to manage the “child” inside the mill based on identification processes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Bombay’s textile mills.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

List of words related with learning in the preschool curriculum document61 Children out of bounds. (Courtesy: Malayala Manorama Daily, Kottayam)89 A new evolution. (Courtesy: Malayala Manorama Daily, Kottayam) 92

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Children, Youth, and Modernity in the ‘Everyday Urban’ Anandini Dar and Divya Kannan

The making of this volume coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its resultant nationwide lockdowns and morbidities. This tragic moment reiterated that young people are central to discourses on modernity and projects of modernisation in countries such as India as educational institutions and public spaces remained closed for almost two years, causing great disruption to familial and work time-space arrangements and notions of learning. In Indian cities, owing to the high density of population and housing, and emergent health crises in access to hospitals and treatment, we witnessed several young people struggling to come to terms with the pandemic and missing the lack of alternative spaces to socialise. Yet, the pressures on children and youth, especially those belonging to the middle classes, from administrators, educators, and A. Dar (*) School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University, Haryana, India e-mail: [email protected] D. Kannan Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Dadri, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_1

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families, to follow and perform certain age-appropriate norms and obligations prevailed even as digital technology was hailed as the panacea for school closures. These experiences were far from uniform and depended on varied socio-economic and regional locations wherein marginalised young people got further pushed to the peripheries of wider social and national imaginations. Out of the several images that were celebrated during the pandemic as characteristic of India’s narrative of progress, despite the hurdles posed by COVID-19, was that of a poor fifteen-year-old girl, Jyoti Kumari. As out-­ of-­work migrants residing in Delhi and other urban centres who did not receive any public or private assistance for food or health began to return to their native villages, Jyoti cycled with her ailing father at the back over 700 miles. Overnight, the young girl became an internet sensation, and everyone, including Indian and foreign politicians and business company owners, commended the feat. Jyoti was hailed for her perseverance, skills of self-reliance, and resilience—emblematic of a ‘modern’ India—but the uncertainty that loomed large over her life still prevails. Within months of this arduous journey, Jyoti’s father passed away, and today little is known if anything in her life has changed in light of the promises she received from various quarters. This story, while seemingly remarkable and worthy of celebration, is sadly nothing more than the everyday plight of the majority of subaltern children and youth across the country steeped in conditions of poverty and vulnerability, while the current government boasts of marching ahead and being a ‘global’ power. At a time when globalisation reigns as the catchphrase for all, the trajectories of the spread of COVID-19, its aftermath, and the unevenness of subsequent vaccination campaigns have also revealed the fault lines of national borders and reiterated the growing dangers of right-wing ethno-­ populism and discriminatory citizenship laws. The pandemic exacerbated the inequalities and precarity faced by the most marginalised and simultaneously produced narratives of a shared universal plight of people. More pertinently, millions of young people across the world, emblematic of hope (Cole & Durham, 2008; Dyson, 2014) and pride in several national and international arenas, experienced a drastic unsettling of their everyday lives and routines. Nothing was more disruptive than the shutting down of schools, colleges, and universities, and public parks and spaces, which hogged the limelight about the generational impact of the pandemic in terms of productivity, learning outcomes, and changes in demography. Despite the well-documented consequences of the ‘stay at home’ and

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‘e-learning’ policies on young people (Chanchal, 2020; Dar, 2020; Meo & Chanchal, 2021; Pushpam & Nair, 2021), various print and digital media also celebrated the distinct ways in which India continued to cope to meet the standards of prescribed school learning, curriculum, and examinations. However, as a substantial number of children and youth remained distant from their physical site of formal education for almost two and a half years, and some, like Jyoti, continue to be out of school, this situation has rendered open new and yet familiar imaginings about what it means to engage with modernity in India. For many, the crisis offered new possibilities for bringing technology into the everyday spaces of young people, almost as a quick-fix solution to some of the gravest structural issues that plague the education system. For others, the burden of online learning meant developing methods of enterprising ‘jugaad’ that ensured young people continued to formally study, despite limited access to the internet, shared family smartphones, and make-shift awkward study spaces at large (PTI, 2020; Surya, 2021). In particular, the growing Indian middle class expressed its woes as many government and private schools and universities, especially low-cost, struggled to handle the technical challenges of online learning, and regularly demanded government intervention to ensure examination outcomes maintained the same parameters as before, albeit with low success (Navani & Nag, 2021). Soon, the shifts in children’s daily routine for study, leisure, and work became more strongly enmeshed with earlier notions of globalisation, such as ‘timeless time,’ and digital networks and ‘technoscapes’ (Castells, 1996; Appadurai, 1990). This scenario indicates that it is insufficient for scholars to engage with projects of schooling and its alternatives alone to make sense of the challenges, acts of violence, and complex everyday experiences of young people in Indian cities. This volume, hence, acknowledges but goes beyond the scholarly discussions on modern schooling in India and turns the focus on unpacking young people’s lives as intricately linked to modernisation, globalisation, and urbanisation, as it is through the bodies, policies for, and aspirations of India’s biggest population segment that these processes are forged. Moreover, the chapters focus on how young people in urban India negotiate different institutions, pedagogies, sites, and encounters with adults while affirming their identities and choices as ‘modern citizens.’ Against this background, we contend that it is through a closer examination of the lives of children and youth in the urban context that we can understand the diverse and contested meanings of modernity in India’s everyday

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landscapes, as it is through them that intertwined processes of neocoloniality, capital, development, and urbanisation are made legible. In particular, this volume demonstrates the complex engagements of various groups of Indian children and youth with state policies and discourses on “normality” and “universality” (Rai, this volume; Maithreyi, this volume; Fernandez, this volume; Chakraborty, this volume), the media (Chacko, this volume; Bala Kannan, this volume), the “global” market (Glockner Fagetti, this volume; Chattopadhyay, this volume), institutional (Fernandes, this volume), and situated contexts of the cultural, historical, and social (Ellis, this volume; Vashist, this volume). Collectively, we highlight the problems of a persistent teleological and linear approach of progress that frames nation-building and development agendas of contemporary urban India involving young citizens. Overall, this introduction seeks to advance two critical points. One, we argue for the need for a cross-disciplinary approach to studying childhood and youth that can open up new ontological understandings and meanings about who and what is modern in Indian society. By reflecting on how young people engage with structures of power, and institutional apparatuses targeting them in individual and collective capacities—across varied temporal and spatial scales—we study nuanced conceptions of modernity by centring children and youth as analytical categories. Two, we advance that the rhetoric of “multiple childhoods” is no longer sufficient to explain young people’s everyday lives (see Balagopalan, 2014) situated amidst persistent inequalities of caste, gender, class, sexuality, and ableism. Instead, we propose the concept of the ‘everyday urban’ relevant in global South contexts. Such a framing departs from paying emphatic attention only to ‘key moments’ or ‘big events’ in the lives and conditions of young people in the global South as per the norms laid down by Western epistemological and political vocabulary. Instead, it allows us to highlight the co-constitution of categories of the urban, childhood, and youth through their entanglements in the realm of every day and embedded socialities in India. We do not posit a binary paradigm of the local and the global but focus on how children and youth navigate diverse spatio-temporal sites. Although several studies in childhood studies have also argued to move beyond the binary of local versus the global (Ansell, 2016; Burman, 1996; Nieuwenhuys, 2007; Stephens, 1995), and instead turn towards a relational and intergenerational reading of young lives (Abebe, 2022; Alanen, 2020; Ansell, 2016; Balagopalan, 2021; de Castro, 2020; Twum-Danso Imoh, 2022), we contend that to

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be an urban, young citizen in India entails a distinct set of performative conditions within familial, educational, and broader sociopolitical spaces that are further imbricated in the vagaries of global markets and media. Besides, for our purposes, there is no monolithic category of the urban as the fragmented layers of place-making are shaped by ascribed and acquired identities of young people and how modes of governance operate on and through them. We critically unpack the commonplace tendency to view urbanisation as synonymous with modernisation in India (Prakash, 2002), and demonstrate how children and youth, the bulk of the population, are configured by and also involved in the configuration of their cities and futures. Drawing from cross-disciplinary research, the chapters in this volume cast a spotlight on a plethora of urban settings and trace the movements and actions of young people through a historical and contemporary lens on missionary marching bands, textile mills, streets, slums, life skill programmes, after-school centres, NGOs, personality development classes, elite and local schools, and various print and popular media. Here, the reader will often find young Indians in various cities and towns embody and perform the meta-narratives of Western modernity linked to the politics of ‘self-fashioning’ viewed as a disruption of the ‘traditional’ domain and yet also observe distinct ways through which they reshape and claim identities, seek love, and choose pathways for their futures by straddling the local, regional, national, and the global in their ‘everyday urban,’ sometimes seamlessly and frequently with great trepidation, and thereby complicating our understanding of how modernity is experienced, manifested, and reconfigured.

Modernity, Development, and ‘Being Modern’ Most post-colonial and de-colonial scholars argue against the Western-­ dominated notions of linear, evolutionary development, which aims to naturalise modernity as a “universal global process” (Mignolo, 2010; Kaviraj, 2000; Cannella & Viruru, 2004; Dube, 2009). In such a framing, modernity becomes a stage of arrival that either results in the “constant reproduction of ‘coloniality’” (Mignolo, 2010, p. 304) or situates post-­ colonies as perpetually in the “the waiting room of history” (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 8). This disturbing concept of “coloniality” is explained by Anibal Quijano (2000; also cited in Mignolo, 2010) as “the colonial matrix of power,” which constitutes the “dark side of modernity” and results in

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sustained control of political and economic power, and, more importantly, the control of knowledge and its production by the standards of Euro-­ Western modernity. To understand this further, one can think of the many ways in which newer global institutions of the twentieth century such as the various bodies and agencies of the United Nations and World Bank set universal standards for welfare, progress, and civic rights by bringing forth the idea of development and progress as closely linked to a transition away from ‘traditional’ customs and practices, be it of female genital mutilation in African regions or of child marriage in South Asia or of youth and drugs in Latin America, which adversely affect women and children in the ‘backward’ societies of the global South. As Shenila Moolji (2018) argues, through the efforts of humanitarian aid and conventions set by such “global” agencies, buttressed by a language of universal rights, and overseen by national laws and regulatory bodies, children of the “poor” or “developing nations,” especially girls, become subjects to be saved, and who need to be provided new opportunities for self-improvement through training and leadership programmes. The most prominent are international campaigns for “girls empowerment” (see critique: Desai & Angod, 2022; Moolji, 2018; Maithreyi, 2021), or other avenues that allow young people in the global South to also become entrepreneurial “modern global citizens” and assume “leadership” roles in their communities without addressing fundamental historical inequalities, geopolitics, or domestic issues of governance (Maithreyi, this volume; Glockner Fagetti, this volume; Chattopadhyay, this volume; Cheney & Sinervo, 2019). However, these programmes and policies which aim to reform and “modernize” the children and families of the global South reinforce earlier templates of colonial power (Vallgårda, 2014, Balagopalan, 2014), never resulting in the stage of “arrival” but continuously trapping “developing” nations in the cycle of an elusive sense of progress and reinforced paradigms of coloniality. Countries such as India are able to neither claim proper ‘development’ nor rethink civic agendas that could account for the variations and challenges implicit in regional and local politics of age, caste, class, language, and so forth. Instead, local and national governments develop mechanisms to govern and regulate any “deviant” young person who does not conform to the agendas of citizenship outlined by the state (Dutta, 2019; Subramanian, 2021b; Kumar, 2013). Those youth who are viewed as outliers because of their religious, caste, abilities, linguistic variations, or diverse practices of expression, and who do not fit into narratives of “normality” as they

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deviate in their life choices from those prescribed for them, get labelled as “risky” youth who need to be further managed and controlled within projects of the nation (Naafs & Skelton, 2018, Ansell, 2016). However, modernisation and universalising agendas do not account for the ways in which people envision or desire “being modern”. The two discursive child figures in India, ‘marginal child’ and ‘subaltern student’ represent how children are read as ‘modern’ or ‘non-­modern’ primarily through the framework of schooling, rife with debates on access, aspirations, and lived realities. In a recent paper, by deploying the figure of the “subaltern student,” emerging from a historical reading, Sarada Balagopalan critiques the normalised practices of discrimination embedded within Indian schools and argues for a need to discard the “deficit framing” that surrounds our understanding of the lifeworlds of first-generation students, who then get labelled as “non-modern.” The marginal child, located in the discourse of ‘victimhood’ is presented as in need of saving by modern schooling. Balagopalan suggests that both these discursive figures have been produced within the country’s “modernizing project” (p.  9), highlighting the distinction between identities and political-­economic processes that impinge upon these young subjects in colonial and post-colonial India. Several recent studies on youth in India demonstrate the tussle between modernisation and young people’s own ways of being modern in distinct ways, which includes a dynamic interaction of risk-taking behaviours in their local contexts (Krishnan, 2022) and ensuring they meet generational obligations as they explore their aspirations for global connectivity and navigate their vastly unequal and precarious futures. In his ethnography with young migrant men in Delhi, Gabriel Ethiraj Dattatreyan (2020), for instance, deploys the term “globally familiar” to demonstrate how youth “reimagine and remake self and city through hip hop practice” (p.  3). Further, the transnational media and music that these young men consume open up sites by which their identities get shaped not by the effects of the global or local alone, but rather as he claims, “in excess of both” (p. 10). As young migrant Dalit and Black men consume digital hip-hop, they also oscillate between their aspirations and obligations, and in many ways this can be read as annexing “the global into their own practices of the modern” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 4). In contrast, working with young lower-middle-class women in Delhi, Asiya Islam (2020, 2021) discusses their attempts to blur the boundaries between gendered work and leisure. Islam argues that women choose newer forms of employment, such as

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working in cafes, call centres, and shopping malls, as an alternative to traditionally feminised professions to avoid domesticity, leading them to possibilities for consumption of leisure/leisure-related products and activities. These newer forms of employment have enabled young women to partake in “globally inflected patterns of consumption” through clothing, fashion, and movies, which, for instance, Ritty Lukose (2005) studied in her ethnography in a community college in the state of Kerala. However, these consumption practices that have been enabled through economic liberalisation, Lukose (2005) points out, are also “reconfigured in relation to the colonialist and nationalist projects concerned with the place of women within the public/private and tradition/modernity dichotomies” (p. 917). Hence, the gendered manifestations of global capital and discourses on liberalisation are mediated within the choices young people make, primarily in cities, as they negotiate the expectations placed upon them by gendered patriarchy, families, and the political economy of the urban state. This burden on young people in India, to live up to social expectations and nationalist visions and be able to forge individualistic paths in terms of occupation, habits, and interests, is not free from violence, stress, and anxiety. This violence places a disproportionate burden on young girls who face the brunt of being cast as prone to different moral and sexual dangers, transgressions, and violence (Lukose, 2005; Abraham, 2001; Das, 2008; Atluri, 2013; Subramanian, 2021a). Unfortunately, the threat and acts of sexual violence against young girls is a ‘given’ in everyday India, provoking long-standing youth protests for better law enforcement and protection. The language of neoliberalism and urbanisation agendas, however, also harks on the potential of young people to fashion and refashion themselves as globally competing “entrepreneurs” and “innovators,” a cruel paradox in the face of growing unemployment, precarity, and poverty in the region with declining government support (Mathew & Lukose, 2020; Thomas, 2020). Contemporary projects of ‘self-making’ through ‘self-­ reliance,’ such as the recent ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan’ campaign of the Indian government, are deeply linked to the consolidation of capitalist-­ neoliberal forces which are shaping the discourses on how ‘responsible individuals and consumers’—including the young citizen herself—must attain the necessary resources to ensure uninterrupted education and prospects through the latest technologies very much on their own. Those belonging to elite sections continue to prosper as their social and cultural capital affords possibilities for employable and exceptional futures, whereas

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the marginalised and the subaltern remain at the periphery, and either fall behind or are pushed out of the system with no adequate means to recourse from those elected to power. Against this context, psychological self-regulation techniques such as Life Skills Education (LSE) programmes have also gained traction in education and youth policies in India, which aim at cultivating a spirit of entrepreneurship in young people, as witnessed through the recently launched Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum by the Government of Delhi, without looking towards the state as the harbinger of social welfare and employment. In reality, however, these pedagogical agendas conform to a bourgeois urban-middle-­ class vision of development that tends to ignore structural issues of inequality, especially caste, and instead, focuses on the individual as the predominant site of reform and action. Such approaches also avoid addressing the risks involved in pursuing self-employment and the lack of capital for the youth belonging to disadvantaged groups to plan for the long term (Maithreyi, 2021). These wide disparities between a small minority of young business people inheriting a well-established and wealthy family and corporate enterprises in India, and the majority that is urged to ‘think like an entrepreneur’ despite various failures, also came to the fore during the pandemic. For instance, amidst the growing conditions of precarity, several young men and women in Indian cities have been compelled to work long hours for meagre returns and lack welfare measures in the various platform and gig economy-driven jobs they hold (Ghosh, 2021; Prabhat et  al., 2019). As various governments declare India’s youth as its biggest human resource asset, we find it pertinent to study the processes of market, media, and family, alongside state interventions, which mark this demographic group. For the lower and middle classes, their path to fulfilling aspirations has been diverted towards grooming and personality development classes, an industry unto itself (Chattopadhyay, this volume). Young men and women with limited educational qualifications and cultural capital are trained to acquire English-­ speaking skills and change their deportment to suit the demands of a ‘global industry.’ Their bodies and selves are sought to be repackaged in a way that leads to an endless process of ‘upskilling’/‘up-valuing’ in which students are taught to be ‘more modern’ in appearance and conduct than their counterparts in the country. Yet, in these grooming schools, the attendees’ English language skills or networking patterns is never ‘quite enough,’ but the onus to improve life chances and be their ‘best selves’ at all times is entirely on them.

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Those who fail to keep pace with such interventions or assume responsibility for personality development are often derogatorily labelled as “behenjis” (Chakraborty, this volume). In her ethnography on the urban bastis of Kolkata, Kabita Chakraborty demonstrates changing perceptions of premarital relationships and romance among young, Muslim women. Their experiences of intimate relationships fraught with violence and anxieties related to decision-making about marriage and employment do not subscribe to conventional assumptions about Muslim women as predominantly shackled by patriarchal religious forces. Instead, the women venture to undertake low-paying jobs in middle-class neighbourhoods, navigate social media, and harbour strong ideas and desires of companionate husbands and romantic encounters, influenced heavily by Indian cinematic representations. Their aspirations both at an intimate and a political level are, however, mediated by several embedded phenomena occurring in the space of the crowded basti, social media, films, and religious configurations. The young women see themselves as modern individuals navigating the travails of city life despite their segregated living space and weak economic conditions. For upper-class and elite youth in India, being modern is also closely linked to practices of ‘skilling’ not enforced upon them via targeted government programmes, but rather through their elite families, schools, and concomitant connections. These skill sets for the elite include speaking foreign languages, international travel, and expensive, international curriculum–based schooling (Forsberg, 2017). Examining the everyday lives of primarily upper-caste, and upper-class NRIs living in urban Bengaluru, Adrienne Atterberry (this volume), demonstrates how elite youth acquire the skills to wield their privilege, perform cosmopolitan leadership, and prepare for higher education abroad, as pathways to becoming modern. The adolescents in her study attend elite international schools and, through everyday engagements at their schools and in their social and family gatherings, learn that being modern is largely about inculcating transnational human capital, that is, the skills to act transnationally, which also includes being physically mobile across national borders (Gerhards et al., 2017). But we also pause to ask what mobility means to those whose lives are marked by varying levels of disability and legitimated as per parameters set by medical and legal interventions. It is an important shift in which disabled children have been studied primarily through the anxieties around the embodiment of abuse and impairment (Curran & Runswick-Cole,

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2014). Most scholarship assumes children and youth to be ‘healthy’ agents of action, and educational agencies in India rarely provide the requisite infrastructure to accommodate the needs and desires of the differently abled. In her work with three after-school centres for disabled children with disabilities in the city of Delhi, Kim Fernandes (this volume) argues that notions of ‘normality’ and ‘ability’ of children are consistently negotiated and reworked within such programmes. Drawing on debates from disability studies, Fernandes interrogates the conditions under which “disability” is produced in the after-school centres by questioning the category of a “normate childhood.” Several contributors in this volume, therefore, argue that the children and youth do not necessarily subscribe to an essentialist idea of “Indianness” but remain well versed with wider economic and political developments around the globe that enable them to aspire for resources, statuses, mobility, and commodities without jeopardising their posturing within locally defined cultural domains and age-related hierarchies. Yet, whether these aspirational behaviours, self-improvement efforts, and actions result in fruitful opportunities and success is highly dependent on access to financial and transnational cultural capital, training, kinship networks, and state support.

Young People in Cities: The ‘Everyday Urban’ Approach Since the 1990s, the efforts to modernise India and open it to a liberal market led to a greater encouragement of urban migration and infrastructure development (Jeffrey & Harriss, 2014, p. 125), wherein cities became the sites for hope, advancement, and the future, in both temporal and spatial terms. Large-scale rural to urban migration in India lured many working-class people into the myth that arriving in cities would result in secured futures for their families, and particularly for their children. But cities have been far from inclusive spaces, and the glitzy wealth of one set of residents has been on the backs of labouring millions living in miserable conditions in slums and lower-class tenements in informal settlements. In fact, migration in the neoliberal cities has now been understood as a central process of urbanisation and the making of ‘global’ cities, which would otherwise not be possible without the services of this group of people (Prakash, 2018; Samaddar, 2018). Despite their valuable contributions in city making and urbanisation, relatively little scholarly attention has been given to the exclusionary

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practices and the problems of the everyday of one of the most disadvantaged groups—migrant children—in cities. Some policy studies and reports (NCPCR, 2015; India Migration Now, 2019; Young Lives & UNICEF, 2020) have shown that migrant children and families have borne the brunt of living in neighbourhoods with shanty infrastructure and suffer from lack of access to basic services, such as state-sponsored childcare services (anganwadis and balwadis), water, and electricity; they face regular discrimination by middle-class residents, and are unable to stay enrolled in good city schools, among other disadvantages. Some recent studies (Dyer & Rajan, 2021; Rajan, 2021, 2022; Roy et al., 2015) have highlighted that migrant children, including those who migrate seasonally with their families, endure several exclusionary practices within public spaces as they disrupt modern ideals of childhood (Ní Laoire et al., 2010) and remain outside of the “‘normal’ modes of living and learning” (Rajan, 2021, p.  1). As the majority of migrant children in Bengaluru remain out of schools (Bangalore Mirror, 2019), like in many cities in India (Bangalore Mirror, 2019), some well-meaning NGO schools and programmes for these populations then enter this landscape to “empower,” “re-educate,” and “re-socialize” them (Glockner Fagetti, this volume). Annie McCarthy’s (2021) work also critiques such approaches and highlights how children’s narratives and performances rupture this widely circulated notion of ‘underdeveloped’ subjectivities of marginalised children in India. Valentina Glockner Fagetti (in this volume), through her ethnography of migrant children in Bengaluru, who are engaged with the nonprofit organisation Concerned for Working Children (CWC), provides a complex analysis of how, on the one hand, these supportive non-government organisations (NGOs) recognise the differences and needs of working migrant children. But on the other hand, they also shape young people as conforming subjects through a set of programmes on vocational and skills training, financial education, self-esteem, and personality development. However, when local NGO workers who share the social positions of these disadvantaged children engage on the ground in developing these re-education programmes through the formation of children lead collectives, they end up problematising the Euro-Western construct of modernity related to ideas of modern childhoods. It is in this context, hence, that we find the conceptual frame of the ‘everyday urban’—that is, the critical reading of the seemingly mundane experiences, encounters, actions, performances, and negotiations, within the urban spaces—as productive for our examinations of young people’s

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engagements with modernity. This idea of the ‘everyday urban’ is configured by adapting two different yet related conceptions. First, the framing offered by Gyan Prakash (2002) on ‘the urban turn’ and, second, by Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarrukai (2019) on the ‘everyday social.’ In his essay on the ‘urban turn,’ Prakash (2002) suggests that to understand the modern city one must move away from the temporal and spatial unfolding of the city as envisioned by planners and policy-makers, and rethink the urban also as ‘society.’ He urges that scholars unpacking modernity and its meanings must think of the urban as constituent of multiple dwellings of local politics, movements, and services of slum dwellers, NGO workers, and activists, and, for our case, children and youth, and their incursions on and experiences in the urban. It is in this way, Prakash suggests that “the urban turn, then, offers an opportunity to revise the history of Indian modernity, to bring into view spaces of power and difference suppressed by the historicist discourse of the nation” (p. 6). Hence, it is precisely in the spaces of the everyday that India’s modernity can be understood by centring new subject positions and their negotiations with modern structures, adult frameworks, and institutions that otherwise aim to fix their experiences according to a linear temporal framework. Furthermore, Guru and Sarukkai (2019) offer in their concept of “the everyday social,” certain valence to everyday lived experience. It is in these experiences that the sense of the ‘social of an individual’—within categories of caste, nation, religion, gender, or, what we include, generation— also gets shaped. Hence, unlike the insistence on reading the experiences of young people through the frame of agency (Prout & James, 1997), which has dominated the global North childhood studies discourse, the “everyday social” provides a nuanced reading of experiences through the “socialities” of those oft-forgotten, such as those “of house-wives, maids, children, city sanitation workers … and processes around us” (p. 4). These socialities are also often left out of the discourses and discussions on society, urban space, and modernity in India. Hence, when we blend these two frameworks in our conceptualisation of the ‘everyday urban,’ it is to suggest that young people’s experiences of processes of modernity in the urban world also shape and inform our understanding of modern Indian society. Moreover, the ‘everyday urban’ unravels the scale of linear temporality, as the everyday is not to be understood as a series of predetermined events but one that is rather informed by multiple time frames—cosmological, historical, functionalised, the sacred, and profane, mythic and real, as well

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as the cyclical and linear time—that can coexist in our everyday life (Ray & Ghosh, 2016). When young people encounter modern institutions in urban contexts, we find they are able to articulate the problems with the caste system and the inequalities they witness and experience daily, as both a historical and a contemporary problem (Glockner Fagetti, this volume). They also undermine the set rules and structures of the marching brass bands of the colonial juvenile justice system (Ellis, this volume), question the ableist discourses of institutions (Fernandes, this volume), and challenge dominant mainstream schooling pedagogies as an alternate solution to child labour (Glockner Fagetti, this volume). As the ‘every day’ is often understood as a space for the uncritical reproduction of social practices (see critique, Ray & Ghosh, 2016, p. 4), this chapter foregrounds, instead, the need to critically read the seemingly ‘mundane’ experiences in the urban every day as a constituent of the negotiations, relationalities, and identity politics of the oft-forgotten social actors—young people. The relation of the everyday with the urban is also very intentional in our conceptualisation of modernity and young people as the urban sphere is a critical site for development agendas and where the project of modernity is imagined to finally arrive. Association of urban cities in India as akin to ‘global cities’ (Sassen, 2005) such as Tokyo, Shanghai, or New York, with sprawling high-rises, and markets where globally produced items can be purchased as though anywhere else has resulted in the creation of ‘socially produced aspirations’ (Huijsmans et al., 2021). However, when we unpack the urban, by reading everyday experiences, and the temporalities that constitute it, it is rife with risk and encounters with various social structures. Young people risk their futures as they leave their villages and aspire for lives and products available only in cities. Sometimes they risk their affiliations with their communities and families, as they choose premarital relationships and ultimately their own choice of life partners. Most often, young men and women are risking their lives in precarious work conditions—as detailed earlier. Hence, it is not possible to unpack a reading of modernity and young people in the everyday, without also recognising that the ‘everyday urban’ also constitutes the experiences of young people with the “large-scale projects of social engineering” which other scholars, like Ritty Lukose (2009, p. 219), have read as outside of the purview of the ‘everyday’ in earlier examinations of modernity and young people in India. The ‘everyday urban’ includes encounters, negotiations, and experiences of young people with institutional, transnational, and global

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conditions of precarity. These have cut across periods and resulted in contestations for claims to varied forms of the contemporary and cosmopolitan citizenry that continuously come at odds with the larger agendas of the state. It is in these conflicts and contestations within the everyday that we can then begin to understand children and youth in historical and contemporary India. Furthermore, while the everyday has been a conceptual and methodological frame employed largely in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, we suggest that by extending this framework as a theoretical tool to read the engagements of young people with modernity, we claim it as central to a cross-disciplinary agenda.

Politics and Problems of Knowledge Production for the South In the 1960s, the French historian Philippe Aries famously argued that ‘childhood’ was invented after the Middle Ages and children came to be increasingly valued by families and societies. Drawing on representations of family portraits in medieval art, Aries demonstrated that children did not occupy any distinct location, whether in dress, work, or physical space in Europe during this period. In the nineteenth century, with the onset of industrialisation, and subsequently, post-Fordist movements, childhood came to be situated within its contours of space and time. While Aries’ conclusions were extensively critiqued, particularly for these generalised arguments based on family paintings (Diana Gittins, 1998), it resulted in new research in the humanities and social sciences on the role of young people in community socialisation, education, social reproduction, and projects of nation-building. Soon, the value accorded to children and the representation of childhood as a distinct period of life (Zelizer, 1985), and determinants of age-consciousness and age-based segregation (Chudacoff, 1989) became significant markers of modern Western childhoods. Implicit in this construction were the dualistic notions of the deviant and the innocent child (see: Bandopadhyay, 2015; Jenks, 2005; Prout, 2015), the former requiring ‘correction and reform’ (Chacko, this volume; Kannan, this volume) and the latter, ‘protection’ (Ellis, this volume). Child protection and child rescue policies emerged in contexts “culturally and historically bound to the social preoccupations and priorities of the capitalist countries of Europe and the United States” (Boyden, 1997, p. 189). It was precisely these same norms that several scholars of ‘global

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childhood’ have argued were exported to the global South through international policies, development and humanitarian agendas, and globalisation (see Boyden, 1997; Monaghan, 2012; Stearns, 2005). This ‘export’ of particular notions of childhood as a phase of prolonged protection, however, assumes a teleological understanding of modernity. In this regard, young people in countries such as India become perpetually infantilised (Sen, 2005) or situated in the ‘waiting room’ of modernity, never able to transcend their limitations fully. Instead, Sarada Balagopalan (2014), Partha Chatterjee (2002), Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002), Sudipta Kaviraj (2000), and Nita Kumar (2001), among others, argue how the shaping of modernities in India has a distinct trajectory from that of Western frameworks, imbricated within the histories of colonialism and capitalism that shape young subjects profoundly. Children and young people have, unfortunately, been relegated to marginal positions in important community decision and policy-making endeavours due to their subordinate positions in age hierarchies in India (Pande, 2020; Vashisht, this volume). These histories have also altered our ways of knowing and have further marginalised Dalit, girl, indigenous, and queer childhoods. In an agenda to modernise and appear globally competitive, India’s child rights landscape has systematically erased the agency of the subaltern child. In this case, the subaltern child is doubly marginalised—by the global white supremacy discourse and also by the national-caste-class boundedness (Hopkins & Sriprakash, 2015). For instance, schools such as the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, (KISS), Orissa, have expanded into boarding schools that reform tribal children. Children from neighbouring tribal areas are encouraged to enrol in the boarding school, distanced from their everyday life cultures (Kumari, 2022). This institute caught international attention recently when the World Anthropology Union withdrew its plan to host the 2023 World Anthropology Congress at KISS. Similarly, NGOs display the image of the eternally hapless poor child in India, and other global South contexts (Manzo, 2008) and universal ideas about childhood often dictate policies in a top-down approach without recognition of local, material, and discursive contexts (Rai, this volume). In the past few years, scholars working on and based in the global South have demonstrated the wide gaps in knowledge production, circulation, and consumption that exist in the field of childhood and youth studies (Maithreyi & Kannan, 2022; Abebe et  al., 2022; de Castro, 2020). Whether it is the case that scholars of this field are building knowledge on

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a “limited set of canons” (Andal, 2021, p. 10) or that there has emerged an epistemic North and empirical South binary, wherein the global South becomes the site for testing theories developed in the global North (Balagopalan, in Cook et al., 2018), it can be now assumed that Southern perspectives (Abebe et al., 2022; Connell, 2014) and a turn towards ‘relational ontologies’ (Spyros et  al., 2018; Tisdall & Punch, 2012), de-­ colonial and post-colonial theories (Balagopalan, 2014; Cannella & Viruru, 2004; Liebel, 2020; Nieuwenhuys, 2007), are necessary for the field of childhood and youth studies, if they are to remain relevant and critical. Earlier scholarship on young people in India largely revolved around ethnographies on issues of child labour, schooling, and civil society reports on the rights of children. The problem with these studies was the lack of an engagement with historical processes and context-specific understandings of the contemporary issues of young people (Balagopalan, 2019; Stephens, 1995). Often, this led to a continued acceptance of Western theories in the study of the lives of young people, which strengthened disciplinary silos and resulted in limited production of critical work from institutions located within India. Despite the disciplinary dominance of developmental psychology on knowledge produced about children (Saraswathi et al., 2018), critical books in the past decade have come to the fore from diverse disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that interrogate the political and social contexts which construct and maintain certain norms and ideals about Indian childhoods and youth such as Inhabiting Childhoods (Balagopalan, 2014); Childhoods in India (Saraswathi et  al., 2018); Children and Knowledge in India (Bowen & Hinchy, 2015); Children and NGOs in India (McCarthy, 2021); Educating Youth: Regulation Through Psychosocial Skills in India (Maithreyi, 2021), among others. In particular, Bowen and Hinchy’s (2015) edited volume also highlights the significance of “analysing the historically and culturally specific concepts of childhood embedded in knowledge about and for children” (p. 324). They argue that it is either through knowledge or stories of children themselves or through an exploration of “knowledge for children,” advanced by NGOs, education systems, and governments, that “our understanding of social, political, economic and cultural change” can be enriched (p. 324). Asking, hence, who is knowledge being produced for and by whom, is critical to unpacking the politics and problems of knowledge production about children and young people.

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While childhood and youth studies scholars, primarily in and from the global North, have critically reflected upon the debates about its own inter-/multi-/cross-disciplinary position for some decades now (Cook, 2010; Korbin, 2010; Prout, 2005; Thorne, 2007), as scholars located in the global South, devoid of institutions or departments dedicated to this field, we wish to advance theoretical and empirical engagements within and across the global South in conversation with existing scholarship rather than looking towards normative Western frameworks. Owing to the lack of institutional interest, funds, and pedagogical training, childhood and youth studies scholars remain at the margins of the academia or are relegated as activists working for children and youth welfare organisations which are constrained by limited resources to generate a vast amount of rigorous research-based knowledge that can shape public debates substantially. With a growing decline in funds for the humanities and social sciences in India (Chatterjee, 2002), partly because of the political dispensation and its anti-intellectualism, the growth of critical interdisciplinary programmes in childhood and youth studies in India also remains largely absent. While the impetus for such research in Europe and the US has been tremendous over the past two to three decades, the global South has lagged far behind owing to structural, financial, and political reasons. These have exposed the glaring imbalances in the circuits of knowledge production in the field as scholars and young people in the global South mainly occupy the role of ‘empirical informants’ and secondary ‘collaborators’ rather than leading research investigations with substantial institutional support. For this field to advance, a certain amount of introspection is also urgently required in wider scholarly networks in the global South and dialogues among similar regions. We demonstrate that knowledge need not be produced in any singular way as proposed by the tenets of childhood studies established some twenty-five years ago in the European and American contexts (Prout & James, 1997). This is essential so that the trappings of Western-oriented childhood studies may not be repeated in collaborative and scholarly research emerging from India, which is not yet confined within any singular disciplinary domain. Another related challenge to the limited critical scholarship in this field in India also comes with the exclusion of the young subject in research emanating from traditional disciplines such as sociology, history, and economics. While the discipline of sociology in India experienced an important interdisciplinary turn with the onset of women’s studies (Patel, 2006, 2020), it largely excludes the sociology of childhood (Sriprakash, 2015;

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Dar, 2023). Similarly, in the discipline of history particularly, feminists and post-colonial scholars working in South Asia are contributing to the field with unique explorations of various archives (Ellis, 2023; Pande, 2020). Taking inspiration from Balagopalan’s (2011) provocation, this collection brings together critical research from disciplines of history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, childhood studies, and education, to unpack meanings about children and youth—across the generational spectrum— which engage with the uneven project of modernity and its pervasiveness in everyday social and cultural environments. We add to the ongoing debates and raise this self-critical and self-­ reflexive concern as we note that several of the contributors of this volume have also received their formal training or occupy positions in academic institutions in the North, while they identify their homelands and research terrains in the South. To encourage participation from the global South, Divya Kannan, along with Anandini Dar, organised the “Childhood, Youth and Identity in South Asia,” supported by a grant from the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY), Department of History, Shiv Nadar University IOE, and Centre for Publishing, Dr. B R Ambedkar University Delhi, on 5 and 6 January 2020. A few of the chapters in this volume emerge from the conference presentations and have been revised to engage more closely with the theme of this volume, which also necessitated rigorous theoretical engagements, alongside discourse analysis, and archival or empirical work. As editors, we engaged in several rounds of internal edits and organised public paper presentations to provide the necessary intellectual support for the authors as this process highlighted the growing fissures in global academic knowledge production also caused by the pandemic. Several of the contributors with their field sites in India but university affiliations abroad were challenged by the effects of the pandemic on their families and research, and had to navigate these varied scapes of mobility and immobility. By adopting an approach of solidarity with our contributors, we intend for this volume to add to the growing scholarship in the inter/cross/trans-disciplinary field of childhood and youth studies in South Asia and anticipate these research explorations, tied together by a move to unpacking meanings of modernity through the engagements in the everyday urban by young Indians, will provoke further lines of inquiry in the years to come.

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Thematic Explorations The thematic organisation provides us a glimpse into young people’s everyday lives in India which are complicated by the exclusionary paradigms of caste, gender, ethnicity, tribe, age, and religion, which assign them into varying order of statuses. Steeped in a deeply hierarchical and unequal social structure, children and youth in India occupy their positions long before birth through the ascription of their parents’ religious and caste identities. Often, the ‘poor’ child belongs to the lowest rungs of the socio-economic divide, battling the overwhelming prejudice of other communities, and striving to partake of the benefits accrued by modernity through schooling and skilling endeavours. This volume is broadly divided into two sections, which engage with the themes of bodies performance, aspirations, and mobility. The first set of authors primarily demonstrate how young bodies are regulated through discourses on modernity in the everyday urban contexts. While the others highlight children and young people’s own experiences of performing/ embodying particular ideals, we do not suggest this thematic organisation to present any sort of fixed binary between the regulations/mediation and performance/embodiment of modern young subjects. For instance, Catriona Ellis’ historical analysis of the Salvation Army marching bands consisting of low-caste children in the twentieth century indicates how poor children also disrupt strict adult surveillance by exerting their autonomy albeit limitedly, during regulated and practised performances, and straddles both themes. However, the types of sources (a focus on adult-­ authored texts vs interviews with children/ethnography) and diverse methodological interventions (archival research/discourse analysis vs fieldwork/activism) offer us a distinct possibility to read the ways in which young subjects—and their physical bodies—are both regulated and shaped by discourses of modernity as well manifested through their embodied and performative practices in their everyday. Both themes provide us a glimpse into young people’s everyday lives in India which are complicated by the exclusionary paradigms of caste, gender, ethnicity, tribe, age, and religion, which assign them into varying order of statuses. Steeped in a deeply hierarchical and unequal social structure, children and youth in India occupy their positions long before birth through the ascription of their parents’ religious and caste identities. Often, the ‘poor’ child belongs to the lowest rungs of the socio-economic divide, battling the overwhelming prejudice of other communities, and striving to partake of the benefits accrued by modernity through schooling and skilling endeavours.

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In the opening section, “Shaping Modern Subjects,” these endeavours are read by us as “strategies” of the state such as formal education and skilling policies that are geared to produce obedient and “entrepreneurial” subjects as highlighted by R. Maithreyi in this volume. She points out the discursive terrain, dominated substantially by psychology, sociology, and critical psychology frameworks, that aims to regulate the imparting of psycho-social skills in school-going children. A more implicit form of the prevalence of strategies can be found in early childhood development policies and curricula formulated based on Western or Euro-American norms of child growth and development, discussed, and mapped out in the chapter by Prabhat Rai. Against the backdrop of the recently announced National Education Policy of 2020, Rai examines how early childhood education policies are guided mainly by the ideals of objectivity in modernity and overlook important aspects of fairness and equity. Mary Ann Chacko adds another dimension to the discussion by calling our attention to the key role played by the media in constructing the image of a ‘good child citizen,’ moulded by ideas of social service and state developmentalism. Juxtaposing issues of media-led moral panics and mediatised childhoods, Chacko enquires into the politics of “media modernity” heralded by Kerala’s prominent daily newspaper Malayala Manorama and its Nalla Paadam (Good Lessons) initiative for child readers. Similarly, Smruthi Bala Kannan orients her lens to the “good child” in a sense, but in the government school classrooms of Chennai, to examine uniform dress codes and discourses of hygiene that seek to determine the contours of acceptable and respectable forms of conduct, especially among young girl students. She argues that school uniforms act as a signifier of different childhood ideals in institutionalised school spaces, and perpetuates class and caste distinctions among children through personal hygiene and sanitation campaigns. In their historically oriented chapters, Catriona Ellis and Palak Vashist situate several contemporary debates on “fixing” childhood and regimes of control on young children. In her study of the records of reformatories and certified schools in the Madras Presidency, and the Salvation Army missionaries records with children, Ellis argues that controlling the bodies and minds of children becomes a way for politicians and administrators of colonial India—very much manifest in the everyday urban—to prove their own scientific modernity and discipline children into conforming into new moral and social hierarchies of colonial modernity. Set in a different urban context of India, Palak Vashist examines age as a category of analysis in

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early twentieth-century Bombay factories and argues that the interlinkages of law, industry, and medicine constructed the “modern” childhood within parameters of “digits of age.” While the middle-class child was portrayed as in need of prolonged protection, the reformist zeal wavered in matters of child labour. Whereas the Western child is perceived as the normative figure for childhoods in the global South, this volume demonstrates that we also push to the fore that upper-caste, upper-class Indian children epitomise as the ‘ideal’ for children belonging to the subaltern groups in the country. Hence, the performance of childhood, situated in the scales of the local and global, are also majorly situated within the fissures of the national and the everyday. To be considered as ‘modern’ entails the adoption of habits, attires, and deportment of the children of the national elites, equipped with the paraphernalia of the latest technology, usage of the English language, means of mobility, and ease of access to the echelons of higher educational spaces. This volume, hence, also highlights how children and youth employ distinct practices in the ‘everyday urban’ to contest, navigate, and negotiate modern adult and institutional disciplinary regimes. The second thematic is hence construed as “Embodying Modernity/ Being Modern Subjects” and represents how “aspirations and (im)mobility” have come to define the crux of identifying the formation of young people’s own subjectivities in relation and at times in contestation with state, global capital, NGOs, parents, elders, and child social workers. Who is a ‘happy and healthy’ child is premised on categories of ableism that implicitly exclude those enduring any form of physical and cognitive disability. Kimberley Fernandes’ chapter explores the after-school programmes in Delhi that aim to fashion “disabled” children into desirable subjects through a tailor-made curriculum. However, these constructions of disability are constantly shifting in pedagogical interactions, and the challenges posed by children’s specific needs are often erased in an attempt to construct a universally able-bodied child. Yet, she points out that in the everyday urban encounters “disabled” children also inhabit distinct modern subjectivities. In India, several strategies for self-fashioning prevail; for instance, what Suchismita Chattopadhyay argues are personality development classes for urban youth to “up-value” and “modernize” themselves. Drawing upon participatory research in one such personality development programme in the alleys of north Delhi, Chattopadhyay explores soft-skill classes,

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embodying the spirit of “professionalism,” a focus on English speaking and bodily conduct to impart a sense of a “global” and “cosmopolitan” attitude and attire to young, middle-class individuals entering the job or marriage market. In another urban contemporary context, Kabita Chakraborty explores the politics of love and premarital relationships of young Muslim women in the urban slums of Kolkata and draws our attention to how young people claim their identities as being distinctly modern through the influence of popular media, straddling the shifting sites of private and public. These young people are neither agents nor victims (Lukose, 2014); as portrayed in earlier literature about the global South, their everyday engagements unsettle the neat and homogenous notion of modernity adopted from Euro-American framings. Such contestations by young people, however, are not easy nor linear. In her study with activists and children part of grassroots NGOs such as Concerned for Working Children, in Bangalore, Valentina Glockner Fagetti finds that it is through everyday intergenerational and relational connections that children negotiate and assert their subjectivities. In contrast, Adrienne Atterberry’s study on the elite adolescents of Bangalore, with American citizenship, who attend elite schools to ultimately obtain admission in colleges in the US, demonstrates how childhood is packaged and shaped among elite NRIs who enjoy global mobility. Standing in contrast to the chapters discussed above, Atterberry deconstructs the educational choices made by elite and transnationally mobile families in Bangalore for their adolescents. Packed with extracurricular activities, these children’s daily schedules of upper-class families largely remain occupied for most parts of their day, with little time for leisure activities that are not structured and monitored. It is in this context, hence, that the concept of socially reproduced aspirations (Huijsmans et al., 2021) becomes productive and is explored in the chapters described above. While we organise these chapters into two broad themes, they are not bound by these two thematic sections, as all eleven chapters offer a more comprehensive argument towards disrupting the linear temporality inherent in the project of Western modernity. Instead, together, they help advance and engage with the possibility of a framing of modernity and the young through the concept of the ‘everyday urban,’ more pertinent for regions such as India. Finally, in an effort to contribute more theoretical insights from the global South contexts, we hope this volume offers new ontological possibilities for the field of childhood and youth studies.

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PART I

Shaping Modern Subjects

CHAPTER 2

Development Discourses and Psychosocial Interventions: The Discursive Construction of ‘Risky’ and ‘Resilient’ Childhoods and Youth R. Maithreyi

Introduction In a bilingual speech delivered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the occasion of the World Youth Skills Day in July 2020,1 young people in India were encouraged to constantly reinvent themselves, remain flexible and self-reliant, through the acquisition of skills.2 Both skilling and 1  Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on the occasion of the World Youth Skills Day (14 July 2020). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE9RIQWp9q4. The two languages used were Hindi and English. 2  Note: The terms ‘young people’, ‘youth’ and ‘children’/‘childhood’ are interchangeably used in the chapter to draw attention to the broad range of young citizens targeted through skilling programmes. The continuities in training aimed at these different sets of young people is described elsewhere (see Maithreyi, 2021).

R. Maithreyi (*) Strategic Lead, Adolescent Health, KHPT, Bengaluru, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_2

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reskilling were presented as the key mantras for resilience, even in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, that brought the whole world to a standstill. Skills alluded to in the speech were not just technical skills, but rather the embodiment of a certain desirable personality that ‘skilling’ has come to stand for, resilient and demonstrating little dependency on the state (Gooptu, 2013). This is even as opportunities to progress through formal education have failed to offer young people routes for social mobility (Jeffrey et al., 2005; Maithreyi, 2019). Skilling youth has gained a global urgency in the last three decades. Skills training and education have been positioned as the panacea to all social, cultural and educational challenges that young people encounter within contemporary times (Ashton et  al., 1999; Crouch et  al., 2004; Gibb & Walker, 2011; Keep & Mayhew, 1999; Maithreyi, 2021; Taylor, 1998). The various sites of skilling (within and outside schools; government and non-governmental; from ‘high’ to ‘low’), offer us an opportunity to examine the context of the ‘everyday urban’ (see Dar and Kannan, this volume) within which young people are continuously reshaped, to fit with the political agendas of nations and markets. Drawing upon one specific skilling programme—life skills education (LSE)—observed in the Indian context, I discursively analyse this trend and imperative towards skilling youth. I show how programmes such as LSE bring together modernist assumptions of (developmental) psychology and the economics of human capital formation in regulating youth. Historically, child/youthhoods have been a key site of modernization, and linked to national and economic progress of states (Cannella & Viruru, 2004; Millei et al., 2018). Newer global impetus, such as the neoliberal restructuring of economies, continue to influence how social relationships between young people and institutions have come to be rewritten in order to achieve these transnational ends (Butterwick & Benjamin, 2006; Bowen & Hinchy, 2015; Millei et  al., 2018). Neoliberal conceptualizations of citizenship have foregrounded the value of ‘enterprise’ in young people (Gooptu, 2013), so as to allow structural risks to be transferred to individuals (Beck, 1992). Learning to manage risks, being adaptive, flexible and self-governing, through the perpetual psychological regulation of the self are seen as the skills that young people require within this context (Gooptu, 2013; Maithreyi, 2021). Socio-historically tracing the growth of skilling programmes, I show how it has coincided with these neoliberal shifts. Simultaneously, I also trace the disciplinary evolution of the psy-sciences that have primarily

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contributed the knowledges for regulation of populations in modern times (see Rose, 1999). I show how the psy-disciplines have contributed to establishing skilling agendas as the appropriate developmental solutions to manage youth. Further, I show how these discursive shifts in economic and psychological practices have together produced categories of ‘risky’ and ‘resilient’ youth that have also been imported to the contexts of the Global South. Different childhoods and youthhoods are marked as ‘risky’ or ‘resilient’ in accordance with the standards for behaviour and participation set by the knowledge-discourses of psychology and economics. The chapter is structured as follows: after introducing the methodology, I discuss the emergence of childhood as a specific site of regulation via the project of colonial modernization. In this, I discuss how the discipline of psychology has played a pivotal role in aligning child development agendas with the economic agendas of the colonial/post-colonial and transnational state. I further discuss the diffusion of these psychological knowledges (in the form of child development discourses, and later skilling) to the Indian context, thus drawing attention also to how the ‘everyday urban’ gets constituted. I then present data from an ethnographic study of LSE programmes observed in Bangalore, to show how socially disadvantaged youth in government and other low-income schools are targeted for LSE programmes. Marked as ‘at-risk’ for educational failure, I show how the ‘life skills’ identified as missing in such youth coincide with personality expectations consisting of behaviours, mannerisms and practices available within middle-class homes. Finally, I also present young people’s own accounts of these programmes, describing their performative experiences of finding place within the ‘everyday urban’. I show how facilitators of these programmes, belonging to similar social locations as their students, reinterpreted the programme and its expectations for young people to manage precarious and ‘risky’ futures, that are increasingly rewritten as individual contexts of ‘at-risk’. Adaptation in this context paradoxically requires the personal qualities of conformity or obedience, and entrepreneurialism.3 Thus, I present a situated understanding of modern childhoods, by examining the relationship between ‘knowledge about, knowledge for and knowledge constructed by children’ (Bowen & Hinchy, 2015). 3  The idea of the entrepreneurial self refers to the management of oneself as an enterprise, through a never-ending process of self-reflection and self-actualization, by holding oneself responsible for carrying out these activities as well as for its outcomes (Kelly, 2006).

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Methodology The chapter is based on a year-long ethnographic study of LSE programmes, conducted between 2012 and 2013 in Bangalore. Adopting a discursive approach to understanding LSE programmes, the data consists of textual material such as academic and non-academic literature, policy documents, reports and websites on life skills education. It also comprises ethnographic insights gathered from three organizations offering LSE programmes in select government, charitable or low-cost private schools in Bangalore. The ethnographic research extended from the life skills organizations into other sites that formed a part of these organizations’ networks, such as schools, corporate and non-corporate partner organizations, homes and communities of the young people who were the recipients of these programmes, and other training agencies that interfaced with the organizations. Interviews were conducted with key personnel from the organizations, as well as with the students who attended these programmes, their teachers and their parents. Focus group discussions were also conducted with students, but data was largely gathered through immersion and observations within the field sites and through informal conversations with the different actors. Key personnel from four other organizations providing LSE were also interviewed. Institutional Ethnography (IE) was adopted to examine LSE as a field. Linkages between everyday actions of individuals in the field and larger frameworks and processes, such as that of globalization of education systems and schooling, and its implications particularly across developing urban contexts within India were explored. The attempt was to locate local LSE programmes in relation to “broader visions, policies and practices (of education and economic development) within the global imaginative space” (Madsen & Carney, 2011, p. 116). The research focused on a wide spectrum of actors from children to youth, who were subjected to the LSE training in different ways. This continuity adopted in understanding young people’s developmental experiences breaks away from modernist binaries and linear frameworks that bind childhoods into specific stages (Prout, 2011). Thus, the research presents the experiences of a spectrum of young people, from adolescence to youth, who organically came together within the space of the programmes.

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Modernity, Disciplinary Developments and Psycho-­economic Regulation of the Child A key shift in modern times has been the identification and establishment of childhood as a distinct phase of life, in need of care and protection, bringing new attention to the child, and contributing to the global governance of childhoods. Historically, at least five different conceptions of the child can be identified, emerging within the West, and that have circulated through colonial and post-colonial knowledge discourses to non-Western contexts—namely, that of the innocent child to be protected; the immature child to be shaped into a rational adult; the child as a trope that recapitulates the evolutionary progress of the species and of civilizations; the child to be redeemed from its original sinful status; and the active child who discovers herself during the course of socialization (Zhao, 2007). Across these various constructions, a benevolent concern of care and protection of the child has masked an underlying agenda of classification, regulation and subjectification of children via expert knowledge systems (specifically, those of Christian Salvation and post-Enlightenment scientific rationality [Cannella & Viruru, 2004; Nadesan, 2010; Zhao, 2007). A common goal informing the regulation of the child subject has been the expectation of developing future citizens or homo psychologicus (De Vos, 2013)—that is, modern citizen-subjects who would possess an innate rationality and autonomy, and remain motivated to maximize her self-­ interest through greater self-control (Zhao, 2007). To this end, disciplines such as psychology have been instrumental in producing the measurements, methods and child development pedagogies that could be harnessed by the state in preparing children for their future role as modern citizens. Paradoxically, this has entailed fashioning the ‘empowered’ child, who is to be active and self-directed, while simultaneously ensuring her domination through the normative standards of development imposed, in order to align her with the state’s expectations for modern citizen-subjects (Nadesan, 2010). While concerns around “population stock and quality” (Burman, 2007) informed disciplinary developments around the child, and contributed to the universalization of child development norms modelled on the developmental trajectories of the elite, white, male child (Cannella & Viruru, 2004) within the Empire, in the colonies the recognition of diverse childhoods was central to the practices of colonial regulation of childhoods (Balagopalan, 2018). Within the colonies, the import of child

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development norms and frameworks contributed to the double colonization of native childhoods (Cannella & Viruru, 2004)—first, as a result of adult discourses that positioned the child as ‘immature’ and ‘lacking’, and placed the child in a relationship of subordination, surveillance and control vis-à-vis adults; second, via colonial apparatuses of governance that marked those in the colonies as ‘infantile’, and ‘wanting’ in relation to colonial standards of modernity (Balagopalan, 2018; Cannella & Viruru, 2004; Kannan, 2021; Vallagårda, 2014). Drawing upon similar humanist concerns of protection that informed the regulation of childhoods within the Empire, the colonial state sought to include the ‘multiple childhoods’ within the colonies into modern systems of education, discipline and regulation, premised upon a more extractive logic (Balagopalan, 2018). Importantly, the acknowledgement of ‘multiple childhoods’ within the colonies also determined the limits of inclusion for different childhoods within these modern systems, thus, historically contributing to varied trajectories of development, even post-colonization, for different caste and class children. Though accommodative of differences, native children’s everyday cultures were located as separate from and outside the scientific and legal knowledge systems of colonial governance, premised upon normative and universal understanding of childhood. As such, Balagopalan (2018) argues that the colonial state deliberately distorted the modern apparatuses and institutional arrangements such as that of schooling and education in ways that legitimized the reproduction of caste-class and regional differences in labour suited to its economically extractive agendas within the colonies. Scientific knowledge produced around the child within the Empire, and institutionalized via colonial apparatuses of governance, such as schools, prisons, childcare centres and remand homes, and even the family (Rose, 1999), continues to exert influence on the development and regulation of childhoods in post-colonies in South Asia and the Global South (Balagopalan, 2018). By the twentieth century, scientific knowledge of the Empire had established the portraiture of the ‘risky’ or ‘at-risk’ child— that is, a class of children who presented certain dangers to the state—such as that of becoming future welfare dependents, criminals, or a threat to the global economic order (Nadesan, 2010). These images of ‘risk’ and ‘resilience’ continue to be harnessed via international development work, national and international programmes and research on children, in regulating children’s lives in the Global South (Balagopalan, 2018; Burman, 2007; Maithreyi, 2021; Vallagårda, 2014). Thus, as Vallagårda (2014,

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p. 3) points out, the pedagogic project of creating modern subjects, which began as the imperial project of “white adults saving brown children from brown adults”, “persists in present-day humanitarian discourses about children in the Global South”. Local childhoods in the Global South at present are marked by a hybridity born out of the entanglement of ideologies and agendas of the colonial and national elite, captured aptly by Dar and Kannan (this volume) as through the ‘everyday urban’. National elite, while deeply ambivalent of their own children’s institutionalization, have been active in the modernization of ‘provincial’ childhoods and youthhoods in line with nationalist agendas of development (Kumar, 2007; Sen, 2012).4 Children and youth in the Global South have also drawn global and national attention as a result of the ‘demographic dividend’ they offer,5 not just to their own countries but also to the global labour market. Seen not only as members of ‘non-integrating’ economies, with the potential for socioeconomically transforming their nations, but also as “ticking time bombs waiting to explode” (Maithreyi, 2021; Sukarieh & Stuart, 2008), ‘life skilling’ of young people within these economies has thus gained an urgency. Rapid transformations within these societies, brought by globalization, rapid urbanization and neoliberal expansion of capital, have deepened structural inequities and produced new forms of insecurities (Naafs & Skelton, 2018). Simultaneously, it is these transformations that are seen as the “vehicles for national claims and aspirations to modernity” (Naafs & Skelton, 2018). Thus, youth in these contexts are sought to be prepared to take on new roles, fraught with risks and increased demands upon the self, even as the state cuts back on guarantees for social security, higher education and decent employment (Vasavi, 2015; Naafs & Skelton, 2018). Despite the precarity characterizing transitions, young people’s success and resilience are measured in relation to chronological and institutionalized biographical time (i.e., based on age-appropriate transitions through education systems, labour markets, legal and welfare regimes, etc.) 4  I use the term ‘provincial’ in the way Nita Kumar (2007) does, to describe marginal childhoods and youthhoods in India that are seen as not sufficiently ‘modern’ and/or integrated into the vision of development of the state. 5   Countries with a youthful or working-age population are considered to have a ‘demographic dividend’. Several countries in the Global South, including India, will witness a youthful population in the coming decade unlike several countries in the Global North that will experience an ageing population.

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(Morrow, 2013; Naafs & Skelton, 2018). International and national agencies assess whether young people’s lives in countries such as India are ‘on’ or ‘off track’ based on this normative understanding (see WHO, 1993; Population Council, 2020). Though, in reality, developmental time intersects with young people’s life circumstances,6 those who deviate from normative life courses and choices are identified as constituting a significant ‘risk’ for individual, national and global development (Naafs & Skelton, 2018). A particular disruptive image of young people who do not align with these normative timetables has also been globally circulated and validated by powerful figures, such as the former president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn. Wolfensohn states: “when young people feel hopeless, they risk doing desperate things which are costly to themselves and to society at large” (as cited in Sukarieh and Stuart 2008, p. 305). This has served to position a large majority of young people in the global south ‘at-risk’. Under these circumstances, Naafs and Skelton (2018, p.  5) argue that “young people are having to demonstrate all kinds of adaptive, resilient and reworking tactics”, and bear the enormous weight of expectations of families and the nation. For countries, youth offer an economic value as they can render nations globally competitive. Thus, the regulation of youth to make them ‘resilient’ in managing the structural risks of globalization and political-economic changes, through the cultivation of personality and skills, has become a national priority (Gooptu, 2013; Maithreyi, 2021; Naafs & Skelton, 2018). This approach to managing youth and potential risks can be gleaned not just from statements of national leaders (e.g., PM Modi’s state presented above) but also through national discourses and public campaigns such as ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’, ‘Make in India’, ‘Skilling India’, seen in the recent times, all of which require the youth population of India to adopt a particular kind of self-reliant and entrepreneurial personality in order to realize the developmental vision of the state.

6  Developmental time here refers to the expected milestones of learning and maturation associated with specific chronological periods of life

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Teaching Young People to Manage Life’s Risks Through a Set of Skills LSE is a popular programme identified for young people’s development within this context. ‘Life skills’ has been defined by the World Health Organization (WHO, 1993, p.  1) as “psychosocial abilities for positive and adaptive behaviours that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life”. The WHO lists out a set of ten skills that cover all domains of the self—intrapersonal, interpersonal and cognitive.7 Further, it lists a range of problems that LSE is targeted at: from poor social competence, low academic achievement, impulsiveness and truancy, to poverty, all of which are considered to increase the risk of violence among youth (WHO, 2009). LSE is expected to preventively address potential risks that threaten to render youth ‘off course’ by increasing their participation at school and improving their chances of becoming gainfully employed, thus reducing their risks of violence in childhood and later life. Interestingly, in accounts of international development agencies such as the WHO, a number of disparate problems, from personal qualities such as social competence and impulsiveness, are placed alongside socially determined circumstances such as poverty, all of which must be addressed through an individual set of psychological skills. Evident from these accounts, and the very definition of ‘life skills’, is the conversion of everyday problems emerging from structural conditions (e.g., poverty and unemployment) into problems of individual adaptation. Developmental discourses of psychology have positioned the management of external risks as ‘life skills’ and as integral to one’s own development, similar to other forms of development, such as learning to walk or talk (Maithreyi, 2021). In fact, even the earliest LSE programme, planned as part of the US government’s ‘War on Poverty’, sought to train youth in life skills that would aid the management of the structural condition of ‘stagflation’ and unemployment (Maithreyi, 2021). Thus, the first life skills programme by psychologist Winthrop Adkins aimed at making youth “self-reliant, self-­ directing, employable citizens”. Adkins’ LSE programme targeted 7  The ten skills include self-awareness, effective communication, interpersonal relationships, empathy, critical thinking, creative thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, managing stress and managing emotions. For a classification of the skills, see Maithreyi (2021).

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unemployed youth to teach them skills to “make decisions and choices, resolve conflicts, gain self-understanding, explore environmental opportunities and constraints, communicate effectively with others, and take personal responsibility for their actions” (Adkins, 1984, pp. 44–45) Devoid of pathologization, the language of skills and competencies-­ based training has been applied in recent times to establish an understanding of normality and what it means for young people to develop naturally, by learning to overcome risk and become resilient. Skills discourses have shifted the ground from an external, normative ideal, to an internal standard that must emerge through the never-ending process of reflexive engagement with the self (Rose, 2004).

Life Skilling Youth in India: Cultivating Resilience and Conformity among Disadvantaged Youth Dispersed widely through global infrastructures of educational governance, ‘life skilling’ youth has gained immense interest in countries across the Global South. Positioned as a component of ‘basic education’ through international frameworks of Education for All (EFA) and advocacy of supranational agencies, psychological techniques for managing oneself have also been included as part of National Curriculum Frameworks (NCF) in countries such as India. The paradoxical training of youth— focused at once on their empowerment as entrepreneurial citizens and their regulation to align their actions with the expectations of authorities—was nowhere more clearly seen than through the LSE programmes observed within government and low-income schools in Bangalore, India. LSE programmes were introduced by the state as part of its efforts at regulation of population health, through the Adolescent Education Programme (AEP) in 2005. The AEP and LSE targeted young people in relation to their sexual and reproductive health, particularly during the height of the HIV/AIDs pandemic in the early 2000s. Within the conservative Indian society where adolescents and young adults have very little access to information around sexual and reproductive health, LSE was seen as possible avenue to address young people’s risky reproductive health practices, sexual relationships and teenage pregnancies (Boradia, 2009). However, public protests over the teaching of ‘sex education’ to children brought the programme to a halt across several states by 2007 (Bahuguna, 2007).8 8

 LSE has been continued by the CBSE schools, however.

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Yet, LSE programmes by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social entrepreneurs have proliferated, particularly within urban settings, specifically targeting young people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. A large majority of these programmes have avoided contentious topics revolving around young people’s sexuality and health, and have instead focused on addressing problems such as school dropout and employability. As programme managers, such as Pavan Raghunath of Vivek Youth Brigade (VYB), shared with me during the course of my fieldwork in local schools,9 LSE training has even explicitly positioned interventions to improve attendance and pass percentages of government and other low-income schools, which have traditionally fared poorly in terms of student outcomes. Though the heads of several LSE organizations, such as Rajesh Sridhar of VYB, Amir Raza of Media for Change Limited (MFCL) and Devesh Arya of Imagine Possibilities (IP), had envisioned these programmes as developing personalities, and the soft skills of creativity, communication and enterprise, school managers and officials of the education department only appeared to be interested in these programmes if they were seen to forward their own agendas of ‘discipline’ and improving school outcomes. However, common across the narratives shared by school and education department personnel, as well as the non-state organizers of LSE programmes, were conceptions of the ‘at-risk’ youth and the need to develop their resilience through skilling. Significantly, the need for the skills was articulated by these various actors as needed to train socially disadvantaged youth to manage despite their social conditions of disadvantage. For example, stating the need for and importance of life skills at a training for his staff, Devesh Arya, the CEO of IP, explained: Whatever you study, in five to seven years is going to go waste—the technical skills. But what we can take ahead is our ability to be adaptable and flexible. This is a life skill. Twelve to 14 million people graduate from our country but don’t get jobs. If the ultimate aim of education was to help you lead a high quality of life, and one part of quality of life was a job, then education is failing us somewhere.

9  All name of respondents, organizations and schools have been anonymized in the chapter to protect privacy and confidentiality of respondents.

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As Arya’s statement clearly shows against the illusory promises of formal education systems to deliver masses out of poverty (Vasavi, 2015), it is individual resilience that is the most valuable form of learning to adapt to the unstable economic conditions and a precarious future, entailing extracurricular efforts by young people in working upon themselves. Similarly, discussing the thinking behind the LSE programme introduced by VYB in government schools, Pavan Raghunath stated: Whether we like it or not SSLC becomes important.10 Life is in a very different dimension if you do not cross this … When we are pushing for academic needs, we understand that just tuition is not enough … personality is important in making them successful.

Like Arya’s (and even PM Modi’s comment before), Raghunath’s comment also demonstrates how personality has come to be regarded as the critical component to educational (and other forms) of success. Interestingly, within these accounts, it is the cultivation of a particular form of personality that has come to be regarded as ‘life skills’. In fact, similar to Ainely and Corbett’s (1994) analysis of life skills training in a different context, what was evident from an analysis of various LSE progamme in the Indian context as well was the conflation of ‘life skills’ with bourgeoise or middle-class practices and life trajectories. This was even made explicit in discussions by the likes of Raghunath, who further explained his concept of “personality” by stating that the skills for success were already present within “our” (i.e., middle class) children—a sentiment that was also echoed by members of the other organizations as well. Arya argued that his programme aimed at “giving back” to society, and specifically disadvantaged youth, those skills that had made him successful, so that they too might “escape their cycle of poverty”. As seen within international accounts, within local accounts too, LSE was positioned to address a set of structural disadvantages such as poverty or poor quality of schooling through the development of individual skills and the individualization of these risks. In this manner, an “ideology of merit” (Upadhya, 2007) characterized the programmes. That is, middle-class organizers of programmes and school authorities attributed their own life successes to certain habits, behaviours and practices, terming them ‘life 10  Secondary School Leaving Certificate (signifying the completion of basic schooling after class 10).

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skills’, while overlooking their own privileges that had made them successful, or the structural barriers of poverty, socio-historical discrimination and disadvantages that affected the lives of the children they worked with. For most children in the government and low-income schools I visited, life and the trajectories of education and schooling were marked by a context of uncertainty. Largely being first-generation learners from migrant agricultural or artisanal families, who often balanced education with work, in order to support the family’s survival within the urban economy, learning at the government or low-income school for these children was often interrupted for a variety of reasons. From accounts of students who were unable to afford bus fees to come to school regularly, to limited space and time at home to undertake school activities, what was evident was that these young people persisted with education under challenging conditions. Along with this, the poor quality of education offered at these government or low-quality private schools, marked by teacher vacancies and absences, substitution of teaching by trainee teachers, as well as large losses in learning time due to bandhs, strikes and interventions by external actors, purportedly offering these young people different kinds of ‘life skills’, rendered the whole process of schooling itself risky (Maithreyi, 2021). Yet, the identified risks within the discourses of middle-class actors such as the teachers and life skills organizers were not associated with the structural context or process, but students’ and their families’ and their ‘cultural contexts of poverty’. For example, describing the ‘cultures of poverty’ that the children came from, teachers such as Sindhupriya from a low-­income school in east Bangalore explained that her students needed LSE to learn “manners, like how to give respect, to lead life and learn good from bad”. Another teacher, Suma, from a government school in south Bangalore, stated that the students in government schools needed LSE to learn “moral values”, as their parents, unlike middle-class parents, were not able to teach them these important lessons. This deficit framing of the students and their families was also visible in accounts of the managerial staff of the LSE organizations. For example, Garima Acharya, chief operating officer of IP, explained the need for the programmes, stating: You and me, daily, use life skills to manage conflicts. … For children from difficult backgrounds, they address these challenges by substituting themselves with alcohol, crime, drugs or just being poor … Even if they get a job, they don’t know how to conduct themselves at a job or manage conflicts at work.

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In the accounts of local actors like Garima also, the condition of being poor itself was identified as what made young people from disadvantaged backgrounds ‘risky’, similar to how it has been positioned within international developmental discourses (as discussed above). More importantly, it was identified as an individual quality, to be contrasted with the middle classes’ successful ways of being. Along with programme managers like Acharya, field staff or facilitators, who often belonged to similar backgrounds as the students themselves and were only slightly older than the students,11 identified specific deficits in the behaviours and mannerisms of young people that placed them ‘at-­ risk’. For example, Yamuna a facilitator from VYB, stated: government school children require life skills more because they don’t know anything, have no discipline, won’t wear uniforms; … they come like free persons. They are the rebel kind. They don’t know that they need to wish the teacher. Government schools don’t teach them how to behave or about interpersonal ‘talking’.

Students’ conduct that were considered to be inappropriate within school (rather than specific skills or their academic abilities) were often used to explain both their poor educational outcomes as well as the need for life skills. Within most teachers’ accounts, LSE was meant to “put good sense in children” (“OLLe buddhi he ̄LikoDuvudakke”, in Kannada), and encourage them to improve their performance at school. Therefore, too, programme organizers like Dr Chandrika Bavegadi, a psychologist, for example, would convert lessons on self-development and well-being into sessions to advise students on the appropriate kinds of behaviours to adopt for supposed academic success. For example, presenting a story on ‘Warm Fuzzies’ and ‘Cold Pricklies’, meant to help students identify how they could enhance their own self-­ esteem (i.e., by presenting themselves ‘Warm Fuzzies’) and avoid making themselves unhappy (i.e., by presenting themselves ‘Cold Pricklies’), Bavegadi however summarized the lesson in a different fashion. Explaining to students at a government high school in south Bangalore, Bavegadi 11  In comparing the field staff with the students, I highlight the modest, lower-middle-class or lower-class, rural and/or agricultural backgrounds that they too belonged to. The field staff, like the students, can be described as Nita Kumar’s (2007) ‘provincial other’—that is, those who present a foil to the urban, globally focused, corporatized, ‘modern’ India, that the managerial staff of the LSE organizations belonged to.

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stated: “Eighth and ninth standards are an age of ‘Whys’ and ‘I’, when young people largely desire only to be rewarded by ‘Warm Fuzzies.” Such “Warm Fuzzies”, she added, included giving into the temptations of watching television. Stating this, she drew the students’ attention to long-­ term consequences, pointing out: “If I see T.V. today, what will happen tomorrow? I won’t tell you to study, but you think and decide.” Presumptive assumptions about students rebellious or pleasure-seeking behaviours were used in this manner to construct student deficiencies in relation to which the ‘soft skills’ of intra-, interpersonal and cognitive development were applied to developing specific behaviours to address students’ risky educational outcomes. However, for the facilitators who shared the students’ cultural and generational contexts, the precarity of such educational investments was also evident. Thus, during the course of their sessions, facilitators, such as Gautam from IP, stated to children after playing the Yes Game (in which one child must find an object hidden by the rest of the group, by following the cues given by the group): In the ‘yes game’, if you tell the child searching for the object the wrong route he can’t reach the goal. In the same way only if we follow our parents and teachers, we will be able to reach our goals. We have to listen to elders and teachers. Otherwise you will go off on the wrong path … ‘Study hard and somehow pass’.

Gautam’s caution to students to “somehow pass” clearly revealed the understanding that the young facilitators had of the difficult contexts and pathways that their students had to transact in order to individually take responsibility for ensuring their academic and life successes. On the one hand, the facilitators sought to prepare their students to manage the precarity of their conditions by motivating them to be obedient, conforming and complying with the developmental expectations set by school, the nation and the global developmental agendas for ‘youth at-risk’; on the other hand, they also sought to prepare them to become entrepreneurial to manage these risks. Thus, for example, another facilitator, Bharat, also from IP, motivated students to make the most of the programmes, when schooling quality and outcomes for the students remained poor. Bharat explained to his students:

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I was poor. My parents struggled to put me through school. Someone like this (pointing towards me) taught me art, clay modelling, acting, dance, and today it has helped me get a job.

Thus, together, the observations of various LSE programmes within the urban context of Bangalore, and discussions with the different actors managing youth, ranging from teachers to life skills organizers and facilitators, clearly showed how LSE programmes functioned as sites for the regulation of personalities rather than the development of specific skills. What was further visible was also the performative understanding of the self and a demonstration of resilience that young people had to adopt in order to be identified as ‘not-at-risk’. Further, the need for this regulation of personalities was also seen as necessary for a specific set of population—that is, for those who did not seem to align with the middle-class development visions of state and non-­ state actors. LSE programmes functioned as ‘discursive’ sites for the conflation of ‘normative development’ with middle-class ideologies and agendas of development, through which child/youthhoods in the ‘everyday urban’ were formed. Young people, particularly those from disadvantaged social backgrounds, who were unable to confirm with such expectations were identified as at-risk for going ‘off-course’; and the LSE was seen as necessary to render them resilient despite their social and structural disadvantages.

Conclusion Under the intensification of neoliberal economic ideologies, unstable futures and precarious conditions of living in the present for young people in urban India, (life) skills and personality have come to be positioned as the panacea for developmental problems, leading to an intensified focus and expectation of individuals to cope and adapt to these circumstances. As I have argued in the chapter, skilling discourses not only have served to lay greater responsibility on the individual but also have in fact served to glibly rewrite “institutionally structured relations of class, gender, ethnicity, (dis)ability and geography” as complex yet quantifiable (Kelly, 2000) and manageable problems emerging out of an ontology of individual development (rather than as a result of capitalist development). In this context, global discourses, national priorities and middle-class ideologies of governance have combined in identifying specific youth as ‘at-risk’ and

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in need of LSE.  A culturally constituted set of deficiencies mark non-­ middle-­class youth who may lack the attitudes, mannerisms and behaviours required to adopt a ‘middle class modernity’ and conform to developmental visions of the state (Fernandes, 2000). Against this context, psychological self-regulation techniques, such as LSE, have been discursively positioned as education and training programmes, and aim at cultivating the twin qualities of conformity (with bourgeoise developmental expectations) and entrepreneurialism (to ensure economic development and progress for individuals and nations despite structural risks). Interestingly, young people, upon whom these expectations of entrepreneurial resilience is set, do demonstrate both entrepreneurialism and resilience, which however may not be in expected ways. However, programmes such as LSE do become important sites of learning and opportunity by which they attempt to manage their risky futures. Within these everyday sites of the urban, children and youth lay claim to citizenship and modernity, albeit in ways that also disrupt the normative expectations of development.

References Adkins, W.  R. (1984). Life skills education: A video-based counseling/learning delivery system. In D. Larson (Ed.), Teaching psychological skills: Models for giving psychology away (pp. 44–68). Monterey, CA. Ainley, P., & Corbett, J. (1994). From vocationalism to enterprise: Social and life skills becomes personal and transferable. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 15(3), 365–374. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1393149 Ashton, D., Green, F., James, D., & Sung, J. (1999). Education and training for development in East Asia: The political economy of skill formation in East Asian newly industrialised economies. Routledge. Bahuguna, N. J. (2007, August 20). No sex education please- We\’re Indian. Other News. Retrieved from http://www.other-­news.info/2007/08/nosexeducation-­please-­wereindian/ Balagopalan, S. (2018). Colonial modernity and the “child figure”: Reconfiguring the multiplicity in “multiple childhoods”. In T.  S. Saraswathi, S.  Menon, & A. Madan (Eds.), Childhoods in India: Traditions, trends and transformations (pp. 23–43). Routledge. Beck, U. (1992). Risk society. Towards a new modernity. SAGE Publications. Boradia, A. (2009). Education for youth and adolescents in India: Education for all—Mid-decade assessment. NEUPA.

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Bowen, Z., & Hinchy, J. (2015). Introduction: Children and knowledge in India. South Asian History and Culture, 6(3), 317–329. https://doi.org/10.108 0/19472498.2015.1030875 Burman, E. (2007). Deconstructing developmental psychology. Taylor & Francis e-library. Butterwick, S., & Benjamin, A. (2006). The road to employability through personal development: A critical analysis of the silences and ambiguities of the British Columbia (Canada) Life Skills Curriculum. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 25(1), 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370 500309543 Cannella, G.  S., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and post-colonization: Power, education and contemporary practice. Routledge Falmer. Crouch, C., Finegold, D., & Sako, M. (2004). Are skills the answer? The political economy of skills creation in advanced industrial countries. Oxford University Press. De Vos, J. (2013). Psychologization and the subject of late modernity. Palgrave Macmillan. Fernandes, L. (2000). Restructuring the new middle class in liberalizing India. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle East, 20(1 & 2), 88–112. Gibb, T., & Walker, J. (2011). Educating for a high skills society? The landscape of federal employment, training and lifelong learning policy in Canada. Journal of Education Policy, 26(3), 381–398. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939. 2010.520744 Gooptu, N. (2013). Introduction. In N.  Gooptu (Ed.), Enterprise culture in neoliberal India: Studies in youth, class, work and media (pp. 1–24). Routledge. Jeffrey, C., Jeffrey, P., & Jeffrey, R. (2005). When schooling fails: Young men, education and low-caste politics in rural North India. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 39(1), 1–38. Kannan, D. (2021). “Children’s work for children”: Caste, childhood, and missionary philanthropy in colonial India. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 14(2), 234–253. https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2021.0021 Keep, E., & Mayhew, K. (1999). The assessment: Knowledge, skills and competitiveness. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 15(1), 1–15. Kelly, P. (2000). The dangerousness of youth-at-risk: The possibilities of surveillance and intervention in uncertain times. Journal of Adolescence, 23, 463–476. Kelly, P. (2006). The entrepreneurial self and ‘youth at-risk’: Exploring the horizons of identity in the twenty-first century. Journal of Youth Studies, 9(1), 17–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260500523606 Kumar, N. (2007). The politics of gender, community, and modernity. Essays on education in India. Oxford University Press.

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Madsen, U. A., & Carney, S. (2011). Education in an age of radical uncertainity: Youth and schooling in urban Nepal. Globalisation, Societies, and Education, 9(1), 115–133. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2010.513589 Maithreyi, R. (2019) ‘Curricular analysis of India’s vocationalisation of secondary and higher secondary education scheme’ In R. Maithreyi, K. Prabha, A. Iyer, S. R. Prasad, & J. Jha (Eds.), A critical sociological analysis of the skills development initiative of India (pp.  16–42). https://cbps.in/wp-­content/uploads/ Final-­Skills-­Full-­Report_19-­July-­2019.pdf Maithreyi, R. (2021). Educating youth: Regulation through psychosocial skilling in India. Sage India Pvt. Ltd. Millei, Z., Silova, I., & Piattoeva, N. (2018). ‘Towards decolonizing childhood and knowledge production’, In I. Silova et al. (Eds). Childhood and schooling in (post)socialist societies. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­62791-­5_12 Morrow, V. (2013). Troubling transitions: Young people’s experiences of growing up in poverty in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. Journal of Youth Studies, 16(1), 86–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2012.704986 Naafs, S., & Skelton, T. (2018). Youthful futures? Aspirations, education and employment in Asia. Children’s Geographies, 16(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14733285.2018.1402164 Nadesan, M.  H. (2010). Governing childhood into the 21st century. Biopolitical technologies of childhood management and education. Palgrave Macmillan. Population Council. (2020) Navigating successful transitions to adulthood. National Dissemination of UDAYA Findings. Webinar conducted on August 19, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5S_5kwKMh0 Prout, A. (2011). Taking a step away from modernity: Reconsidering the new sociology of childhood. Global Studies of Childhood, 1(1), 4–14. Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul. Shaping of the private self. Free Associations Book. Rose, N. (2004). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge University Press. Sen, S. (2012). Colonial childhoods. The juvenile periphery of India 1850–1945. Anthem Press. Sukarieh, M., & Stuart, T. (2008). In the best interests of youth or neoliberalism? The World Bank and the New Global Youth Empowerment Project. Journal of Youth Studies, 11(3), 301–312. Taylor, A. (1998). Employability skills: From corporate ‘wish list’ to government policy. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 30(2), 143–164. Upadhya, C. (2007). Employment, Exclusion and ‘Merit’ in the Indian IT Industry. Economic and Political Weekly, 1863–1868. Vallagårda, K. (2014). Imperial childhoods and Christian mission. Education and emotions in South India and Denmark. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Vasavi, A. R. (2015). Culture and life of government elementary schools. Economic and Political Weekly, 50(33), 36–50. WHO. (1993). Life skills education for children and adolescents in school. Introduction and guidelines to facilitate the development and implementation of life skills programmes. WHO. http://whqlibdoc.who.int/hq/1993/MNH_ PSF_93.7A.pdf WHO. (2009). Violence prevention the evidence: Preventing violence by developing life skills in children and adolescents. WHO. http://www.who.int/violence_ injur y_prevention/violence/4th_milestones_meeting/evidence_briefings_all.pdf Zhao, G. (2007). The making of the modern subject: A cross-cultural analysis. Educational Theory, 57(1), 75–88.

CHAPTER 3

Conceptualisation of Development and Learning in Indian Early Childhood Curriculum Prabhat Rai and Prachi Vashishtha

Human reason (rationality), scientific method that rely on empiricism and objectivity, technology and new ways of organising life in an industrial society were some of the tools and aspirations that were employed by modernity to transcend space (place), time (historical experience) and action (abstract culture-free individual). Dahlberg et al. (1999) express it emphatically:

P. Rai (*) School of Educational Psychology and Counselling, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Peninsula Campus, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] P. Vashishtha Jindal School of Psychology and Counselling, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_3

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[T]he project of modernity had ambitious goals: progress, linear and continuous; truth, as the revelation of a ‘knowable’ world; and emancipation and freedom for the individual, socially, politically and culturally. (p. 19)

This freedom, based on definitive truth to determine life, is followed in many social science disciplines. The focus in this chapter is on developmental psychology and conceptualisation of ‘developmentalism’, which in turn has guided curriculum making in early childhood education. This chapter builds on the already-existing critique of ‘developmentalism’ to make a case that the preschool curriculum document (hereafter referred to as PCD) 2019 and National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 in India draws on the age- and stage-based idea of children’s development. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA)as a methodological tool to analyse policy document, the chapter shows that the two documents mentioned above are guided by the concept of ‘developing child’, which presents a universalistic, masculine and eurocentric ideas of childhood. These conceptualisations of childhood have been supported by the empirical and objectivist methodological commitment of modern science, which often sidesteps the questions of subjectivity, context and mediation while overemphasising the linear movement and naturalisation of mind as a central object of inquiry. Drawing on the work in cultural-historical psychology and critical psychology the chapter offers a critique which demands a historical, local and yet not relativist approach in conceptualising children’s development. The chapter is divided into four sections: The first section presents a brief background of developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) to offer a context and some of the main tenets that are picked up later to show how they have influenced early childhood curriculum writing in India. Section 2 offers a narrative around timelessness (ahistoricity) and spacelessness (acultural) as two central features that have guided theory making in developmental psychology. Sections 3 and 4 present a methodological frame and analysis of the PCD in India. The last two sections show that an international trend is being followed in India that focus on standardisation of curricular goals through large-scale assessment measures. The grand metanarrative of child development theories has made ‘central processor’ model of cognitive development the central aim of early childhood education. A brief outline of a few principles from the cultural-historical theory is presented at the end to suggest that a historical, local and yet non-­ relativist approach in conceptualising children’s development is possible.

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Background The focus on early childhood education could be seen as an educational reform which is intended to solve some of the vexed problems of poor performance of children (especially on large-scale achievement tests) in school years. The curriculum documents of early childhood education are “travelling educational reforms” (Ellis et al., 2016); similar to this argument in the Western economies, a case is made that early childhood education leads to better learning outcomes in the later years and leads to the development of human capital. Highlighting the nature of these ‘travelling educational reforms’, Sriprakash and Hopkins (2016) rightly suggest that there is a template approach for education—a context-free ‘travelling rationality’ (Craig and Porter Craig & Doug, 2006) … The tendency towards simplification, categorisation and universality appeals to a desire for development to be a process that is coherent, linear and commensurable, and whose technical success can be easily measured in the face of such complexity and contingency. (p. 201)

Here, we turn briefly to the history of ‘developmentally appropriate practice’ to understand how developmentalism entered into the curriculum discourse. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), an American professional body, in 1987 published guidelines for children from birth through age 8 with a central purpose to present an accreditation model for early childhood education (see Bredekamp, 1987; Bredekamp & Copple, 1997). Bredekamp states that the DAP guidelines in 1987 were launched with a purpose to build “consensus about standards to guide professional practice and to advocate for compliance with such standards among members of the profession” (Bredekamp, 1997, p. 34). These DAP guidelines were revised in 1997, and at least made two major additions. One, it included 12 fundamental, empirically based principles of child development and learning that informs NAEYC’s practice decisions. Two, a key addition was made to explicitly acknowledge the role of culture in children’s development. It is worth noting here that the understanding of culture presented in the document is limiting and merely as an environ where activities happen. The 1997 document and subsequent revisions mentions culture merely as a ‘context’ for learning. Cole (1996) has offered a more robust critique of this

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position of seeing culture as a context. Most importantly, this position sees a dualism between individual and social. It is worth noting that this conceptualisation of ‘culture as context’ undermines child’s agency to influence her development and wellbeing. Burman (2017) in her writings has shown the critique-critical theory, postcolonial theory and poststructuralist theory presents to the acceptance of the power of science to objectively determine the universal laws of human development. These theoretical traditions have shown that the traditional developmental psychology research that is being used to organise practice in the field of early childhood education has been predominantly based on a homogeneous population (particularly white, middle class). This understanding overlooks the way culture mediates children’s development and learning (Lubeck, 1994). Moreover, belief in hierarchical theories embedded in the conceptualisation and understanding of DAP may lead to early childhood teachers to regulate children’s learning to what is considered to be “normal” (Williams, 1994), thereby ignoring children’s diversity and agency. The prime impetus of DAP has been the idea of child-centred education. The intensive debate and consultation in 2009 revision of the document, and, more recently, NAEYC in its 2020 revised policy document, defines DAP as “methods that promote each child’s optimal development and learning through a strengths-based, play-based approach to joyful, engaged learning” (NAEYC, 2020, p. 5). DAP demands early childhood educators to seek out and gain knowledge about three considerations: commonality, individuality and context. This is very similar to the already-­ existing understanding of developmental appropriateness in terms of age (read commonality), individual and culture (as context). Historically, the NAEYC’s DAP-centric approach has been severely criticised for creating binary between appropriate and inappropriate practices and its commitment to epigenetic and maturational theories of child development (see Kessler, 1991; Walsh, 1991; Lubeck, 1991). It is also critiqued for its lack of attention to the democratic and inclusive values for early years education (Bloch, 1992; Kessler & Swadener, 1992). It is worth mentioning that DAP can be viewed as a codified body of knowledge put forward by a professional organisation, that is, NAEYC. This professional code is based on agreed-upon principles that guide practices in the professional community of early childhood educators. The document also emerged from the necessity to establish credibility, to organise and, even if inadvertently, to bureaucratise a hierarchical system of practice in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE). The DAP-centric

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curriculum thus lacks multivocality, which has been evident in the ECCE literature. It restricts itself to the developmental psychology and child development discourse and that too an archaic and inane theorisation of children and their development. As Lubeck argued: “non-mainstream values, beliefs and experiences are given short shrift” (1991, p. 169). This epigenetic and maturational view of childhood is also supported by “the dominant developmental approach to childhood, provided by psychology, is based on the idea of natural growth … childhood therefore is a biologically determined stage on the path to full human status” (James & Prout, 1990, p. 10). We see a seductive lure of high modernity in this conceptualisation where theoretical neatness and simplicity is used to avoid complex questions of subjectivity, history and identity.

Modernity and Theorising Children’s Development The project of modernity formulated in the 18th century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment consisted in their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic. At the same time, this project intended to release the cognitive potentials of each of these domains from their esoteric forms. The Enlightenment philosophers wanted to utilize this accumulation of specialised culture for the enrichment of everyday life-that is to say, for the rational organization of everyday social life. (Habermas, 1981, p. 9)

Kontopodis et al. (2011) argue that performative turn in social sciences have had a minor influence on developmental psychology. Similar to modernist sciences, developmental psychology tended to share a few general patterns. Theories were developed that conceptualised their objects in terms of closed system of dynamics—in terms of both space and time. The emphasis, as Hess (1997) puts it, was that “modernist style in science are consistent with the modernist culture of the surrounding societies” (pp. 131–132). Science, and especially psychology as a discipline aspiring to be categorised as a ‘science’, played an important role in creating and designing tools of disciplining used by the modern state (development of IQ tests could be read as a good case example). It would be worth noting here that aligning with the epistemological principles of modern science children’s development was also seen as a naturalised category; though unlike science where efforts are made to arrive at a common definition, the notion of ‘child’ and ‘its development’ were seen to have common-sense

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understanding. The category of ‘the developing child’ had a cultural normativity at its centre where ‘child’ was only seen as a distinct category from the adult (Walkerdine, 1998). In this context, the purpose of education, especially in early childhood, is to work towards the ideal ‘adults’ ways of functioning. The curriculum frameworks of early childhood seem to imagine that the answer to effective early years education programme lies in effective psychology, which can be more accurate in telling us how children “really learn”. The sociocultural and political conditions of educability became insignificant, and supporting children’s development based on evolutionary principles became the central focus. Turner (1999) argued, “applied anthropologist went to the field thinking of themselves as ambassadors of modernity, bringing the possibility of a future to the people trapped by different cultures in a past with no viable entry into the present. Modernisation, as the mission of applied anthropology, meant overcoming cultural difference as a necessary condition of bringing those with different cultures into a common temporality with the modern world” (Turner, p. 115). Child development theories share a similar purpose of modernising society through erasing cultural differences or homogenising it. Chaudhary (2018) alerts us to the domination of occidental ideologies on childcare practices in families. Her argument is a powerful one, in which she asks us to acknowledge not only culture as given but also “the capacity of the human mind to create culture, that is distinctive of human development” (p.  88). The argument of agency of individual to create culture in turn moves away from the universalising idea of singular childhood to the recognition of “multiple childhoods” (Balagopalan, 2002) and create an alternative narrative to the hegemonic ideal of the Western bourgeois childhood. She has also shared her worries that “the child figure got deployed and acted upon within emerging technologies of governmentality, including most importantly an apparatus of care and surveillance that produced a modern Western ‘childhood’ as a legitimate and agreed-upon ordering of ‘biological immaturity’” (Balagopalan, 2018, p.  26). With this brief discussion on conceptualisation of child development, we turn to the two recent documents on early childhood education in India: PCD published by NCERT in 2019 and NEP 2020 (NEP, 2020).

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Methodological Frame The chapter applies Fairclough’s (1992) framework for CDA to the PCD 2019 in India to investigate how the relationship between learning and development is presented in this document. CDA draws its roots from the long-standing tradition of critical social analysis (Fairclough & Graham, 2002). It sees reality as “conceptually mediated”, thus “meaning that there are no social events or practices without representations, construals, conceptualizations or theories of them” (Fairclough, 2013, p.  178). Fairclough (2013) further elaborates “social realities have a reflexive character, i.e., how people see, represent, interpret and conceptualize them is a part of these realities” (p. 178). CDA thus asks the fundamental question on seeing the problem, how are they constructed, the actor/agents involved and also how explanations are built around a particular solution. It is worth noting that contemporary ECCE policies first present a sense of crisis (marked by learning crisis or poor achievement scores) and then present an aspirational picture using ‘scientific’ evidence to offer a solution (Wood, 2020). CDA offers the tools to not merely describe or assess policy but to infer emergent meanings and hence evaluate policies in the context of their realities (Fairclough, 2013). Linking CDA and critical policy studies draws attention to the discursive (semiotic or linguistic) character of policy, policymaking and policy analysis (Fairclough, 2013, p. 177), thus shifting the focus to the policy intentions and the ways in which language and concepts are used to produce the desired or required outcomes. CDA offers the methodological means for identifying ideological assumptions, power and the effects of power, specifically what counts as valued or legitimate knowledge (Fairclough, 2013), and from whose perspectives. Building on the work of Wood (2020), following two analytical questions were used to unpack policy intentions and their theoretical lineage: . How are learning and development conceptualised in the PCD? 1 2. What is/are the dominant theoretical framing evident in the document? Fairclough (2013) states that there are three ways to explain the relationship between social practice and semiosis: “as a facet of action, in the construal (representation) of aspects of the world and in the constitution of identities” (p. 179). In this chapter, the focus is largely on construal.

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The analysis of text also involves linguistic analysis, thus analysing the lexical structures and central concepts employed to construct the discourse. Sum (2009) offers a list of questions that could help to explore the “discursive features of capitalist social relations”. While analysing the PCD, following questions from his list were used as a guide: “where do particular policy ideas and their related discursive networks originate; what ideas (or knowledge brands) are selected and drawn upon to recontextualise the referents of these objects; how do these ideas enter policy discourses and everyday practices; how do they become part of the hegemonic logics and challenge by diverse social forces” (pp. 198–199)

Conceptualisation of Learning and Development in the Preschool Curriculum Document The terms ‘learning’ and ‘development’ are used together, interchangeably and also as a precursor for each other in the PCD 2019. The knowledge of neuroscience and child development theories are presented as an evidence to emphasise that we need to urgently intervene in early childhood education. Every child is unique, the document states, “each child is unique and acquires abilities and skills at his/her own pace” (NCERT, 2019, p. 4). Learning and development are thus seen as an individualistic phenomenon. This also offers the possibility for developing a measuring, mapping and monitoring system using individual’s learning as a unit of analysis. The National Educational Policy 2020 states, “we are currently in learning crisis: a large proportion of students currently in elementary school—estimated to be over 5 crore in number—have not attained foundational literacy and numeracy, i.e. the ability to read and comprehend basic text and the ability to carry out basic addition and subtraction with Indian numerals” (section 2.1, NEP 2020). Stobart (2008) calls ability testing as the “the new IQism” (p. 31). His concern is a valid one that “ability could simply be an alternative for ‘achievement’ or ‘attainment’, the reality is that it shares the assumptions of intelligence testing: that ability is seen as the cause of achievement, rather than a form of it”. Thus, similar to IQ testing, this ability testing model could shape learner’s identity and individualise their failure on tests. Gillborn and Youdell (2001) have argued that ability “has come to be understood (by policymakers and practitioners alike) as a proxy for common sense notions of ‘intelligence’” (p. 65).

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Optimal Enhance/s Better/further Enable Expanding Holistic New Self-paced Support Stimulating Contextualized Experiential Playful Play-based

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Experiences Opportunities New things Behaviour

Learning

Lifelong Human Early Natural Children’s

Style/s Abilities Gap Outcomes Levels Skills Difficulties Needs Visible Objectives Principle Environment Progress Material

Fig. 3.1  List of words related with learning in the preschool curriculum document

It would be worth looking carefully at the lexical sequences or words that follow before and after the term ‘learning’ in the PCD 2019. Figure 3.1 shows the list of words. The document does not define or explain its position on learning or development clearly. It presents three possible relationships between learning and development: . Development leads learning, 1 2. Learning is same as development 3. Learning leads development Thus, one cannot understand the theoretical position of the document on these fundamental concepts. In this context, to develop a better understanding of ‘learning’ and ‘development’ as presented in the PCD 2019, it would be worth looking at the list of words being used around learning. The curriculum aspires for learning to be ‘optimal, holistic and self-paced’; thus, learning is done by individual (child). The role of the teacher in that context is to create a ‘supporting, stimulating and experiential’ learning

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opportunity for the child. The document consistently highlighted the role of early childhood education for lifelong learning. At no point does the document explain or present a reason for this relationship. Moreover, it distinguishes early learning from learning in later school years or life. This distinction is explained through playful or play-based learning being specific to early years. Mentioned below are some of the typical sentence structures that encapsulate PCD 2019 position on learning and development: The aim of preschool education is to facilitate optimum development of child’s full potential and lay the foundation for all round development and lifelong learning. (p. 12) Learning begins at birth and continues over life. Since, children learn through senses and stimulations, the early care and stimulation have a cumulative impact on their development. (pp. 3–4) Providing strong foundations for all round development and lifelong learning. (p. 2)

The focus is on holistic or all-round development where ‘holistic’ is defined by four areas of development-physical, cognitive, emotional and social development. To synthesise its diverse position, the curriculum document states that it should “address all the domains of development through the three broad goals”: Goal 1: Children maintain good health and wellbeing Goal 2: Children becomes effective communicators Goal 3: Children become involved learners and connect with their immediate environment. (pp. 12–21)

The curriculum document has a long section from pages 24 to 50 dedicated to presenting a model curriculum for children in three age groups: preschool I (3–4 years), preschool II (4–5 years) and preschool III (5–6 years). This division is further subdivided based on the three goals mentioned above. Presented in a tabular format, the document shows key concepts, pedagogical process and early learning outcomes. The section on pedagogical processes focuses only on “providing opportunities and experiences”. This aligns with the Piagetian understanding where learning is considered as interaction between children’s natural psychological

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functions and their environment. The other clear message is relating pedagogy and concepts to learning outcomes. A standardised idea of optimal learning is at play which could be used to create an assessment regime in early years often referred as Foundational Literacy and Numeracy in the NEP 2020.

Theoretical Framing Guiding Preschool Curriculum The curriculum document delineates 11 guiding principles that will “ensure that the present curriculum is holistic, developmentally appropriate, indigenous, and most importantly play and activity based” (p.  3). These principles could be divided into three broad sections: a) What is the nature of learning? The document sees learning as “continuous and cumulative”. It also highlights that children learn through “senses and stimulations”. The metaphor of optimal stimulation is consistently evoked to explain learning. Walsh (1991), while highlighting the characteristics of vulgar-­ Piagetian (an analytical category he developed to explain developmentalism), says, it is believed that “children were more dependent on nature than on their own actions”. The focus on senses and stimulation shows that learning and development is seen as a naturalistic process where the role of teacher is merely to support the evolutionary journey. b) What facilitates learning? What is the context of learning? • Each child is different and grows, learns and develops at her/ his own pace. • Responsive and supportive interactions with adults are essential to children’s learning. • Children learn by being provided with an environment for experiential learning. • Play and activity are the primary contexts of learning and development. • Interactive teaching enhances learning experiences. • Development and use of indigenous material enhances learning opportunities. • Responsiveness to context and appreciation of diversity support learning.

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• Mother tongue/home language should be the medium of instruction. • Family involvement contributes to learning. Similar to DAP, the focus of these principles is on age appropriateness (commonality), individual child (individuality) and context (culture). Given the focus on individual child and role of context of being important as well, the policy does not explain these relationships further. In spite of these mentions about family, mother tongue and indigenous material, it is unclear what would be the role of adult in these situations. Turning to purpose of education might give us some answers. The document further highlights that “children’s learning in the cognitive domain needs to be facilitated through development of their five senses and encouragement of the 3 E’s i.e. Exploration, Experimentation and Enquiry, based on children’s prior knowledge and immediate context” (p. 19). c) What is the purpose of learning? The document considers “early learning matters for later outcomes”. It emphasises on school readiness and traits like reading, writing and numeracy which are valued in school. Based on these discussions, it is visible that the term ‘developmental’ does not have consensus definition. There are two factors though that explain this position in the document: 1. It involves a set of traits around readiness of children for school (this is primarily explained in terms of numeracy and literacy). 2. It is also used as an opposition to the content-based curriculum. Thus, it highlights children more than the subject knowledge. The term may give an impression of consensus, but below the surface there are serious differences. The basket of theoretical positions the idea draws from makes it even more difficult to understand its maturationist, constructivist or cognitivist perspectives. The term ‘developmental’ is used for both the outcome and the process to arrive at the outcome.

Discussion The analysis shows that the PCD 2019 offers insights into the distinctive curriculum, assessment and pedagogy for early years. At this stage, it would be worth highlighting some of the intrinsic contradictions and

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deterministic models which PCD 2019 document presents. While discussing them, the author has also drawn on the previous curriculum frameworks and early childhood policy documents to situate the present preschool curriculum. There are two aspects worth noting specifically: 1 . Developmentalism and childhood education

deterministic

discourse

of

early

Developmentalism offers a grand meta-narrative that brings together the development of the child and the development of the society or nation. For the purpose of analysis in this chapter, two points are worth noting: First, development is assumed to be moving from simple, embryonic, premature or immature forms to complex, mature and advanced forms. Second, and more importantly, it also assumes a linear path of movement from basic stage to advanced stage; this movement is as true for society as it is for human children. These stage-based developmental movements are visible in the works of developmental psychologist and child development researchers. The one movement which has informed majority of curriculum making for early years, across the globe, has been Jean Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. The commitment to developmentalism and age-based normativity were visible in the PCD 2019, where they have relied on the universal and predictable model of children’s growth to design curriculum. The age-based division of curriculum presented from pages 24 to 50 shows that age-appropriate levels are prerequisite for learning. This age-based normativity brings with it developmental milestones and a developmental pathway to achieve the expected outcomes. This commitment is evident in the following quote from the PCD: preschool curriculum aims at providing a cohesive approach to facilitate the unfolding of each child’s innate potentials in all the domains of development. The curriculum focuses on the developmental stages when children inquire, explore and discover a great deal about themselves and establish attitudes and competencies related to the learning that stay with them for life. (Emphasis added, NCERT, 2019, p. 2)

Central to this developmental appropriateness is the idea of individualisation and psychologisation of children’s learning. The PCD states that “providing optimal stimulation at the right time is the key to the networking of brain cells, which shape the way individuals behave,

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think and learn for the rest of their lives” (NCERT, 2019, p. 1). It further suggests to “offer variety of developmentally appropriate material for children to explore and experiment independently” (NCERT, 2019, p.  23). Children’s development and learning here are seen primarily in terms of development of neural networks and following a clear epigenetic path that could be awaken by proper stimulation. As explained previously in this section, the overriding principle is a linear path of individual child’s development. Another section of the PCD presented below shows how the document is arguing for ability grouping based on age in the same group. It is assumed here that there exists a clear link between age and ability and that children in multiage group need to be given different activities based on their ages. These assumptions and age-based segregation of children are contrary to the very purpose of multiage grouping for teaching and learning: Divide the whole group into two groups of children with varying abilities and ages. While the younger age group of children with emerging abilities is engaged in free play the teacher conducts the guided activities with the older age group of children with higher abilities. After a period of 30 minutes the teacher can conduct guided activities for the younger age group of children with emerging abilities while the older age group of children are engaged in free play. Thus, the teacher will be able to manage the varying abilities and age groups through developmentally appropriate activities. (NCERT, 2019, p. 7)

DAP is often seen as a determinant of good-quality early childhood education services with an undue focus on psychological and child development perspectives. Focus on these perspectives “serves to narrow the parameters of inquiry within early childhood education” (Swadener & Kessler, 1991, p. 85). The assumption involved in the discourse of DAP, “which assumes that practice or at least worthiness of practice, can be determined by knowledge of children’s development, reflects the universalism of the grand systems” (Walsh, 2005, p. 43), especially Piaget, Freud and learning theories. Giving undue attention to developmental theories marginalises the complex and diverse experiences of children and their families. With increasing complexities and diversities in our societies, it is crucial that teacher educators avoid “indoctrinating” preservice students into DAP (which was, in fact, a suggestion made in a roundtable discussion

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at the 1995 National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators conference) (O’Brien, 2000). One of the central features of PCD 2019 is that it aligns with the ideals of Enlightenment project to seek one answer (DAP) to one question (conceptualising children’s development in educational settings). 2. Multidimensional, mosaic and all-encompassing notion of DAP The bigger challenge PCD 2019 presents is the utter confusion that arises from the mosaic and conceptually incoherent approach to explaining learning and development and relationship between learning and development. Both the PCD (NCERT, 2019) and National ECCE curriculum framework (MWCD, 2014) use a number of terms along with developmental appropriateness. It is difficult to comprehend the difference between these interchangeable use of the terms: developmentally appropriate ‘practice’, ‘approach’, ‘experiences’, ‘materials, ‘program’, ‘activity/activities’, ‘curriculum’. For example, the PCD states: It needs to be ensured that children are provided developmentally appropriate materials, experiences, and challenges in order to help them construct their own knowledge. (NCERT, 2019, p. 5) In the similar line, the national ECCE curriculum document mentions: To ensure optimal development for all children, there is a need to create a planned curriculum framework, encompassing developmentally appropriate knowledge and skills.” (MWCD, 2014, p. 2) It is worth bringing to notice that these multi-theory and mosaic approaches are also used to shield the core thesis of developmentalism. Moreover, both the preschool curriculum and the national ECCE curriculum documents explain DAP in terms of multiple domains or typologies of development (e.g. cognitive, social, emotional and physical development), thus arguing for holistic development of the child. The other documents such as the position paper by the national focus group on ECCE (NCERT, 2006) also refer to the domains of development while extending the concept of DAP. For example, the position paper makes an all-­ encompassing statement: The practices need to cover all areas of development—physical, social, emotional, and cognitive—and to be linguistically rich in ways that are age related, individually appropriate, as well as contextually meaningful. (NCERT, 2006, p. 44)

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Now there are two related problems in this understanding, one is the way it views children’s ‘development’ as fragmented in nature (in terms of different domains of development) with no explanation on how they contribute to holistic development. More categories could be added to these typologies as they are not about understanding the essence of children’s development but about multiple dimensions so as to cover children’s different activities in their early years. Secondly, it is also unclear what developmentally appropriate means in these multiple areas of development. It is difficult to discern how these different typologies relate with the DAP. Do we have distinct and clear criteria in each of these typologies of development to decide on physical DAP or cognitive DAP and so on. While critiquing DAP, Kessler (1991) raises an important question: Is ‘development’ in DAP used as a metaphor? The term ‘development’ in this DAP-centric position is used as a metaphor for education and cannot be taken in a literal sense (Kessler, 1991). One of the biggest issues here is that ‘development’, which can be an outcome of educational experiences, is seen as a precondition for teaching in early years. The PCD 2019 also states that “the curriculum follows developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) that are appropriate to their age, stage and context to promote children’s optimal development” (p. 4). It is worth noting in this quote that development is used as a theoretical tool guiding practice and also as an outcome. It is worth reminding ourselves that development is not the same as education. Education can be the way to influence development or development can be an outcome of the educational experiences. The tautological nature of argument presented in the PCD makes it impossible to imagine pedagogic practices or teacher education models based on these ideas. It is worth mentioning here that these multiple areas of development are also presented to develop a ‘regulatory modernity’ (Moss & Dahlberg, 2008). Following (Latour, 2005), the question worth asking would be: What are the alternatives to the modern developmental approaches in psychology and elaborate on what could be a non-modern approach (Latour, 2005)? Wood (2020), based on her analysis, suggests that “it is not more, but better theories of children’s development that are needed” (p.  33). Vygotsky’s work, which Papadopoulos (1999) regards as ‘antimodern’ and which “focuses on the relations of the notions of subjectivity, mediation, context and performativity” (Kontopodis, 2011, p. 199), could be one such alternative. His theoretical approach moves away from the binary opposition and universalism which Dahlberg (1995) argues is central to modernity. Development in such a theoretical paradigm is not seen as

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“happening out-there, but as a mediated relation between the ‘in-here’ and ‘out-there’” (Kontopodis, 2011, p. 199).

Cultural-Historical Conceptualisation of Children’s Development and Learning Toulmin (1990) argues that “the seduction of High Modernity lay in its abstract neatness and theoretical simplicity: both of these features blinded the successors of Descartes to the unavoidable complexities of concrete human experience” (Toulmin, 1990, pp. 200–201). Vygotsky challenges theoretical simplicity and neatness and argues for studying children’s development in all its complexity: A positive picture is possible only if we radically change our representation of child development and take: into account that it is a complex dialectical process that is characterized by complex periodicity, disproportion in the development of separate functions, metamorphoses or qualitative transformation of certain forms into others, a complex merging of the process of evolution and involution, a complex crossing of external and internal factors, a complex process of overcoming difficulties and adapting. (Vygotsky, 1997, pp. 98–99, emphasis added)

One of the central distinguishing features of Vygotsky’s work is conceptualising a clear relationship between learning and development, where, unlike Piaget, learning does not follow development; rather, learning precedes development. Second, while “explaining learning Vygotksy challenging linear development from the everyday to scientific concept in favour of an approach in which scientific concepts in their formation, act back on everyday concepts” (Derry, 2013, pp. 135–136). Thus, learning is not a linear but a dialectical process, and logicomathematical learning is not considered higher than everyday learning. Third, crisis instead of accommodation and assimilation is considered as the marker of development. Therefore, instead of stable periods of development based on age, Vygotsky presents both critical and stable periods based on cultural age, thus highlighting not the evolutionary path but the revolutionary path of learning. Seen in this way, learning is not merely cumulative but more importantly transformative. Lastly, his work alerts us to the ‘social situation of development’ (SSD), a concept which presents to explain a child’s unique relationship with its environment. It

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thus explains both individual and social aspects of learning and development. The concept of SSD denotes the special combination of internal developmental processes and external conditions that are typical of each developmental stage and that condition both the dynamic of mental development for the duration of the corresponding developmental period and the new qualitatively distinct psychological formations that emerge toward its end. (Bozhovich, 2009, p. 66)

Vygotsky in his writings has not emphasised “biological age in itself but [refers] to age period defined by societal traditions that then becomes reflected in the child’s experiential relation to the world” (Hedegaard, 2012, pp. 11–12). In particular, it allows us to distinguish between learning and development, by linking development, as the more significant change, with societal demands, such as starting school. Learning, though important, is evidenced by changing relationships with a social situation; while development arises from changes in the social situation, which themselves arise through the structuring of society. These distinctions are helpful when designing pedagogic practices so that it could respond to the needs of children with coming from different social situations. In his introduction to the book Vygotsky and Education, Moll (1990) remarked: The power of Vygotsky’s ideas is that they represent a theory of possibilities. The construct of zone of proximal development reminds us that there is nothing “natural” about education settings (and about educational practices such as ability groupings, tracking, and other forms of stratification). These settings are social creations; they are socially constituted, and they can be socially changed. (Moll, 1990, p. 15)

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is another Vygotskian insight that has been used extensively to understand the interrelationship between the learner and the more expert other during the teaching-learning process. The cultural-historical approach to learning and development emphasises the importance of what the learner brings to any learning situation as an active meaning-maker and problem-solver who acts in and on the world. Therefore, it acknowledges the dynamic nature of interplay between teachers, learners and tasks and provides a view of learning as arising from interactions with others. The concept of the ZPD figures prominently as a

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means for describing the way a child’s intellectual capacity changes over time to reach new levels with the dialogic support of an adult or more capable peer (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1984). Thus, the role of adult is central in children’s concept development. Teacher or adult is not a mere facilitator in the child’s learning environment.

Conclusion: Synthesising Key Arguments Believing in objectivity and the ability of science to reveal the true nature of a real world, modernity cannot recognise that it is a paradigm, a particular way of understanding the world produced within a particular historical and cultural context. It is unable to see itself as offering just one perspective, one way of thinking and practising. (Moss & Dahlberg, 2008, p. 5)

The developmentalism embedded in the writing of PCD 2019 and NEP 2020 intends to impose a uniformity of structure, directionality and progression towards some predetermined end point which is now defined as foundational literacy and numeracy in the new education policy. The binary categorisation of practices as appropriate or inappropriate “diminish(es) cognitive complexity and rely on simplified cognitive oppositions: independent vs. dependent, literate vs. oral, verbal vs. spatial, concrete vs. logical. These oppositions are textbook-neat, but … are narrow and misleading” (Rose, 1988, p.  268). The argument presented above, based on cultural-historical theory of Vygotsky, offers an internal critique from within psychology to the mainstream developmental psychology’s conceptualisation of childhood and child development. Many scholars (Kessler & Swadener, 1992; Cannella & Viruru, 2004; MacNaughton, 2003) have questioned and challenged the authoritative structuralist expertise that would judge, assess or label others, and have drawn attention to the historical, contextual and power-oriented nature of generating knowledge that is legitimised in the name of science (Cannella, 2005). The analysis also hints that the PCD 2019 and NEP 2020 in India legitimises use of redundant international discourse on DAP in early childhood education in India. Some of the efforts by Indian authors, for example Kakar’s (1978) work titled Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, have extensive discussion on early childhood influences, or Sinha’s (2002) writing from the cross-cultural perspective offers an alternative position to engage with child development, which is distinct from ‘Western childhood’. PCD 2019 doesn’t draw or aspire to explore these alternative

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possibilities. In this context, reconceptualisation of ECCE/preschool curriculum demands engagement with philosophical, historical and political dimensions that influence teaching-learning practices in early childhood years. The present effort of developing curriculum for early childhood education in Indian context has been enormously tilted to the developmentalists side of the spectrum. Focusing on children’s developmental levels, without addressing the questions of fairness, equity and democracy, truly represents our failure to develop responsive early childhood education. The challenge to universal standards, normativity and neutrality that Vygotsky’s work offer, challenges the modern project of mainstream psychology to homogenise, quantify and label child development. The normativity being created through the curriculum document also has a tendency to dominate discourse and is seen as the ‘truth’ or ‘best practice’. DAP has influenced the ECCE/PCDs and policy discourse on teacher preparation for early childhood education in India. In this chapter, I argue that DAP-centric position is limiting and inappropriate for the diverse Indian context. Premised on the ideas of developmentalism and maturational understanding of children’s development, DAP could be rather seen as a big hurdle in developing a responsive pedagogy for early childhood education. The chapter also shows a theoretically incoherent and mosaic conceptualisation of DAP that makes it difficult for early childhood educators/teachers to engage with its meaning and to bring it to their practice. This chapter makes a case to move away from the individualistic and contextual conceptualisation of children’s learning to a more holistic approach which affords possibility to address questions of democracy and social justice in early childhood education. Child development theories then can be just one part of thinking about curriculum and pedagogy in early years and not the only possible way of conceptualising them.

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Ministry of Women and Child Development. (2014). National early childhood care and education (ECCE) curriculum framework. MWCD. Ministry of Human Resource Development. (2020). National Education Policy 2020. Government of India. https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_ files/mhrd/files/NEP_Final_English_0.pdf Moll, L. C. (1990). Vygotsky and education. Cambridge University Press. Moss, P., & Dahlberg, G. (2008). Beyond quality in early childhood education and care—Languages of evaluation. New Zealand Journal of Teachers’ Work, 5(1), 3–12. National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). (2020). Developmentally appropriate practice. National Association for the Education of Young Children Position Statement. NCERT. (2006). National Focus Group on Early Childhood Education. https:// ncert.nic.in/pdf/focus-group/early_childhood_education.pdf O’Brien, L. M. (2000). Engaged pedagogy: One alternative to “indoctrination” into DAP. Childhood Education, 76(5), 283–288. https://doi.org/10.108 0/00094056.2000.10522114 Papadopoulos, D. (1999). Lew S. Wygotski: Werk und Wirkung. Campus. Rose, M. (1988). Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism. College Composition and Communication, 39(3), 267–302. https://doi.org/10.2307/357468 Sinha, D. (2002). Culture and psychology: Perspective of cross-cultural psychology. Psychology & Developing Societies, 14(1), 11–25. Sriprakash, A., & Hopkins, L. (2016). Revisioning ‘development’: Towards a relational understanding of the ‘poor child’. In L.  Hopkins & A.  Sriprakash (Eds.), The ‘poor’ child: The cultural politics of education, development and childhood (pp. 193–202). Routledge. Stobart, G. (2008). Testing times: The uses and abuses of assessment. Routledge. Sum, N.  L. (2009). The production of hegemonic policy discourses: ‘Competitiveness’ as a knowledge brand and its (re)contextualizations. Critical Policy Studies, 3(2), 184–203. Swadener, B.  B., & Kessler, S. (1991). Reconceptualizing early childhood education: An Introduction to the Special Issue. Early Education and Development, 2(2), 85–94. Toulmin, S. (1990). Cosmopolis : The hidden agenda of modernity. Free Press. Turner, T. (1999). Activism, Activity and the New Cultural Politics: An Anthropological Perspective. In S. Chaiklin, M. Hedegaard and U.J. Jensen, Activity Theory and Social Practice, pp. 114–135. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Vygotsky, L.  S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes Cambridge. Harvard University Press.

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Vygotsky, L.  S. (1997). The collected works of L.S.  Vygotsky, “The history of the development of higher mental functions”. Vol 4, trans. M. J. Hall; R. W. Rieber (Ed. English translation). Kluwer Academic and Plenum Publishers. Walkerdine, V. (1984; 1998) Developmental psychology and the child-centred pedagogy, in J. Henriques, W. Hollway, C. Urwin, C. Venn and V. Walkerdine (eds). Changing the subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity, Methuen, pp. 153–202. Walsh, D. (1991). Extending the discourse on developmental appropriateness: A developmental perspective. Early Education and Development, 2(2), 109–119. Walsh, D. (2005). Developmental theory and early childhood education. In N.  Yelland (Ed.), Critical issues in early childhood education. McGraw-Hill Education. Wertsch, J.  V. (1984). The zone of proximal development: Some conceptual issues. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 23, 7–18. https:// doi.org/10.1002/cd.23219842303 Williams, L. R. (1994). Developmentally appropriate practice and cultural values: A case in point in B. In L. Mallory & R. S. New (Eds.), Diversity and developmentally appropriate practices: Challenges for early childhood education (pp. 155–165). Teachers College Press. Wood, E. (2020). Learning, development and the early childhood curriculum: A critical discourse analysis of the Early Years Foundation Stage in England. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 18(3), 321–326.

CHAPTER 4

Mediated Childhoods: Newspapers and the Modern Malayali Child Mary Ann Chacko

Introduction Children and media is an expanding interdisciplinary field of study. Located predominantly within heavily mediatized Western contexts, this scholarship operates on the premise of a “universal relationship” (Banaji, 2015) between young people and digital technologies. Media theorist Shakuntala Banaji (2015) attributes the lack of scholarly interest in children’s interaction with non-digital media to this dominant perception and exhorts that physical spaces have not been replaced by digital spaces for most Indian children. Building on Banaji’s sensitive reminder, this chapter seeks to address the paucity of scholarship that examines the relationship between children and “traditional media”, in this case, the print newspaper. Here I would like to make a distinction between children and news and children and newspapers. News refers to content, newspaper refers to the medium and while newspapers have long been the primary source of

M. A. Chacko (*) School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_4

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news, the two are no longer isomorphic. Children’s engagement with news continues to be viewed as essential for their political socialization as informed citizens. There is hence a growing body of scholarship that examines the relationship between the two (e.g., Alon-Tirosh & Lemish, 2014; Buckingham, 2002; Kleemans et  al., 2017). The same, however, cannot be said about children and newspapers. This could be for a slew of reasons, such as the high-cognitive skills required to access a written medium as well as the decline in print readership following the technological and, more recently, digital revolution globally. While this chapter does not explicitly foreground the urban and the “everyday urban”, print and digital media along with digital devices like mobile and smartphones have played an important role in extending urban sensibilities beyond cities and their inhabitants. Media and digital devices, thus, signify “micro-level sources (the contexts as defined by the daily routines of individuals) of modernity” (Ravindran, 2009, p. 96) across the rural-urban divide. Set in a context where print journalism is increasingly having to transform itself in the face of challenges posed by new media, this chapter illustrates how associating with the “new generation” helps newspapers keep pace with modernity while also mediating desires for modern childhoods and socialities. “Mediated childhoods” in the title is drawn from the work of media anthropologist Sahana Udupa (2015) who defines “mediated narratives” as narratives that are shaped and supported by news media practices and the market logics of news production. Examining the case of Malayala Manorama, a popular daily Malayalam1 language newspaper, this chapter focusses on mediated narratives about children and childhoods to show that children as “future citizens” serve as a bridge that enables the newspaper to straddle its social commitments and its commercial compulsions fueled by rapid transformations in the media landscape. At the same time, Malayala Manorama’s (henceforth Manorama) astute attention to the anxieties and aspirations tied to middle-class child making helps the newspaper garner public and political consensus for its mediated interventions into the lives of children. Attending to newspapers’ address of children as consumers, thus, enables us to probe into the valuable role played by children in garnering economic, social, and sentimental value for the newspaper. Robin Jeffrey (1997, 2009) attributes the potential for “power and profit” enjoyed by leading Malayalam newspapers like Mathrubhumi and 1

 Malayalam is the dominant regional language of the South Indian state of Kerala.

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Manorama to the close association between “language and local honor” in the Indian context. Moreover, characteristics unique to Kerala such as high rates of literacy, gender parity in education, and a heavily politicized public sphere, were pivotal for the proliferation of newspapers in the state. Additionally, Kerala’s economic growth powered by foreign remittances and the resultant increase in Malayalis’ purchasing power, made Kerala an attractive destination for advertisers furthering the cause of newspapers. But writing in 2009, Jeffrey wondered if the age of mass media will weaken the popularity of print journalism. Unlike in Europe and America, print media in India held its ground and transformed itself in the digital age (Udupa, 2015). The Indian Readership Survey (2019), however, shows “a slow decline” in newspaper readership across languages. This is accompanied by a reduction in the youth readership of printed newspapers (Tewari, 2016). In this chapter, I show that this decline in youth readership does not entail that young people are insignificant for newspapers. Rather, the “need to locate, create and target specific audience groups” (Udupa, 2012, p. 822) so as to increase circulation and attract advertisers is essential for print media to survive and succeed (Jeffrey, 1997). However, as the following section illustrates, the relationship between media and modern childhoods is a complex one.

Media Panic and Modern Childhoods Media is perceived as an emblem, enabler, and commentator on modernity. Ravindran (2009, 2010) describes the contemporary in India as “new media modernity”. New media modernity entails not only a re-definition of everyday lives in relation to technologies such as mobile phones and internet-based media, but also a re-calibration of the characteristics of modernity such as risk, reflexivities, and panics by new media. If new media has consistently marked the arrival of new modernities, new media’s entry on the social scene has simultaneously spurred “media panics” (Drotner, 1999, 2013). Influenced by Stanley Cohen’s (1972/2011) famous concept of “moral panic”, Drotner (2013) defines media panic as “discourses of concern over the putative ill-effects of (new) media … for particular social groups” (pp.  18–19), especially children. Importantly, media itself plays an important role in engineering and serving as “primary definers” of media panic (Cohen, 1972/2011; Drotner, 1999, 2013; Hall et al., 1978/2013). Ravindran (2010), for instance, discusses the role of

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the Tamil press and TV in catalyzing panic around young people’s use of mobile phones and internet-based media. Scholarship on media panic sheds ample light on the intimate relationship between modern childhoods/youth and media panic. While new media represents opportunities in a digitized world, young people’s use of mobile phones and digital technology is also a source of adult fear and anxiety. These fears stem primarily from concerns about young people’s exercise of unregulated agency and experiments with identities in these spaces and lead to the construction of what I refer to as “dystopic childhoods”. Dystopic childhoods are characterized by “untimely” children (Lesko, 2001) who are irreverent about age-informed moral boundaries. As psychiatrist Dr. C.J. John insists, “The goal of children this age is not to enjoy the sexual acts on their phones. On the other hand, it is to demonstrate that they have also become smart enough to do these things” (Malayala Manorama, 2014a). While scholars like Buckingham and Bragg (2005), Rao and Lingam (2021), Ravindran (2009, 2010), and Stern and Odland (2017) examine the nature and implications of such media panic for young people, this chapter primarily focuses on the “productive” nature of media panic. Balagopalan (2018), Drotner (1999), Deshpande (2003), and Zhao (2011), while addressing modernity in different contexts, highlight dualism—the co-presence of opposing impulses of agency and control, empowerment and domination—as one of the central paradoxes of modernity. This chapter illustrates how media panics and anxieties about dystopic childhoods also provide media companies like Manorama a rich soil for re-imagining childhood in ways that resolve the paradox of modernity. This resolution is brought about through mediated constructions of “utopic childhoods” that reconcile agency with social conformity. Vieira (2022) describes utopia and dystopia as “offshoots of modernity” (p. 34). If dystopic childhoods, like dystopias, express “a renunciation of modernity” (Vieira, 2022, p.  29) and its excesses, utopic childhoods reinstate one’s faith in modernity. Thus, I show how, even as they mediate panic, newspapers are simultaneously invested in mediating “solutions” to these problems (Blackmore & Thorpe, 2003). In the following section, I undertake a co-relational theorization of dystopia and utopia to establish the relationship between mediated fears and desires about childhoods within new media modernity. I then provide a brief sketch of Manorama’s early interaction with children within colonial modernity to highlight that print media was not just a product of

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modernization but also an agent of modernization. Examination of this early interaction underscores the key role played by private entrepreneurs like the Malayala Manorama Company in shaping early conceptions of modern Kerala and the value and responsibility placed on literate children for mediating utopic visions of a modern Kerala. In the subsequent section, I analyze more recent mediated narratives about dystopic and utopic childhoods in post-liberalization Kerala, highlighting the ways in which the newspaper emerges as both the interpreter and the doctor for the crisis of unbridled consumerism pervading Malayali homes. Examining Manorama’s historical and contemporary engagement with children also illustrates how children play a pivotal role in Manorama’s emergence as “an exemplar of ethical or conscious capitalism”, one which “transform[s] the dominant capitalist paradigm toward one that is … more concerned with societal benefit, ‘doing good’, and social responsibility” (Daily, 2017, p. 228). I conclude by illustrating how a school-based utopic project initiated by Manorama dovetails with middle-class aspirations for social mobility and distinction in Kerala, thereby underscoring that “ethical capitalism … does little to reform existing modes of accumulation” but rather “secures the continuation of excessive consumption” (Daily, 2017, pp. 228–229). In fact, I argue that this convergence of ethical capitalism and middle-class aspirations are essential for assuring the marketability of mediated initiatives and the commercial success of the newspaper itself.

Entanglement of Dystopic and Utopic Childhoods The data for this chapter is drawn from two sources. The historical account of Manorama’s interaction with children is gathered from Sakhyatharingini (Tharakan, 1982), a rather hagiographic but detailed history of the Akhila Kerala Balajana Sakhyam, a children’s organization established by Manorama in 1929. Details of Manorama’s contemporary interactions with children are drawn from newspaper articles on Nalla Paadam, a school-based learning project spearheaded by Manorama, as well as articles pertaining to children more broadly that appeared in the newspaper from June 2014 to August 2015. Between 2014 and 2015, I was conducting a multi-sited ethnography of a citizenship training program called the Student Police Cadet project in select government high schools in Kerala. My purpose in gathering newspaper articles during my fieldwork was to help me understand topical debates about childhoods and schooling in

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Kerala. Fieldwork in schools thus provided rich contextual knowledge to compare and supplement news about children. An intertextual reading (Allen, 2011) of newspaper articles and field notes helped me theoretically connect the logic of child-centered interventions undertaken by disparate agencies in society, in this case, the Malayala Manorama, a private company, and the Kerala police department. Importantly, it enabled me to interpret the critical role that the “co-presence of despair and promise” (Sreekumar, 2009, p.  75) play in these child-centered interventions. In other words, reading these texts in relation to each other helped me discern the invaluable role that stories of dystopic childhoods—such as those of children addicted to drugs or accessing porn through their mobile phones—play in garnering public and political consensus for utopic projects like Nalla Paadam and the Cadet program that sought to fashion students into law-abiding, socially responsible citizens. Thus, in this chapter, I examine utopia and dystopia “as intimately related acts of imagination” (Gordin et al., 2010, p. 3; see also McAlister & Aiello, 2017; Sreekumar, 2009). As Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash argue, “every utopia also comes with its implied dystopia— whether the dystopia of the status quo, which the utopia is engineered to address, or a dystopia found in the way this specific utopia corrupts itself in practice” (p.  2). It thus becomes pertinent that we study utopia and dystopia in their entanglements rather than through their internal rationalities alone. More importantly, Gordin et al. point out that utopia and dystopia are not merely acts of imagination about the past or the future but “can also be understood as concrete practices through which historically situated actors seek to reimagine their present and transform it into a plausible future” (p. 2). In other words, utopia and dystopia are not mutually contradictory “intellectual constructs” but related “analytical categories” that help us understand how individuals interpret and intervene on their present in relation to their past and imagined future. Studying the co-presence of mediated dystopic and utopic childhoods in their relationality thus enables us to understand the constellation of discontents and the desires that shape the active administration of the modern child. When it comes to print media’s relationship to children, I will show how newspapers serve as the engine that both sustains alarming visions of a childhood destroyed by unregulated media use while also generating possibilities for socially committed childhoods that address mediated anxieties about children. In the next section, I briefly describe the history of Manorama’s

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earliest address of children as conduits for pre-figuring a modern and enlightened Kerala.

The Bhasha Press2 and Modern Childhoods Scholars like Arunima (2006), Chiriyankandath (1985), Jeffrey (2009), and Mochish (2014) who have studied print culture in Kerala accord Malayalam newspapers a significant role in the development of a modern Kerala. In fact, as Chiriyankandath (1985) starkly shows, the rapidly growing press in early twentieth-century Travancore3 was not merely “reporting” the socio-economic, political, and administrative transformations that accompany modernization but were fully embroiled in the political rivalries, communal tensions, and debates that marked this period. The Malayala Manorama newspaper, the flagship of the Malayala Manorama Company founded by Kandathil Varghese Mapilla, was first launched as a weekly in 1890 (Tharakan, 1982). Today, it is one of the largest circulating daily newspapers in an Indian language with an average issue readership of 17 million people (Indian Readership Survey, 2019). One could argue that both Varghese Mapilla and his nephew and successor K.C. Mammen Mapilla were deeply invested in the project of modern childhood. Varghese Mapilla was a board member of the Mar Dionysius High School, while Mammem Mapilla was the headmaster of M.D. High School before taking charge as the editor of Manorama (Chiriyankandath, 1985). Interestingly, Mammen Mapilla felt that he will be able to contribute to the lofty task of molding children across Kerala in a much more significant fashion as the editor of a newspaper than a school teacher (Tharakan, 1982). Malayali children have been the addressees of Manorama since 1910 with the newspaper announcing that it will be sold to school children at half-price; an indication of the sizable number of literate children in early twentieth-century Kerala (Tharakan, 1984). While Jeffrey (2009) notes the presence of newspapers in libraries, schools, tea shops, and reading rooms in late nineteenth-century Kerala, this enrolment of children as 2  I am  indebted to  Udupa’s (2012) revision of  the  dominant and  colonial address of  regional-language print media in  India as  “vernacular” to  what she develops as “bhasha” media. 3  The state of Kerala was founded in 1956 uniting British-ruled district of Malabar and the British-supervised princely states of Kochi and Travancore.

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consumers could be read as a strategy to make newspapers an integral aspect of modern Malayali homes. On April 16, 1910, the newspaper launched Balapangthi (Children’s Column), a weekly section for children penned by Kochettan (meaning older brother, however, one who is youngest among the older brothers and hence closer in age to a child and possibly more relatable). Kochettan was the pen name adopted by K.C. Mammen Mapilla, the chief editor of Manorama, as he took up the role of “friend and guide” to children (Tharakan, 1982, p. 9). In 1929, Kochettan became Shankaran chettan: “Shankar means someone who brings good to all. He is someone who is above narrow-minded, communalist and divisive mentalities” (Tharakan, 1982, p. 18). It is noteworthy that while Kochettan is a non-denominational name, Shankaran is an explicitly Hindu name. It is evident that this was a marketing strategy of Manorama to distance itself from the dominant perception of being a “Christian newspaper”4 (Chiriyankandath, 1985) and to position itself as a “popular” one. Balapangthi hosted competitions for children and published children’s stories as well as Shankaran chettan’s letters to his young friends. Tharakan (1982) notes that by setting aside space for children within a mainstream newspaper, Manorama was instrumental in “enabling children to make their presence felt outside the home and the school thereby making children aware that they too are a valuable part of society” (p. 8). In 1929, Mammen Mapilla established the Balajana Sakhyam, an organization for the holistic development of children and the formation of the “future citizen” through service to humanity. It was re-branded as Akhila Kerala Balajana Sakhyam (All Kerala Balajana Sakhyam) in 1930. With its motto “We Serve”, and its slogan “Love for God, Love for the Country and Love for Fellow-Citizens”, the Sakhyam was open to all boys below the age of 17 and girls below the age of 14.5 The organization adopted a democratic representational structure wherein children were elected to hold leadership positions within the organization. In a letter announcing the launch of the Sakhyam, the editor exhorted the literate Malayali child,

4  The Kandathil family who founded Malayala Manorama is a Syrian Christian family (Jacobite sect). 5  The Sakhyam’s membership criteria (age and sex) and its structure has changed over the years.

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That the future of the world depends on children is well-acknowledged. You must have read in books that children are the future citizens and the ones who have to govern the world. Are my little brothers and sisters planning to sit idle despite knowing this? Being a child is a position of great responsibility. Your life habits as a child will determine your rise and fall. Malayala Manorama will help you utilize the opportunities and develop an ideal character. (Tharakan, 1982, pp. 14–15)

The editor’s words highlight the active role played by Manorama in creating new avenues of communicating modern ideas of the self to and through children, while also facilitating the literate Malayali child’s participation in the emergent public sphere. In her analysis of two Malayalam novels—Indulekha (1889) and Padmavati (1920) and their relationship to colonial modernity, feminist historian G. Arunima (1997) makes a striking argument about the “asymmetrical” nature of regional engagement with colonial modernity in India owing to the differences in the degree of the colonial state’s penetration from region to region. She points out that unlike in Bengal, a region that is overwhelmingly the template for analyzing colonial relations and colonial modernity in India, “the world of the intellectual in Kerala was less burdened by its constant engagement with colonial modernity” (p. 289). This meant that the crisis of the self that was unleashed by the colonial encounter was primarily expressed “within the contours of the community and region” (p. 289) rather than a nationalistic discourse. What does this imply for constructions of Malayali childhoods during colonial modernity? One could argue that, to an extent, this freed modern conceptions of the Malayali child from the normative burden of “cultural difference” imposed by the colonial state on constructions of childhood in the colony (Balagopalan, 2018). This in turn enabled Malayali reformers in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to discuss childhood primarily in relation to the project that sought the “transformation of the Malayali landscape” (Arunima, 1997, p. 290). It is noteworthy that the time that Manorama first addresses children, that is, 1910, coincides with a period in Kerala’s socio-cultural history when intense debates about Malayali domesticity, responsible parenting, and the ideal of the modern family were gaining circulation within the public domain. The gradual emergence of the small family norm as the archetype of the modern family cemented the emergence of the child as someone who needed to be crafted into a “full-fledged, rational,

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industrious, self-disciplined Individual” (Devika, 2002, p. 8) through the gendered work of parenting. It also led community reform movements to naturalize efficient “child-crafting” by parents as essential for the birth of a “modern community identity” (Devika, 2002). Manorama was thus an active participant in this social milieu wherein the molding of children into fully fledged individuals was emerging as a “novel suggestion” (Devika, 2002, p. 13). It is, however, essential to note that the primacy given to the development of the liberal individual was happening within a public sphere fractured by sectarian conflicts based on caste, sect, and religion. In these times, the development of print culture in Malayalam offered a “language of communication and expression which cut across these differences” (Arunima, 2006, p. 73). According to Arunima, in her examination of the role of print culture in the development of a shared identity in colonial Kerala, the standardization and modernization of Malayalam through newspapers and literary magazines and the role played by visionaries like Kandathil Varghese Mapilla were pivotal for the consolidation of a modern Malayali identity within a contested public sphere. And one could argue that it was the literate Malayali child that served as Manorama’s lynchpin for pre-figuring the utopic modern, secular, and non-hierarchical Malayali society. The Balajana Sakhyam was envisioned as fashioning a “children’s kingdom” (Tharakan, 1982); a new society whose citizens embody communal harmony, brotherhood, and patriotism through active engagement in the public domain with children from all castes and religions. The young members actively opposed casteism through initiatives like cross-caste dining, publicly taking out processions carrying the straw effigy of the “caste demon” before setting it on fire, extending their circle of friends through pen pals within and outside Kerala, and observing friendship day among the diverse members. Thus, the nexus between newspapers and children in early twentieth-century Kerala illustrates that mediated desires about children as uncontaminated by social restrictions were pivotal for the circulation of “modern” ideas about the individual and community. What this also makes clear is that it is impossible to conceive of social transformation without invoking children. The politics of transformation is also a politics of childhoods. What I have provided here is only a very brief sketch of Manorama’s early interaction with children within colonial modernity. It, however, sheds light on the importance of the relationship between early mass

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media and literate child audiences for shaping modern perceptions of sociality and childhood. Since then India’s media landscape has been unrecognizably altered with the entry of Information and Communication Technologies hailed as India’s gateway to “urbanized modernity” (Rao & Lingam, 2021). As Udupa (2014) illustrates, newspapers are not a static medium and have been undergoing significant transformations to “circumvent the limitations of a monological medium … [in response to] the pressure of digital interactivity” (p.  14). Manorama’s interaction with children has also diversified over the years. While the All Kerala Balajana Sakhyam and the children’s column Balapangthi are still going strong, Manorama also addresses children through an educational supplement called Padippura (House of Learning) and a learning project called Nalla Paadam (Good Lesson).

Nalla Paadam: A Kerala Scripted by Children Nalla Paadam was launched by Manorama in 2012 with the goal of bringing the stories of schools that support students’ academic learning through innovative and service-oriented activities to the public domain. It is hoped that these stories will inspire more schools to join the Nalla Paadam initiative in undertaking “social welfare through students” (Kalorth & Sreekumar, 2015, p. 7). The tagline of Nalla Paadam is “A Kerala scripted by children” (Kuttikkal Rajikunna Keralam). Open to all types of schools and grade levels, each school that enrolls in the initiative selects two teachers who serve as coordinators. During the course of an academic year, Nalla Paadam schools are expected to undertake a range of socially useful, compassionate, and innovative initiatives of their choice. These initiatives have included teaching Malayalam to migrant workers, organizing school-based exhibitions of traditional agricultural tools and native flowers, constructing a butterfly garden in the school, and so on. The schools send a report of their activities to Manorama. These activities are evaluated in person by a team of well-established personalities from the social and educational fields for their social usefulness and academic impact. This selection committee decides the district-level winners who will receive cash awards of up to 25,000 rupees. The school that wins the first prize at the district level will be invited to participate in the Grand Finale which will be telecast through the Malayala Manorama TV channel. The finale will be attended by select students and teacher coordinators who will interact with a panel of celebrity judges. The state-level winners

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selected during the Grand Finale will receive cash prizes of up to 1 lakh rupees. Teacher coordinators of prize-winning schools will receive a cash prize of 10,000 rupees (Malayala Manorama, 2017). The activities undertaken by Nalla Paadam schools are prominently and locally covered in the Manorama newspaper. As evident, Nalla Paadam is an innovative, competitive, monetarily rewarding, and publicity-grabbing initiative.

The Dystopic Malayali Child: Middle-Class Parenting Gone Awry As explicitly stated in the first page of a booklet on Nalla Paadam (Malayala Manorama, 2017), this learning project is proposed as an antidote to a crisis that is invading Malayali households and schools leaving the primary socializers of children—parents and teachers—helpless and clueless. This is the crisis brought on by children’s untrammeled access to cyberspace through gadgets like mobile phones. The number of child victims of cybercrimes is on the rise. It is due to their ignorance that children are falling prey to such crimes. We cannot let our children be gadget addicts like children in the West. US-based news informs us that one out of eight individuals in the new generation is seeking treatment in internet de-addiction centers. Experts in the area state that the numbers are rising in our country too … Nalla Paadam can achieve a lot in this context. Let us formulate school-based projects that not only teach lessons in safety but also enable students to implement these lessons in their lives. (Malayala Manorama, 2017, p. 1)

The cartoon (Fig.  4.1) appeared in a section titled “Children Out of Bounds” (Kuttikal Paridhikkapuram) in Metro Kochi, a supplement of Manorama. The blurb read, “What is the problem with today’s children? Where are unlimited conveniences taking them?” The picture shows two schoolboys glued to a smartphone, where the savvier one seems to be initiating his friend into the illicit pleasures of mobile technology. The centerpiece article opens with a scene playing out in the fourth-grade classroom of a prominent school in Kochi City, the pride of urban Kerala. The teacher walks into the class during a short break to see a group of boys congregating like a swarm of flies around a smartphone. Seeing the teacher, the boys scatter. On the phone were numerous pornographic videos, many of which had been shared among friends. The teacher narrated

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Fig. 4.1  Children out of bounds. (Courtesy: Malayala Manorama Daily, Kottayam)

this incident while attending a seminar for teachers organized by Ernakulam6 Psychiatric Association and concluded by asking how teachers might respond in such situations. The journalist points out that mobile phones were not the only concern of teachers at this seminar with many sharing shocking stories of students addicted to drugs and alcohol. After 6  Ernakulam is the name of the district where the city of Kochi/Cochin is located. Ernakulam also refers to the most urbanized parts of Kochi city.

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narrating the above incidents, the article quotes the psychiatrist Dr. C.J. John, “Don’t assume that such incidents happen in schools attended by children from low-income families. This is also the situation in schools attended by the rich”. Dr. C.J. exhorts his readers not to brush aside such incidents as exception: Every student in Kerala is on the precipice of danger (vipathinde vaalmunayilaanu) for, the artificial pleasures and happiness that were once available to adults through the internet, pornography, Facebook, and addictive substances are now wide open before the children. Their tentacles have spread through society in a way that can no longer be controlled by parents and teachers.

The article concludes with a quote by a doctor who warns readers about the dangerous trend of internet addiction among Indian teenagers (kaumarakar) which is giving rise to a generation of young people who are bereft of any sense of responsibility toward people and society. In their comparative analysis of Dwell, a home decor magazine, and the website Unhappy Hipsters: It’s Lonely in the Modern World designed to be a dystopic critique of Dwell’s domestic utopia, McAlister and Aiello (2017) underscores the “subjective entanglement” essential for making dystopic imaginations compelling and personal. Dystopia is a “critique from within” (p. 222). The incidents highlighted in the newspaper articles mentioned above, experts claim, are not isolated cases but indicative of a widespread phenomenon. Here panic is induced by the fact that deviancy has come to roost in “good homes … hitherto considered to be unlikely or even unable to break the law” (Cromer, 2004, p. 398). The column warns the readers about a “spatial shift” (Molloy, 2002) indicating that contamination and breakdown of order are no longer quarantined in low-income neighborhoods and schools but has become a pervasive problem invading even middle-class Malayali homes. Feminist historian J. Devika (2007) views this crisis as an unsurprising corollary of transformations in two areas that mark Kerala as a model of development: the small family norm and education. The demographic transition achieved by Kerala has brought about a near-universal acceptance of the small family norm across Kerala. Simultaneously, the migration of Malayalis to different parts of the world, especially the Gulf, has vastly increased the disposable income available to their families in Kerala (Zachariah & Rajan, 2004). This has made consumption, including

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consumption of education, one of the primary avenues for “self-assertion” in Kerala (Devika, 2007). However, in a state marred by high levels of educated unemployment, investment in education does not guarantee benefits for families. The result has been the accentuation of parental anxieties about children’s futures often visible in the form of “authoritarian and intensive parenting” (Sancho, 2013, p. 160) or “pathological child-­ crafting” (Devika, 2007). One of the consequences of this child-crafting, according to Devika (2007), “is a withdrawal from the public, a concentration of time, energies, and desires on shaping children into products saleable in the global job market” (p.  2468). A psychologist in Chua’s (2014) ethnographic study of suicide as a pathology of aspiration in Kerala expresses concern about the “shrinking lifeworlds” of the Malayali child, saying, “These days children only see the inside of their home, school, and tuition center” (p. 167). Recalling a comparison I heard during my fieldwork, the psychologist went on to liken these children to “broiler chicken” brought up in carefully controlled environments. Accentuating these moral panics about social alienation in the modern world, media panics forewarn that the deeper “media penetrates into our social life” (Drotner, 1999, p. 611) the less social life we have. Thus, while dystopia denotes a putative breakdown of moral order, it is not as Gordin et al. (2010) remind us, necessarily the opposite of utopia. Rather, it depicts the utopia of responsible parenting and the fashioning of the individual gone wrong. It is to these bewildered Malayali households and schools that Manorama offers a competitively packaged opportunity to get children hooked on to “good lessons”. Nalla Paadam suggests the child’s enrollment in the social as the means to ensure a healthy childhood and society. It is a solution that recalls what Chua (2014) refers to as the “outsourcing” of child-rearing or the expectation that enrolling children in enrichment programs will ascertain “the emotional and psychological development they fail to receive at home” (p.  183) and school. If the launch of Nalla Paadam is impelled by the media panic about children on the precipice of danger, the mediated narratives of children actively participating in Nalla Paadam bring to us stories of children whisked away from danger through this initiative.

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The Utopic Malayali Child: Regeneration of Kerala Through Children June marks the beginning of the academic year in Kerala. The advertisement (Fig. 4.2) for Nalla Paadam given below recalls man’s evolution from the hunched-back monkey to homo-erectus. The bolded letters below the picture state: “The beginning of a new evolution”. Nalla Paadam promises regeneration—a “new evolution” of society through the figure of the child-student. Detailing the anxieties about the Chinese child in the 1990s, Anagnost (2008) describes that “the child, incarcerated by the heightened demands for exam success, becomes a figure of stunted social development, severely incapacitated in developing social relations and fearful … of having to go out into the world” (p. 61). In that sense, the advertisement marks the evolution or the maturation of the Malayali child—from one “who cannot ‘face society’ because of the exhaustive regimentation between school and family” (Anagnost, 2008, p.  56) or from being hunched over their gadgets, into one who is standing erect in the service of mankind. The child-in-uniform also suggests the evolution of a new kind of schooling experience made possible by Nalla Paadam. Moreover, here the child who is expected to be the “recipient of care” has evolved to be the “carer … [contributing] to other people’s welfare” (Zelizer, 2005, p. 190).

Fig. 4.2  A new evolution. (Courtesy: Malayala Manorama Daily, Kottayam)

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“All hail Ahmed Shahul (Ahmed Shahul Ki Jai): Smooth flow of traffic in Puthenkavu” was the caption of a Nalla Paadam news that appeared in the Manorama (Malayala Manorama, 2014b). It told the story of a seventh-­grader who was instrumental in the deployment of traffic police at a busy intersection near his school. This provided relief not only to the students of the numerous educational institutions in the area but also to people in the locality. He achieved this laudable feat by writing a letter to the Nalla Paadam Letter Box. As part of the Nalla Paadam Letter Box project, students are invited to write letters to concerned authorities about issues or problems. These letters are then published in Manorama. Ahmed had addressed his letter to the district collector, the foremost administrative officer of a district or administrative unit, informing him about the traffic congestion and the difficulty faced by pedestrians to cross the road. The collector read his letter and responded by assigning traffic police to the intersection. The article pointed out that Ahmed had written the letter on behalf of the thousands of students studying in the numerous educational institutions in that area. The story carried a picture of Ahmed being felicitated by the assistant commissioner of police. In this Nalla Paadam story, Ahmed is depicted as a responsible and agentic child who has a stake in the social. He does not ignore a social problem or pawn it off as adult concern and responsibility. Like the “priceless child” in Zelizer (2005), Ahmed plays a mediating role between the “masses” and the “state” when he informs state authorities and acquires state assistance to solve a problem faced by the public. Thus, from being perceived as “future citizens”, children are now being recognized and addressed as “full citizens” (Guerra, 2002) whose opinions and views need to be listened to. While the above Nalla Paadam story indicates greater democratization in adult-child relations within contemporary modernity, juxtaposing Ahmed’s story with that of the dystopic child illustrates some of the paradoxes and limits of children’s autonomy. Even as Nalla Paadam stories mediate desires for the autonomous child, it endorses an autonomy that “embraces a conception of children focused on their rational capacity” (Archard, 2002, p. 80). In other words, rational capacity is a “precondition for autonomous choices” (p.  81). A child’s autonomy and rational capacity become intelligible as such when it is exercised within a trusting relationship to authority rather than in contestation to it. One gets a sense of Ahmed’s rational and autonomous self not from his deeds per se but from the approval it garnered from the adults. The district collector responds to him favorably and the police officer comes to felicitate him in

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a public function. A child as a full citizen thus embodies the rationality attributed to adults and the innocence and goodness attributed to children. Media panics, on the other hand, focus on emotionally charged discourses and images. Mediated panics are conspicuous by the absence of any acknowledgment of children’s agency and autonomy. Rather, children’s experience of new media is overwhelmingly reduced to “illicit pleasures” and tend to conveniently ignore young people’s diverse experience of media, their levels of media literacy, and even the reality of media divide shaped by class, location, and gender that continues to exist in India (Banaji, 2010; Rao & Lingam, 2021). These contradictions in adult constructions of childhood highlighted through a relational reading of utopic and dystopic childhoods are significant because they have material effects on children’s lives. Banaji (2010) conducted focus group discussions with 10–14  year children from different class and regional locations in India around their access to leisure media, particularly television. The conversations with these children make clear that children were often compelled to rationalize their media use to family members as opportunities to learn, for instance, a new language, with pleasure alone not being “an acceptable reason for leisure” (p. 63). Banaji argues that such instances indicate the lack of autonomy children face around leisure, in this case, “mediated” leisure, in the name of “protection” and “education”. In fact, the panic seems to be less about mobile phones and internet technologies accentuating social alienation, and more so about the unmoderated “new cultures of intimacies” (Ravindran, 2010, p. 62; Rao & Lingam, 2021) that these technologies foster away from the reach of institutional panopticons such as families and educational authorities.

Modern Schooling and Nalla Paadam The socio-cultural context of media panic plays an important part in shaping the action that is taken to address the crisis (Drotner, 2013; Rao & Lingam, 2021). In this context, it is pertinent to notice how the “solution” put forward by Manorama through the Nalla Paadam initiative dovetails with parental anxieties and priorities within the highly competitive educational landscape of Kerala. Education, but more importantly, parental educational choices and strategies have become a key indicator of responsible parenting and middle-class consumption and aspirations in post-reform Kerala (Chacko, 2020). In fact, Vincent and Ball (2007) insist that parents invest in or pressurize schools to include

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enrichment activities in the curriculum to buffer anxieties about failure in an intensely competitive, congested, and uncertain educational market. News about Nalla Paadam garner wide publicity for individual schools by highlighting the almost dizzying array of enrichment activities undertaken by these schools. It would not be far-fetched to suggest that schools, families, and students covet the mediated publicity earned through Nalla Paadam within Kerala’s increasingly competitive educational landscape. In fact, schools in Kerala are “active advertisers” (Blackmore & Thorpe, 2003), and flex boards outside schools publicizing their students’ academic and extracurricular achievements are a common sight. Moreover, in response to parental demands for their children’s “exposure” to activityoriented rather than mere bookish curriculum, schools in Kerala compete with each other to “accumulate” enrichment activities (Chacko, 2020). Thus, one could argue that Nalla Paadam, which provides schools advertisement in the most popular Malayalam daily newspaper and its television channel along with the potential for monetary rewards and certificates of participation, is both responding to and co-producing this competitive educational landscape by helping to market schools. Relatedly, showcasing the innovative work done by individual schools takes schools out of their private, aided, government ecosystems and structures toward a discourse of individual efficiency and pushes schools more and more toward an “outward market accountability in response to the imperatives and fluctuations of parental choice” (Blackmore & Thorpe, 2003, p. 582). Thus, in Nalla Paadam, we espy a newspaper that is committed to the social but in ways that dovetail with middle-class aspirations. One could argue that Nalla Paadam’s solution for pathological child-crafting through an entrenchment in society has the potential to garner consensus and subscribers for Manorama’s brand of ethics because of its potential to re-entrench the ultimate goals of middle-class child making.

Conclusion Childhood studies scholars often tend to neglect the relationship between newspapers and children owing to, among other things, the perception of children and young people as digital natives. This chapter invites childhood studies scholars to consider children as valuable consumers for print media in their efforts to retain a competitive edge within new media modernity. Associating with future citizens supplies an ideal site for newspapers to reconcile their commercial interests with their social

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commitment. This chapter illustrates how Manorama plays a vital role in bringing childhoods and children into the public domain through the co-­ construction of mediated anxieties and desires about modern childhoods. Studies of modern childhoods will greatly benefit from studying the co-­ presence of these mediated fears and desires about children as it is their simultaneity that shapes social discourse about childhoods and legitimize interventions, policies, and laws pertaining to children. Studying these dystopic and utopic childhoods as related acts of imagination enables us to understand the paradoxes in modern conceptions of the agentic child. I conclude by arguing that utopic conceptions of childhood mediated by the newspaper have the potential to garner public consensus as well as commercial success for the newspaper as it dovetails with middle-class anxieties and aspirations for social mobility and distinction in Kerala.

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CHAPTER 5

Clean Bodies in School Uniform: Childhood and Media Discourses of Cleanliness in Tamil Nadu, India Smruthi Bala Kannan

“Sithappa (uncle), you ride a scooter to an open ground to defecate. What kind of progress is this?” read a mural placed near a railway station in peri-­ urban Chennai. The profile of a shirt-clad boy, who looked about seven to eleven years of age, was painted to be almost six feet. He looked straight at the person stepping out of the railway station, pointed with his right palm, and smiled with derision. The mural had the emblems of the current Clean India and Clean Schools campaigns. His shirt’s clean white collar1

1  Stiff collar, mandatory in boys’ uniforms, is considered difficult to clean since it accumulates sweat.

S. B. Kannan (*) Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University-Camden, Camden, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_5

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looked strikingly similar to the school uniform shirts of the boys from a nearby government school who walked past two such murals to reach their houses and public transport stops. Above the school boys’ heads, a marketing poster for Surf Excel laundry detergent with a giant five-armed pink and blue blob of a stain exclaiming karai nalladhu (stain is good) loomed large. The boy-model in this billboard wore a uniform nothing like theirs. His white collar had a maroon tie knotted around it. In his other avatars through the campaign, as he splashed through muddy waters and food wastes, he also carried a maroon jacket. Murals, posters, and media campaigns proclaiming their entanglements with hygiene and cleanliness with child in school uniform as its protagonist are ubiquitous and a common sight in most regions in Tamil Nadu for the past decade. Pitched as a change-making and modernizing narrative, these campaigns called the audience to action toward societal change. Different stakeholders including government public health officials and corporate marketers are invested in this discourse, albeit with different points of entry. In this chapter, I trace how narratives of childhood and portrayals of children’s everyday sartorial experiences, which play a central role in these discourses, are tethered to notions of futurity. In particular, within these campaigns, we find an underlying idea of the school as a clean space filled with clean bodies and an invisibilizing of the labor of its everyday maintenance. Juxtaposing and supplementing these discourses with ethnographic data with schoolchildren and their communities, I complicate and describe the visual construction of this narrative through the everyday object of the school uniform. By marking the “modern” child through the symbolic use of the school uniform, I observe that the campaigns produce the child-in-school as a lynchpin in the community’s ongoing and “unfinished project of modernity” (Balagopalan, 2014) The chapter begins with a genealogy of the ways in which modern schooling in Tamil Nadu, childhood futurity, and ideas of hygiene are entangled with the school uniform’s visual aesthetic. This section is followed by a description of the field data collection and media analysis methodology employed. The first analytic section describes the symbolic use of the figure of a child clad in school uniform in the narratives of public health and sanitation campaigns and its limited engagement with the reproductive labor of the uniform’s everyday maintenance. The second section reflects on corporate advertisement narratives of the middle-class child’s school uniform

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as backed by the consumption of laundry detergent and the affordance of maternal domestic labor. In the third section, I engage with media discourses on environment that complicate the middle-class ethos of the sanitation campaign albeit reproducing the image of the child-in-school as a futuristic and pedagogic one. While both the public health and corporate campaigns that I describe far exceed the focus on school uniforms in their ambit, I dwell on the school uniform as an analytic to open up the assumed audiences and underlying assumptions about childhood within different communities.

School Uniforms, Childhood, and a Hygienic Future School uniforms play a significant role in the visual and material culture of mainstream2 schools in Tamil Nadu, India, as a disciplinary tool regulating children’s bodies, and as a visual aesthetic signifier of a school-going body. The rationale for this “regime of appearance” varies widely from provision of sartorial welfare to the efficient management and training of young bodies in a public space (Dussel, 2005). As a disciplinary tool or “technology” of schooling, the uniform regulates what can be visible on the school-­ going body on an everyday basis and what needs to be obscured (Craik, 2005). As a visual aesthetic marker, the uniform expands the visual culture of the school into the public spaces and homes that the children inhabit carrying parents, community members, institutions and their discourses regarding schooling (Chacko, 2019; Mathew, 2018). The school uniform carries meanings of modernity in its everyday circulations in Tamil Nadu. As a marker of modern schooling, it embodies the collective “common sense” that equitable access to schooling is a pathway to welfare and social justice. While this ideal has been derived from the decades of collective political struggles in the region for equitable access to education (Anandhi, 2018), schools and their curriculum served as critical sites of political contestation of embodied caste segregation and ideals of a casteless society (Veeraraghavan, 2020). One key way contemporary modern schooling in Tamil Nadu identifies as modern is by attempting to erase caste-based segregation and practices, identifying them as pre-modern. This is demonstrated through many practices 2  Schools characterized as “mainstream” in the region, over “alternative” schooling systems such as traditional paatashalas, schools for differences in ability, or elite schools that did not implement the more prevalent disciplinary regimes.

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including state textbooks which, on their opening page, mention “Untouchability is a sin; Untouchability is a crime; Untouchability is inhuman”, attempt to ban the overt wearing of caste markers on schoolchildren’s bodies,3 and implement a uniform attire code.4 However, post-colonial “modernity”, as in “modern” schooling, is paradoxical as a “desired space-time that has happened someplace else but not here” (Balagopalan, 2014). Post-coloniality, a period after/following a colonial past and influence (Balagopalan, 2020) and modernity, a time of progressive present and future distinct from a historicized past (Rollo, 2020), are characterized by a temporal identity that produces fields of difference. Discourses of temporality similarly entangle children and the future (Cole & Durham, 2008). Within this paradigm, the child in the school is positioned as a conduit between the “modern” school and the community—its “other” (Balagopalan, 2014). As future adults in the becoming, institutions such as schooling perceive children as the site to work upon to bring about societal transformation across “generations”. Hence, the school uniform functions as a material-political “technology” and an artefact that signifies modern schooling and the subjectivation of the child within this institution (Kumar, 2001). Moving away from the tactile priorities of the caste system, the visual modality takes center stage in marking modern schooling (Ramaswamy, 2017; Cody, 2013). The sartorial culture carried the aesthetics of modernity in the post-colonial Indian state in tandem with “clean” modern architecture and spatial administration, which were implemented through the optics of invisiblizing what was considered unclean (Dutton et  al., 2002; McFarlane, 2008). The embodied sartorial expressions and aesthetic tensions around clothes, which sit at the center of caste, class, gender, and age in Tamil Nadu (Nakassis, 2016; Sharma, 2019; Hardgrave, 3  In 2019, the Tamil Nadu Director of State Education issued a circular to district officers disallowing students wearing colored threads as caste-markers, which was later revoked. The education minister clarified that this was due to the absence of any complaints of such threads. A heated debate ensued in the media regarding the “cleansing” caste politics in the state’s public schools, informed by the idea that modern schools ought to be free of any markers of caste apart from those towards affirmative action. 4  Students and teacher’s caste identities within schools were usually hinted, albeit unreliably, through the kind of language one spoke or in discussions of food or ritual codes. Apart from these school’s policies, students and teachers implemented different caste identity modification/neutralizing strategies in their everyday language practices. Dwelling on another person’s, in particular a student’s caste identity by an adult was often perceived as an act of aggression.

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1968), play a key role in visually marking and sustaining hierarchies in schooling. Hygiene, a purported reason for the sartorial codes for school students, has been understood as a colonial tool to manage “othered” bodies (Gleason, 2018; Sibley, 1995). Following the script of vulnerable childhoods (Christensen, 2000; Manzo, 2008), extensive research and data on school sanitation focus on measures of students’ health, their enrollment and retention, the impact of sanitary and health facilities in schools on these measures, and possibilities for effective use of the school to intervene into practices of the community it serves (Coffey & Spears, 2017; O’Reilly et  al., 2017; Chaplin, 2013). This body of research and interventions assume school as a suitable site for hygiene interventions into communities through the everyday lives of children, founded on notions of the impressibility of the child. However, the tethering of schools and children’s education with modernizing through cleanliness ideals comes with a long colonial and post-colonial history of civilizing and developmental efforts (Ramaswamy, 1997; Laporte, 2002; Balagopalan, 2010; McClintock, 1995; Kidambi, 2011; Watt, 2011). School-based material and spatial object-lessons on cleanliness, including school uniforms, often played a role in these histories. The scholarship on school uniforms’ history indicates the paradoxical way in which uniform policies function. Though they express a democratic intent, they also bring unequal lived experiences for the children. As heteronormative able-bodies are normalized, “othered” and “unruly” ones are brought into learning “aesthetic and bodily dispositions” of the children’s social and inner selves (Gleason, 2018; Warren, 2010). Caste, class, gendered, and disabled bodies are “cleaned-up” and enter the school uniform’s visual aesthetic to participate in a casteless and democratic ideal of schooled futures. Even this democratic, albeit normalizing, ideal of the universal education for child is fragmented in India by the presence of a class segregated and hierarchical schooling (Mukhopadhyay & Sarangapani, 2018). While the school choice is determined by the economic affordances and aspirations of the children’s family and kin network, children’s everyday material-spatial experiences of schooling in Tamil Nadu are marked and made visible to the public outside the school on children’s bodies through the school uniforms (Kannan, 2022).5 Building on this 5  Leya Mathew (2018) and Nita Kumar (2001) make these observations in Kerala and a “north Indian non-metropolitan urban center”, respectively.

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c­ ontextual understanding, I trace the discursive use of children in school uniforms, as symbols of a generational shift and harbingers of societal change.

Methodology and Context My chapter contrasts public health and corporate marketing campaign media related to cleanliness circulating in Tamil Nadu during the 2010s that center the schoolchildren as their protagonists. The data towards this analysis was collected during ethnographic work conducted across northern districts in and around four schools in Tamil Nadu in 2019. I worked with two private and two government-aided schools in these localities through in-school ethnography and workshop facilitation. Outside the schools, I interviewed parents and kin of school-going children in the community and teachers who taught in both government and elite private schools apart from my ongoing everyday experience of observing public spaces and engaging in conversations with shopkeepers, municipal cleaning workers, and public health workers. Though some of the campaigns themselves were produced as early as 2000s, I discuss campaigns that lingered in the memory and everyday spaces of my informants in 2019. The media data analyzed in this chapter draws from campaigns that circulated or remained in the public spaces such as murals and sign boards and digital platforms including online cinema, websites, and social media. I identified these physical, digital, and, in a few cases, archival sites by following details mentioned by children, teachers, non-teaching school staff, shopkeepers, children’s kin, and parents across class and caste locations during my fieldwork. My analysis traces topical and thematic patterns following “the metaphor” (sensu Marcus, 1995) of cleanliness and “visibility” of the school uniform as “a means to follow the connections, the associations, and translations that produce the network of schooling” (Dussel, 2013). The public health and sanitation campaigns I draw upon include the Government of India led Total Sanitation Campaign (1999),6 Nirmal 6  TSC including Sanitation and Hygiene Education (SSHE) in Central Rural Sanitation Programme (1986) frames children as receptive targets and community champions (GoI, 2007). Similar perception of children within hygiene education in late-colonial sanitary programming has been critiqued as a diversion from necessary structural investments (Harrison, 1994) and attempts by urban middle class to produce a field of hygienic difference through “social service” and philanthropy (Kidambi, 2011; Watt, 2011) undermining everyday lives and labor of their target communities.

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Bharat Abhiyan (2009), and Swacch Bharath Abhiyan (2014). Each of these campaigns prioritize availability of sanitation facilities and WASH education in schools and have collaborated with UNICEF towards this end in Tamil Nadu and at a national level. As large-scale campaigns across the country as well as the state, the efforts’ funding came from central government allocations,7 state government contributions, and matched contributions focused on grass-roots-level campaigns by different non-­ governmental bodies including corporate social responsibility funds, philanthropic monies, and UNICEF.8 The physical-material manifestation of these campaigns included large murals on public walls, government buildings and schools, and frequent television and radio advertisements on public broadcast media. Apart from the media produced towards Tamil audiences in the above said campaigns, I also engage with campaign materials of the Chennai Metropolitan City’s “Namakkaga” (2019) and Tamil Nadu State Government’s single-use disposable plastic ban (2019). While the latter was aired on major private-owned television channels through the year as an advertisement campaign, the former found place in electronic sign boards in the city alongside online advertisements through targeted Google Ads, YouTube videos, and social media. I compare the figure of the child in school uniform in these public health and sanitation campaigns with the Surf Excel “Karai nalladhu” (2005) campaign and outreach. Though the original advertisements were produced in Hindi and dubbed in Tamil, the campaign manifested as large street-side billboards in some of my fieldwork districts. The outreach component of this campaign was implemented in collaboration with acclaimed Tamil film directors to draw on their fan base. Both the public and the corporate campaigns targeted schoolchildren of different class positions to participate in their campaigns. While the public campaigns conducted various activities in schools including handwashing days, anti-littering parades, WASH and menstrual awareness sessions, alongside the construction of closed toilets, the corporate campaign 7  Centre for Policy Research. Accountability Initiatives, Budget Briefs, Sbm, Goi 2016–17, Vol8/Issue2. URL: http://accountabilityindia.in/sites/default/files/pdf_files/SBM.pdf. 8  Deep, Aroon. (2017). “Swachh Bharat spent Rs 530 crore on publicity in three years— but little on grassroots awareness”. Scroll.in. November 22, 2017, URL: https://scroll.in/ article/857030/centre-spent-rs-530-crores-in-3-years-on-swachh-bharatpublicity-but-has-little-to-show-­for-it.

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capitalized on middle-class children’s access to digital and television platforms.9 As I interviewed 10–14-year-old children in 2019, they complicated the campaigns by positioning themselves as not the sole agential pedagogues in their community nor as vulnerable victims but as negotiating different tasks alongside their kin. Both the campaigns and children’s lived experiences far exceed my description in this chapter. I focus solely on the visual-material discourse of the school uniforms to anchor my analysis.

School Uniforms in Display School uniforms in my fieldwork localities were marked by a recognizable visual aesthetic—plain or plaid/checked fabric with a specific palette of colors. The aesthetic was coupled with the frequent and repeated appearance of a specific dress code on the roads and public places. Even if one did not know any student from the school, a regular community member would be able to place the child by class and gender. While middle-class parents and teachers denoted government and government-aided school children’s bodies through ideas of lack of moral and bodily cleanliness, cleaning workers and working-class parents discussed private schooling and its material demands as unaffordable. Among the schools in the urbanizing areas I researched, as the fees and school-related expenses increased, a reduction in percentage of students of scheduled caste and a corresponding increase in students in general category student percentage was discernable.10 Though caste display was largely prohibited in the private and aided schools, hierarchy between schools thus engaged the caste-­ class nexus. The uniformed body, placed in a hierarchy of cleanliness and class, becomes a symbol of schooling to the public eye. Public welfare campaigns for better sanitation and health often evoke this symbolism in varying ways to mark a child’s body in the visuals as a schooled and clean body, or a self that is capable of civic habits towards public health. Contrasting the uniformed child with the “color dress” or “home dress” of a child in a squalid background is a pattern in this visual rhetoric.

9  Some teachers also discussed sessions in private schools conducted by Proctor and Gamble on menstrual management using disposable pads. 10  Based on data in https://src.udiseplus.gov.in/ (Accessed April 2021).

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Public Health Sanitation Campaigns and the Agential Child “Sithappa (uncle), Smartphone in your hand and you defecate on the railway tracks. What kind of progress is this?” The text that followed said, “Good toilet practices are true progress”—declared a little boy who looked straight into the viewer and pointed at you with his hands. Similar to the mural discussed at the beginning of this chapter, this larger-than-life mural for Swacch Bharath against open defecation remained painted in 2019 on the outside of a government school’s compound wall on an arterial road in peri-urban Tamil Nadu. This was visible to the public who stop for a signal and take a moment to look around till the traffic signal changes. When I brought this mural up in a conversation with a parent of a private school nearby, she reminded me of a series of videos produced for a television public service announcement made in 2009 by UNICEF as a part of Sampoorna Swacchatha Abhiyan that was dubbed in Tamil. The videos portrayed a videographic image of a child in uniform who thinks and uses a piece of chalk to correct sanitation-related problems that she sees around her. The society and environment, unlike the child, are still-­ motion animations created out of stylized sketches. In one of the videos, she sees an adult man defecating in the middle of lush bushes. She draws out a rectangle around him to contain him in the act of defecation. Once he is done, he now steps out of a built toilet. The video communicates the ability of the schooled child to produce social change. The video suggested that the adult and society do not belong to the three-dimensional world as the child/children who are promises for a future clean India (UNICEF, 2009). The aforementioned parent of a middle school child described having viewed this video in late 2014. What marks the child’s body in these two media narratives is the legible image of the school uniform. The boy’s clean white-collared shirt in the mural, and the videographic girl’s white shirt, blue skirt, and a blue ribbon were parallel to their contemporary government school uniforms. These uniforms were predominantly perceived as welfare provisions as they were provided free of cost. Mandated in the beginning of the year and supplied through their schools, both teachers and non-governmental volunteers who worked with schools described how children often wore these uniforms throughout the day even after the school ended and required frequent replacement. Entangling children’s sartorial well-being

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with their overall health and hygiene, these adults underscored the necessity of uniform provision towards children’s healthy growing up. The narratives in the mural  and the video, however, extended an interpretation of the school-child not just as a promise but also as a corrective to the current situation its adults have constructed. Children’s presence in school, symbolized by their school uniform, was discursively constructed as preserving childhood’s current state of innocence and the promise of the child as a becoming adult and citizen. The society outside including their own parents and other adults in the family were visualized to be a threat to the child. A suggested distinction was made between these ignorant adults and the educated and teaching adult who inhabits the school space. The latter category of adults includes doctors, teachers, and so forth, featured wearing formal white-collar workers’  attire. The former category of adults were pictured as attired in sarongs, dhotis, sarees, and skirts and are associated either with homes or fields. The distinction in attire also suggested a potential class and habitus difference between the child and the adult worlds—habitus hinting at education, urban/rural or caste differences.11 This distinction featured more explicitly in narratives where adults feature as central characters, as in the Total Sanitation Campaign material produced and circulated in Tamil in 2014. Dr. Chi Chi Sollappa, the campaign mascot, is a doctor-figure featuring both in TV campaigns and on murals. His figure was painted outside government elementary school buildings and community centers with text about appropriate toilet practices. Many of these murals remained in place till 2019–2020 during my fieldwork. The phrase “Chi-chi” in Tamil is used to express disgust at something. For instance, one would say it when you see human or animal feces, come in contact with it or if you encounter spoilt food. His name means “Dr. Say Chi Chi” or a doctor who recommends what kind of practices to discourage and express disgust. He wears a white doctors’ coat with a stethoscope and intervenes at the end of short TSC ads in TV to advice children on what practices are “chi-chi” worthy. In one of the ads, for instance, a child is forced by his mother to leave for school in school uniform without using the toilet. This child who does not have toilet at home is seen defecating in the open. The doctor stops him, advices that he say “chi-chi” to open defecation, and encourages that the child use the 11  Apart from attire, these manifest in features like the built structures of the home or the language spoken by the parents.

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school toilets at the moment and later motivate his parents to build a toilet in their home (UNICEF and Govt of TN, 2014). In the dynamic between the state and the society, the child-in-school marked through the school uniform is to be interpreted as a portal through whom information, education, and change is distributed to the present adults, and incorporated in the children who will be future adults. In the case of both the Sithappa campaigns and the Dr. Chi Chi Solappa campaigns, children are encouraged to transform the adults in their community to better sanitation practices by shaming them. The videographic girl, who is framed in the midst of two-dimensional adults and community, chalks a toilet around people defecating in the open. As another manifestation of “the unfinished project of modernity” (Balagopalan, 2014), developmental discourse utilizes the symbolic modality of the child in school uniform to “clean up” their community. While the children-in-­school are molded and educated by expert adults, the unfinished and ongoing transformative nature of the modernity project manifests in these cases by framing the children-in-school as the harbingers of change to their home communities. If we were to view these advertisements through this lens of the colonial infantilizing view of the colonized (Nandy, 1983), the “non-modern” adult12 who is the parent of the child is portrayed as initially childish, is ignorant, has not learnt hygienic practices from any historical experiences with sanitation, or is mired in “traditional” practices. However, the school-­ going child enters the picture as the innocent and childlike Indian who is willing to learn and stay loyal to the knowledge and “expert”/“modern” adults among whom she is institutionalized. She is also willing to reject the views of her parents. Instead, the uniform-clad child reproduces the teacher-student relationship with these adults, where the student becomes the teacher to the parent. Thus, the child-in-school, no longer vulnerable, is projected as saving the nation from squalor. Following the advent of accessible visual media as a campaign tool, the visuality of the embodied child has been signified through material codes such as dress, accessories, apart from gender and ability. The children in these campaigns are able-bodied boys and girls clad in government school uniforms of the specific period of time portrayed as transformation agents with power within their community and as  a part of a  collective future clean state or  nation. These videos and murals highlight the children’s  As a heuristic category.

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living conditions at home and school environment as static entities obscuring the present labor required for the cleanliness and the upkeep of the school uniform. Selling Cleanliness, Capitalizing Reproduction How does one keep the school uniform clean? Pivoting our attention to this question highlights the material environment required for the school-­ going children to produce themselves as clean bodies. The public health campaigns position soaps, toothpaste, and “modern” cleaning objects required to keep the children’s body and their clothes clean as neutral and unmarked affordances. However, these objects are entangled with the market outside of the space of the school. Surf Excel’s Karai Nalladhu (stain is good) campaign was launched in 2005 alongside its Hindi counterpart Daag Acche hain.13 Marketing a laundry detergent, this campaign sought to re-signify stained and soiled clothes as not a “dirty” thing to eliminate but an everyday reality that can occur for “good” reasons. This discourse parallels Owen Jones’ geographic observations on the idea of idyllic rural disorder as a safe site for childhood and play afforded by its separation from “risky” urban spaces (Jones, 2000). In this case, the material routines of washing through consumption and domestic labor produce the classed separation that affords “soilable” childhoods. At the center of this campaign were stories of children’s engagement with their lifeworlds through exploration, play, and most significantly, helping other people. The advertisements typically  started with a child’s exploratory and helpful interaction with materials such as dust and dirt. They ended in the household of an upper-middle-class family—made evident through the availability of a washing machine, and other modern gadgets that mark middle-class households in India today. A middle-aged woman signified as the child’s mother receives the child’s soiled uniform and responds to it. The scene began with her disappointment about the soiled clothes. Her simultaneous grasp of two details turned her happy  about the soil—the child’s “good” or “helpful” deed that caused the soil, and the availability of Surf Excel detergent that would help her restore the uniform clothes to 13  Social Samosa. (2018). “Daag Acche Hai—A Lowe Lintas brainchild that changed the face of Surf Excel’s brand identity”. https://www.socialsamosa.com/2018/02/surf-exceldaag-acche-hai-campaign/.

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sparkling clean. Key to the advertisements was the mother’s moment of realization or emotional change towards dirt or soil. This ad campaign, unlike the public health campaigns, dwelled on the reproductive workings of household centered on the mother’s labor. Set up in a spacious well-lit middle-class household with machine laundry facility, the narrative situated children’s “dirty” and “messy” explorations and altruistic acts as contingent upon the security that the detergent and the mother’s labor afford. My field informants reflected on these advertisements as not representative of their households. Especially 10–14-year-old girls provided a much more complicated picture of the productive and reproductive labor in the everyday upkeep of the school uniforms. Although the mother’s role in the maintenance of the school uniform was significant, children across the four schools described their own, elder siblings’, grandparents’, or other female kin’s role in washing, drying, and mending the school uniforms. Many private school children’s upper-middle-class households with mothers working in the Information Technology sector or managerial work employed domestic help, often women. While the teachers’ and cleaning staff’s caste identities were hinted at in informal exchanges, these were sites of possible stereotypes and assumptions based on their work, as Sarah Hodges discusses in her chapter on waste management workers (Hodges, 2018). Nevertheless, cleaning staff and teachers rarely ate lunch together due to incompatible work schedules and different furniture, albeit reminiscent of caste segregation. Akin to the cleaning staff employed in the private schools and the difference in their  class and, likely, caste composition from the teachers and the students, the domestic help working with these upper-middle-class households belonged to a different class, caste, and dwelling locality as their employers. They could not afford to send their own children to the same schools where their employers did but most often to a government, aided, or low-fee private school in the locality. Additionally, female kin of school children who also worked as domestic help in middle-class upper-caste households spoke about how they would divide time between their paid labor and the cleaning work at home towards younger kin. The prevalence of socio-economic difference and caste hierarchy, invisiblized in the public health films and advertisements, took a philanthropic garb in an extended ad film campaign. In Tamil Nadu, Karai Nalladhu Campaign was extended to include children’s participation through the Little Big Film Campaign in 2010,

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which called children to send interesting stories of soiled clothes.14 The company funded directors of repute to produce select stories from the pool they received into short films. In these films, the stories of “helping” was not limited to one’s own community as in the public welfare campaign. Marked by class differences, both the short films and ads involved children “helping” an older family member or an economically less privileged person with middle-class affordances unavailable to them. For instance, one of the commercials narrates the story of a boy lying to his mother about being selected for a football team to lend his less-privileged friend a pair of sports shoes.15 He uses soiled uniform as the façade to keep his mother in belief. In one of Little Big Films, a middle-class boy with a uniform and tie helps a chicken-keeper’s son rescue chicken that he let loose from the pen. These campaigns normalize a middle-class home with furniture, built structures, and  branded detergent as consumable affordances, and the mother’s cheerful domestic labor that a clean uniform invisiblizes in public. However, in sustaining this mediated public narrative, both the children’s own labor, paid domestic help, and any home conditions that deviate from such a middle-class norm find little room. Further, as a characteristic feature of campaigns that describe embodied and sartorial hygiene, school uniform design variations as per contemporary material-­ visual trends help mark class hierarchy between communities to which the children belong. The productive and reproductive labor of cleaning bodies, bodily wastes, clothes, and spaces, which are marked by gender and caste hierarchies in the communities find little room in the narrative. Contrasting the popular erasure and silence around caste differences, director Divya Bharathi in her documentary Kakkoos reports the experiences of Dalit workers who are forced to handle human waste as a part of non-­permanent contractual jobs with the municipality and schools due to their caste. Some of workers, parents themselves, report fear of contagion and disgust from their own bodies to their children (Bharathi, 2017). While the specific caste identities were less discussed in private and aided schools, the cleaning 14  D’Souza, Johnny. (2010). “Surf Excel LBFM TVC”. Johnny D’Souza. Nov 26, 2010. 1:49 min YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0gg2Lqkt2A. Surf Excel. (2016). “Are your kids #ReadyforLife?”. Apr 26, 2016. 2:33 min YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-jPrQzvE9E. 15   Surf Excel. (2011). ‘Surf Excel-Chicken Champion—LBFM 3’. June 16, 2011. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eua77uu9FpI.

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staff in the school played a key role to ensure the cleanliness of school uniforms within the school. They handled a range of tasks from sweeping and brooming floor areas where students sat to removing spills on school furniture or supporting any student in need with a spare set of uniform clothes. Further, cleaning staff and the students wore uniforms attire within the private and aided schools, similar to municipal sanitary workers who visited homes and schools for garbage collection.16 The regular soiling of the adult and young adult cleaning workers’ clothes during their everyday work of producing clean public spaces and garbage dumps was in stark contrast with a singular instance of a middle-class boy’s school uniform getting soiled. In portraying the school uniform-clad boy’s willingness to get it soiled to help the “other”, these Surf Excel campaign films evoked the child as teaching the parent empathy. This narrative draws upon a discourse of generational transformation between the parent and the child’s attitude towards cleanliness, marking the parent’s “irrational” insistence on a clean uniform itself as insufficiently “modern” and a vestige of a past that ought to be corrected. This child, like the government uniform clad one in the sanitation campaign, uses affective tools to influence one’s parent and community through one’s own everyday experience and activities. The child, a flexible neoliberal citizen, teaches the parent that it is okay to “soil” rather than be clean, thus normalizing dirt as nalladhu (good). However, the dirt’s “good” emerges from charity, rather than equality or justice, embedded in an unequal social landscape. It is then the private, and “good”, choice of the middle-class consumer child and mother to address inequality through compassion.

Claiming Shared Futures, Obscuring Difference The classed hierarchy is not similarly sustained in environment-centric, cleanliness-oriented, and, more recently, pandemic prevention campaigns, wherein generational distinctions take priority. Centering the use of plastic and the stagnation of water in home structures, the environmental cleanliness campaigns targeted community practices of consumption and maintenance that were not mindful of the life cycle of their material use. These environmental cleanliness campaigns, which predominantly critique  Also discussed by Sarah Hodges (2018).

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middle-class practices, portray children-in-school as demanding their right to a safe future. By embedding the plurality of school access and domestic affordances within a singular symbolic realm of generational divide, the school uniform plays the role of marking the child through ideas of futurity rather than through social-difference. Moving away from either a squalor-oriented or middle-class narrative of the community, the dengue prevention campaign in 2019  in Metropolitan Chennai involves three middle-schoolgirls as ambassadors. A set of three videos, each displayed a classroom with sunlight pouring onto clean desks, playground, and schoolgirls’ oiled braids as they study, and their well-ironed clean government school uniforms. In this campaign, the girls called on the audience to keep their environment clean through the monsoon so that mosquitoes do not breed. Indexing a general public without class definitions through first and second-person pronouns, this campaign framed the prevention of mosquitoes through the prevention of stagnant water as a public space concern (Namakkaga, 2019). The campaign slogan was namakkaga, naattukkaaga, naalaikkaga (for us, the nation, and tomorrow) underscoring the children’s role in the social collective as both a nation building and futuristic endeavor. In March 2019, two-dimensional entertainment production aired a classroom video of actor Surya educating schoolchildren on plastic waste.17 In this video, children clad in non-specific school uniforms learn to reduce and manage plastic waste. In a series of similar short films and videos aired on popular Tamil channels through 2019, children in different school uniforms of both genders are portrayed interrogating and correcting adults’ inappropriate waste management practices including tea shop visitors’ littering and parents’ faulty waste segregation. The news media also aired government schools’ children’s campaign work in different districts to educate the public. Children’s involvement on plastic and litter ban was marked as a concern across class positions through a similar advertisement campaign aired by Surf Excel. However, distinct from the public service and welfare campaigns which utilized private and government school uniform, this market-oriented campaign portrayed a group of children in clothes of varied colors and designs cleaning up litter and shaming adults for pollution. 17   2D Entertainment. (2019). ‘Maatralaam! |Suriya |Harish Ram LH | LH | 2D Entertainment | Knack Studios’. Tamilnadu Pollution Control Board. Mar 8, 2019. 4:27 min. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgbKp8RkGUc&t=206s.

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Striking within the plastic litter and dengue prevention campaigns was the fact that a majority of their target audience included middle-class adults and households. Public health workers visited households across districts during this 2019 monsoon, including my then peri-urban residence, to inspect for stagnant water. Moving further from their monitoring of public spaces in earlier years, they insisted on inspecting indoors and garden spaces. They identified water stagnation in refrigerators’ drains as a breeding ground of mosquitoes. In addition, the disposable plastic ban in Tamil Nadu, which was implemented during January 2019, banned the public from consuming or using single-use disposable plastic but for a few exceptions including food packaging. The large refrigerator, spacious private houses with possibility for water stagnation, and ubiquitous consumption of disposable plastics in food and water packaging were markedly middle-class affordances. While reproducing the idea of school as a site of expertise and current information on material usage, these environmental campaigns did not distinguish the adult audience by their class position unlike in the hygiene-oriented sanitation campaigns. Nevertheless, the children themselves were marked as occupying specific class locations through the clothes they wore. Underscoring the central role of children and youth in environmental cleanliness-related media in post-colonial India, Assa Doron (2016) notes the classed nature of this discourse. He argues that cleanliness campaigns are tethered to the frustrations and aspirations of middle-class youth, in contrast with futuristic ideas of childhood within prior nation-building campaigns. Observing the proliferation of “Adarsh Balak” posters, Doron notes the anonymity and ubiquity of these print posters and their popularity in the early decades of independence. However, the centrality of school uniform-like attire in the posters he cites helps us identify that the “pedagogic product of the paternalistic project of the post-colonial nation state” has not been taken up in the twenty-first century only in the manner of “humor and irony”, as he indicates  about contemporary  parodies of “Adarsh Balak” posters. Rather than showing the children how to be, the current narrative weaves-in an international trend of emphasizing children’s voices and stories towards public pedagogy through shaming “illegitimate” aspirations, instilling cleanliness ideals, and celebrating charity through consumption. In portraying school uniforms, the public welfare campaigns continue to obscure the domestic and “private” labor involved in keeping them clean, relegating these discourses to the market. School uniform figures as

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one of the materials through which children are constructed as objects of feminized reproductive labor and consumption (Ferguson, 2017). However, the emphasis of children and childhood’s affective import in cleanliness campaigns relegate children’s role, even in their physical and material work, primarily to the affective and performative labor. The campaigns combined and mediated together in the community’s media sphere—TV, roads, and phone-ads—serve to bring into the realm of capital and nation-state the task of enabling and nurturing childhoods. The variations obscured within individual campaigns manifest in the contrast across campaigns by marking their target audience. The campaigns selectively utilize children’s narratives and voices—playful exploration and service orientation of children in middle-class, likely upper-caste, homes, and aspirational futurity of children from rural or poor households as markers of modernization. Though a concern to all classes, the spatial dimension of environmental discourses and the public commons are mediated by this selective capitalization of classed childhoods and their respective media imaginations of futurity. After the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and related school closures till 2022, relatively few publicity materials for cleanliness and public health produced in the state or in marketing used the figure of the child in school uniform for their messaging. The cleanliness discourse of the school uniform relied on viewer’s ongoing participation in the spatiality of the school and its everyday processes which became absent during the pandemic. The absence of children in school buildings during the pandemic also threw into stark relief the plural and complex everyday routines, labor, and consumption that produce the visual discourse of school uniforms.

Conclusion Murals, posters, and media campaigns proclaiming their entanglements with hygiene and cleanliness with child in school uniform as their protagonist are ubiquitous and a common sight in most regions in Tamil Nadu for the past decade. Pitched as a change-making and modernizing narrative, these public health and sanitation campaigns call the audience to action towards societal change. Within these campaigns, we find an underlying idea of the school as a clean space filled with clean bodies, with the symbolic child clad in school uniform as its centerpiece. Symbolizing a “modern” child-in-school, the school uniform evokes ideas of “modernity”

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framing the child as its harbinger to the community. On the one hand, I observe that this portrayal is selectively deployed regarding working class and rural children as clean bodies in school uniforms in public health campaigns. Thus, the materiality and symbolism of this child in school uniform is firmly situated in the imaginary of the “everyday urban” (Dar and Kannan, introduction to this volume). On the other hand, corporate visualization of middle-class childhoods in school uniform evokes a different, “messy” futurity which call on their parental generation to open up to a philanthropic and neoliberal creative potential that comes with soiling their school uniforms and consuming products to clean laundry. Complicating the class and geographic differentiation in these two portrayals, campaigns towards environmental cleanliness and pandemic-­ related restrictions emphasize the figure of a class and rural/urban agnostic child-in-school. I discuss how the portrayal of school uniform in such narratives effaces gender, class, and caste labor of its everyday maintenance. The visual aesthetic of uniforms and cleanliness complicate the urban middle-class ethos of advancing the child-in-school as the harbinger of modernity in their communities. Drawing attention to the everyday materiality of the school uniform in children’s lifeworlds and its discursive potential, this chapter highlighted the ways in which school uniform as an example of an object representing modernity that can both serve to produce and efface children’s lived realities by carrying affective meanings, risks, and possibilities in childhood.

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CHAPTER 6

The Trumpet and the Drum: Music and Reclaiming the Delinquent Child Catriona Ellis

We heard the Boys’ Band playing such music as tom-tom and bamboo reed can never make—glad music, and strong music, music to which men can march with their heads upright, a music made for triumph and unconquerable hope. To teach these boys any music at all is something of a victory, but to teach them such music as we heard, and to teach them to play it so accurately and with such a swing in its joy—this is achievement of a notable kind. And the music had passed into the souls of the boys. Instead of slouching bodies, they stood upright and strong; instead of matted or twisted hair, their heads were as neat and brushed as a British soldier’s; instead of scowling looks and heavy sensualism, their faces were bright with intelligence and

Thanks to Dr. Divya Kannan, Dr. Anandini Dar, Dr. Francesca Young Kaufman and the peer reviewers for their generous and helpful contributions. The assistance of Steven Spencer of the Salvation Army Heritage Centre (SAIHC) has been invaluable. C. Ellis (*) University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_6

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glad with health. It seemed an illusion that these handsome and smart boys could be the sons of the crouching village massed together in the dust of the compound. (Begbie, 1912)

This account of a performance by a Salvation Army Boys’ Band, written by the English journalist Harold Begbie, encapsulates the way in which teaching children to play in a brass band was used by missionaries and colonial administrators as a means of promoting the moral, social, emotional and physical reformation of Indian children.1 The brass band was a distinctive part of a larger project to rehabilitate and reform children who were perceived to be criminal, either because they were incarcerated for petty crime under the Children’s Acts or because they were members of the denotified, formerly Criminal, Tribes (henceforth CT). A close study of the brass bands run by children’s homes between 1900 and 1940 provides a distinctive lens to analyse the reformative aims of the late colonial state and the production of new modern citizens by the state and its allies. I will analyse the disciplinary strategies used and the reality of life in the bands, considering how this both reinforced and challenged modern categories of difference and the ways in which colonial modernity was produced on and through the bodies of children. The chapter also explores how children negotiated and understood both the constraints and opportunities of everyday life in the children’s homes, and their unique position as embodying modernity within the local community through their participation in the band. I will consider this through a variety of source material from the South of India, juxtaposing the colonial state records of the Certified Schools in the Madras Presidency with the reports and photographs produced by the Salvation Army in magazines such as the South Asia War Cry or All the World: A Monthly Record of the Work of the Salvation Army in All Lands and with the short silent films they produced as part of their fundraising strategy. A number of scholars have written about the reformatories or Certified Schools and the attempt to regulate and reform young Indians.2 Heather Ellis, for example, has suggested that juvenile delinquency emerged first as a Western concept, closely tied to the emergence of modernity which brought the child into a new relationship with the state (Ellis, 2014;  Begbie was a prominent journalist known for his Christian and secular writing.   Institutions for reforming children were known as reformatories from the 1897 Reformatory School Act, renamed as Certified Schools in 1920 Madras Children Act. 1 2

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Chatterjee, 1995). She emphasised the new responsibilities of the state for the child in need of care or control; highlighted the pressures on communities and families in the face of rapid economic and social change and argued that juvenile delinquency became a politically potent idea, a way of managing a small population of vulnerable individuals, whose existence and rehabilitation was symbolic of concerns about the stability of the empire. The legal definition of crime and the criminal was thus an important strategy of colonial rule (Yang, 1985). Satadru Sen has written extensively on the symbolic potential of the delinquent child to reinforce the rehabilitative capacity of the modern colonial state that viewed the child as innocent and reformable, and claimed to have the scientific knowledge to accomplish this (Sen, 2005). Yet, this discourse also questioned whether the native child was sufficiently malleable to be fully reformed, thereby underlining the pseudo-scientific racial hierarchies of late colonial modernity. The child in the reformatory became the object of competition between a wide variety of experts, both British and Indian, each attempting to demonstrate their own modernity and scientific authority through their control over children’s bodies, and each reinforcing the perceived backwardness of native parents as a means of further infantilising Indian adults. Any attempt to contest that power in the daily life of the institution merely proved the inherent incorrigibility of the poor Indian child. It was in these disciplinary enclaves and in the deployment of modern, though changing, rehabilitative strategies that the individual child, separated from their family, bore the ideological weight of moral and political position of the whole community. Building on Sen’s work, a study of music bands as a form of rehabilitation speaks to both the practical and performative power of colonial rule and the centrality of both the construction of the ‘modern child’ and body of the juvenile child subject as central to the shaping of colonial modernity. The work of colonial administrators and criminological experts was supported by the work of the Salvation Army (henceforth SA), an evangelical Christian missionary organisation which ran industrial schools for groups of marginalised children such as leprosy sufferers or famine victims. From 1911, the SA were responsible for the management of settlements for the so-called criminal tribes in the Madras Presidency, building on their previous all-India work under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (Radhakrishna, 2001; Tolen, 1991). The Salvation Army were different from other missionary groups, initially opposed by the British Raj because of their distinctive and disruptive evangelistic campaigns which were characterised by loud

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processions, noisy bands and a disregard for colonial authority, applying techniques honed in the London slums and towns of Northern England to attract the Indian poor (Berry, 2008). The formation of working-class bands, as a means of encouraging bravery among their followers, drowning out opposition and providing safe and respectable leisure pursuits, was already a core element of their modus operandi in Britain, and was easily transferred abroad. ‘Boom marches’ or lively, musical processions with flags and instruments, became central to their mission strategy in the subcontinent. They gained responsibility for the CT industrial settlements partly because they were self-funded, partly because they used modern penological techniques to fulfil their stated aim to ‘uplift them spiritually, socially and morally’,3 partly because no one else was believed in the reformative potential of these ‘unloved and unwanted and greatly misunderstood people’.4 Although less overtly reliant on coercive control and more explicitly in favour of a strategy of rehabilitation and education, the SA used methodologies not dissimilar to that of the colonial state. Combining SA and government sources speaks to the intersection between state and humanitarian power, based on Christian and modern scientific methodologies, which was specifically focused on the symbolic and actual bodies of the marginalised and dispossessed. Recognition of the vulnerabilities of childhood and modern methods of juvenile criminology thus became a way for both groups to prove their own varied, though broadly Western, understandings of modernity within a colony, a space otherwise assumed to be bereft of modern technologies, or ways of being. A number of rehabilitative strategies were used by the SA and colonial state, but the focus here is on music and the brass band. There is a growing literature in the British context which explores the wide range of brass bands in Britain and their use in reformatories, as occupation, as training and as future career (Sheldon, 2009; Parker, 2016; Holman, 2019). That these successful techniques were transferred to Britain’s biggest colony is not a surprise, particularly given the British military reliance on bands and the desire for local recruits. Indeed, by the twentieth century, brass bands had become an embodiment of the imperial experience, a visible demonstration of imperial power in a local context (Herbert, 2000). This was a contested and multidimensional process, intersecting with traditional 3  Madras and Telegu Territory: A short history of the Stuartpuram Settlement, 1948, SAZ/1/1/4, Salvation Army International Heritage Centre, London, UK (SAIHC). 4  ‘Gunga Din’ All the World. Jan/Feb/Mar 1922, SAIHC.

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musical cultures and new formations of princely power in performance, ultimately changing the leisured listening of the middle classes; influencing classical music, jazz and military music traditions; and altering the celebration of local weddings (Reily & Brucher, 2016; Shope, 2008). M.  Radhakrishnan, for example, has demonstrated that SA songs and music have become integrated into significant elements of the oral tradition and history of the Yerukulas, one of the most prominent CT in South India (2000). The intersection of these traditions—the imperial bands, community music making and modern criminology—could be found in the body of the institutionalised child, highlighting the symbolic value of malleable childhoods.

Reforming Children There were a number of institutions directly funded and managed by the state in the Madras Presidency, which will be discussed under the umbrella term ‘children’s homes’. The Chingleput Reformatory, renamed as the Senior Certified School, was established under the Reformatory Schools Act 1897 and a Junior Certified School was established at Ranipet in April 1923.5 A further school was temporarily established in Rajahmundry but transferred to Bellary in November 1931. By 1937, there was also a Senior Certified School for girls run by the Madras Children’s Aid Society, a Junior Certified School run by the Madras Society for the Protection of Children and St. Mary’s Adi-Dravida Girls School in Vellore, the only explicitly caste-based institution, although the records of these institutions are more limited.6 Music was part of the curriculum in the boys’ schools: Rajahmundry/Bellary provided training in bugle and band playing while Ranipet included bugle, flute and bagpipes.7 Chingleput had an extensive music curriculum and its reputation was well established among the regiments, although there is no evidence they formed their own band.8 There were also bands at a wide range of SA institutions, such as boarding schools at Nagercoil, Fyzabad and Bareilly, as well as around 16 CT settlements at places like Gorakhpur and Stuartpuram.9 Some, such as Nagercoil, had 5  Report of the Director of Public Instruction (now DPI) 1922–1923, 1923–1924, IP/25/PJ.3, National Library of Scotland (NLS), Edinburgh, UK. 6  DPI 1936–1937, 1932–1933 to 1936–1937 IP/25/PJ.3, NLS. 7  DPI 1931–1932, 1927–1928 to 1931–1932 IP/25/PJ.3, NLS. 8  DPI 1909 IP/25/PJ.3, NLS. 9  India’s Cry. Jan 1900, p. 2, SAIHC.

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their own junior bands, which were used in weekly evangelistic services.10 While the bands themselves were almost exclusively male, girls were taught dance, singing and tambourine and were also used in performances.

Brass band, boys’ school Nagercoil, The War Cry Sept 1913, SAIHC

The children’s homes were intended to both physically represent enlightened modern governance and to reform the inmates into new forms of modernity. In particular, the modern state claimed power through its capacity to classify and regulate between groups of children as in need of care or control (Balagopalan, 2014). Although the Certified Schools were designed to reform juvenile delinquents under the Madras Children Act, in practice they offered a home for destitute children sentenced either for petty crime or under Clause 29 because they could not identify their home or were without parents or guardians (Ellis, 2023). There was thus  Picture: Brass band, boys school Nagercoil, The War Cry. Sept 1913, SAIHC.

10

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little difference between the orphaned children in the SA homes and the children incarcerated in the Certified Schools for vagrancy or petty crime, and both were categorised as helpless victims in need of care and savage beings in need of control. The modernity of the state and its allies was signalled through providing for the ‘unwanted child’ from poor and low caste communities as much as from rescuing them from the ‘non-­ modernity’ of their subaltern parents (Balakrishnan, 2011; Sen, 2005). At the same time, an important aspect of modern governmentality was the classification and separation of populations of children deemed ‘incorrigible’, those from the CT communities, a distinction widely recognised by state and SA agencies, and accepted by the Indian upper castes.11 The criminalisation of entire communities justified the removal of CT children from the age of six years from their parents, who were deemed a ‘contaminating’ influence (Sen, 2005).12 Daily or weekly visits from parents were allowed but this was dependent on the ‘individuality’ of the child and the ‘character of the parent’. The children were also segregated from their peers in the Certified Schools because they threatened the innocence and ‘spoil[ed] the moral tone of others, speaking of their experiences outside during innocent conversations’.13 This gave them a liminal status, not fully child and not within the purview of the Madras Children Act, but not fully criminal, coming within the CT legislation but with the possibility of redemption.14 There was also a recognition that reformed young people had an educative role in demonstrating new forms of domesticity and avowedly modern family life to the rest of the community (Gore, 1944).

Reinforcing Imperial Power Children’s bands had an important, though often overlooked, role in the performance of colonial modernity. They received ‘special attention’ at melas, at sporting events and at religious gatherings, attracting audiences and encouraging a festival atmosphere of celebration—because ‘all 11   A.J.  Nicholas, Superintendent, Borstal Institution, Tanjore. Evidence 4/1/1920. Evidence to Indian Jail Committee (IJC) 1919. IOR/L/PARL/2/407A, India Office Records, London, UK. 12  Adjutant J.  Beattie SA, Perambur, Madras; Major JP Cameron, Inspector-General of Prisons, Madras; Muhammad Sadulla Badsha. Evidence to IJC, IOR. 13  R. Littlehailes, Director of Public Instruction Madras. Evidence to IJC, p. 310. IOR. 14  MRRy Krishna Warriyar, Acting Superintendant, Reformatory School, Chingleput Evidence to IJC, IOR.

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children the world over are captivated by the drum and flag’.15 They were used to accompany religious talks and testimonies within the CT settlements.16 The music and lyrics combined Christian militarism, seen in hymns like ‘Sound the battle-cry’ or ‘A crown for the young’, with more overtly imperial anthems such as ‘God save the King.’17 Usually, these songs had been translated into the children’s heart languages, and there were frequent translations in the SA magazines of hymns into Hindustani, Tamil, Singhalese, Urdu and Marathi, as well as use of local tunes. These children became object lessons to the wider community. With the close association between military bands and the colonial state, children were used to perform militaristic imperial pride by audiences who failed to recognise the nuance of the relationship between the SA and the colonial state itself. The children playing in the bands became loud and visible symbols of the impact that modern education could have, and of the future opportunities that this provided as well as a reminder that the children had new allegiances and were part of a different community, to which their parents had no access. This was also the case for drill and drum beating, the children being used to perform colonial modernity to their own communities through rhythm and controlled music—‘precision and earnestness’—the adherence to disciplined movement and music evidencing their transformation from chaos and backwardness.18 As Begbie recorded, similar to the boys mentioned in the opening example: ‘They looked so pretty and charming, they were so kempt and self-respecting, there was such understanding in their eyes and in the smiling curves of their lips, that one had constantly to remind oneself that these were the children of heathen villages, so profoundly ignorant and so disastrously superstitious that they can almost be described as savages’.19 Participation in musical performances, within the bands and in communal singing of anthems, choruses and hymns, was used to visually signify the move from savagery to civilisation. The enthusiasm and quality of the singing was a key way to classify differences  between populations.  India’s Cry, May 1900, p. 2 SAIHC.  ‘Save the children’ The War Cry, 1911 SAIHC. 17  ‘Music,’ The War Cry, 1911 SAIHC. 18  India’s Cry Jan 1900, p. 1 SAIHC. 19  ‘Kneeling children of India!’ All the World Jan 1912 SAIHC. 15 16

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Firstly, it differentiated between Christian and non-Christian children, at Bezwada boarding school the twenty-two ‘youngsters sing Army songs with that vim and gusto that only Army boys and girls can acquire’.20 It also helped to differentiate between generations, young people demonstrating their potential for rehabilitation through their ability to hold a tune and rhythm and their enthusiastic engagement. This contrasted with the old who ‘barely opened their lips as they sang and clapped half-­ heartedly, but the young people put their very hearts and souls in the singing’ (Krupavathie, 1940). The discipline of army life, of drum and flag which was encapsulated in the modern precision and skill of the drill and musicians was contrasted constantly with the unregulated dancing and uncontrolled chaos of village noise.21 In the CT settlement at Stuartpuram, a visiting SA Brigadier noted that the twelve young men in the whistle band ‘played to us with splendid time and execution,’ and this evidenced their reformation from ‘little wild, undisciplined thieves and potential criminals’ to ‘young men and women who are unrecognisable from what they used to be’.22 The lack of musical appreciation and ability reinforced the perceived backwardness of the communities from which these children came.23 The perceived failure to value musical culture separated low caste and CT communities from upper caste and more classical forms of Indian, particularly Carnatic, music with its intricate melodies (raga) and metrical structure (tala). Musical education was assumed to have a humanising impact, encouraging children to assume characteristics such as beauty, kindness, gentleness associated with more races deemed to be more civilised (Begbie, 1912). Establishing cultural difference again proved the modernity of the state and the Indian elite, justifying their interventionist schemes. The modernity of the band, the civilising impact of music and symbolism that these children now belonged to alternative, and superior, new community was also seen in the sartorial choices. Matching uniforms reinforced the transition from the ‘symbols of criminality’ to modern living and were intended to instil pride in a new identity, while the addition of  War Cry 1900, p. 5 SAIHC.  ‘Northern India’, War Cry March 1901 SAIHC. 22  Brigadier Perera ‘An Inspiring Weekend with Col Nurani’ War Cry 1913 SAIHC. 23  Statement by Commissioner Baugh (1920s) Criminal Tribes work, SAZ/1/1/3. SAIHC. 20 21

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stripes and medals could reinforce the internal hierarchies of the band and encourage good behaviour.24 Again, this visually separated the child from their family, reinforced by a discourse that drew associations between parental neglect, immorality and dirtiness.25 As seen in the opening quotation, the healthy and clean body, neatness and a clean uniform meant that the child came to physically embody the clean living and hygienic choices encouraged within the children’s homes. Bernard Cohn has argued that the reformulation of Indian traditions into new forms of militaristic uniform and dress were central to the establishment and promotion of British imperial power (Cohn, 1996). For children this, alongside other militaristic symbols such as flags and banners, proved a swift and easy way to demonstrate their transformation and loyalty as future citizens of the empire.26 Uniforms, ordered marching, band names associated with particular homes were used to inculcate local pride and loyalties and encouraged new affective communities, providing support networks and companionship for the children. As segregated from home and parents, these new communities were intended to encourage feelings of pride and community among the children themselves and to challenge the loyalties and ties to their natal communities while also engendering ideas of comradeship and respect for authority deemed so necessary for the modern child.27

Producing Modern Citizens A detailed consideration of the reformative strategies used in the children’s homes suggests that children were not only symbolically valuable for late colonial modernity, but that the colonial state and SA were actively engaged in the reformation of children and production of future citizens. An SA Officer, Lt. Col. Balwant, stressed two aspects of this: ‘the child is a little man or a little woman. But I would add a man or a woman in the making’ (Balwant, 1911). This dual role as reformable in the present but  A.J. Nicholas, p. 95 Evidence to IJC, IOR.   Report of the working of the Certified School 1931 (CS Report). GO 902 28/6/1932 TNSA. 26  Photograph of Willingdon Boys’ Home, Papers of Commissioners Alfred and Clara Barnett, BAR/3 SAIHC. 27  ‘Save the children’, War Cry Feb 1911, p. 2 SAIHC. 24 25

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valuable in the future, informed many of the decisions around everyday life in the children’s home. The overriding aim of the homes was to build good character, teaching the children to forsake a life of crime and ‘making them respectable and law-abiding members of the community’.28 This meant that teaching focused on characteristics that would allow the young people to function in the modern world as adults on release—time discipline, team work, basic literacy and numeracy and respect for authority.29 In his evidence to the Indian Jails Committee, AJ Nichols, superintendent of the Borstal school at Tanjore, suggested that this required lengthy incarceration, a minimum of three years being needed both to teach an industry and to fully convert ‘a social parasite into a producer, a law-­ breaker into a self-respecting citizen and a simpleton into a man of average common sense’.30 The 1936 Certified Schools Report suggests only 20% of children received sentences of two years, with 32% being incarcerated for two to three years, 20% for three to four years and a further 27% between four and ten years.31 Low caste or CT children might have been more malleable than the native adult, but this was recognised as a slow and haphazard process. It also meant that they were under state or SA control for their whole childhood, the duration of the sentence being calculated by the time before they reached sixteen years. An important aim of the children’s home was to educate the boys into the correct forms of masculinity for the twentieth century. This started with a focus on ‘cultivating a prisoner’s self-respect and give back to him his manhood’.32 Mrinalini Sinha has shown how a particular colonial masculinity was emphasised in the late nineteenth century based on notions of vigorous muscular Christianity and athleticism but also grounded in racial difference and distain for the effeminate Bengali middle class (Sinha, 2017). The SA officers both contested and supported this idea in their work. By aiming ‘to give the Crims a sense of true manliness, letting them feel that they were being trusted and were on their merits’ they were encouraging a form of muscular, self-controlled manhood not unlike the  Cameron, p. 160 Evidence to IJC, IOR.  CS Report 1931. GO 902 28/6/1932 TNSA. 30  A.J. Nichols Evidence to IJC, p. 99. IOR. 31  Report 1936, GO 2610 12/7/1937, TNSA. 32  Nicholas, p. 98 Evidence to IJC, IOR. 28 29

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earlier construction, but at the same time were making it a possibility for the lowest echelons of Indian society (Smith, 1945). The strident militancy of SA culture reflected its working-class heritage, the claim to respectability through temperance and hard work and the belief in a universal capacity for transformation in stark contrast to the more elitist colonial administrators. This masculine ethos was particularly promoted through physical education, which was designed to bring out the ‘innate instincts of fair play, good sportsmanship and self-control’.33 It included team games, such as football, hockey, cricket, boxing, wrestling and gymnastics.34 Drill was also important.35 For boys who were not naturally athletic, this same ethos of comradeship, self-control and military endeavour could be encouraged through participation in the brass band and as songsters. Thus, the band provided another space where the child was taught to become a self-respecting modern individual within the context of a wider team with shared interests, uniform, timetables, and under the strict control and discipline of the bandmaster. There were few girls in the Certified Schools, but they were central to the SA mission. Girls were not allowed to learn wind instruments, but frequently participated in drill, dancing and singing.36 Image 2 of the girls in a tambourine band shows that the instruments were gendered and that rhythm remained a key signifier of orderliness.37 Music for girls was thus used to encourage appropriate forms of femininity and bourgeois domesticity so prized by missionaries, reformers and the late colonial state (Sreenivas, 2008). For both girls and boys, these ideas were reinforced by the modern disciplinary strategies that rejected corporal punishment and encouraged ‘the development of self-control and personal responsibility’ through structured daily routines—‘each day is apportioned to sleep, play, lessons and work’.38

33  Report of the working of the Borstal School, Madras Presidency. 1932. Law (Gen), GO 2071 15/6/1933, TNSA. 34  CS Report 1925 GO 1376 12/7/1927 TNSA. 35  DPI 1902–1903—1906–1907 IP/25/PJ.3 NLS. 36  War Cry Feb 1913 SAIHC. 37  Photograph of Ahmedabad Girls Boarding School, Papers of Commissioners Alfred and Clara Barnett, BAR/3 SAIHC. 38  Report on the Borstal Schools 1936, TNSA; India’s Cry Jan 1900, p. 2 SAIHC.

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Photograph of Ahmedabad Girls Boarding School, Papers of Commissioners Alfred and Clara Barnett, SAIHC (BAR/3)

The primary aim of the children’s homes was to rehabilitate and return children to society having taught them a useful skill, making them productive contributors. Children were taught literacy and numeracy, significantly improving their life chances and ability to engage with government bureaucracy. The discharge statistics of the Certified Schools suggest that this was successful—in 1927, while 46 were illiterate on arrival, all 66 who were released could read and write, while in 1936 the 125 discharged were all literate.39 The key emphasis was on industrial training, this proved that the children had been reformed by evidencing a transition from labourers and coolies, or even more problematic beggars and wanderers, to skilled tradesmen.40 It also educated children into the forms and structures of the  CS Report 1925 GO 1376 12/7/1927; CS Report 1936 GO 2610 12/7/1937 TNSA.  CS Report 1936 TNSA GO 2610 12/7/1937 TNSA.

39 40

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modern capitalist economy, instilling time-discipline, respect for authority and hierarchy. The focus on an industry kept them occupied, immortalised in the CT chorus that included the lines ‘amid buzz of industry soon he forgets/His life of the criminal kind…. I am living by industry, honestly wrought/I’ve been changed from the criminal kind’ (Anandham, 1916). In the Certified Schools, the choice of industry included carpentry, metal work, weaving, tailoring, band playing, masonry, gardening and drawing.41 The choice was more constrained in the CT homes which had smaller budgets and were more likely to specialise: in Stuartpuram and Bezwada, the boys in the boarding school focused on silk weaving and dhurri carpet making, the girls on needlework and handicrafts, while at Fazalpur/Moradabad the 115 boys and 124 girls learned tailoring, shoemaking and carpentry (Blowers, 1942; Smith, 1945). There were also opportunities for bright children, particularly girls, to sit a more formal academic curriculum and to train as dispensers, teachers and nurses, work that would be useful to the settlement of the future.42 Structured engagement in useful employment was intended to have a moral and spiritual impact for these children as they learned the satisfaction that came through hard work (Smith, 1945). Music was one of the options for boys in the children’s homes, providing an opportunity for talented pupils to shine (Sheldon, 2009). Students were taught by a bandmaster, who could be either Indian or European, and used a wide variety of instruments. Percussion instruments included the tambourine and both European and Indian drums, such as the mridangam and the tall/bhajani cymbals; while the brass instruments comprised the trumpet, cornet and euphonium as well as simple military instruments such as the bugle and fife (Perera, 1913). The postcard shows twenty-two boys of different ages, in uniform and with fifes and drums.43 These were instruments that required a little skill, but could be taught relatively easily to children and were cheap to obtain. Adult bands and bands with Christian children were more likely to use more skilled brass instruments such as the cornet, reinforcing generational, religious and  DPI 1902–1903—1906–1907 IP/25/PJ.3 NLS.  Madras and Telegu Territory (1948). 43  Postcard depicting ‘Drum and Fife band at one of The A.rmy’s Homes for Criminal Boys, India,’ (1920s) Papers of Bertie Hants, SAIHC. 41 42

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educational hierarchies.44 The extent to which children chose their industry is unclear, but musical training appears to have been a prestigious option with significant immediate and long-term benefits. This was seen, for example, in the number of boys who were transferred between schools because of their musical ability and because they required more advanced instruction. The pupils engaged in music training are among the easiest individuals to trace in the records because of the attention they received.45 It appears that within the constraints of the system, talent and good behaviour was recognised and rewarded, that the musical children were more likely to be recognised as individuals and that the bandmaster had considerable influence in comparison to the other instructors.

Postcard depicting ‘Drum and Fife band at one of The Army’s Homes for Criminal Boys, India,’ (1920s) Papers of Bertie Hants, SAIHC  Social Industrial special (Nov 1902) War Cry SAIHC.  Cameron, JP to Sec. to Government of Madras [letter 10/11/1926], Law and Education Department, GO 2222 1/12/1926 TNSA. 44 45

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Playing in the band also meant that the children had good, long-term employment prospects. There was a real concern by the administrators that the young people would relapse into a life of hereditary or poverty-­ based crime when they left the control of the institutions.46 Both the Certified Schools and the SA homes cultivated links with local businesses who would continue to supervise their charges and provide a structured life after release. Helping children to follow the rhythms of industrial capitalism was a clear indication that the work of reformation had been successful. Maconachie, chief inspector of the Certified Schools, worried that ‘the years immediately following school life are the formative and dangerous years. Released from the school discipline of childhood, the lad starting to work for his living is generally badly at sea’.47 Accordingly, the SA home in Stuartpuram cultivated a relationship with the post office in Calcutta, Postmaster General and Works Department providing a mutually beneficial relationship of hardworking recruits in return for continued supervision. This was particularly the case for the bands, with links established with local army and police bands, or promotion to the SA adult bands. In 1925, of the ten boys who were in the Chingleput band, nine found positions as buglers and one joined a band after discharge.48 This was a significantly higher retention rate than any other industries. The pattern was consistent: in 1934, for example, fourteen were trained in band and eight left to join a local band; in 1936, the figures were nine trained and six accepted.49 While historians such as Gregory Booth have traced the rise of local brass band traditions, often linked to weddings, the released boys were more likely to remain in government service, for example, in 1927, one became a bugler at Rajahmundry Central Jail, one joined a military band and one joined a police band (Booth, 1990).50 Consequently, as adults, the children themselves became part of the disciplinary apparatus of the state. While it is unclear the extent to which children had any choice in their eventual occupation, it does appear that musical training significantly improved their life opportunities.  Sadulla Badsha, p. 256 Evidence to IJC, IOR.  CS Report 1931 GO 902 28/6/1932 TNSA. 48  CS Report 1925 GO 1376 12/7/1927 TNSA. 49  CS Report 1934 GO 1282 24/6/1935 TNSA. 50  CS Report, 1925 GO 1376 12/7/1927 TNSA. 46 47

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Children’s Everyday Negotiations of Colonial Modernity Any analysis of the perspectives or reactions of the young people incarcerated is necessarily tenuous and uncomfortable given the lack of child-­ authored sources. While Sheldon’s work suggests that British boys involved in bands benefited both in the everyday experience of institutionalisation and in career prospects in comparison to their non-­musical peers, it cannot be assumed that this was always the case in South India, while the musical opportunities available to the children was contingent on age, institution, gender and the personality of the instructor (Sheldon, 2009). It is also impossible to assess how much influence the children themselves had on these processes, and how this impacted their sense of selfhood or being in the community. These uncertainties and ambiguities speak to wider methodological concerns surrounding the historical actions and voices of children, and the constant tension between seeking the agency of the child in ways which problematically frame the child as a rational, selfreflective actor or the ‘discourses of victimhood’ which conceptualises the child as merely ‘acted on’ by adults in authority (Balagopalan, 2014). Instead, Sarada Balagopalan suggests that we change the question, considering instead the ‘violence, opportunities, hierarchies and ambiguities produced by the historical workings of modernity in the lives of children’ (Balagopalan, 2014, p.  19). This next section will tease some of these ideas out. Children appear to have been enthusiastic about the prospect of playing in the band, and participation seems to have been voluntary, for example, in the Young Persons Brass band at Stuartpuram (Blowers, 1942, p. 58). It may be that music was less physically laborious and less monotonous than other industrial work, or because of the respectability, prestige and camaraderie associated with uniformed activities. As noted earlier, it also appears that talented or committed musicians were more likely to be noticed and rewarded. The experience of the conductor Charles Nalden who grew up in a rescue home in New Zealand suggests that, within the confines of the rigid structures of a children’s home, music provided opportunities for individual self-expression, a new identity, more possibilities for physical movement, the development of a talent, even experiences of joy in practice and performance which were not possibilities for other children learning more functional industries such as weaving (Nalden, 1989). Although there are no equivalent sources in the South Asian

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context, it is important to reflect on how children used the resources and opportunities available to them to negotiate their circumstances and secure small improvements and happiness within their everyday lives. Children in the band also had greater opportunities for travel and engagement with outside agencies than their peers. There were frequent inter-school sports competitions, Scout rallies and engagements with local and colonial dignitaries which all required the presence of a brass band, and the children’s homes were happy to acquiesce, recognising this as a fundraising and profile-raising opportunity.51 A number of SA children had opportunities to travel abroad—including Melbourne and London— to perform.52 Other bands were engaged in local evangelistic trips, a further opportunity to leave the confines of the children’s homes and interact with the wider community.53 By the 1940s, melas became a feature of SA work with the CT communities in the North of India, and these featured competitions between drum and pipe bands and between Singing Companies. These events included the whole community with food, races and a holiday atmosphere.54 Participating in community events and competitions gave children a break from the monotonous routine of life and the opportunity to access sweets, garlands and festival food, which feature heavily in the autobiographies of more privileged Indian childhoods (Ellis, 2017). Whilst participation was a constrained choice and perhaps a reward for good behaviour, the suggestion that the children chosen to perform the imperial anthem felt ‘tremendously proud of themselves’ gives a hint that some children enjoyed the experience of performance, or that musical ability built their self-confidence.55 These thoughts are fragmentary and ill-defined, but it is important to note the children ascribed a variety of meanings to their everyday lifeworlds. The direct reactions of children to adult decisions and structures are only rarely evidenced in the adult-authored sources. Beattie, a SA officer in Perambur, Madras, described the direct opposition of children uninterested in learning or opposed to the disciplinary structures of the

51  Report 1925 GO 1376 12/7/1927, Report 1934 GO 1282 24/6/1935, Report 1935 GO 1354 14/7/1936 all TNSA. 52  Picture ‘Indian famine boys in Australia’ War Cry April 1901 SAIHC. 53  CS Report 1937 GO 3195 28/6/1938 TNSA; War Cry March 1911 SAIHC. 54  ‘Young People’s Melas’ All the World, July-Sept1941, ‘A high day at a CT Settlement’ All the World, Oct –Dec 1941 SAIHC. 55  DPI 1911–1912 to 1916–1917 IP/25/PJ.3 NLS.

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classroom: ‘these children used to sit with their fingers in their ears’.56 Disciplinary offences were also listed in each Children’s Act Report. In 1930, eighty-four offences were listed, most related to breaking school rules, although seven were because the children owned prohibited articles and ten were assaults, probably fighting between the boys. The punishments involved two being confined to barracks, four warnings, one whipping, eight had their status as monitors reduced and sixty-nine received ‘cuts’ on the palm.57 This reveals a pattern of minor offences and limited punishment, sufficient to frustrate adult authority in the everyday interactions of the children’s homes but not cause significant disruption. These records provide some indication not only of how the children managed the disciplinary boundaries set by adult authority, but also how their own actions contributed to discourses of control and power within the Certified Schools (Christiaens, 2017). While Satadru Sen argues that any resistance was read as a ‘productive failure’, merely reinforcing colonial ideas about the incorrigible nature of the native, it is important to read them too as small, perhaps deliberate, perhaps inadvertent, acts of individual action which serves as a reminder of the limitations of adult power (Sen, 2005). Children were also portrayed as ‘quite normal happy little people— bubbling over with wit and humour’, engaged in low-level acts of fun which, rather than causing concern, reinforced their status as ‘normal’ children (Blowers, 1942). Karen Vallgårda has shown how this portrayal of children often reflected the fundraising strategies of the mission agencies determined to portray Indian children as sharing ‘universal’ characteristics, such as playfulness or naughtiness, and thus prove the potential and efficacy of their reformative work, in contrast to earlier nineteenth-century portrayals of Indian children as either wild and untamed or as helpless victims (Vallgårda, 2014). While the pictures generally show the children as regimented and sober, there are occasional hints that even within the rhythms of daily life, children found moments of pleasure and fun. The description of the school day at the Girls’ Boarding School at Nellore included devotional singing and choruses, schoolwork and industry but also two periods of free time for bathing and unstructured play.58 The sources tell us nothing about the production of new affective communities in the schools, the personal friendships, the age hierarchies among the  Beattie Evidence to IJC, p. 151 IOR.  CS Report 1931 GO 902 28/6/1932 TNSA. 58  ‘Day at Girls’ Boarding School at Nellore’ War Cry, Dec 1916, p. 3 SAIHC. 56 57

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children, their perceptions of the home community and whether these changed over their time. They do, however, make us humble about our claims to the past, recognising that even as disciplined into new modern forms of being, children found and ascribed new meanings to their everyday thoughts and actions.

Visualising Childhood The silent films produced by the SA, presumably as a means of raising funds and encouraging their supporters in the metropole, provide alternative insights into the lives of the children. They provide remarkably personal evidence of SA activity, the first a sixty-second clip filmed in the grounds of their Boys’ Home in Ahmednagar (Maharashtra).59 The boys are pre-arranged in groups on the ground forming the letters of the English alphabet. They are dressed in uniform, and clap and sing with varying levels of rhythm and enthusiasm. However, within the regimented confines of the performance, there are a couple of the boys without hats, a very animated younger girl, a boy who claps with one hand and a few more who look down, refusing to engage with the camera. Within the disciplinary confines of the timetable, and perhaps with little forethought, children could participate, ignore and revise the instructions of adults, and negotiate their own path in ways that made sense to them in that moment. The second film is more extensive. Salvation Army General Commissioner Edward Higgins leads a parade through an unidentified Indian village in 1904, accompanied by organised ranks of men, women and children.60 The band is arranged in height order, and a number of children parade five abreast holding tambourines and flags, or waving handkerchiefs in time, followed by local children waving sticks in a much more unruly manner. The film conveys the spectacle and holiday atmosphere of the boom march. One boy is particularly interesting. Dressed distinctively in white with a black hat and a long white cane, he revisits the camera four times stopping to wave, smile or perform on each occasion. His personal enjoyment and the support of his peers is undeniable, contributing to the joy of the procession, but subverting its order and regimentation, undermining the SA 59  Boys home in Amnednagar, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-boys-home-inahmednagar-­1905-online British Film Institute (BFI) [accessed 27 Jan 2023]. 60  Salvation Army Parade in Village No. 2, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-­ salvation-­army-parade-in-indian-village-no2-1904-online BFI [accessed 27 Jan 2023].

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emphasis on humility and self-control, a small-scale reminder of the juxtaposition of discipline and chaos in many aspects of life. The second half of the parade is more orderly, with evidence of euphoniums, flags, trumpets and couple of boys in bullock carts holding up song books or bibles, followed by adults with bullock carts displaying a number of weaving and industrial implements. The third film depicts Gujarati schoolgirls performing a number of organised dance displays to celebrate the visit of SA officials to their school.61 The girls are organised by size, and perform a number of dance moves with pompoms, led by a female teacher. This four-minute clip suggests that children practiced hard but enjoyed the performance events, most are smiling and happy participating together, perhaps on request although their body language suggests enjoyment. At the same time, the youngest girl in the bottom right corner is frequently confused and sometimes disengaged, while in the later performance a young child runs in front of the dancers. These suggest, in a very small way, that life in the children’s home was less controlled and regimented than the more official reports would suggest, and reminds us 120 years later that the children existed, acted, ascribed meaning and enjoyed relationships within the structures ascribed to them by adults. The last, beautiful fifty-five-minute silent film shows the work of the SA among a number of communities in 1925.62 It is clearly listed as a campaigning film, showcasing SA work across the subcontinent and depicting scenes of rural and tribal life, interspersed with shots of SA meetings with seated children, often clapping rhythmically and singing. There is footage of village processions/boom marches (13:00), of drill and gymnastic performances and of a young person’s band (36:40) marching with flags and uniforms watched by their peers alongside extensive footage of medical, educational and industrial work. To some extent, this evidences the performance of modern, imperial hierarchies at the village level, with the juxtaposition of the seated, clothed and often turbaned children circled by the semi-clothed adults, often with bows and arrows.63 It certainly 61  Commissioner Higgins visits Ahmedabad Girls School 1904, https://player.bfi.org.uk/ free/film/watch-commissioner-higgins-visits-ahmedabad-girls-school-1904-online BFI [accessed 27 Jan 2023]. 62  Salvation Army Work in India, Burma, Ceylon, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/ watch-salvation-army-work-in-india-burma-and-ceylon-1925-online BFI [accessed 27 Jan 2023]. 63  This is particularly the case at the beginning with adults from the Bhil community, a CT in Maharashtra.

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highlights the reformative and transformative impact of SA work on local communities, civilised into modern patterns of industry, clothing and controlled marching. Equally, it conveys the blend of chaos and order that often accompanied large processions, undermining the intended discipline as much as reinforcing it. The recordings of the young person’s band highlights the precision of their marching, the distinctiveness of the uniform, the skill of the playing and the admiration of their more simply dressed peers and suggests that music training might have been a good choice for these children, particularly in contrast to the earlier footage of unskilled labour. Similarly, the short gymnastics display is followed by a close shot of the two boys, whose faces show their sheer delight, joy, pride (38:00) and perhaps suggests the self-confidence that could be built through performance. The films convey the enthusiasm of some participants, the confusion of many others, including the little boy standing clapping among his sitting classmates (15:27) and his contemporary gently chastised with a poke from his teacher’s white umbrella (14:22). It was in the humble, the everyday, the ambiguities and opportunities of everyday life that modern power was both produced and undermined particularly in the bodies and minds of young people.

Conclusion The combined evidence from a variety of sources suggests that inclusion in the brass band had significant benefits for the children. As future adults, it significantly improved their career options and earning potential and gave them opportunities for social progression and mobility. As children, it provided them experiences and opportunities to travel and perform that were unavailable to their less musically gifted peers. It is also possible that music relieved some of the monotony of life in the children’s homes and provided a source of pleasure or relief in the everyday. Participation in the band or in singing groups gave children the opportunity to forge a new identity, both as a modern, skilled individual and as part of a team and affective community of peers, encouraging new forms of loyalty and camaraderie albeit within a strictly regimented hierarchy. At the same time, these opportunities were only possible within the constraints of a disciplinary system that the children could influence in very limited ways. Separated from their natal communities, delinquent children and children from the CT groups were reformed and educated, or at least taught to operate, within the disciplinary boundaries of the

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school in ways which symbolised the modern scientific expertise of the late colonial state and the missionary enterprise. They then performed their modernity, their capacity for transformation and their difference from their communities by playing in bands and procession through their villages and the settlements probably inhabited by their own families. This made them, perhaps unwitting, drivers of change, the embodiment of militaristic Christianity and the reinforcers of imperial power within their communities, symbols of the reformative potential of children and of the backwardness of their parents, encapsulating new symbols, authority structures and new moral and social hierarchies within their musical performances. Their participation in uniformed musical performances, therefore, both contested and reinforced the rigidity of late colonial racialised hierarchies and the perception that Indian children were irredeemably flawed. It is impossible to know how these children responded, but important to note that they made sense of these constrictions on their own terms. The more intimate and personal film footage of the period suggests that children justified, contested, manipulated and ignored the constraints imposed on them, ascribing new or alternative meanings as they negotiated everyday life. Considering the role of children highlights the limitations, as well as the potential, of modern adult power.

References Balagopalan, S. (2014). Inhabiting ‘childhood’: Children, labour and schooling in postcolonial India. Springer. Balakrishnan, V. (2011). Growing up and away: Narratives of Indian childhoods: Memory, history, identity. Oxford University Press. Balwant. (1911, February). A foreword about the children. War Cry. SAIHC. Begbie, H. (1912). Kneeling children of India! In All the world: A monthly record of the work of the Salvation Army in all lands. SAIHC. Berry, E. A. (2008). From criminals to caretakers: The Salvation Army in India, 1882–1914. Northeastern University. Blowers, A. R. (1942). Memorandum on criminal tribes. SAIHC. Booth, G.  D. (1990). Brass bands: Tradition, change, and the mass media in Indian wedding music. Ethnomusicology, 34(2), 245–262. Chatterjee, G. (1995). Child criminals and the Raj: reformation in British jails. Skhaya. Christiaens. J. (2017). Testing the limits: Redefining resistance in a Belgian boys’ prison, 1895–1905. In Becoming delinquent: British and European youth, 1650–1950 (pp. 101–116). Routledge.

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Cohn, B. S. (1996). Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: The British in India. Princeton University Press. Ellis, C. (2023). Imaging childhood, improving children: The emergence of an ‘avuncular’ state in late colonial South India. Cambridge University Press. Ellis, C. P. (2017). Children and childhood in the Madras Presidency, 1919–1943. Thesis, University of Edinburgh. Ellis, H. (Ed.). (2014). Juvenile delinquency and the limits of Western influence, 1850–2000. Springer. Gore, H. (1944). The criminal tribes of India. SAIHC. Herbert, T. (Ed.). (2000). The British brass band: A musical and social history. Oxford University Press. Holman, G. (2019). Music of discipline and reform-the bands of children’s orphanages, industrial schools and asylums. Krupavathie, D. (1940). At work among India’s criminal tribes. SAIHC. Nalden, C. (1989). Half and half: The memoirs of a charity brat, 1908–1989. Parker, R. (2016). Boys’ bands in children’s homes: A fragment of history. Journal of Children’s Services, 11(1), 73–84. Perera. (1913, September). An inspiring weekend with Col Nurani. War Cry. SAIHC. Radhakrishna, M. (2000). Colonial construction of a ‘Criminal’ tribe: Yerukulas of Madras Presidency. Economic and Political Weekly, 2553–2563. Radhakrishna, M. (2001). Dishonoured by history: “Criminal Tribes” and British colonial policy. Orient Blackswan. Reily, S. A., & Brucher, K. (Eds.). (2016). Brass bands of the world: Militarism, colonial legacies, and local music making. Routledge. Sen, S. (2005). Colonial childhoods: The juvenile periphery of India 1850–1945. Anthem Press. Sheldon, N. (2009). The musical careers of the poor: The role of music as a vocational training for boys in British care institutions 1870–1918. History of Education, 38(6), 747–759. Shope, B. (2008). The public consumption of Western music in colonial India. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 31(2), 271–289. Sinha, M. (2017). Colonial masculinity: The ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ in the late nineteenth century. Manchester University Press. Smith, H. (1945). Capturing crims for Christ. Salvation Army Challenge Books, London, SAIHC (Pam.145). Sreenivas, M. R. (2008). Wives, widows, concubines: The conjugal family ideal in colonial India. Indiana University Press. Tolen, R.  J. (1991). Colonizing and transforming the criminal tribesman: The Salvation Army in British India. American Ethnologist, 18(1), 106–125.

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Vallgårda, K. (2014). Imperial childhoods and Christian mission: Education and emotions in South India and Denmark. Springer. War Cry Feb 1916 pic on the front of women (135847_ who got prizes for cleanliness in the Stuartpuram settlement Anandham. (1916, February). The Crim as we find him in the Telegu country. War Cry. SAIHC. Yang, A. A. (Ed.). (1985). Crime and criminality in British India. University of Arizona Press.

CHAPTER 7

Identifying Child Labor: Revisiting State’s Craft in Bombay Textile Mills (1880–1911) Palak Vashist

Introduction This work utilizes archival methods to examine the processes of identification authorized by the colonial state to establish the certification routine for children employed in the textile mills of Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specifically, this project investigates how colonial administrative and bureaucratic policies, along with the legal regulation of the Indian Factory Acts, naturalized ‘age’ as the category of identification for laboring children. Therefore, the work plans to center on ‘age’ as a historical category of analysis and its institutionalization with related processes of identification through the introduction of

P. Vashist (*) Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_7

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medico-­legal procedures by the colonial state.1 The idea is to understand that the ‘industrial child’ was produced as an age-based category through the interaction between these regulatory processes, a corrupt bureaucracy, and a superficial colonial concern for child protection. I have conducted this inquiry primarily through archival investigation of the Indian Factory Acts of 1881, 1891, and 1911, which mark a turning point in the labor history of Bombay textile mills and India at large. These Factory Acts are crucial because they established a significant moment in history by defining both ‘factory’ and the ‘child.’ Moreover, the implementation of factory legislation also brought forth the notion of ‘age’ as a crucial factor in defining a child. Consequently, the child’s identity is no longer solely tied to the family unit; instead, it becomes an independent entity, obtaining wages and possessing certification rolls or identification cards for accessing the factory. This shift allowed children to gain a degree of autonomy in entering and exiting the factory premises, reducing their complete reliance on their parents for this purpose. Furthermore, relating to the naturalization of ‘age’ for the category of child labor, I attempt to explore the connection between the factory acts and the current laws concerning child labor (for instance, the Child Labor [Prohibition and Regulation] Amendment Act of 2016). The 2016 amendment also defines a child on an ‘age’ basis as someone below 14 years of age. In this chapter, I trace back the history of the ‘age’ to factory legislation in Bombay. Therefore, this work aims to re-examine the historical background of these legal norms to help untangle the politics of the modern Indian state. The significant aspect of this work is to explore how the textile mills of Bombay serve as an example of colonial modernity. I intend to present it in two ways. First, the idea is to present a historical tracing of ‘age’ as a measure of colonial modernity. To analyze the Bombay textile mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as not just India’s commercial center but also as a field where ‘child labor’ or ‘the industrial child’ was categorized for the first time in history. Despite very rich historiography on Bombay textiles, child labor has received very little attention in the past. In these historiographical debates, ‘age’ was further marginalized 1  See forensic evidence and instability of age by Pande, I. (2020). An Age of Discretion: Querying Age and Legal Subjectivity in the Secular Shariat. In Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 (pp. 257–282). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779326.007. 108–120.

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and obscured by ‘age of consent’ analysis. By focusing on the colonial state’s rigid obsession with fixing the category of ‘age,’ I will link it with the larger project of modernity. By this, I do not intend to suggest the linear progress of history from factory legislation in Bombay to the 2016 Act, but rather a historical process of tracing modern state’s obsession with fixing the category of age for child laborers. Thus, I am focusing on the concept of ‘identity formation’ (a modern concept based on medico-­ legal practices and certification). Second, to illustrate my argument about colonial modernity and to see the working of ‘age’ in matters of state control, I am focusing on the concepts of ‘discipline’ in the textile mills of Bombay. I explore the concept of discipline through the study of factory schools in Bombay textile mills by Mary Carpenter, a British social reformer and philanthropist. The objective is to examine the implementation of ‘discipline’ disguised as a ‘civilizing mission’ by the colonial state, with the intention of morally uplifting individuals. This also links the study of child laborers in the Bombay mills to the larger project of ‘everyday urban’. It is significant to understand that the study of age and factory schools are not two separate domains of colonial control. The colonial state’s obsession with fixing the ‘age’ through medico-legal processes led to producing the ‘industrial child’ as a particular category that was then regulated and disciplined in factory schools. By reflecting on how child laborers engage with structures and institutions of power and control, such as schools, the study highlights the nuances of modernity and the modern state by centering children as analytical categories. The interlinkages of factory law and factory discipline constructed the childhood for the child laborers employed in the factory. This childhood was both ‘modern’ and ‘disciplined’ as it was built on the modern conception of age and state control. I begin the chapter by providing a concise history of Bombay textile mills and examining the protective arguments put forth by the colonial government to justify the inclusion of child identification measures in the Indian Factory Act. The next part presents a comprehensive analysis of the medical and legal procedures employed by the colonial state to identify children, emphasizing the pivotal role of the child’s body in the state’s regulatory practices. It explores the limitations of these medical-legal processes, colonial authorities’ challenges in defining a child’s ‘age,’ and the overall ambiguity surrounding the certification process. Furthermore, it sheds light on the debates surrounding the concept of ‘age’ as a historical

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analytical category and its association with ‘colonial modernity.’ Following this, the third section delves into the colonial state’s endeavor to modernize by establishing factory schools that promoted the ideology of ‘discipline.’

The Implementation of Indian Factory Acts The first cotton mill in Bombay started functioning in 1856, and by 1870, there were ten cotton mills in the city. The cotton industry began in western India in the 1850s when cotton mills were established in Bombay, Broach, and Ahmedabad (Morris, 1965). The real boom for Bombay textile mills came in the next two decades, with the rise of 70 new mills employing over 50,000 workers by the 1890s. The number of workers doubled by the 1920s. These workers migrated to Bombay from Ratnagiri, Konkan, and Satara regions, and the high migration rate resulted in new family settlements in Bombay. A significant portion of the labor force in Bombay textile mills consisted of migrant male workers (Chandavarkar, 1994; Morris, 1965). Children comprised a small workforce out of this large number (about 6%), and their number declined to (3%) by 1918 (Mehta, 1954; Morris, 1965). The Bombay textile mills were the first industry where the Indian Factory Act XV of 1881 was implemented with provisions for child laborers, which became the starting point for the history of Indian factory legislation. The Factory Act XV of 1881 provided the first-ever official definition of factories. Factories were defined as a workplace employing over 100 workers and using steam power. In 1891, the Act was amended, expanding the definition of factories to include workplaces with more than fifty employees. In my examination, 1881 holds particular importance as it marked the introduction of regulations specifically addressing children in industrial workplaces, particularly regarding their ‘age.’ It meant that children between the ages of seven and twelve could legally be employed for a maximum of nine hours per working day. In 1891, the upper age limit of the legal protection of children was raised. The factory legislation in Bombay in 1881, 1891, and 1911 drew upon English legal precedent. It can be traced back to the British factory legislation, which began with the Apprentices Act in 1802, aiming to safeguard factory children from overwork and corruption. Later, the first two Factory Acts limited the working hours for children between 9 and 16 years of age to 12 a day (Wood, 1902). Historical records do not provide

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clear and definitive explanations for the specific factors that led to the introduction of factory legislation in Bombay textile mills. However, the outcome of such legislation offered valuable insights into how English laws were adjusted to suit diverse colonial contexts, particularly concerning the regulation of labor within complex and varied categories. The interests of employers played a significant role in shaping these adaptations. This involved applying the principles of the master-servant law within the factory setting and defining the legal status and rights of colonial subjects (Hay and Craven, 2004). Scholars have made efforts to investigate the motivations underlying the enactment of factory legislation. One perspective suggests that the textile industries in Bombay and Lancashire were competitors, and the emergence of Indian capitalist unity influenced the implementation of labor regulations in Bombay. This unity responded to the pressure exerted by the Lancashire cotton lobby and aimed to legitimize exploitative labor practices in Bombay. Consequently, there was a recognized need for labor regulation to address the concerns surrounding the treatment of workers (Sarkar, 2018). Secondly, Mary Carpenter (a British social reformer in the sector of child education) has also been considered one of the pioneers of the Indian Factory Act (Hansard, 1875). Carpenter’s protectionist reform agenda was pedagogy-based. She viewed factory legislation as a form of educational instruction, aiming at establishing factory schools as sites of discipline and civilizing the workforce of Bombay (Sarkar, 2018). The labor movement in England directly impacted the call for protective factory legislation in India. The connection between the two movements laid the groundwork for the demand for similar laws in India, resulting in the formulation of the Factory Act. The modern factory system’s functioning “transplanted Britain’s industrial virtues upon Indian soil” (Sarkar, 2018, p. 50). Additional archival evidence supports the idea of child labor protection through the Factory Act. In a letter addressed to the government’s secretary in 1905, the council made a compelling argument stating that children who are not physically suitable for factory work should be safeguarded by law from what, in their case, can often be deemed outright cruelty (Department of Commerce and Industry, 1905). Moreover, Dr. Pechey Phipson, who arrived in Bombay from England on December 12, 1883, as the senior medical officer, argued that the mill industry and the shadow of protective factory laws are responsible for materially reducing the number of “half hungry, discontented, uncared for children into the well-fed,

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loyal and cared for, and healthy artisans” (Vinayak A. Talcherkar, 1907). In opposition to the colonial state’s rationale, I contend that creating an alternative narrative that challenges the notion of factory laws solely being protective is imperative. The Factory Act of 1881 did more than mere protection. It was a significant step in the ideation of the child as a being with a separate identity, independent of his or her imbrications in caste, communities, and family ties (Alexander, 2009, p. 249). Factory law defined ‘the child’ as a quantifiable identity that could be measured and regulated on ‘age criteria.’ The colonial state designed a new identification process based on medico-­ legal practices (Pande, 2020a). Following the establishment of ‘age’ as the determining factor to differentiate between adults and children, the Indian Factory Act designated certifying surgeons responsible for verifying children’s age. These certifying surgeons held the exclusive authority to determine whether an individual was classified as a child. This bestowed significant power upon the certifying surgeons, as highlighted in  the Factory Inspection Report of 1882, “in the absence of registration of births, the best evidence of age, when available, is, of course, a certified bill copy of registration of births, and if registration were made generally compulsory, it would be easy to make the production of such a certificate the first condition of employment” (Factory Inspection Report, 1882). Intriguingly, the regulations outlined in the Indian Factory Act highlight the challenges and complexities surrounding in determining a child’s age within the mill setting. As a result, the subsequent section delves into the intricacies of the certification process. The colonial state’s emphasis on ‘age’ as a defining factor becomes evident through the inconsistencies in the certification process and the dilemmas faced by surgeons and inspectors. It reveals the inadequacy of using certification methods as a reliable means to precisely define a child’s ‘age’ or determine their exact age.

Complexities in the Processes of Certification: Marginal Children Encounter with Colonial Modernity and Chronological Age In the case of Bombay textiles, Sarkar argues that “the law of certification was made operative through a series of dubious, informal practices, which, in a circular motion, drew their efficacy from the letter of the law itself, which was deeply ambiguous” (Sarkar, 2018, p. 189).

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Colonial administration divided the task of identification into separate departments. The certifying surgeon held the authority of defining who was considered a child or not, based on the parameter of ‘age,’ defined by medical examination and proved by certification. Children were certified at the certifying surgeon’s office. When the mill owners wished to employ a child as a full-timer, they would have the choice of three courses, that is, to send the child to the certifying surgeon to get the certificate; to tell him that he must go himself to get a certificate; and to employ him without a certificate risking prosecution if the inspector found out that the child is under age (Drew, Inspector of Factories, 1887). If the mill owner opted for the first option, then the timekeeper or the mill official would enter the child’s name in the register and send the child with the foreman to the doctor who certified their age by signing the register. In the second option, children went with their relatives to the mill and, if found, over 12 years were given age certificates. In both cases, the certificate fee was borne by the child’s family, which was one rupee (ibid.). To certify the child, various medical procedures were devised. The first medical examination process was of ‘teeth count’ (the most standard test in contemporary medical practice) (Carpenter, 1876).2 In the colonial records, “the possession of twenty-eight teeth was a practical guarantee that the child is at least twelve years of age” (Accompaniments to Government Resolution, 1906). Also, children with fewer than 24 teeth were considered below 12 years of age (No. 4351, 1887). The quarterly inspection reports contain evidence of teeth tests conducted by inspectors who held the second-most significant authority, following the certifying surgeon. Inspectors were appointed to check the discrepancies in the identification of the child. They also checked the ‘Occupiers’ register to confirm the ages of working children in the factories. For example, H.W.J. Bagnell provides insight into the practices at the ‘Sassoon Spinning and Weaving Company’ in Malegaon, Bombay, where cotton spinning and weaving took place. In his account, he mentions specific cases such as Luxman Baloo, certified as over twelve years old in 1890, with twentyeight teeth; Vithu Tookaram, certified as over twelve years old on August 7, 1890, also with twenty-eight teeth; Jayram Baloo, certified as over twelve years old on August 12, 1890, with twenty-seven teeth; and Nahood Govind, certified as over twelve years old on December 18, 1889, 2  The standard medical reference seems to have been William B. Carpenter’s Principles of Human Physiology, published initially in 1839 and reprinted in 1852 and 1876.

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with twenty-six teeth. These individuals were confirmed as over twelve years old and employed as full-time workers and regular employees in the mill (H.W.J. Bagnell, 1891). The teeth test was utilized to make assertions about age determination by converting teeth measurements into an estimation of chronological age.3 The study of teeth to determine age had been developed in Britain following the regulation of child labor, especially the passage of the 1833 Factory Act, which prescribed nine as the minimum age of employment and made it illegal to employ children without a medical certificate attesting to their age (Saunders 1838). Although the teeth test may have been a convenient method, it was widely regarded as an inappropriate means of determining a child’s age by numerous officials, including W. Porteons (collector of the district of Nasik). According to W. Porteons, the teeth test has not been successful in its application. He observes instances where children have been certified as over twelve years old based on the number of teeth, despite appearing to be younger, possibly around eleven, ten, or even nine years old, as perceived by ordinary observers (Porteons, 1890). Consecutive reports consistently expressed dissatisfaction with the reliability and accuracy of the teeth test as a method for determining the age. In the report by W.O. Meade, King stated that the inspector found a little girl whose teeth denoted that she was under 11 years of age. However, on paper she has been certified as 12 (King, 1882). W. Doderet, who assumed the role of factory inspector for Bombay in January 1888, also voiced concerns regarding the uncertainty surrounding the teeth test. He shared his experience at a mill where he had identified children whose age was questionable, only to discover they had been certified as over twelve; he argues, “considerable doubts about the method of ascertaining age by the number of teeth” (W. Doderet, 1888). The test that followed the teeth count was ‘Thumb Impression.’ W.L. Harvey, Secretary, in a letter to the government of India, pointed out the importance of thumb impression, “the certificate itself, or a ticket bearing the description and the thumb mark of the child certified, should be produced in all the cases on the demand of the inspector” (Proceedings, 1906). However, this process was complicated to conduct with thousands of children. Doctors were afraid about the children’s clarity of the thumb  Anthropologists have worked on the ideology of the colonial state behind the teeth tests (Sen, 2005). 3

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mark. They claimed that only one in ten marks was decipherable (Accompaniments to Government Resolution, 1906). It was even termed expensive and sometimes a waste of effort. Additionally, certifying surgeons raised concerns about the technical feasibility of recording thumb impressions. They argued that deciphering the impressions would be practically impossible, and even if attempted, the results obtained would be of little to no value (ibid.). Furthermore, it was argued that, “thumb impressions were practically meaningless except to an expert: and no court in the presidency would accept the evidence of factory inspectors at that point” (Jackson, 1907). The superintendent criminal investigation department to whom several certificates were submitted also reported that about 75% of thumb impressions were either thick smudged, or indistinct as useless (ibid.). As Colonel Barry writes: “it should be surprised if one mark in ten were decipherable. The children would only smudge” (ibid.). The fault appears to be due to carelessness on the part of the mill clerks who take the impressions, difficulty with frightened children, haste in recording a large number of impressions in a short time, use of other than printer’s ink, and the failure to take a ‘rolled’ as distinct from a ‘plain’ impression (Hatch, 1912). Another proposed method of certification was the recording of “marks of identification” on the child’s body. This suggestion, like all other methods, invited conflicting opinions on its process of recording; as certifying surgeon notes, “even if the children bore indelible marks on the face or hands, the matter would be a complicated and laborious one, but few children have such marks, and in nearly every case, it would be necessary to strip the child and examine the body generally. Nevertheless, of course, with a hundred to inspect monthly, this would not be possible. However, even if this is accomplished, there remains the moral aspect of the question in the cases of girls” (Surgeon General Report, 1895). The surgeon also expressed that if all the marks are found on the chest or legs and inserted in the certificate, it would be necessary for the manager or the inspector to strip the children again to verify the marks (ibid.). The government suggested that only the marks apparent without removing the child’s clothing be recorded. The last suggested medical test was of ‘bone examination.’ This was one of the most scandalous methods to certify the child’s age. Mr. Kennedy, member of the council of governor general of India, commented on the bone examination test, which is worth producing in its entirety.

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“The only true and insoluble test was the appearance of the bones of the pelvis, the examination of which could only be made employing a post-­ mortem examination—testimony to that effect was given by more than one medical officer, and he seemed that the interest of humanity hardly would sanction this test” (Legislative Department Proceedings, 1881).4

Lastly, the Factory Act made it mandatory for the mill owner and the children to hold age certificates, the cost of which was on the child’s family (Rules, 1881). The certifying surgeon held the authority to cancel the certificate if the child was found underage (Draft rule, 1912). There were many opinions on granting the certificate to children. Lieutenant Colonel Mactaggart expressed support for the concept of a compulsory certificate in a letter addressed to the commission. Similarly, Mr. W. Allen (collector of Broach) and several other officials advocated for the mandatory requirement of age certificates with comprehensive details about the child’s place of residence. This was to prevent the duplication or misuse of the certificate (Vidal, 1891). In a similar vein, the Collector of Land Revenue Bombay also expressed the fear of duplicate certificates in the official records, “I would, however, point out that there are grave practical objections to these separate certificates owing to the case with which they could be sold or otherwise transferred by the holders” (Reply to Surgeon General 1895). Colonial records claim that the situations mentioned above made it impossible for the certifying surgeon, inspector, and mill manager to recognize every child individually. For instance, one report suggested that “mill children were constantly changing from one mill to another or going home for a few months holiday. It must be obvious that 4 or 5 children might use one certificate at different times as each would have to go to a different mill and assume a name in the certificate” (Reply to Surgeon General, 1895). There was no certainty that the certificate was granted to the child who had been persecuted in such cases. The manager or the employer, the only person responsible under the law, would have no document to produce in his defense if called upon to prove the child’s age. The absence of the mill children was not spared by these arguments either. Some certified children were usually absent during the surgeon’s visit on 4  Extract from the Abstract of the proceedings of the council of Governor General of India, N0336, Legislative Department Proceedings, April 1881, The Indian Factory Act 1881, Home Department, Factory Branch, 11 March 1881, NAI.

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illness or some other cause. Only half the number would generally be present, the other half (shift) being at home (Notes, 1911). There was a fear of being caught with duplicate certificates or being proved as underage. The factory owner would have to bear a fine, which had repercussions for the child laborers, as they were put to overwork without pay. The problems occurred as the certification process was not an easy task. Certifying surgeons faced many concerns (Hume, 1978). Even appointing a certifying surgeon was difficult for the colonial government. Certifying surgeons were the presidency surgeons, usually very busy men immersed in their private practice. They also had to mark their attendance in the police courts, leaving little time to give the attention required for the mills’ certification process. By the time of 1900, the medical inspection of the mills was already taken away from them. It was given to the personal assistant of the surgeon general (Government of Bombay, 1907). During that period, the responsibility of performing the duties of the certifying surgeon would fall upon the civil surgeon, who would undertake these tasks without receiving any additional compensation (Letter from SurgeonGeneral, 1887). Furthermore, a significant concern arose due to the appointment of a limited number of certifying surgeons to oversee multiple factories, as this was the case in the Thana factory, where the inspector notes that “the civil surgeon at Thana is nearly as far from the Coorla (Kurla) mills for which he acts as a certifying surgeon” (W.O.  Meade King, 1882). Despite all the colonial attempts to certify the child’s age, the factory records highlight the conversation among colonial officials regarding the impossibility of determining the child’s exact age. Certifying surgeons listed limitations in the certification process, such as “avidity of parents, striving to obtain “full-time” wages for their children’s work, and the deception of children themselves” (Factory Inspection Report, 1882). Surgeons also blamed the families for the duplicate certificates by misrepresentations, as they issued 13,000 passes in 1882, and only 4300 children were employed (Letter by Sale, 1930). The migration of children further amplified the existing concerns. The factory inspection report provides evidence of migration, stating, “out of forty-five children casually collected in a factory, we found that seven only were born in Bombay, and when the search was done for the registration of those seven births, only one could be found” (Inspector of factories Bombay, 1882). The challenge of certifying children’s age was not limited to the certifying surgeon alone, as several colonial officials concurred with this notion.

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A colonial state official Charles Roberts shared his perspective, stating that no specific physical indicators are consistently uniform enough to allow the certifying surgeon to determine the child’s age accurately (Roberts, 1876). Likewise, the surgeon general made a noteworthy comment suggesting the abolition of age standards. According to the Indian Factory Labor Commission, he contended that even approximating a child’s age is nothing more than speculation. This sentiment is reinforced by a statement from Mr. Gibbs, a colonial state official, who stated, “I had, until recently, around 30 or 40 children in my compound; I have known many of them since their birth, and I can assure you that no doctor could accurately determine their ages.” (Gibbs, 1879). Gibbs explained how his workers had no other answer to his questions regarding their children’s age, except how can we tell? Gibbs also criticized mill owners by arguing that “the labor question in Bombay is one which the mill owners as a corporate body have not yet managed to solve” (Sale, 1913). Lastly, the category of ‘Jobber’ (a person responsible for the recruitment of laborers) was held responsible for the fluctuation in the supply of child labor which was one of the chief obstacles in the system of registration of child laborers and further complicates the system of certification. (Sale, 1913). Despite the inherent difficulties in certifying the age of children, the certification process persisted and was accompanied by routine inspections in the factories. These inspections were conducted to enforce the provisions of the Factory Act, which mandated the submission of quarterly reports. The inspection reports were generated using children’s certificates to identify and address any existing discrepancies within the factory premises. Nevertheless, the colonial records state multiple concerns that the factory inspector faced as “the inspector would frequently find children working in mills to be of ‘doubtful’ age, and, not being able to trust his authority on the subject, he would refer them to the doctor for certification, and it remained a vicious cycle of identifying the child as a laborer” (Sarkar, 2018, p. 189). In a similar vein, Lieutenant Colonel Mactaggart notes, “he saw a large number of children obviously under nine, though certified as over that age, working in the mills in the Bombay Presidency” (Secretary Chamber of Commerce, 1908). Similarly, the Factory Labor Commission acknowledged that the current inspection system was ineffective due to the inadequate number of appointed factory inspectors and the government’s excessive reliance on ex officio inspectors. Likewise, the Factory Labor Commission notes, “the present system of inspection has proved to be a failure because the government has not appointed a

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sufficient amount of factory inspectors and has depended too much on ex officio inspector” (Commission Report, 1906). Furthermore, an official report highlights discussions regarding flawed mill administration and preliminary inspections conducted by the Department of Commerce and Industry (1907). In summation, a careful examination of the identification processes and their limitations suggests that the ambiguous practices of the law, particularly factory legislation for children supposedly intended for their protection by colonial rule, uncover the colonial project of ‘modernity.’ As Dipesh Chakrabarty rightly argues, “the idea is to write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and the ironies that attend it” (1992, p. 37). The identification process, particularly using quantitatively based analysis, such as determining age and thumb impressions, is a modern concept that originated from the West. The entire process, built and regulated on the backdrop of children’s protection, was an attempt to civilize, control, regulate, and discipline the mill workforce, representing modernizing politics. Government departments and local administrations were asked to supply information about the age of children employed in factories. These identification processes also introduced the notion of time in the child’s life (Thompson 1963). The age identification certificates also determined the number of hours children could be employed in the factories. The child’s every day was affected not just by working hours in a factory but also by the struggle the child went through to travel miles by walk to reach the factory to earn his/her minimum wage (Legislative Council Proceedings, 1881).5 The politics of modernization reveals the colonial state’s obsession with ascertaining chronological age as a fixed parameter for defining child laborers. Then, the primary question to address is why the colonial state was obsessed with determining the ‘age’ of the child. Neither the absence of birth registration in India nor the colonial state’s protectionist agenda seems like an adequate reason for the medical examination. While it is difficult to answer these questions, what can be seen is the resonance of such colonial obsession in the modern Indian state, which crystallizes the ‘industrial child’ in the category of ‘age.’ 5  Sheoram Mahadoo, an 11-year-old in 1890, said that he spent Re 1 on himself ‘for sweetmeats’ and gave the remaining five rupees to his parents—Legislative Council Proceedings, 11 March 1881, IOR V/9/18–19, p. 108, OIOC.)

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The historiography of South Asia, specifically India, has predominantly focused on debates surrounding the ‘age of consent’ when discussing the concept of ‘legal age.’ However, the methodologies employed by scholars in this field can be used to pose a fresh set of inquiries. For instance, Ashwini Tambe’s work draws heavily upon legal and policy sources as she draws the course of legislative debates, investigates psychological discourses about girlhood, and examines policy created by intergovernmental bodies (2019). Extending her argument to the Bombay textile mills allows us to examine the legislative debates concerning ‘age’ for the ‘industrial child’ and focus on the colonial discourses around identity formation (as discussed in the above section). Similarly, a theoretical framework of the ‘epistemic contract of age’ developed by Ishita Pande could be utilized to understand the colonial state’s obsession with the category of ‘age’ in the textile mills of Bombay. This concept refers to an agreement around chronological age serving as a natural, universal measure of human capacity. It also highlights the age-­ stratified stipulations in the law and the privilege of ‘age’ as a fact worth recording about individuals (Pande 2020b). Expanding upon Pande’s theoretical framework, the analysis can be extended to examine the case of textile mills in Bombay, where the conceptualization of the industrial child was predominantly contingent upon their age. The institutionalization and naturalization of ‘age’ as a defining criterion within the mill context led to the population of children being classified and characterized based on universalized assumptions concerning the interrelated categories of ‘age’ and ‘industrial child.’ Consequently, these assumptions, coupled with the colonial endeavor to standardize age as a delineating factor for childhood, further marginalized the precolonial, more fluid understandings of age that had prevailed in the sociocultural fabric of Bombay.6 (Decker, 2020; Premo, 2020; Field & Syrett, 2020). These scholars have delved into its manifestations and transformations across different societies and time periods by exploring age as a social and historical construct. Recognizing age as a crucial category of analysis allows for a nuanced understanding of the complexities involved in processes of identification and sheds light on the intricate dynamics at play. Interestingly, the shift from the fluidity in the precolonial societies to the

6  See, Ishita Pande concept of ‘fludity’ of age in pre colonial socities for further reference (Pande 2020b).

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fixation of ‘age’ does not happen instantaneously. Instead, the fluidity is followed by ‘fuzziness’ around determining age. Scholars have highlighted the Act of estimating age by colonial rule (Premo, 2020, p. 399) globally. Similarly, the study of identification processes in the Bombay textile mills hints at the idea of ‘fuzziness’ around determining the child’s age. The insufficient methods of colonial rule to determine the exact age resulted in guesswork by certified surgeons. As the surgeon general notes, “there are no reliable standards among children whereby even an approximate age could be determined, any conclusions from such data were ordinarily to hand were pure guesswork” (Indian Factory Labor Commission). The certification processes employed during the colonial period shed light on the deliberate efforts made by the colonial powers to establish what Ishita Pande refers to as “digits of age” (Pande 2020a, pp. 18–19). The development of forensic technologies in the early twentieth century is an example of setting the digits of age in place. Pande discusses the state’s obsession with the category of ‘age,’ suggesting that in the case of India, states’ reliance on age-based qualifications was visible even before any particular methods of keeping records through statistics around the date of birth were designed (Pande 2020a, p. 410). The scientific methods of age determination were undefined everywhere. However, colonial law and modernity helped make ‘digits of age’ ubiquitous (ibid.). In the Bombay textile mills, a comparable endeavor to shape a singular identity for the industrial child was pursued through the implementation of the certification process, primarily focusing on determining their chronological age. The certification process relied on physical measurements to determine an individual’s chronological age. This chronological age, in turn, formed the foundation for regulations governing child labor within the mills. Eligibility for education and employment was contingent upon this assigned chronological age. However, it is important to note that the concept of chronological age had limitations in capturing the full complexity of an individual’s experiences and abilities. By categorizing child laborers into specific age groups and distinguishing them from adults, the colonial authorities imposed fixed standards and naturalized the notion of an ‘industrial child.’ These regulations, when extended to employment, dictated the minimum age at which children could participate in labor, as governed by factory regulations. I have borrowed Ishita Pande’s ideas of chronological age (Pande, 2020a). It is different from the idea of ‘biological age.’ As Balagopalan suggests, “biological age” functioned as a

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regulatory mechanism to distinguish and classify different groups of marginalized children within the colonial context. This concept, serving as a means of control, allowed for identifying specific populations of children based on their developmental stage and physical maturation (2019). Legalizing the age of working children reveals the complexities of colonial rule and the politics of knowledge production within the factory regime regulated by ideologies of colonial modernity (Kumar, 2018).7 Modernity as a concept is significant in our understanding of the colonial state’s working inside the Bombay textile mills. As factory law entered the domain of Indian mills in the era of modern textile capitalism and regulated the workforce, the idea of capitalist modernity was centered on regulating labor through practices of discipline and certification. Capitalist modernity served the dual purpose of favoring industrialists while strategically feigning that regulations were aimed at protecting workers. The rise of the modern industry strictly defined intervening ways in workers’ lives (Sarkar, 2018). The colonial state practiced the model of modernizing subjects by certification of child laborers. This was the process of colonial modernity which Dilip Menon argues became the expression rather than the project of colonialism (Menon, 2003). Alternatively, as Pande argues, we can recognize how the modern disciplines and governmental procedures manufactured age (2020a). The concept of categorizing industrial children based on age is interconnected with another aspect of colonial modernity seen in the establishment of factory schools in Bombay. Against this background, the following section highlights the existing historiography of South Asia, which has focused on various aspects of childhood, such as the framing of the poor Indian child and colonial educational reforms. Building upon these historical discussions, I will investigate how colonial practices shaped a new modern childhood in colonial India by introducing factory schools in Bombay. This exploration examines how colonial practices employed modern disciplinary methods to distinguish, regulate, and govern children during that time.

7  Also see Arun Kumar’s discussion of colonial modernity with the introduction of schooling and politics of knowledge production in Kumar, A. (2018). Skilling and Its Histories: Labour Market, Technical Knowledge and the Making of Skilled Workers in Colonial India (1880–1910). Journal of South Asian Development, 13(3), 249–271. https://doi. org/10.1177/0973174118810050.

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Colonial Modernity and Disciplinary Practices of Factory Schools Historians have discussed various aspects of children’s lives in South Asia to map the historical, literary, and social constructions of childhood in India and explore how these differ from Western-dominated ideas of childhood. Some of the first scholars to begin this work was Sudhir Kakar and Ashish Nandy. While Kakar (1978) focused ‘inwardly’ to produce a psychoanalytic reading of Indian Hindu childhood, Nandy (1984) looked ‘outward,’ offering a postcolonial perspective. In a different vein, Satadru Sen has surveyed the historical constructions of colonial childhoods (Sen, 2005). Based on this reading of the poor Indian child, colonial missionaries argued that their evangelical and educational efforts among Indian children would provide an avenue for civilization, improvement, and protected childhood. (Vallgårda et  al., 2015). Similarly, Divya Kannan has recently highlighted the significant role of British Protestant juvenile missionary periodicals in constructing and circulating everyday ideas of colonial childhoods. These ideas are particularly about poor children in the nineteenth century (2021, p. 234). An interesting aspect emerges when examining the beliefs held by missionaries regarding caste-associated labor, as they perceived lower castes to be inherently inclined towards physical labor (Kumar, 2019; Vallgárda, 2014). On the other hand, Tschurenev highlights the policies of ‘incorporation’ and ‘differentiation’ in the colonial reform projects that characterized many nineteenth-­ century projects of educational expansion (2019, p.  95). Similarly, Balagopalan draws attention to the hypocrisy within colonial politics of inclusion, which revolved around the notion that children from impoverished laboring backgrounds had no aspirations beyond manual labor (2014, p. 64). Another group of historiographies has emphasized the presence of colonial racism within schooling by conducting a comprehensive analysis of disciplinary practices (Catriona Ellis, 2009). An example of the disciplinary model was the establishment of ‘monitorial schools’ in the early nineteenth century, emphasizing on the ‘moral upliftment’ for children. These schools could also be considered as one of the modern disciplinary technologies emphasizing on techniques of peer disciplining with the master exercising supreme powers of surveillance and control (Watt, p. 16).

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Historians of colonial modernity have found it very fruitful to discuss the so-called reforms set in place by the colonial state through the lens of a ‘civilizing mission.’ It was a mission that, at its core, was about ‘morally’ and ‘materially’ uplifting the ‘backward’ people of India to make them more ‘modern’ and ‘civilized’ as per the standards of colonial rule (Watt & Mann, 2011). Scholars who have worked on the civilizing mission have argued that the idea of civilizing missions under the guise of enlightenment agenda, in reality, was used for the self-legitimization of colonial rule (Tiné &  Mann, 2004). Similarly, Carey A.  Watt (2011) argues that the civilizing mission was used to justify a legitimized establishment and continued rule of overseas colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of imperialism (2011). The political dominance of the colonizer was, therefore, linked to its ability to decide what was regarded as legitimate knowledge and legitimate ways of evaluating knowledge (Lele, 1996, p. 333), and in this, knowledge became a “vital active instrument of western hegemony” (Viswanathan, 1989, p. 167). This resulted in a hierarchical relationship in which “the Indian population was placed in a master and servant, teacher and pupil, parent, and child or—as Ashish Nandy has demonstrated (1996)—husband and wife relationship that justified the imposition of discipline, education, and upbringing. In short, the ‘civilizing mission’ (Tiné & Mann, 2004, p.  4).To explore the role played by education in child protection, particularly working in the factory schools in Bombay, existing research on the colonial ‘civilizing mission’ provides an essential theoretical framework. One of the key elements of moral upliftment was the idea of education reform through colonial rule-designed curriculum and language regulation. The educational reforms started after 1813 and became a fundamental element of the civilizing project. Scholars have highlighted the democratization of schooling under the civilizing mission as the colonial pedagogic intervention, which focused its structure on the differentiated form of education, enabling the subaltern to reproduce the existing lines of social stratification (Tschurenev, 2019; Balagopalan, 2019). Scholarly research on the disciplinary practices imposed on poor children, including factory workers and juvenile delinquents, during the colonial rule has underscored the prevalence of colonial racism (Sen, 2005). My argument builds upon colonial discourse’s existing portrayal of the poor ‘child.’ I aim to highlight the complexities and contradictions inherent in the notion of ‘upliftment’ and ‘progress’ under the civilizing mission’s project, particularly concerning the ‘factory child.’ By focusing on

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factory schools, I demonstrate how the factory child becomes a central component of the civilizing mission’s agenda. The hypocrisy of the civilizing mission becomes evident when examining the conditions of these factory schools. The definitions of these schools vary in the records, with some describing them as educational institutions. In contrast, others refer to them as mere rooms or places for leisure activities during breaks, with no compulsory attendance or academic requirements for the children. An example from the factory records, as reported by W.F. Sincloir, the collector of Thana, illustrates this contradiction. According to his report, “Factory school is an open room 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., with an interval of half an hour in the afternoon for meals and is attended in rotation by the children in each set during the intervals allowed for rest … the attendance and lessons are not compulsory, and the children play away much of their time in school” (Report, 1891). Furthermore, he elaborates that the primary intention was not to focus on teaching the children reading or writing skills but rather to provide security by keeping them gathered in one place under the supervision of a responsible individual. This depiction of the schools emphasizes the disciplinary nature of the civilizing mission project. The introduction of factory schools underscores the colonial project of ‘discipline’ carried by Mary Carpenter in India. Mary Carpenter was a British social reformer who played a crucial role in establishing the disciplinary regime of factory schools. Various scholars have focused on the philanthropic agendas of Mary Carpenter: for instance, her interest and concern for the poor and deprived children (Gehring & Bowers, 1974) and her institutional experiments in the juvenile reformatories (Koven & Michel, 1990). Based on Carpenter’s directions, Arthur Crawford established the first experimental school, which opened its doors at Ratnagiri in the Bombay Presidency in 1865. The factory’s grounds still housed the industrial school, which accepted apprentice boys of all castes between the ages of 7 and 15. These young men worked in the workplace for a regular income. They had to attend school for two hours each day to receive their pay, and deductions were made if children did not attend the  school (Journal, 1874). Carpenter’s regulations were particularly stringent regarding children’s behavior in classrooms and workplaces, and she voiced her pride in Englishmen for instilling discipline in Indian children. Carpenter’s interventions for factory schools and the continuity between the school and the factory are central to this analysis. Carpenter always expressed her delight in how the discipline of labor runs in a continuous line through the advocacy of reformatories, industrial schools, and

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factory reforms. Her visit to India was caught up in disciplinary strategies executed by bureaucratic apparatuses. She administered social control and discipline policies to children working in Bombay textile Mills. Factory schools were designed to transition the discipline of the factory to the schools. As Sarkar notes, “schooling built an industrial worker, and work ‘educated’ a boy into habits of discipline and productivity” (2018, p. 52). In a similar vein, Gregory Clarke (1994) critically questions the introduction of factory discipline in England: Before the Industrial Revolution in Britain, most workers controlled their pace, timing, and conduct at work. Factory discipline radically changed this. Employers now dictated how, and when the work was done. Why did discipline triumph? Was it required by the need to tightly coordinate workers with new technologies? (p. 128)

These similar questions need to be addressed in the working of Bombay textile mills. Foucault calls the school building a mechanism for training, a structure that trains vigorous bodies, and an apparatus for continuous surveillance (Foucault & Hurley, 1978). Similarly, the Factory Act of 1891 introduced factory schools in Bombay textile mills. As presented in the colonial records, the idea behind this amendment was to protect children from industrial overwork. The colonial state’s solution was that the children’s time away from the factory was deployed in the school’s alternative discipline. In this case, the Factory Act was a pedagogic intervention. Balagopalan has also argued about the implementation of factory schools by the colonial state and the encounter that marginal children have with colonial modernity in the form of schooling. The objective is to comprehend how the colonial state normalizes labor in the lives of marginalized children by utilizing modern educational technologies (Balagopalan, 2014). Therefore, discipline and amelioration were combined in these initiatives. Moreover, the earliest attempts at bettering the working conditions of child laborers came predominantly from paternalistic employers. These employers invested in disciplinary paternalism. In this paternalism, exploitative and extractive capitalism were frequently married to various disciplinary and welfare practices centering around regulation and education. According to Foucault, disciplinary practices were organized as a multiple, automatic, and anonymous power (Foucault, 1977). Surveillance assumes a significant role within the production dynamics and disciplinary mechanisms, which is similarly applicable within the context of factory schools.

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Discipline functions not through coercion but through the process of normalization. Consequently, comprehending the emergence of factory schools as spaces for modern disciplinary practices becomes highly significant. Within these spaces, such as factory schools, we witness a profound interconnection between children’s lives and the mechanisms of colonial modernity. It is also significant to understand that the colonial policies of age determination and the introduction of schooling are not isolated ideas but inextricably linked with each other. Without establishing a definition of an industrial child, the subsequent process of regulating children within the educational institution becomes unattainable. Moreover, the child’s everyday interactions with the colonial state within the factory school, encompassing aspects such as time management, attendance, absenteeism, and assimilation of the introduced curriculum, can all be linked to the broader notion of the “everyday urban” experience.8

Conclusion The history of child labor or identifying who is a child has been long and contentious. Child labor emerges as a social category through the interaction of state regulation and an interplay of demand and supply associated with a specific form of capitalist industrialization. This chapter argues that the interaction of regulatory processes and social relations of production in the Bombay textile mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provided the context in which ‘child labor’ as a social category was produced. In this, a child as a laborer emerged as an object of regulation, welfare, and reform. The politics of identification determined by medico-­ legal practices are empirical examples of colonial modernity. The idea of welfare and reform are explored in the context of factory schools in the textile mills of Bombay under the umbrella of the colonial civilizing mission. 8  It is important to note that the detailed exploration of the concepts of everyday urban experience, the comprehensive discussion of children’s functioning within factory schools, and the limitations associated with them are beyond the scope of this chapter. However, the available colonial records provide significant and sufficient data to demonstrate how children were regulated at an everyday level within these factory schools. For instance, compulsory attendance was implemented to monitor the presence of child workers in the factory, and instances of absenteeism were directly linked to wage reductions, illustrating the establishment of complete control over the ‘industrial child.’

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I explored assertions of authority and legal regulations to manage the ‘child’ inside the mill in Bombay textile mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus of the study was to understand ‘who is a child’ by definition. I tried to grapple with how an individual child’s identity as a laborer was produced in law. More importantly, we see the larger agenda of colonial modernity in this work of law. A consistently arising question pertains to generalizing age, particularly chronological age, as a category. In my analysis, I have endeavored to address this question within the context of colonial rule by closely examining the child’s construction within the mill, focusing primarily on the single criterion of ‘age.’ This investigation reveals that the medico-legal practices of the time were inadequate in providing the desired precision for the colonial state. Although age criteria were perceived as inherently objective, in reality, they were subjective, malleable, and intricate when determining a child’s status in the mill. Even the expertise of the certifying surgeon was insufficient in quantifying age as an objective standard for factory legislation concerning child labor. Age, therefore, became a defining factor in the disciplinary measures employed by the colonial state. Additionally, another objective was to highlight the resonance of the ideology of the modern Indian state in factory regulation, specifically through the establishment of age as a historical category of analysis. This exploration led to examining the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act passed by the Indian Parliament in 2016. While initially perceived as a progressive step, a critical evaluation revealed that the refined legal language of the Act did not fully address the issue. August 10, 2016, issue of The Hindu newspaper featured a headline that seemingly contradicted the Act’s intentions: “A law that allows child labor.” A closer examination of the Act unveiled the continuation of age-based categorization of child laborers, reminiscent of the colonial practice of age identification that originated in the textile mills of Bombay. Consequently, the 2016 Act reinforced the method of identifying and regulating child laborers based on age. These limitations and contradictions brought significant attention to the issue of child labor and shed light on the complex politics surrounding the modern Indian state. Thus, an examination of the factory regulations in the Bombay textile mills during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries uncovers two crucial aspects of colonial modernity. Firstly, it reveals the modern politics surrounding the determination of age, which can be traced back to the factory legislation implemented in Bombay. It further highlights how

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age became a pivotal factor in regulating and controlling the workforce within the colonial industrial context. Secondly, establishing factory schools and implementing disciplinary measures on the children within these schools shed light on the politics inherent in colonial modernity.

References Secondary Sources Alam, J. (1999). India: Living with modernity. Oxford University Press. Alborn, T.  L. (1999). Age and empire in the Indian Census, 1871–1931. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 30(1), 61–89. https://doi. org/10.1162/002219599551912 Alexander, E. (2009). The ‘special classes’ of labor: Women and children doubly marginalized. In P.  Mohapatra & M.  V. D.  Linden (Eds.), Labour matters: Towards global histories (pp. 131–151). Delhi: Tulika Books. Balagopalan, S. (2011). Introduction: Children’s lives and the Indian context. Childhood, 18(3), 291–297. Balagopalan, S. (2014). Inhabiting “Childhood”: Children, labour and schooling in postcolonial India (1st ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. Balagopalan, S. (2019). Afterschool and during vacations: On labor and schooling in the postcolony. Children’s Geographies, 17(2), 231–245. Baland, J., & Robinson, J. A. (2000). Is child labor inefficient? Journal of Political Economy, 108(4), 663–679. https://doi.org/10.1086/316097 Basu, K. (2003). The economics of child labor. Scientific American, 289(4), 84–91. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1003-­84 Bhattacharya, S. (1981). Capital and labour in Bombay city, 1928-29. Economic and Political Weekly, 16 (42/43). Bombay: Sameeksha Trust. 36-44. Chakrabarty, D. (1992). Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: Who speaks for “Indian” pasts? Representations, 37, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928652 Chandavarkar, R. (1994). The origins of industrial capitalism in India: Business strategies and the working classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge South Asian Studies, Series Number 51). Cambridge University Press. Clark, G. (1994). Factory discipline. The Journal of Economic History, 54(1), 128–163. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022050700014029 Cohen, L. (2000). No aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the bad family, and other modern things (1st ed.). University of California Press. Decker, C. A. (2020). Feminist methodology of age-grading and history in Africa. The American Historical Review., 125(2), 418–426.

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Ellis, C. (2009). Education for All: Reassessing the Historiography of Education in Colonial India. History Compass, 7(2), 363–375. Blackwell Publishing. Esher. (1891). Speech of Lord Esher in the House of Lords. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol. 347. The Edinburgh Review. 173(354), 360. Field, C. T., & Syrett, N. L. (2020). Age and the construction of gendered and raced citizenship in the United States. The American Historical Review., 125(2), 438–450. Foucault, M., & Hurley, R. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume I: An introduction. Pantheon Books. Foucault, M., & Sheridan, A. (1995). Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage Books. Gehring, T., & Bowers, F. B. (1974). Mary Carpenter: 19th century English correctional education hero. Journal of Correctional Education., 54(3), 116–122. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates. (1875). (3rd Series), vol. 226, House of Lords, Friday, 30 July. Hay, D., & Craven, P. (2004). Masters, servants, and magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (Studies in Legal History) (New edition). University of North Carolina Press. Hindman, H. D., & Hindman, H. (2009). The world of child labor: An historical and regional survey (1st ed.). Routledge. Kakar, S. (1978). The inner world: A psychoanalytical study of childhood and society in India. Oxford University Press. Kannan, D. (2021). Children’s work for children: Caste, childhood, and missionary philanthropy in colonial India. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth., 14(2), 234–253. Koven, S., & Michel, S. (1990). Womanly duties: Materialist politics and the origins of welfare states in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920. The American Historical Review., 95(4), 1076–1108. Kumar, R. (1938). Family and factory: Women in the Bombay cotton textile industry, 1919–1939. The Indian Economic and Social History Review. 20(1), Sage Publications. 81-96. Kumar, R. (1987). City lives: Workers’ housing and rent in Bombay, 1911-47. Economic and Political Weekly. 22 (30). Bombay: Sameeksha Trust. 47–56. Kumar, N. (2006). Provincialism in modern India: The multiple narratives of education and their pain. Modern Asian Studies. 40 (2). Cambridge University Press. 397–423. Kumar, A. (2018). Skilling and Its Histories: Labour Market, Technical Knowledge and the Making of Skilled Workers in Colonial India (1880–1910). Journal of South Asian Development, 13(3), 249–271. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0973174118810050

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Kumar, A. (2019). The ‘untouchable school’: American Missionaries, Hindu social reformers and the educational dreams of laboring Dalits in colonial North India. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies., 1–23. Lele, J. (1996). Hindutva as pedagogic Violence. In Nigel Crook. The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia: Essays on Education, Religion, History, and Politics. Oxford University Press. Mehta, S. D. (1954). The cotton mills of India, 1854 to 1954. Textile Association (India). Menon, D.  M. (2003). Religion and colonial modernity: Rethinking belief and identity. Economic and Political Weekly, 37(17), 1662–1667. Morris, D. M. (1965). The emergence of an industrial labor force in India: A study of the Bombay cotton mills, 1854–1947 (1st ed.). University of California Press. Nandy, A. (1984). Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood. Alternatives, 10(3), 359–375. Pande, I. (2020a). Power, knowledge, and the epistemic contract on age: The case of colonial India. The American Historical Review, 125(2), 407–417. https:// doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa189 Pande, I. (2020b). Sex, law, and the politics of age: child marriage in India, 1891–1937. Cambridge University Press. Premo, B. (2020). Meticulous Imprecision: Calculating age in colonial Spanish American Law. The American Historical Review., 125(2), 396–406. Ranjan, P. (2001). Credit constraints and the phenomenon of child labor. Journal of Development Economics, 64(1), 81–102. https://doi.org/10.1016/ s0304-­3878(00)00125-­5 Roberts, C. (1876). The physical requirements of factory children. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 39(4), 681. https://doi.org/10.2307/2339159 Salmon, M. (2006). Holly Brewer. By birth or consent: Children, law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in authority. The American Historical Review, 111(4), 1247–1248. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.111.4.1247a Sarkar, A. (2018). Trouble at the Mill: Factory Law and the Emergence of Labour Question in Late Nineteenth-Century Bombay. Oxford University Press. Saunders, E. (1838). The teeth a test of age. The Lancet, 30(774), 492–496. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-­6736(02)84210-­6 Sen, S. (2005). Colonial childhoods: The juvenile periphery of India 1850–1945 (Anthem South Asian Studies, Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series) (0 ed.). Anthem Press. Tambe, A. (2019). Defining girlhood in India: A transnational history of sexual maturity laws. University of Illinois Press. Thompson, E. P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage. Tiné, H.  F., & Mann, M. (2004). Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India. Anthem Press.

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Tschurenev, J. (2008). Diffusing useful knowledge: The monitorial system of education in Madras, London and Bengal,1789–1840. Paedagogica Historica. 44(3).245-264. Tschurenev, J. (2019). Empire, civil society, and the beginnings of colonial education in India. Cambridge University Press. Upadhyay, S. B. (1990). Cotton mill workers in Bombay, 1875 to 1918: Conditions of work and life. Economic and Political Weekly, 25(30), 87–99. Vallgarda, K. (2014). Imperial childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and emotions in South India and Denmark. Palgrave Macmillan. Vallgårda, K., Alexander, K., & Olsen, S. (2015). Emotions and the global politics of childhood. In S. Olsen (Ed.), Childhood, youth and emotions in modern history: National, colonial and global perspectives (pp. 12–34). Palgrave Macmillan. Viswanathan, G. (1989). Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. London: Faber & Faber. Watt, C. A., & Mann, M. (2011). Civilizing missions in colonial and postcolonial South Asia: From improvement to development. NBN International. Wood, G. H. (1902). Factory legislation, considered with reference to the wages, & c., of the operatives protected thereby. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 65(2), 284. https://doi.org/10.2307/2979666

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Inspector of Factories Bombay to the Secretary to Government, ‘Report on the Working of the Indian Factories Act’, 24th June 1882, vol. 3, M256, General Department, Maharashtra State Archives. Inspector of Factories Bombay to the Secretary to Government, ‘Report on the Working of the Indian Factories Act’, Poona, 24th June 1882, vol.3, M183, General Department, Maharashtra State Archives. Suggestions and Recommendations by Factory Labour Commission, 11th July 1907, vol.54, compilation no. 404, pt 1, M 251, General Department, Maharashtra State Archives. Journal of the National Indian Association, no. 46 (October 1874): 238–42. Journal of the National Indian Association, no. 51 (March 1875): 62–3. Minute by the Honorable J Gibbs, Legislative Council Proceedings, 30th January 1879, Home (Factory), April 1881, National Archives of India, New Delhi. Letter from A.M.T. Jackson (Collector of Bombay) to the Secretary to Government, Bombay Collector's Office, 17th August 1907, vol. 49, compilation no. 340, M 89, Factory Department, Maharashtra State Archives. Letter From A.O HUME, (Collector of Bombay) to Local Governments and Administrations, No.152, Department of Revenue Agriculture and Commerce, Legislative Council Proceedings, 4th November 1978, Home (Factory), April 1881, National Archives of India, New Delhi. Letter from E.L.Sale (Collector of Bombay) to the Secretary to Government, Bombay Collector’s Office, Factory Department, Bombay 18th June 1913, January, Proceedings Nos1–19, Commerce and Industry (Factories), File No 23 of 1913, National Archives of India, New Delhi. Letter from G. W. Hatch (Collector of Bombay) to the Secretary to Government, Bombay Collector’s Office, 26th August 1910, vol. 64, M 293, Factory Department, Maharashtra State Archives. Letter from Surgeon-General to the Government of Bombay, no. 3299, 24th August 1887, No. 4351, General Department, Maharashtra State Archives. Letter to the Secretary of Government of India, Bombay Castle, 13th December 1905, vol. 36, compilation no. 35, M 143–144, General Department, Maharashtra State Archives. Letter from the Secretary of Chamber of Commerce, Bombay, No.1604”, 10th September 1908, vol. 54, compilation no. 404, pt 1, M 472, General Department, Maharashtra State Archives. Letter to His Excellency the Right Honourable the Governor-General of India in Council, ‘Appointment of the Factory Labour Commission,’ India Office London, 23rd August 1907, Revenue No,134, Nos.1, Commerce and Industry (Factories), File No 32 of 1907, National Archives of India, New Delhi. Carpenter M., SMI, vol. 2, p. 36 No.4351, GD, Bombay, 24 August 1887, MSA. Notes on the Factory Bill as amended by the Select Committee, ‘opinions of the Local Government and the select committee’s report on Factories bill,’ May

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PART II

Being Modern Subjects

CHAPTER 8

Examining Shifting Us-Them Binaries: The Experiences of Disabled Children in After-School Programs Kim Fernandes

After-school programs in India have increasingly come to be a central site where youth have the opportunity to engage with and negotiate their relationship to the modernity-tradition binary. Far from being seen as optional or of little value, these programs are often recast as central to the future of children  (see, e.g., Philp and Gill, 2020). In particular, after-­ school programs are thought of as integral for their role in shaping children into desirable future adult subjects. Ostensibly, several of these programs, which cover a range of activities such as dance, music, arts, theater, debate, and sports, as well as the development of socioemotional skills, are designed with the aim of filling in the perceived gaps within the education system in India. However, participation in these programs serves a dual, often intertwined, set of aims: first, they are thought of as an

K. Fernandes (*) Departments of Anthropology and Education, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_8

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essential symbol of modernity in and of themselves, and second, they are widely sought after for their attempts at training schoolchildren for productive futures. These programs therefore contain the promise of accomplishing what the school system is not able to, assuring parents and educators alike that children can and will be fashioned into more desirable subjects. As this chapter discusses at several points, the overarching goal of greater desirability often includes an ableist approach to the question of who or what is considered desirable, and under what circumstances. However, this attention to the everyday life and activities of disabled children also enables a greater attention to how disability as a category comes to be constructed, negotiated, and reworked through social interactions. Through these programs, as well as through school curricula, socioemotional learning has emerged as a key area of focus, one that has been widely described as “largely unrecognized within the Indian ecosystem” (Looma & Chawla, 2020). However, despite the growing popularity of these programs, programs that are designed for disabled children, and more recently, after-school programs in self-described ‘mixed’ environments, that is, those that aim to include both disabled and normate1 children, have not been the subject of extensive scholarly attention. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of a year, this chapter will examine disabled children’s experiences in after-school programs across three sites in Delhi. It will interrogate the ways in which inclusive after-school programs have come to be conceptualized as inclusive, designed as such, and subsequently implemented with the aim to provide nuanced insights into how disabled children inhabit broader categories such as modernity on an ongoing basis (cf Kumar, 2006;  Thomassen, 2012). The chapter therefore begins with a discussion of the theoretical frameworks that inform subsequent analyses of the relationship between ability, embodiment, modernity, and the everyday. In particular, key questions relevant to the study of disabled children’s lives will be discussed through 1  Throughout this chapter, I use the word ‘normate’ to refer to children without disabilities, rather than able-bodied or normal. This term has been coined by Rosemarie GarlandThomson, who uses the term to signify everything that is the opposite of what the disabled person is within society, that is, the normate body is one that is considered unmarked by oppressed or stigmatized identities, whereas the disabled body, for instance, is every body that is clearly marked by/as that which is not considered traditionally normal. A broader discussion of the use of this term is available in the “Theorizing the Everyday Lives of Disabled Children” section.

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an engagement with scholarship from disability studies and disabled children’s childhood studies. Subsequently, it turns to a discussion of the methodology through which data were collected. Finally, the chapter will outline dominant themes that emerged in these after-school programs as sites of everyday interactions for disabled children and their families.

Theorizing the Everyday Lives of Disabled Children At the outset, it is useful to clarify some of the ways in which the term disability is used throughout this chapter, both by my participants and by me. Among many others, two key models that have informed the spectrum of scholarly engagement with disabled bodies are the medical model and the social model. On one end, the medical model has been widely discussed within and beyond the field of disability studies (see, e.g., Oliver, 1990), particularly for the ways in which it understands an illness or a disability as either a physical or mental condition that is housed within an individual’s body. In this largely clinical understanding, the conversation is often focused on treatment and cure, with the desire to improve an individual’s quality of life primarily through treating the illness housed in their body. However, the medical model’s focus on the individual often does not allow for a comprehensive systemic understanding of the many ways in which structures can prove disabling to an individual (see for example Goodley, 2014). Additionally, for the purposes of this chapter, approaching the study of disability through the medical model alone leaves little room for an attention to the everyday practices and interactions through which children come to be ‘acquired’ by their disabilities (cf McDermott, 1993). As McDermott notes in his work on learning disabilities, a disability is “usually assumed to be acquired by children due to some lapse in their development” (p. 271). However, as McDermott points out, the labels that are associated with a child who is considered disabled “precede any child’s entry into this world” (p. 272) such that the impairment itself cannot be separated or studied without taking into consideration the ways in which social practices of “displaying, noticing, documenting, remedying and explaining it” contribute to the making of the child as disabled (p. 272). This chapter is therefore concerned not with seeing disability as a fixed, immutable identity that disabled children hold, but rather both as an identity and as a set of practices through which this identity is made, that is, through which children acquired disability as a label.

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In line with McDermott’s argument above, and in partial opposition to the medical model of disability, the social model of disability works to separate disability from impairment by noting systemic factors as integral in disabling individuals. Under this model, while an impairment is an issue that a person faces in the structure or functioning of their body, it does not always have to lead to a lack of ability. Rather, it is only when an individual’s needs (whether arising out of impairment or other requirements) are not taken into consideration that an individual comes to be disabled. A disability studies approach to understanding childhoods therefore enables us to consider the conditions under which disability is produced and to ask more carefully: “How do particular kinds of embodiment get framed as different, by whom and in what contexts, and what are the implications of those framings?” (McLaughlin et al., 2016). The theoretical framework for this chapter is informed by a range of scholarship from disabled children’s childhood studies (Connors & Stalker, 2007; Curran & Runswick-Cole, 2014; Goodley & Runswick-­ Cole, 2013; Watson, 2012). These works discuss disabled children’s childhood studies as an approach to inquiry that draws from both contemporary childhood studies and disability studies while continuing to offer a uniquely intersectional framework through which to understand the everyday lives of disabled children. As several scholars in the field have pointed out, including Katherine Runswick-Cole and Tillie Curran, through the use of disabled children’s childhood studies, we are able to move away from speaking about disabled children and focusing on other (often adult) understandings of their lives (2014). Much work on the lives of disabled children exists from the perspective of their siblings, their parental figures and other caregivers, and their educators, and is often focused on anxieties (Thomas, 2020) around the embodiment of “inequality, impairment and abuse” (Curran & Runswick-Cole, 2014). By actively seeking to question pervasive normative understandings of childhood, this new approach to inquiry allows for disabled children to be at the center of attempts to understand their own lives and, in turn, enables us as scholars to reconsider interpretations of the relationships that they may have with various other figures in their lives (Curran, 2013; Watson, 2012). Additionally, in this chapter, since disabled children were often compared with their peers without disabilities, I draw upon what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson refers to as the “normate,” that is, an aggregate body consisting of various ‘unmarked’ racial, gender, class, ability, and other

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identities (Garland-Thomson, 1996). Therefore, instead of referring to disabled children and their counterparts as divided by diagnosis, or seemingly fixed abilities, I aim to frame ability more broadly within the space of other (seemingly aspirational) components of identity that it is often related to and defined against. The use of the term normate also deliberately dismantles assumptions that children without disabilities are normal as a fixed category of belonging; rather, normate is used to mark their belonging to categories seen as desirable. Although disability is often discussed as a fixed, biomedical category, the implicit ways in which everyday interactions come to influence how disability and normalcy are both co-constructed and re-negotiated remain central to this chapter (cf. McLaughlin & Coleman-Fountain, 2014; Singh & Ghai, 2009). In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Michel de Certeau argues for the importance of paying close attention to everyday practices, no longer seeing them “as merely the obscure background of social activity” (p. xi). These everyday practices, as de Certeau points out, are constitutive of “the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production” (p. xiv), and in doing so, the attention to that which is everyday also provides a rich commentary on social life, patterns, and habits. To pay attention to everyday practices, as de Certeau also argues, is to pay attention to the power relations, rituals, and negotiations that make them possible (or impede them). As is detailed throughout this chapter, this focus on the everyday within the space of after-school programs for disabled children allows for attention to everyday spaces as areas of resistance, and as occasions for creative sociocultural engagements both with their normate peers and with adults in their lives. Drawing on the above framings of the everyday, the remainder of this chapter discusses the specific ways in which after-school programs come to be considered as sites for the shaping and negotiation of identity. The chapter also pays close attention to how ability comes to be assumed, and to the disabling nature of often ableist spaces, even in the context of inclusive after-school programs, that is, those that are targeted at disabled and normate children. Finally, the chapter asks the following questions: What are the ways in which tropes about disabled lives come to be used to prop up notions of ability within these programs? How do disabled child participants in these programs respond to the notions of ability that are often assumed about—and therefore imposed on—them? In these extensive

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examinations of disabled children and after-school spaces that are purportedly inclusive, how might we analytically undo, redraw, or reframe some commonly held notions about ability, while continuing to engage with the origins of these notions and the ways in which they travel?

Methodology This paper draws upon data from a qualitative, multi-sited ethnography of after-school programs (also interchangeably known as extracurricular activities) marketed toward the families of disabled children and youth in Delhi. Drawing upon Tanja Ahlin and Fangfang Li’s evocative reconceptualization of field sites as field events, I do not define sites as specific to the three programs—instead, many of the physical locations at which the interactions in this chapter happened were field events that were “co-­ created” by my participants and me, both through in-person interactions and communication over the Internet and the phone (2019, p. 1). This co-creation was particularly central at a time when in-person fieldwork was disrupted by the pandemic, as a later section of this chapter discusses— during that period, all observations of the ways in which everyday interactions shaped notions of ability were entirely virtual and were no longer anchored by a physical field site alone. Each of the three programs had a different focus and audience, although all three were at a minimum interested in sustained engagement with disabled children. The first program, Yes We Can, was an after-school program focused on sports and ran a range of programs at school locations across Delhi that were either (a) only for disabled students or (b) for both disabled and normate students. The second program, Dream Big, was a biweekly theater program for teenagers, hosted at both school locations and community centers. The third program, Speak Up, combined play and music and worked with groups of disabled children and adolescents at their own program office on the weekends. All three programs were open to children whose parents could pay a fee (ranging from Rs. 1500 to Rs. 2500, i.e., $20 to $33), but provided limited scholarships to students who were receiving scholarships from the school or those whose families had requested the program for financial assistance. Although the chapter presents vignettes from across the three programs, it does not intend to establish an in-group comparison or ranking. Speak Up, which had more funding than the other two programs, was able to rent their own office

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space and priced their programs at a higher cost than the other two. As a result, the majority of students in attendance were from relatively more well-off backgrounds than at the other two programs. I did not encounter any overlap in enrollment across the three programs. I established a relationship with each of these three programs through a combination of reaching out via social media and spending time with the facilitators on their teams prior to beginning fieldwork. All three programs consisted of small teams (under 10 people), the bulk of which were comprised of young (under 35) facilitators. One program had an administrator, but the other two did not. Each program had been established within the last two years and obtained funding through a combination of small grants for nongovernmental organizations, some of the founders’ own start-up capital, and relatively larger grants that were funded through the corporate social responsibility arms of large technology firms. Given the relative newness of these programs, the curriculum at each was still evolving, and none of the three had a fixed idea of what the program should look like. Subsequently, the content for each next session was often decided at a prior debrief. Roughly three-quarters of the facilitators across these programs had grown up in Delhi or other big cities in India, and all were from upper-middle-class, upper-caste backgrounds, although their own backgrounds were rarely discussed during my fieldwork, except in relation to the seemingly small budget of each program. At each of the three sites, I collected data primarily through participant observations, individual semi-structured interviews, and the subsequent collection of documents that informed the pedagogical practices of these programs. Participant observations for each program consisted of being present for the duration of the session at the location where it was conducted and, depending on the program, also included arriving early to set up and/or staying late to debrief. The format of debriefs differed across programs—for instance, Yes We Can documented each session via a session template that was filled in by the session facilitator and sent out to everyone on the team via email within 24 hours of the session’s completion. The Dream Big team conducted a weekly debrief call on Sundays, summarizing learnings from both sessions during the week. The Speak Up team would stay behind after each session to debrief and plan for the next session. Given the small team at each of the three sites, my role as a researcher varied at each site depending on the needs of the program team that day. In the beginning, given that I was a doctoral student studying disability,

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all three programs had suggested that I come on as a content expert of sorts, answering any questions that the team of facilitators might have about various disabilities. One founder joked, “We wouldn’t want you to do the mundane work of facilitating sessions.” However, as the children and their parents grew to be more comfortable with my presence, my involvement in session planning and debriefs also extended to helping with session facilitation. Although I never facilitated a session on my own, I was usually pulled in to help manage smaller groups or to work specifically with any disabled participants. Each of the three programs was in close contact with students—and often their parents—but not all were explicitly attached to specific schools. Yes We Can had chosen to approach private schools and set up partnerships with them for programs at their school grounds, as a result of which the majority of students attending these programs were middle-class students whose families were able to afford the tuition and associated costs of the school. Dream Big, which had a much lower budget, had initially attempted to pitch only to private schools, but faced several rejections on account of not having had many experienced facilitators or a history of work in the space. Subsequently, they chose to partner with a couple of private schools (many of whose students were from similar class backgrounds as those in Yes We Can) and to open up the remainder of their programs at a lower cost for enrollment from lower-middle-class students. In the rest of this chapter, where relevant, I describe in greater detail the activities that were undertaken as a part of each program. However, I also briefly outline them here: Yes We Can organized a range of physical activities, from one-off sports day celebrations to four- to six-week-long targeted programs (such as toward learning a sport, like football, or a specific skill upon request from a school), and semester-long programs focused on a rotation of activities (including time spent on yoga, football, and mental wellness). These programs usually ran for 1–1.5 hours after the school day and were held two to three times a week depending on the preferences of the school. Dream Big, motivated by the desire to incorporate theater into everyday life, ran a four-month program (usually roughly timed around the school term) focusing for the first half on simple activities and exercises that would develop relationships between participants and allow them to experiment with their stage personas. The latter half was directed toward guiding participants to script and perform their own small play in groups. The biweekly program was structured such that

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participants would have the chance to get together on both a weekday and a weekend day for 2.5-hour sessions each time, but attendance was often better on weekends at community center sites, since these involved some amount of travel. School sites did not face similar issues with attendance, since participants usually stayed after school. Bringing together play and music, Speak Up directed participants to focus on social issues over the course of a year, with the idea that play—and a broader openness to everyday experimentation—would provide participants with the tools that they needed to bring about social change. These sessions lasted for 4 hours, once a week, and were held on either a Saturday or a Sunday. Although Yes We Can and Speak Up worked with children from the age of 8, the vast majority of my fieldwork across the three programs was with adolescents (13–18 years). Finally, prior to discussing some of the themes that emerged during fieldwork, I wanted to offer a note on the use of language throughout this chapter, since a range of different terms have been used to refer to disabled children. As a disabled person myself, I have chosen to use primarily identity-­first language throughout this chapter, in line with several scholars who argue for its importance over person-first language (see, e.g., Gernsbacher, 2017; Ladau, 2015). However, other terms such as special needs and differently abled are used in some parts of the chapter, as originally used by my participants to refer to disabled people. These terms have been retained as is from field data and are reflective of a range of understandings of what disability meant across different contexts.

What Makes for an Inclusive After-School Environment? Through my observations across all three sites, I remained interested in young peoples’ own perceptions of their participation in these activities and their experiences during this time. In many cases, their own expressions about how they felt came to contrast sharply with some of the conversations that I had with their parents, which were focused on both hopes and anxieties that related to two primary themes: performance and behavior. Parents often brought up with facilitators the question of how their child was doing—were they any “better” than they had been the previous week? Was their behavior “better?” These considerations were consistent and pervasive, guided by normative parental expectations of what

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childhood ‘should’ have been like for their children. They were also guided by the parents’ decisions to invest in an after-school program as a means through which to provide their child with the kind of support that was intangible in numerous ways—parents were often less concerned with whether their children would go on to pivot to a career in sports or music, but were more so investing in the programs as a means through which to ensure that their child had the kinds of habits and training (albeit intangible) that would mark their children as closer to other (normate) children, who they often associated with an aspirational (albeit ableist) form of ‘normalcy.’ As I hung out with the parents while their children were wrapping up activities each week, I noticed that our conversations often discussed the role of after-school activities as more significant than formal educational experiences themselves. A few months after the sports program had begun, one mother, Savita, mentioned in the middle of our conversation that this program brought her son, Akash, the most happiness. I asked in response what else he enjoyed, and whether there were things about school or his time with his friends that made him happy too. We didn’t get to continue the conversation that day, but a couple of weeks later, she mentioned that as parents, she and her husband had pulled him out of his mainstream school the previous year because they felt that he was “not learning anything” there. “At least here,” she offered, “his behavior is improving, we feel he is able to be more like his brother.” While her comparisons between her disabled son and her other able-bodied children were something that several other parents also brought about frequently when discussing their expectations for their disabled children, it was interesting to note that she and her husband had made the choice to continue sending him to after-­ school activities despite having pulled him out of school, as they continued to figure out other options for his education. Savita and her husband fully intended for Akash to join another school that they went on to find, but on a few occasions had mentioned that the facilitators of the after-­ school program were able to engage with Akash in ways that worked better than many of his teachers in school. As Faiza, mother of Abdul, a young girl with a cognitive impairment, also noted: “I don’t think my child will ever be like the others in the building—sometimes he doesn’t even respond to me when I call his name—but somehow he knows when it is time to come here every week. One week we thought of not taking him because it is so far away, but we realized that he

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is very happy when the weekend comes because he gets to come here.” Although Abdul was also in school, both parents mentioned that they were not sure “if he likes school as much. This is the only thing he cares about.” Therefore, although these activities were advertised and often scheduled as extracurricular or after-school, I came to understand from conversations with parents that they were also enriching spaces that allow for a kind of education that both parents and children may not have previously anticipated. This was more so the case in mainstream schools, where parents felt like insufficient attention was being paid to their child’s specific needs, and less with the case of inclusive or special schools. The school system was widely acknowledged as being insufficient in enabling a child’s holistic development, and each program cited the failings of this system as the basis for their work. Across the three programs, the same programs were repackaged in different ways to cater to the aspirations that families of normate children versus families of disabled children were imagined to hold for their children. After a Yes We Can session, Tanya, the founder remarked, “For parents whose children don’t have disabilities, they send their children to our program because they think that the children will learn to be better humans from being around people with disabilities.” As I started to point out how this was an approach toward disability that was rooted in charity, allowing for disabled children to be thought of as only recipients of pity and care, she pointed out that this worked both ways. “Parents of special needs children,” she argued, “also send their children because this way they get real-world exposure and all-round development—maybe they will have the chance to learn from their peers and be exposed to them.” Although this conversation painted both groups of parents’ aims as similar, it was nonetheless clear that the onus remained on the disabled children both to do the learning (in whatever broad ways learning was imagined) and to be undervalued by the families of their peers. As Tanya continued our conversation, she argued, “Every parent wants their child to be independent, to learn to play and do other things by themselves today so that tomorrow they can be in the world by themselves. In our program we promise that we will make the kids independent.” This focus on independence, in turn, fed into a specific notion of inclusivity. Bhaskaran, another facilitator at Yes We Can, described the activities of the semester-long sports program in the following manner: “We have no such activity that is for special needs children—all of our activities are

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inclusive. That means these activities are for both special needs children and those who are not [disabled], both can do them, but for right now, we should build in rigor for normal children.” If anything, therefore, in his framing, the limits of inclusiveness were implied, suggesting that normate children and their families could—and did—want more than their disabled counterparts. In a very different manner, the Speak Up team was also concerned with inclusion and the ways in which it played out in sessions. Several debriefs emphasized the importance of facilitators focusing more on inclusion and on having the participants mix across their groups, since, at the beginning, most normate children would spend breaks together in a group, distinct from the disabled children. This lingering concern was voiced at several points, and Pankaj, the founder, noted, “As a team, we are worried in each program cycle about trying to include kids, but we also want to make sure not to force this inclusion.” Although the Speak Up team did not have extensive conversations about what this inclusion might look like ahead of the start of the program, each session was conducted with an openness to thinking about how the subsequent one might be made more inclusive. Vivek, a music facilitator, also noted during a debrief: “We need to stress that each person must have a distinct and important role in the chance they are imagining. The kids need to know, for our purposes, that they are only as effective as they are inclusive.”

Waiting to Be Included Several of the parents whose children were active in these after-school programs remained understandably frustrated with the systemic stigma and discrimination experienced by people with disabilities. During an afternoon walk, when we were discussing Shaista’s general well-being, Faiza offered: “The main barrier to disability awareness is action on the part of the government…no government authority is willing to follow the approaches that are mentioned in different disability laws, especially the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act.” She added, “For example, there is a provision of having one special educator in every school, but no schools follow that either. This is why, when we can, we send our children to after-­ school programs, where at least there are some more people with training for special education.” On another occasion, Savita had pointed out: “When a person with disabilities goes to a regular school, the school will

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usually tell them, this school is not good for you. However, now we know that if a doctor decides that if the child is fit for regular school, then the school cannot deny admission to that child because that is a violation. Despite this, we see many schools refusing, or worse, they will let in disabled children but will not make any attempt to really include them.” For disabled children in these after-school programs and their parents, there was often an implicit (and sometimes an explicit) expectation that they would follow a specific kind of linear time. This was most evident in the ways that inclusion was spoken of, and in the design of inclusive activities at the early stages of each program, inherent in Yes We Can’s modifications to activities for disabled children, for instance, was an eventual, linear trajectory toward what they considered developmental normalcy. This expectation that able-bodied normativity (which was often what normalcy was imagined as) would emerge through frequent, diligent participation in extracurricular activities stood at odds with another kind of time that disabled children were experiencing when in these programs. As programs wrestled with what it meant to be inclusive, it was evident that disabled participants were frequently waiting for their able-bodied program facilitators to catch up, especially with understanding their own needs. At the start of a Yes We Can curriculum development session focused on modifications, while framing for the team how modifications might be made, Tanya noted, “The kinds of things that we can expect to see from 3- to 4-year-old neurotypical children, those map on to the things that children with special needs who are 10 years old can do.” However, this belief that disabled children could not know their own needs was soon shattered when facilitators began holding sessions. In one early debrief, Bhaskaran wrote, “I am wondering if we can talk a little bit more about how we adapt activities for kids with limited movement—although they did not seem to be too bothered by not being able to fully participate in activities.” In a later debrief that month, he wrote, “The kids know how we should work with their needs—when I have a hard time gauging how sessions are going, especially those that do not have warm-up activities, students are able to show me with their bodies.” This hesitation to understand and engage with the needs of disabled children was not shared when it came to their normate peers. In many instances, disabled children—and disability itself (regardless of the kind of disability)—were thought of as “technical space.” At another knowledge-­ sharing session at Dream Big, Deepak offered: “A child can be a slow

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learner, but that does not imply that the child has a mental disability. Disability is an extremely technical space, and there are specific tools to find out the type and intensity of the disability of a child. We cannot label or assume a child to be disabled—it could be our teaching styles that are not suitable for the child, or even if the content is age appropriate, the child could have a different learning style.” This view reflected an openness to learning further, as well as a reluctance to engage more closely with this “technical space”—the needs of normate children in these programs were never described as technical or unusual. Conversely, even in these explicitly inclusive spaces, there was a tremendous emphasis on the medicalization of disability, rather than an understanding of how barriers are present in the environment. In the same training, Deepak noted: “It is important to assess the type and degree of disability of a child, alongside which there needs to be a baseline assessment of the current learning level of the child. I think it is better to assess the child on multiple intelligence tools rather than doing a standardized IQ test, which feels almost obsolete to me in today’s pedagogical context.” Toward this, he suggested that an inclusive pedagogy might be the solution, saying, “In the modern pedagogy, we say that it is important to understand multiple intelligences…so that way, when we say that children are special needs, it does not mean they are differently abled. They just have different learning styles or preferences, and those are their needs.” Interestingly, although disabled children were noted to have different learning styles or preferences, in practice, facilitators often assumed that normate participants without a formal diagnosis could not have similar needs or learning styles. Although not all three programs shared the same understanding of how children could—and did—learn, another instance of facilitators and their learning processes occurred at Speak Up, during a three-day external training. Following this training, Pankaj circulated an email, explaining: “We have started a document where we are trying to learn as much as we can during this time, and we are updating this document each time we learn something. I think this is a more useful approach than just saying that we are learning about or making content for specific children or specific kinds of disabilities. Skills are important for everyone, and by focusing on skills more broadly we will be able to expand the target base of our program.” Although the external training itself was focused on different kinds of disabilities, it was also interesting to note that the

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specific support needs of disabled participants were obscured under the broader framing of learning.

Explicit Independence, Implicit Interdependence Across all three programs, facilitators frequently noted during group reflections or debriefs that they did not understand the needs of disabled participants as well as they might have initially thought, or in the ways that other participants might have. These reflective moments often began on occasions where facilitators expressed their frustration at the programs not proceeding as they would have liked, but often allowed for the facilitators to shift and reshape their own expectations of what they could do differently within the program. In particular, several of these reflections over the course of the program attended to a common theme: facilitators would often begin their sessions with the assumption that they were “doing good” or “being helpful” to disabled participants and would come to realize after a few sessions that their own understandings of disability were limited in large part due to their lack of prior interactions with disabled people and communities. For instance, speaking about a student in the program, Monica offered during a particularly frustrating debrief: “It is a little hard for me to understand Prateek, and I worry that trying to understand him or getting him to repeat often is not conducive to getting him to talk more.” These worries had come to the fore because of the nature of the session that day, where a range of play-based exercises had been designed for participants. These exercises involved a fair degree of movement, and the session plan had included an assumption that participants would adapt the exercises as best for them. However, during that specific session, the first couple of hours proved to be particularly difficult. Having provided vague directions to the participants, facilitators were then attempting to navigate the initial stillness in each exercise. After the first couple of hours, several changes occurred: Divyansh, one participant with cerebral palsy, had started to adapt a number of exercises to work for him. Two other normate participants had paired up with their disabled peers to restructure the exercises in a manner that would enable all four to participate. Prateek’s speech impairment, although initially framed as a hindrance both by Monica and other facilitators, soon became a site of negotiation between him and other participants—if what he was saying was not easily understood, other

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participants would offer guesses or repeat back what they had understood to him, and he would nod in agreement or correct them until an understanding was reached through a dialogue. In this way, interacting with other participants more frequently generated a bidirectional set of discussions that eventually encouraged Prateek to communicate in ways that he was comfortable with. These lateral interactions also proved more generative and inclusive than explicit facilitator-led reminders to Prateek to participate verbally more often. While facilitator and parent conversations were often brimming with anxieties about impairment and the possibility of a future that did not involve needing to engage with the embodiment of disability on a regular basis, the majority of my conversations with disabled young people themselves did not similarly center on anxieties about their abilities. We spoke often of group dynamics, of what activities would be more fun to do, and what they would like to see more of. As a sometimes-facilitator, and other times an observer, I was initially hesitant about making my own disabilities explicit. I am not ‘obviously’ disabled, but often chose to sit out activities that I did not have the physical capacity to participate in. This led to several interesting conversations with the young people around me, some of whom would also leave the activity they were participating in and come sit by me when they felt like it. Most of these times, we would sit in silence, but a few times, a conversation would begin, often by asking me whether I was bored of the activities too. Although our conversations sometimes touched on the impairments that other young people in the group were living with, these were often brought up in the context of suggesting how an activity might be modified. Once, after a somewhat challenging day of play and movement, Divya, a young person who sat with me, suggested that we (as facilitators) might think through the activities scheduled for the next week differently, because it was evident that “many people were getting tired halfway through.” What we had imagined, therefore, as a series of activities that would provide a play-based version after a packed day of lessons in school, was far less interesting to the children than downtime to simply do their thing. Participants also grew to develop friendships among themselves in a manner that was much different than the facilitators had anticipated. In one Speak Up session where we were sharing what had gone well that day (in pairs), Ashish and Harsh, two disabled teenagers, were paired together. That pairing was the start of a friendship that lasted well beyond the

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program, and Harsh later pointed out: “Ashish told me he feels alone during breaks, and I said sorry to him. I should have noticed and been a better friend.” Harsh’s promise to step up and be more present for his friend’s needs stood in sharp contrast to initial expectations that facilitators from all three programs may have had when defining inclusivity—there had been no discussion about disabled solidarities and disabled students being in community with each other. Shaily, a disabled participant in Yes We Can, came up to Bhaskaran one day and suggested that she be allowed to spend breaks with Asha, another disabled student who was a few years younger and was not participating in the program. Bhaskaran later noted: “I was very surprised when I heard Shaily say that she wanted to keep Asha company when she noticed that Asha was alone—I never thought of it this way, but I am starting to see Asha in the program as someone who can offer help to other students, not just as someone who needs it all the time.” Across the three programs, we sometimes cut short snack breaks when we felt like we were running behind on our planned activities for the day. This proved to be both complicated and somewhat unnecessary, because several young people were fed by a caregiver during these breaks. In Dream Big, the group of facilitators had suggested initially that parents leave during a session and come back only to pick up their children with the aim of allowing children time to interact with their peers. However, over the first few sessions, we noticed that some children were not yet comfortable with being fed by someone other than the caregiver who usually fed them and would therefore eat very little during these breaks. Although these concerns were barely made explicit verbally to the facilitators who had volunteered to help with feeding during breaks, several of the children began to ask for their parents to stay once they had grown more comfortable with the sessions and the facilitators conducting them. During facilitator observations and debriefs, we had come to normatively assume that children would want time away from the various anxieties expressed by their parents, even though this was not in line with what the children might have been most comfortable with. As I worked with facilitators across the three programs to navigate these and other tensions and desires expressed by the disabled children and youth, other articulations of the future emerged both from these young people and their parents. Many parents had ideas of the normal that were a constant undercurrent in their caregiving roles, but these ideas were rarely vocalized by their disabled children. Instead, oftentimes, the children and young people had their own conceptualization of the normal,

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one that understandably included their bodies and minds as the default. In this regard, the modern disabled child was often conflated with the normate child through the space of the after-school activity and the hopes for progress imbued within it. In particular, as several facilitators expressed to me on different occasions, the hope with these activities was that disabled children would get to have a “normal childhood” through the opportunity to spend time with their normate peers on an equal footing.

Learning and Ability During the Pandemic Halfway through the collection of data for this chapter, the COVID-19 pandemic began in India, and my in-person fieldwork was abruptly cut short. Additionally, two of the three after-school programs that had served as field sites could no longer run during the pandemic, in large part due to financial constraints. Yes We Can was able to run online, albeit in a manner different than originally planned. Instead of group classes, or virtual one-­ on-­one classes, this program continued to release a series of online worksheets consisting of at-home activities for parents and their children. These worksheets, although marked as relevant to both disabled children and their normate peers, mirrored similar normative ideas of what the child ‘should’ be able to do with their bodies, leaving little room for the inclusion of children whose bodies (and minds) did not function as per normate expectations. Despite the creation of structures aimed at enabling parents to transition to the smooth, regular use of these worksheets as a substitute for online programs, several parents that I remained in touch with commented on the limited efficacy of worksheets against the backdrop of the larger challenges that they were facing during COVID-19. In particular, during one conversation where I brought up an activity from that day’s worksheet that a child had previously shown interest in, the father of the child remarked in response, “This is good for the NGO to distribute, but we don’t have the time to sit and do such activities with our children. Even though they are saying that all children can do it, my son cannot do it—he needs us to sit with him and show him how to do it. During the time of corona, none of us have the time, so the worksheet is of no use.” The content of the worksheet mentioned in the conversation above was primarily single-digit addition and subtraction problems, a hundred of them jammed onto one page. On average, three to four such worksheets were distributed to parents daily, since they were most readily available as free resources through the Internet. A number of these

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worksheets were distributed with the intention that the child would be able to complete them on their own, with little to no parental supervision, and Yes We Can aimed to share at least one additional worksheet a week containing activities that the parent and child could do together. However, as several adult caregivers pointed out across conversations about online schooling, the abrupt lockdown in India and the subsequent switch to learning online often did not provide the support that parents needed to lead their children through school activities. Additionally, caregivers often struggled to balance their own employment-related tasks with the work of supporting their child’s online learning. The pandemic has shifted several priorities for children and their families worldwide, and India is no exception. As several parents of disabled children continue to find ways in which to adjust to what may be a new normal for several years to come, the focus remains largely on ensuring that children continue to learn even when out of school. Over the last nine months, much less attention has been paid to other socioemotional needs that children may have, as well as to activities outside of school that are integral to their growth and development. These shifting priorities doubtless also have implications for the ways in which disability is conceptualized and responded to by families and schools. Several concerns that my disabled child interlocutors and their families expressed during the pandemic were similar to concerns that normate children and their families had noted, key among them being the uncertainty and anxiety surrounding the pandemic as a moment. Additionally, although I previously was able to communicate directly with all of my child interlocutors, during the pandemic, the majority of my communication was with their parents and caregivers, and to a lesser extent with their educators. Upon requesting to speak directly with my child interlocutors on several occasions, caregivers first mentioned that they did not believe children were doing well with the additional screen time that they had been experiencing. Subsequently, however, I was able to maintain semi-­ regular communication with my disabled child interlocutors, checking in about their day, asking about their well-being and what they were continuing to learn. This concern about learning through an online medium was also differed on the basis of class, since caregivers and children from upper-middle-class families were often more willing to talk over the phone and include me in daily activities over video. On the other hand, those from lower-middle-class families pointed to the inaccessibility of online and phone conversations, made harder by recent job losses within the

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family and on several occasions by other financial hardships that arose during the pandemic. Although schools and after-school activities have yet to be able to resume in person, there is no doubt that several pre-pandemic concerns around the shaping of disabled children into less-provincial citizens persist, even amidst a greater number of systemic barriers during COVID-19. Now, too, much like before, imaginations of modernity and modern behaviors are often conflated with able-bodiedness and referred to as normalcy, because of which disabled children and adolescents come to be imagined and cast as provincial, even as they continue to push back against the imposition of these narratives about their lives and futures.

Countering Commonplace Ableist Narratives Within and Beyond After-School Programs The chapter, thus far, has focused on the everyday discursive construction and social reproduction of disability as a category, and on the ways in which understandings of disability and childhood intersect in the spaces of after-school programs. As the chapter details, the caregivers of disabled children simultaneously hold anxieties about their disabled child’s proximity to normativity, while also engaging with the room that these programs offered for their child’s engagement with learning activities through and with other (often normate) peers. Facilitators of these after-school programs also engaged with them in ways that were both fixed and fluctuating, expressing, on the one hand, a range of emotions around the ways in which the programs were shaped, and learning, on the other, how they might take the lead from disabled participants in continuing to plan content that was inclusive of all participants’ needs. These after-school programs, as the chapter demonstrates, have served as sites of negotiation, playing a particular role wherein disability does not operate as a fixed, static identity, but rather one where questions of ability, belonging, and identity come to be negotiated on an ongoing basis. Drawing upon perspectives from disabled children’s childhood studies and scholarship on the study of the everyday, the chapter demonstrates further that disability as a label is one that is continually negotiated, even in seemingly insignificant moments, and that these everyday moments provide rich insights into the ways that notions of disability and ability are co-constituted.

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References Ahlin, T., & Li, F. (2019). From field sites to field events: Creating the field with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Medicine Anthropology Theory, 6(2), 1–24. Connors, C., & Stalker, K. (2007). Children’s experiences of disability: Pointers to a social model of childhood disability. Disability and Society, 22(1), 19–33. Curran, T. (2013). Disabled children’s childhood studies: Alternative relations and forms of authority? In T.  Curran & K.  Runswick-Cole (Eds.), Disabled children’s childhood studies: Critical approaches in a global context (pp. 121–135). Palgrave Macmillan. Curran, T., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2014). Disabled children’s childhood studies: A distinct approach? Disability and Society, 29(10), 1617–1634. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. University of California Press. Garland-Thomson, R. (1996). Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture. Columbia University Press. Gernsbacher, M. A. (2017). Editorial perspective: The use of person-first language in scholarly writing may accentuate stigma. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(7), 859–861. Goodley, D. (2014). Dis/ability studies: Theorizing disablism and ableism. Routledge. Goodley, D., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2013). The body as disability and possability: Theorizing the ‘Leaking, Lacking and Excessive’ bodies of disabled children. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 15(1), 1–19. Kumar, N. (2006). Provincialism in modern India: The multiple narratives of education and their pain. Modern Asian Studies, 40(2), 397–423. Ladau, E. (2015). Why person-first language doesn’t always put the person first. Think Inclusive, July 20. https://www.thinkinclusive.us/why-­person-­first-­ language-­doesnt-­always-­put-­the-­person-­first/ Looma, S., & Chawla, P. (2020). Social and emotional learning: The real gap in India’s educational system. The Wire, December 3. https://thewire.in/education/social-­emotional-­learning-­real-­gap-­indian-­education-­system McDermott, R. P. (1993). The acquisition of a child by a learning disability. In S.  Chaiklin & J.  Lave (Eds.), Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context (pp. 269–305). Cambridge University Press. McLaughlin, J., & Coleman-Fountain, E. (2014). The unfinished body: The medical and social reshaping of disabled young bodies. Social Science and Medicine, 120, 76–84. McLaughlin, J., Coleman-Fountain, E., & Clavering, E. (2016). Disabled childhoods: Monitoring differences and emerging identities. Routledge.

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Oliver, M. (1990). The individual and social models of disability. Paper presented at the Joint Workshop of the Living Options Group and the Research Unit of the Royal College of Physicians. https://disability-­studies.leeds.ac.uk/wp-­ content/uploads/sites/40/library/Oliver-­in-­soc-­dis.pdf Philp, K. D., & Gill, M. G. (2020). Reframing after-school programs as developing youth interest, identity and social capital. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7(1), 19–26. Singh, V., & Ghai, A. (2009). Notions of self: Lived realities of children with disabilities. Disability and Society, 24(2), 129–145. Thomas, G.  M. (2020). Dis-mantling stigma: Parenting disabled children in an age of ‘Neoliberal Ableism’. The Sociological Review, 1–17. Thomassen, B. (2012). Anthropology and its many modernities: When concepts matter. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18(1), 160–178. Watson, N. (2012). Theorising the lives of disabled children: How can disability theory help? Children and Society, 26(3), 192–202.

CHAPTER 9

“Youth Must Keep Upvaluing Themselves”: Of Personality Development and Modern Selves in Contemporary Delhi Suchismita Chattopadhyay

In the last two decades, Delhi has seen a significant rise in personality development (PD) classes that promise personal transformation and success to the youth of India.1 Globalisation not only brought about new 1  There is no official record of the number of PD or spoken English institutes in Delhi Although a quick search on the internet using any of these search terms generates an entire roster of training institutes and individual tutors. The search can be further expanded or narrowed down if done via lead generation learning websites like UrbanPro or the online version of yellow pages in India called JustDial or Sulekha. In the case of spoken English trainers, the website states that in Delhi there are 2422 private English tutors and 1413 institutes available in Delhi. Most of these places also include PD as part of their advanced pedagogy. However, there are no formal estimates of the number of standalone PD institutes that operate in Delhi like Mrs Batra’s.

S. Chattopadhyay (*) Department of Anthropology and Sociology, The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_9

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ideas of consumption, leisure and employment opportunities but also led to the formation of new dispositions associated with a modern self. This chapter demonstrates that PD classes are an embodiment of the disparate and disjunctive nature of youth engagements with modernity. PD classes in Delhi are mostly conducted by privately owned institutes that aim to teach soft skills as an embodied expression of professionalism. Meredith McGuire (2011, 2013) frames PD classes as a space for cultivating the enterprising subject of the neoliberal economy. She understands PD classes as espousing the ethos of neoliberalism where ‘techniques of self’ become important in changing mental dispositions (McGuire, 2013: 112). I view the PD classes as spaces that enable the youth to aspire for newer, upwardly mobile professional and social spaces and, in the process, be part of the city that is increasingly being postured as ‘world-class’. The PD instructors believe the classes improve students’ professional and personal lives. I argue that PD classes have emerged as sites that produce a particular modern subjectivity which can be performed by the demonstration of specific linguistic and bodily practices. At the same time, the PD courses are also fashioning a discourse of modernity and urbanity. The discourse and its practices are informed by what is assumed to be a globally familiar disposition (Dattatreyan, 2020), not without its own set of contradictions and limitations placed upon young bodies. All the same, the families who encourage their children to attend these classes believe that young people can acquire a modern self-hood/subjectivity through personality development. The chapter has been divided into three sections. The first section conceptually engages with modernity in a post-liberalised India, where the youth are posited as its protagonists. I show the discourse of modernity and the capacity to aspire as unevenly distributed and experienced differentially. The PD class, firstly, becomes the site for the youth to develop the capacity to aspire to a good life that is contingent on the shaping of a modern self. Secondly, the PD classes then train the youth to embody the modern self through language and grooming. In the second section of the chapter, I delve into the pedagogy of PD through an ethnography of one such programme at Mrs Batra’s PD institute in North Delhi. Through Mrs Batra’s classes on communication and grooming, I show how personality is unpacked into teachable components that can be made visible and demonstrated. I also show how the modern self is visually constructed in opposition to a particular category of the ‘ungroomed’. In the concluding section, I summarise the processes by which the youth fashion their

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modern selves, while also highlighting their fragmented experiences of modernity and aspirations.

Methodology The ethnography, through direct participation in the classes, was conducted at Mrs Batra’s, over a period of seven weeks in 2019. The course fee for the seven weeks of PD was INR 13,500. The class that I was a part of consisted of students who were from upper-caste, middle-income backgrounds except for one student, who was from the other backward classes (OBC) category. The class consisted of students studying at Delhi University (DU) colleges and Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), and a few had finished undergraduation and were preparing for the civil service entrance exams. Mrs Batra did not teach spoken English but communication skills, and students in my class displayed a basic proficiency in English in terms of reading, writing and comprehension. The names of my respondents have been changed to maintain the privacy and anonymity of my respondents.

The Modern Self in a Post-liberalised India A newly independent India in 1947 articulated its modernity by adopting principles of rationality and scientific temper towards planning and development (Kaviraj, 2000; Chatterjee, 1998). Subsequently, the New Economic Policy of 1991 was introduced in a bid to revive the sinking fortunes of a deficit Indian economy. The liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation of India would mark a move away from Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies of heavy industrialisation, reliance on the public sector, import substitution and savings. The liberalisation of the market was seen as a new phase of possibilities and reforms that could harness the potential of an untapped market that comprised a “200-million strong middle class” as a resource (Fernandes, 2006: 30). The liberalisation project facilitated a transnational flow of capital and information with the advent of global media and international consumer brands that populated the Indian markets. The state defined modernity by India’s ability to aspire to a global standard by being part of a global consumer market.2 The idea of the 2  This sentiment can be gleaned from Manmohan Singh’s 1991 Budget speech where he says, “[…India] is yearning for new politics…of a poor country trying to modernise itself…”.

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modern subject was underscored by the consumption of luxury goods, international brands and a related lifestyle (Brosius, 2010; Robinson, 2014). Simultaneously, the government and media campaigns like India Shining of 2004, Lead India of 2007, and Pepsi’s campaigning strategy around making the ‘right choice’ to the contemporary Youngistan campaign posit the youth as the protagonists and agents of a modern and globalised India. The trajectory of modernity in India is not a linear transformation from the mega discourses of state planning and development to ideas of consumption and leisure. The difference lies in the way we experience modernity practically, punctuated by technology, media, community, finance and ideology (Appadurai, 1996). For instance, television, through cable TV programmes and advertisements, frequently equated modernity with increasing consumerist desires and aspirations (Mankekar, 1999; Rajagopal, 2001). The advertising industry that peaked in the 1990s produced a distinctive form of commodity production (Mazzarella, 2003: 4) in the form of a consumable modern self. The aim of the advertising industry was not simply about the creation of visuals and jingles but in the production of desire, material wants and, more significantly, a will to aspire. The Indian youth partaking in the disparate experiences of modernity found representation, albeit differentially, cutting across class, caste, gender, sexuality and the regional boundaries. They ranged from non-elite college-going women’s ambivalence around commoditised and globalised events like beauty pageants and Valentine’s Day celebrations (Lukose, 2009); navigating through apparent objects of ‘style’ that represented a route to global modernity (Nakassis, 2016); young men negotiating ennui and disenchantment by doing ‘timepass’ as they are unable to cash in on the opportunities of the new economy (Jeffrey, 2010); or being presented as the creative and transforming force attributed with enterprising qualities and skills that the previous generation lacked (Mankekar, 2013; Gooptu, 2013). This chapter takes forward the process of youth identity formation vis-­ à-­vis modernity at the level of the quotidian, where I examine the specific practices that produce the modern self in the city. I will show how modern selves are shaped through the material, discursive and affective processes that constitute an urban idea of modernity. I use the site of the PD course and its classes on communication skills and grooming to show how the PD courses in Delhi construct the modern self via specific linguistic and bodily practices.

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The images of Delhi as a world-class city have come to be represented around new sites of leisure, consumption and aesthetics (Brosius, 2013). Asher Ghertner (2015) addresses the specific nature of Delhi’s worlding practices as one that is ostensibly rooted in a “rule by aesthetics”. Researching on the mass slum demolitions in Delhi, Ghertner argues that aesthetic norms and codes of appearances replaced processes of planning and legality. The world-class aesthetic of Delhi found its visible articulation in the rise of privatised gated enclaves, new spaces of pleasure and leisure like shopping malls, gourmet restaurants, wellness centres and the creation of “world-class centres for MICE (Meeting, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions), travel and hospitality, tourism…etc.” (DDA, 2021: 28). It points to a new visuality of the city steeped in promoting an urban lifestyle that is also globally recognisable. However, the urban imaginaries of a city are co-constituted by the sites and their inhabitants. The quotidian representation of belonging to world-­ class spaces demands a new visual register from its participants. The aspiring clientele and the workforce of the global economy must speak and read the language of world class-ness and modernity. The performative aspect of being a modern self, of showing one’s belonging to the new spaces of pleasure and employment must be made visible via language, often English, deportment and grooming. Simultaneously, the burgeoning service industry as new spaces of employment mandates the production of new sensibilities and work dispositions via soft skills (Hardt, 1999; Urciuoli, 2008). However, not everybody is always-already adept at soft skills or in the language of consumable modernity and coming across as globally familiar. I borrow the term ‘globally familiar’ from Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan who labels it as a feeling of connectedness aided by the practices of transnational media technologies, an affective economy and the structure of aspiration this feeling produces (Dattatreyan, 2020: 3). Dattatreyan’s ethnography engages with digital hip-hop transmitted across media as a means for young working-class men to self-fashion themselves as entrepreneurial and creative individuals who could participate in urban India’s quest for world-class status (Dattatreyan, 2020: 11). In this chapter, I use globally familiar as a summarising disposition that is desired by my interlocutors. Significantly, it is something that PD and grooming schools actively seek to teach. Unlike Dattatreyan’s young interlocutors who use hip-hop as a mediating category, the PD institutes deploy a range of bodily

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practices to generate the globally familiar self. The markers of being globally familiar, according to the PD lessons, are identified with speaking English, being adept at soft skills and possessing appropriate body language. The desire to be globally familiar rested on possessing the ability to access, attune and enjoy sites, events and cultures in one’s own rapidly globalising city. This chapter also depicts the production of the ‘everyday urban’ via the space of the PD classes. The ‘everyday urban’ is embedded in the relationalities, encounters and experiences of young people as they navigate the symbols and institutions of the ‘global’ in the city (Introduction, this volume). The participants of the PD classes and their aspirations are a result of the complicated interactions between the global spaces of the city, the individual and their relative social positions. The desire to be globally familiar and the subsequent lessons in PD are an illustration of how the ‘everyday urban’ is constitutive to the fashioning of modern selves. The capacity to aspire is explained by Arjun Appadurai (2004) in terms of a relationship between the poor and the marginalised in the larger cultural regimes within which they function and operate. Aspirations are related to wants, preferences, choices and, subsequently, calculations towards achieving the purported good life (2004: 67). They are part of a wider cultural realm even though aspirations are often touted as individually framed within the notion of choices and wants. Appadurai’s postulations are useful for us to understand the notion of modernity and its everyday practices because aspirations are formed in the thick of social interactions. But the capacity to aspire is not evenly distributed. It is mediated by one’s navigational capacity. That is, the more privileged one is, the better they are in their capability and capacity to aspire. The question that then arises is how does one develop the capacity to aspire, when the experience of modernity is so disparate and disjunctive for different classes? If the capacity to aspire is contingent on our existing social realities, then the fashioning of the modern self, hinging on the language of being globally familiar, is not something natural or already given. Then, how do young people aspire to attain this modern self that would fit with the sites of leisure and consumption? It is here that personality development comes into focus that would enable the construction of the modern self. The PD classes, firstly, provide an environment (mahaul) for young people to articulate their multiple wants and desires. Secondly, through its syllabus and pedagogy, personality is broken down into components that are teachable and, consequently, a transferable skill that then

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fashions the modern selves. For this chapter, I limit these specific everyday practices to the realms of English language and grooming classes.

Personality Development at Mrs Batra’s Mrs Batra’s institute in North Delhi is located close to Delhi University (DU) and the adjoining areas of Mukherjee Nagar and Patel Chest. These localities host a variety of coaching centres for the youth to help prepare for qualifying exams for the Indian bureaucracy and the Common Aptitude Tests (CAT) for business schools, amongst others. The presence of DU and the coaching centres ensure a steady stream of aspiring youth as the predominant clientele for Mrs Batra, who wants to hone their soft skills and become successful not just professionally but also socially. Mrs Batra explained that “cultivating a personality”3 was important to be successful. More than spoken English, individuals needed training in confidence-­ building, communication skills and body language. Mrs Batra started her own institute 13 years ago and slowly attracted a steady clientele. They first came through word-of-mouth, and soon a fully developed website and a tie-up with lead generation websites like Justdial and UrbanPro helped in further securing her clients. In her introductory class, she described herself as a PD facilitator. Mrs Batra claimed that her institute was about “making effective personalities”, and her job as a facilitator was to turn us all from a “pupa into a butterfly”. The class comprised of young men and women between the age group of 18–25. In their brief introduction, the students mentioned that they were at Mrs Batra’s to “upgrade themselves”, “clear the interview rounds” and “gain confidence”. The professional ambitions of the class ranged from wanting to go to the US for further studies, getting admission into the business schools in India for a master’s programme, clearing the state civil service exams, wanting to become an air hostess and a beauty executive for a luxury brand in a popular mall in Delhi. Unlike a spoken English class where outcomes can be gauged based on grammar, sentence construction and vocabulary, PD at the outset appears vague. The syllabus designed by Mrs Batra was helpful in unpacking how a personality ought to be developed. The handbook that she distributed to the class included the topics that would be covered across 20–26 3  I have used double inverted commas throughout the chapter to indicate words and sentences that were used specifically by the students and Mrs Batra.

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sessions of one and a half hours each. PD would take place by identifying personality types, attitude training, time management, communication skills, self-image and grooming. When seen separately, some of the elements of the syllabus like time management, communication skills and self-esteem are part of theories of management and self-help. However, for Mrs Batra, PD was about the holistic development of the self, and thereby, the syllabus was a combination of management studies, self-help, psychology and social etiquette. According to Mrs Batra, she ensured a “plastic” change in people as opposed to an “elastic” change. Mrs Batra explained that while the body is elastic in its subjection to physical disciplining, the transformation, as an end product, is plastic and permanent. That is, for Mrs Batra, her students, after having finished their PD course from the institute, did not go back to their older selves. This hints at Mrs Batra’s belief to initiate a permanent change, starting with attitudinal training and putting her students on the path of self-advancement and self-management. Mrs Batra said that she dealt with clients, mostly the youth who were unsatisfied with themselves or were there because their parents were not satisfied with them. The parents felt that their children needed to be “fixed”. This “fixing”, as is evident from the syllabus, is done in a phased manner, where attitude correction becomes the first step. Attitude correction was also the process by which Mrs Batra sought to initiate a plastic change in her students. Attitude correction began with refraining from blaming the world for our problems. The common denominator that underlines the world of grooming is the focus on individual responsibility. One of the things Mrs Batra repeated in the class was asking us to stop expecting that people will change. Instead, the onus was on us to change and improve our emotional intelligence. Through the quizzes on emotional intelligence, prepared by Mrs Batra, we quantified our abilities in self-awareness, self-management, relationship management and social awareness. Attitude training was important since the students were poised to enter the job market. It was understood that workplace dynamics required diplomatic skills and abilities to navigate ego clashes, and thus, students had to be self-aware, self-­ manage and adept at handling interpersonal equations without blaming others’ attitudes. The discourse on individual self-management is not a new phenomenon propagated in PD classes. In fact, the ideologies of self-­ management are hallmarks of the enterprising and neoliberal culture (Rose 1992, Lemke 2001, Gooptu 2013, McGuigan 2014). Considering this literature on the enterprising culture, the PD class seemingly becomes a

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space for subject creation, starting with Mrs Batra’s session on attitude correction. Attitude correction was bolstered by lectures on motivation. Mrs Batra conceded that the problem was that most people “put a full stop” to their learning process after they graduated and entered the job market. She urged the class to be lifelong learners. “Youth must always upvalue themselves”, explained Mrs Batra. “This upvaluation of our selves is possible only if we keep updating ourselves, just like a computer.” The notion of upvaluation where individuals must constantly update and adapt themselves with newer skills and dispositions signals PD and grooming as a continuous process. The PD institutes present themselves as sites that enable people’s aspirational trajectories and provide them with new skill sets in a practical manner. The lessons on communication skills, how to set executable goals and grooming were shown as the practical ways by which we could ‘upvalue’ ourselves. At this juncture, I would like to briefly dwell on Mrs Batra’s idea of the elastic-plastic transformation. Mrs Batra’s claim of being able to bring plastic and a permanent change in her students, while urging them to be lifelong learners, suggests an understanding of modernity not as a linear and a one-way street but as a continuous process in the making. The plasticity lies in an upvalued self, that is not marked by a “full stop” but with a new attitude towards bettering themselves through new skills and knowledge. PD classes also emphasised on the rather inconsequential nature of an educational degree, in the face of a “dynamic personality”. Mrs Batra stated that the number of degrees one possessed did not matter. Instead, it was more important to cultivate a personality. Mrs Batra used me as an example to make her case in class. She told my classmates that despite my several educational qualifications, I was in her class because, in my counselling session with Mrs Batra, I had discovered many lacks (khamiyans) within me. The PD class was meant to rectify my lacks and weaknesses. I contend that it is plausible that the trumping of a dynamic personality over educational degrees was a possible way by which many anxieties of an unequal classroom with different aspirations were put to rest. The lacks were attributed along the lines of attitude and body, which held the potential of being corrected in the short duration of the course. Moreover, since PD courses are not educational degrees, the focus of Mrs Batra lay in the teaching of dispositions that would aid individuals’ social and professional lives. According to Mrs Batra, her responsibility lay in converting our lacks

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into strengths. We were congratulated on our decision to enrol for PD as it was the first step towards becoming our upvalued selves. For this chapter, I will dwell on the two pillars that paved the way for this upvaluation and, consequently, in the construction of the modern self: communication skills via English and grooming. Communication Skills Soft skills have come to play a key role in the new jobs that have come to dominate the informational economy. Soft skills refer to skills that influence how individuals interact with each other. Some of the recognised soft skills in the skilling discourse include attitude awareness, conflict handling, etiquette, communication skills, listening skills, presentation skills, self-­ management, time and stress management. The PD classes that teach soft skills to make young men and women employable assume that the more adept one is with their soft skills, the higher the chances of getting hired and promoted in the informational economy.4 Most PD instructors would speak about the irreplaceability of hard skills but are always quick to add that soft skills play two kinds of roles in India. One, they make you a desirable employee, as someone who can fit themselves as a ‘global professional’ through their attitude, communication skills and interpersonal relations. According to soft skills trainers, such candidates would be favoured for managerial and leadership positions. Two, given the rise of service-oriented jobs in India, a flexible attitude, good communication and people skills could get young men and women front-end jobs in retail, hospitality and communication. Spoken English in PD classes is seen as the first step towards becoming a groomed self. The English language has a long, contested and complicated history in post-colonial India. The ability to speak English is deeply mired in a certain class/caste identity, beginning with its dominance over matters of administration and higher education (Ahmad, 1992; Sen, 2009). English as a language was also first made accessible to the 4  Michael Hardt in his essay “Affective Labour” (1999) explains that the processes of modernisation have led to a migration of labour from primary (agriculture), secondary (industrial manufacturing) to the tertiary (service) sector. Service has come to mean a range of sectors that include health care, education, finance, hospitality, IT, etc. These jobs require workers to have highly mobile and flexible skills. Hardt calls the rise of the service industry as the informational economy. The new jobs demand communication, knowledge, information, and affect to play a central role.

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privileged castes, and thereby, it gets interpreted as a language of power, distinction and domination. In India, English is an instrument of caste privilege, which also makes it an apparatus of social mobility in a globalised world. The returns to speaking in English are also higher where hourly wages are 34 per cent higher for people who speak fluent English compared to those who struggle or do not know the language at all (Azam, et  al., 2010). Unlike Sanskrit, which was considered sacred and kept away from the lower castes and Dalits, English carries no such connotation in the region. Anybody can aspire to learn it irrespective of their caste, gender and religion (Kachru, 1995). Thus, English becomes a language of aspirations and modernity in India. It represents class mobility and urbanity. The knowledge of English often can prove to be an equaliser in a socially unequal space. This is best amplified by an event that surfaced and disappeared between 2006 and 2011. On 25 October 2006, a new goddess made her debut in the pantheon of gods and goddesses who inhabit India. The new goddess was called Angrezi Devi/English the Dalit Goddess. Angrezi Devi wore a hat and a gown and had golden hair. She also held a pen in one hand, and the Constitution of India that guarantees equal rights to Dalits, on the other. The creator of the goddess was Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit intellectual and activist who contended that learning English was the route for Dalits to be upwardly mobile and escape manual scavenging and caste-­ based discrimination. Prasad contends that Dalits need to be part of India’s IT revolution with its promise of “air-conditioned, anti-sweat labour”, and the route to IT was through English and computer education (Prasad in Ramaswamy, 2011: 209). In 2010, the foundation stone for a temple was laid, but the English goddess faced stiff opposition from the upper-­ caste Hindu population and Hindu right-wing outfits who feared Dalit conversion to Christianity. According to newspaper reports in 2013, the goddess seemed to have ‘disappeared’ from public life. The event of the English Goddess signals how English for Prasad is not just the language of power, but it can also be empowering. There is an unsentimental alliance to English for Prasad, as a practical language of power and access (Ramaswamy, 2011). Knowing English means one can be touted as a modern citizen. It is presented as the basic skill set to progress in life, so much so that instructors speak of learning English as a skill. The advent of the software industry and the BPO/call centre boom signalled the use of English as a commodity with definite exchange value (Heller, 2010; Park, 2011). The service sector through the BPOs in India

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brought forth the importance of language work and the language worker where linguistic competence in English was the primary requirement for employment. Additionally, English for my interlocutors also represented an aspiration, ambience and a lifeworld, propelling them to be participants of a global culture. However, simply learning how to speak a cut-price version of the English language is not enough to become visibly modern. English must be pronounced correctly and, at the same time, spoken with considerable ease. After sessions on attitudinal training, the class was nervous and eager to improve their English and communication skills. They were nervous because they were expected to read out and make speeches in English. They were eager because they were looking forward to the practical classes that would lead to their ‘upvaluation’ after being passive recipients of lectures on motivation and character. At Mrs Batra’s, soft skills, amongst other things, involved pronunciation techniques, lessons in business English and public speaking. The class on pronunciation began with Mrs Batra stressing the importance of reading newspapers, which would facilitate conversations at get-togethers and parties. Mrs Batra began the class by writing down words and asked all of us to pronounce them individually. Mrs Batra told the class that it was not ‘jio-graphy’ or ‘tech-know-lawgy’ or ‘wa-tturr’ but ‘jaw-graphy’, ‘tech-­ naw-­lugy’ and ‘wha-ta’. Mrs Batra stated that our English should not be spoken with a desi pronunciation. That is, there should not be a trace of the vernacular. Mrs Batra passed a book and instructed us to read a paragraph each. She asked us to pay special attention to the intonation of our speech and enunciate every word. Lokesh, a civil service aspirant, had the most trying time. Lokesh came from the state-classified OBC category and had completed his graduation from Delhi University. In the introductory class, Lokesh had stated that he was at Mrs Batra’s to improve his communication skills since he thought his speech was unclear. Mrs Batra made Lokesh repeat his sentences several times as he read them out. She first started by asking him to not hunch while reading. Mrs Batra informed the class that a straight posture helped to project and throw their voice to the room. Then, Mrs Batra made Lokesh pause between each word. According to Mrs Batra, Lokesh’s words were all “strung together” when he spoke Hindi and English. Additionally, he did not enunciate his words, and his pronunciation was too desi. “Di-greej doesn’t exist, Lokesh. It is dig-reez”. She asked him to “feel the

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consonants” and each syllable, as the words rolled off his tongue. She instructed all of us to not speak English with our mother tongue with the motto, “Correct the pronunciation and lose the accent” (Pronunciation ko sudhaarna hai, accent ko udaana hai). In the world of communication skills, this is referred to as the Mother Tongue Influence (MTI). MTI refers to the ways in which our mother tongue influences the way we speak English. It is revealed through a certain set of signifiers and little sounds that are carried over to English. Lokesh, on his part, did not look deflated at being corrected many times. In one of our practice sessions, while we were trying to pronounce the often-mispronounced words like ‘almond’, ‘breeze’, ‘please’, ‘façade’, Lokesh confided in me that the initial feeling of being self-conscious in front of everyone had disappeared when he realised that the class with Mrs Batra meant well and was only trying to help him. For Lokesh, the PD class was the only place where somebody had made the effort to teach him as opposed to sniggering at his imperfect pronunciations or was impatient with his unclear sentences. The pronunciation class marked the beginning of a set of four classes that were dedicated to improving our communication skills. Mrs Batra began her lecture by stating that most organisations while recruiting new employees cited communication skills as the single most important factor in choosing managers. For effective verbal communication, we were also asked to pay special attention to our body language and intonation. For instance, in a particular role-play where we were taught polite speech when dealing with customers, Mrs Batra remarked that I needed to make more eye contact and smile, so that I looked approachable. Similarly, my team partner, Aanchal, an air hostess aspirant, had to practice a falling intonation as her voice was high-pitched. According to Mrs Batra, it would not bode well with a career in hospitality. The next aspect of communication skills was to effectively communicate without causing confusion and misinterpretation. According to Mrs Batra, the messages needed to be short and succinct. To drive home her point, she engaged the class in a game of geometrical Pictionary. The class was divided into two teams. Each team member had to describe an object in geometric terms using only four sentences. The first round was oddly frustrating for everyone except Sandeep, who managed to give short instructions going beyond squares, rectangles and circles, invoking the often-forgotten shapes of geometry involving trapezium, cylinder, sphere and parallelogram. Only Sandeep successfully managed to make two of us

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draw a chair and a pair of scissors in four sentences in the first round. The game was illuminating for everyone in terms of giving precise messages, especially Lokesh who spoke slowly and tried enunciating clearly for his teammate who was drawing. Alongside, we were also asked to “stylise” our English by expanding our lexical resources by using “better” synonyms for the same word. Thus, when it came to expressing our likes, we were encouraged to start our sentences with ‘I am a big fan of…’ or ‘I adore…’. We were also asked to be “stylish” in our replies. For instance, if somebody asked us what our upcoming weekend plans were going to be, it was preferable to say, ‘I am going to catch up with my friends’ over the tame ‘I am going to meet my friends’. At the same time, through role plays, we attempted to infuse our vocabulary with ‘cool’ words that would improve our language skills. Thus, we devised scenarios where we used words like ‘chill’, ‘awesome’ and ‘dude’ in our conversations. We were taught to pay special attention and notice whenever “high calibre words” like ‘imperative’, ‘succinct’ and ’stimulus’ were used along with idiomatic phrases like ‘burn the bridge’ or ‘right off the bat’. Thus, speaking was marked both as a social activity and a specialised communication skill that had to be deployed depending on our context (Cameron, 2000). There were a certain set of responses that we all had to master and practise at regular intervals throughout the course. By the end of the PD course, most of the students had ready responses when it came to situations like complimenting the chef/cook (“the food was delicious/ mesmerising/amazing”), making small talk in a gathering (“do you like to read books/sing?”) and giving a basic introduction when it came to public speaking. The discourse at Mrs Batra’s was that of constantly emphasising that soft skills were life skills. Soft skills, for Mrs Batra, did not have a shelf life and were deemed equally useful in maintaining our personal relationships. Mrs Batra was also mindful that not everybody in the class was gearing to be market-ready and secure employment. In my interactions with Mrs Batra, she regarded soft skills as a desirable skill that would impart confidence. This confidence, for Mrs Batra, was associated with wanting to access places of leisure and consumption that might have been intimidating, speak up decisively and respectfully in family matters or become popular in college by learning how to speak well and improve their body language from PD classes.

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Savitha Suresh Babu (2020), in her work on personality development camps organised by anti-caste activists for Bahujan students, argues that learning confidence is a political act in a context where it is caste capital that shapes personality and self-worth. In stark contrast, the PD class at Mrs Batra’s refrained from discussing systemic structures of power that caused inequalities and discriminations and, instead, chose to focus on individual solutions. Individual solutions in the form of soft skills were important when it came to appearing for job interviews and giving presentations, but for Mrs Batra, it also worked just as effectively with difficult personal equations. Contrary to the literature on soft skills and their relationship with the workplace (Urciuoli, 2008, 2019; Allan, 2016), the PD class marketed soft skills as a skill that was essential for personal growth and development beyond employment. Thus, the PD class was marketed as a space that was dedicated to fashioning modern selves—the English-speaking aspirational youth using their time productively to ‘upvalue’ themselves. In fact, at Mrs Batra’s, the notion of the modern self is broken down into specific practices. Linguistically speaking, English is to be mastered at the level of fluency and colloquialism. Thus, one must know the “high calibre words” like ‘succinct’ and ‘imperative’ and, at the same time, be adept at using informal and colloquial words like ‘awesome’ and ‘cool’. Grooming The PD course concluded with sessions on grooming, which included hygiene, clothing, deportment and table manners. As much as soft skills were necessary, our appearance could not be neglected at any cost. The body, for Mrs Batra, was like a machine that needed constant servicing and maintenance. The men in the class were asked to keep their beards well-­ trimmed and their hair neat and short. The men’s grooming included a fleeting discussion of wearing subtle perfumes and what constituted appropriate accessories like matching  belts, cufflinks and watches. The class was discouraged from wearing bright and bold colours for formal events. Mrs Batra added that these instructions must be remembered while appearing for job interviews, since 98 per cent of the decisions were taken after people appraised our clothes. To correct our sartorial choices, we were asked to invest in well-tailored clothing that would accentuate our figure and minimise our “variations”. This generated considerable interest in the class where students asked Mrs

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Batra to actively give them tips. Apart from suggesting possible places, colours and fabrics to shop for, Mrs Batra also handed practical “hacks” to all of us. For instance, people on the heavier side were discouraged from wearing horizontal stripes, and shorter people were instructed to buy high-waisted bottom wear to create the illusion of longer legs and heels, if you were a woman. Following this, Mrs Batra proceeded to correct our posture by pointing out our gait and walking speed: “Do not slouch, bare your shoulders, walk straight, do not swing your hands but do not be very stiff, do not drag your feet, keep your chin high…”. We practised our posture and our walks every day in front of a full-length mirror till we got it right. Mrs Batra also shook everyone’s hands to check their grips. We learned that a good handshake was one that was not clasped tightly, and neither should it be slippery nor flaccid for the other person. For Mrs Batra, table manners and general etiquette constituted the finishing touches of personality development. By finishing touches, she did not want us to mistake them as inconsequential but as techniques that would go a long way in consolidating our first impressions. The session on table manners over Chinese cuisine was one of the quietest classes. For the first time, the class was visibly self-conscious, with people making minimal eye contact. Many frowned in concentration as they practised holding the fork gently and not looking like they were clutching it. As we silently ate, Mrs Batra advised us not to “bob” as we ate. The fork had to come to our mouth and not the other way around. One mildly exasperated student asked Mrs Batra as to why it was necessary to use all the “equipment” when one could simply eat with their hands. Mrs Batra responded that it was very well to eat with hands when one was home, but in a formal setting, it reflected a lack of etiquette and “exposure” on our part unless we were eating bread. Teaching table manners was Mrs Batra’s way of familiarising us with global culture. Bodywork is deemed crucial by PD trainers to embody a globally familiar disposition. Notwithstanding the larger history of grooming that focussed on women and the inculcation of ladylike behaviour and social graces, aesthetic labour in the context of the service sector requires disproportionate effort, time and care from women where practices of femininity must be learnt and performed (Kikon & Karlsson, 2020; Maitra & Maitra, 2018; Otis, 2016). The disproportion, in the everyday context of grooming, was visible in two instances: firstly, when the category of ‘un-groomed’ was invoked, which will be elaborated on in the subsequent paragraphs,

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and secondly, when a separate session was taken by Mrs Batra on feminine deportment. Women had to be distinct from men and tomboys, and thus we were taught how to sit with our knees crossed, hands on our lap and body leaning slightly to one side. Before going on dates, we were advised to try our outfits sitting down to see if they were riding up. Mrs Batra also encouraged us to always wear heels as it would not only make us look taller but also would add a swing to our hips. To look professional, the women were advised to not overdo their make-up, to not wear extra revealing clothes and to smile politely, much like the training women-employees receive in the service industry (Freeman, 2000). Mrs Batra also arranged for a make­up artist who taught the women basics of make-up and different hairstyles.  he Category of the ‘Ungroomed’ T One of the recurring tropes in class was the category of behenji. According to Mrs Batra, people did not call someone a behenji because of their face, but because of their clothes and hair. Thus, appearance was the deal breaker, more significantly for women. Literally speaking, behenji is a respectful term. Behen means sister in Hindi, and the ji is used as a suffix denoting respect and politeness. Several students at Mrs Batra’s referred to a behenji as someone who could be recognised by her outfit of salwar kameez and oily hair. But not everyone agreed. Some said that a behenji was a woman who held conservative views, loved to gossip and was nosy, thereby lacking good etiquette. Behenji seemed both visual and attitudinal. During my fieldwork interviews when I asked women about the term, they unanimously said that they would take serious umbrage if they were addressed as behenji. The men in the spoken English and PD classes said that they had called women behenji specifically to annoy them. Thus, behenji is an amorphous yet pointed term producing distinctions and affective value. It carries with it a sense of insult for urbane women, reflecting a lack of etiquette, polish and cultural capital. Behenji, in the Indian political context, is most notably associated with Mayawati, the Dalit ex-­ chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. While Mayawati as behenji in her salwar kameez, cropped hair and designer handbags embodied upward mobility for Dalits in Indian politics,5 the behenji in the PD class implied an ungroomed woman.

5

 See Ajoy Bose’s Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati (2008).

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The discourse of behenji was not limited to Mrs Batra’s. It is a category that was invoked in other grooming schools as well. It is important to understand that behenji, be it used in the grooming classes or by the English-speaking upper-caste, upper-class media in India to criticise Mayawati’s opulence, is coming from an upper-caste discourse of what constitutes a polished and modern self. The grooming teachers I encountered in Delhi were all upper-caste women, engaged in breaking down a polished and modern self into teachable practices of language, etiquette and appearance. Thus, in a PD class, which was about producing modern selves, looking like a behenji visually and attitudinally was incongruent with being modern. The “non-modern” behenji, as understood by the PD class in Delhi, could be taught and trained to look seemingly modern. The PD institutes market themselves as sites that would enable this journey internally and visually. That is, our physical appearance, along with our soft skills and etiquette, would fashion our modern self. Despite many sessions that focus on attitudinal training, character building and the development of emotional intelligence, there is a significant onus placed on one’s appearance. The “finishing touches” as they were referred to by Mrs Batra, as dressing, etiquette and table manners, are the sessions that made the students most alert after their lessons in communication. The mild discomfort and feeling conscious at handling cutlery and the many questions about clothing and make-up can be summed up by one of Mrs Batra’s often repeated dictums during the grooming sessions: “What is visible will get sold” (jo dikhta hai, wohi bikta hai). That is, in order to fit the requirements of the job market and spaces of a particular urban fashion sensibility, it is important to groom one’s physical appearances accordingly and conform to the reigning visuality of what is supposedly modern and, subsequently, global. A telling acronym of BTM or Behenji turned Mod that I heard in a separate context during my fieldwork was another refrain often teasingly employed by the youth to mark a transformation from an earlier behenji status to a modern woman. ‘Mod’ is a shorthand for modern. BTM was more insulting for young women because it was used to ridicule those who seemed to be trying too hard but were failing to look ‘effortlessly modern’. Thus, it seemed that grooming rested on a fine balance between looking neither like a behenji nor a BTM. The PD class, for my respondents, was supposed to be a space that would teach them to navigate and balance different spaces and tropes.

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The PD classes in Delhi have emerged as sites that produce a version of the modern self. The modern here is narrowly defined by the acquisition of English, soft skills and appearance that are decidedly not that of a behenji, who will be able to navigate the global culture of workplace and leisure. Modernity, eminently consumable, is measured and judged via dispositions and appearances. The everyday articulations of modernity are found in the showcasing of a personality. At the same time, by creating modules for personality development where personality is broken down, communicated and transferred pedagogically, PD teachers are actively engaged in producing a certain discourse of modernity and city life: as one that is globally familiar too. Thus, the active markers followed by the class rest on constantly aiming to upvalue themselves, speaking English with “style” and not overdoing it like a BTM. In Mrs Batra’s class of twelve, four of my respondents were there because campus placements and job interviews were about to begin, and hence, there was an urgency to polish their soft skills. Seven of my respondents were at the PD class on the insistence of their parents, who would rather that they learnt something useful from the classes than just while away their time. They were unsure of their ambitions and hoped that the PD classes might help them aspire by creating the environment (mahaul) that they lacked at home. Generally, the PD classes were considered an investment for the future. Contrary to the assumptions of PD classes producing enterprising subjects (McGuire, 2013), the students were often confused and ambivalent about their aspirations. However, they were eager to speak English and look better to access the new spaces of leisure and consumption like shopping malls and coffee shops. What was also striking was that the students found the classes fun once they took a more practical turn, like lessons in communication skills and deportment. Despite the ungroomed/non-modern foil of youth in the form of behenji and a separate session on feminine deportment, the classes were not considered gendered by the students. The men and women felt that grooming, as a domain of women, was a remnant of the past and that, today, everybody, including men, had to be groomed. In fact, the ripple of eagerness in the class when we practised deportment or spoke about sartorial choices was an indication that grooming was fun and pleasurable. The students felt that such lessons made them more confident when it came to accessing spaces and people that had hitherto intimidated them.

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Conclusion This chapter was an attempt to demonstrate what constitutes the fashioning of a young modern self in the urban city of Delhi. One of the ways of learning how to be a modern self was by enrolling in a PD class. The PD classes with their focus on attitudinal training, communication skills and grooming are successfully able to break down the modern self into a series of visual and teachable material, provided the youth had the resources to access the PD classes. That is, attitudinal training in motivation and ‘upvaluation’ is not enough. The ‘upvaluation’ as being an aspirational modern self must also be demonstrated via appearance. Thus, the lessons in English focus on linguistic dexterity and also voice modulation, tonality and pronunciation. This is then concluded by a session on deportment, table manners and make-up. At the same time, the PD classes are also producing the discourse of a visually consumable modern self. That is, not only are the PD classes a site that produces the modern subject, but they are simultaneously deciding the discourse that constitutes the specific practices of the modern self. It is also important to remember, on the one hand, the PD class ends up being a social space for young people to hang out while they have fun with the session, but, on the other hand, with a discourse of lacks, lifelong learning and ‘upvaluation’, it also generates a cycle of people joining one class after another to fulfil the requirements of a good life. For instance, Mrs Batra mentioned students who have joined other classes like chocolate-­ making workshops, spoken English classes and make-up tutorials to fulfil their journey to arrive at a modern and globally familiar self. In the case of Lokesh, who cleared his interviews and joined the revenue services, he credited the PD classes for improving his soft skills. Thus, what the PD classes are offering are visible ways of being socially mobile, with an aspiration for acquiring social and cultural capital. They are being re-fashioned as modern young urban subjects. In this way, young people also re-fashion what it means to be modern in India today, and thereby new meanings are being offered about the practices of what it means to be a modern self.

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CHAPTER 10

“Nobody Wants to Be the Behenji-Type”: Young People Managing Romance, Work and Violence in the Urban Slums of Kolkata Kabita Chakraborty

Introduction Youth culture in a modernising India is witnessing a slow yet steady shift in young people’s intimate lives, particularly in heterosexual relationships (Netting, 2010; Donner, 2008; Mody, 2008; Kapur, 2010; Patel, 2010; Trivedi, 2014). For many young people in the bustees, an important way to be modern is to gain premarital romantic experience. Across class, ethnic and religious communities, young people in the slums participate in finding one’s own partner (which may or may not lead to marriage) in different ways. While self-directed marriages are becoming more common, overt dating and romance continues to be unacceptable (Chakraborty, 2016b, Chakraborty & Sen, 2020). Societal stigma surrounding

K. Chakraborty (*) Children, Childhood and Youth Program, York University, Toronto, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_10

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heterosexual premarital relationships results in young people taking risks and secretly engaging in romance. Research on the complexities of marriage in India is rich and diverse (Allendorf, 2013, 2017; Allendorf & Pandian, 2016; Kapur, 2010; Grover, 2017). Young people’s premarital relationships, in contrast, have not been at the forefront of research on intimacy in India. This is most likely due to the secrecy of much of young people’s premarital romantic world. In a rapidly globalising India, secret premarital relationships often exist in cultures that are suspicious, or outright hostile, to such coupling. In the bustees (urban slum communities) where I conduct my research, there is significant cultural resistance to independent romance (Chakraborty, 2016a). Further complicating this discouragement is the conservative culture of purdah practised by many in these Muslim-­ dominated slums. The expectation of purdah dominates young people’s experience of public life, and sometimes private life as well. Purdah is the separation of men and women in public and private spaces, and in the bustees we notice that boys and men can be seen everywhere. They are hanging out in the streets, shopping and working in public places. Young women are less visible, as purdah culture sees them making use of the gullys or backend laneways. In these spaces, we find them travelling across the community, meeting up with friends, playing and doing household tasks like washing. When girls and young women are in public, they often take the niqab or burqa to keep purdah and do not spend a lot of time hanging out like boys do in public. Purdah makes it difficult for young people to conduct mixed-sex relationships, including friendships, in public. The scrutiny of young people’s movements and behaviours is gendered as it is girls and young women who are highly monitored. Their clothing choices, associations and travel routes are scrutinised by family and community members. In this space, letter-writing, text messages and phone calls, as well as secret meetups and group dating excursions, all help to create and maintain romantic relationships. In this chapter, I review young people’s understanding of modern relationships, which emphasise the importance of obtaining premarital romantic experience, despite social stigma. Young people are willing to take risks to have such experiences, as these romantic relationships are one way to participate in a “modern” youth culture. Like many cities across India, Kolkata has been in a process of rebranding since economic liberalisation. It has built up many public spaces to facilitate the leisure and consumption possibilities sought by a growing middle class. But like

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Bradbury and Sen’s 2020 special issue about the Kolkata details, the city itself still “bears a heavy burden of representation” (Bradbury & Sen, 2020, p.  427)—that it is a city of slums. That in the shadows of other conservative cities like Hyderabad, it remains a stagnant former capital with limited economic outlook. While Kolkata might have an image problem (Hutnyk, 1996), by focusing on girls and young women who yearn for romance, I show the city on its “human scale, populating its street corners, peripheral neighbourhoods and derelict spaces” (Bradbury & Sen, 2020, p. 427). Many girls and young women in the slums are eager to break free into public places and participate in public life through a variety of avenues, including employment, leisure and consumption. These spaces are hardly democratic, and my participants share how public access to “cool” urban venues is yet another obstacle in their quest to participate in a modern youth culture.

Methodology The data presented in this chapter have been collected over two projects[i]; both projects are situated in the bustees of Kolkata, India, where I have been conducting longitudinal ethnographic and qualitative research on youth culture since 2003. My research focus has been to capture how changes in youth culture occur on the ground. Over the past 17 years, I have been able to show the importance of Bollywood culture in informing young people’s life trajectories (see Chakraborty, 2016a). I have also documented how complicated young people’s relationships can be (e.g. 2015), as well as explored the nuances of violence and mixed-sex interactions (Chakraborty, 2016b; Chakraborty & Sen, 2020). The bustees are characterised by a majority Muslim population of low socio-economic status; they house pockets of Christian and Hindu populations as well. Bustees comprise over 2.5 square kilometres of mixed-use settlements, including heavy industries, like tanneries and automotive shops, and family housing, mostly single-room bustee homes which usually share a wall. Surrounding the community are railway tracks, a freeway and a large garbage dump. With a population of well over 300,000 people, as a whole it is the largest urban slum in Kolkata. But like many large slum communities, smaller neighbourhoods exist in this large space. One of the neighbourhoods is an established community which has mostly tenanted and legal homes, housing second- and third-generation slum dwellers. Tenanted homes allow for much stronger political representation, and this results in more secure

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living conditions. Young people from this community have greater social status than the adjacent neighbourhood. This second site comprises many untenanted and illegal squatter settlements and large factories, in addition to tenanted bustees. The jhupris are often situated on undesirable land, such as on the railway itself, or near open sewage canals. Young people here can be first-generation migrants from rural India and have less established social networks in the city, but we also see that a second generation of families can live in kacha (unfinished) homes. For this chapter, I draw on research conducted with 25 Muslim girls and young women between 14 and 24 years old, who are unmarried. This age range and marital context represents both cultural and legal understanding of “youth” (NYP, 2014) and “child” (UNCRC, 1989) in India. Thus, there is an overlap in terminology throughout my research (for example “young women” and “girls”), which demonstrates the social construction of childhood. Young people in my work are school-going and/ or in various stages of un/employment. The data presented in the chapter are youth-centred; scholars within children’s studies who use child-­centred frameworks make room for children and youth to participate by prioritising participatory methods of voice, art, words, images and movement (Punch, 2002; Ennew, 2010). I want to stress that it is very difficult to explore aspirations and lived realities of romance and violence within romantic relationships, without having rapport with the community. Even with a good rapport, new participants in my projects spend months presenting a very standard and homogenised student identity. For any researcher mapping youth modernities in India, the “I want to do well in my studies” discourse will be a fixture in data collection. Moving into more subversive lived experiences requires the trust of the participants, and a commitment to a research ethics that, in my field site, prioritises anonymity and confidentiality. In the bustees, to have a romantic relationship revealed in public, particularly if you are a girl, can carry severe risks such as violence at the hands of family members who are overly concerned with the family izzat (honour). Families can hastily marry off uncooperative girls and boys who bring shame to the family, and I have known dozens of young people who have experienced this over the years. Worse still, two of the girls I have worked with over the years have been murdered at the hands of their family members for “shaming the family”. Presenting data on youth romance culture, therefore, can only be done using strict anonymity and confidentiality

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protocols, including the changing of all names, places and identifying markers that have the potential to reveal the field site.

Contextualising Youth Romance Culture In a globalising India, scholars have documented India’s paradoxical attitude towards changes in youth culture, particularly in relation to intimate relations. On the one hand, globalisation has facilitated the independent movement of young people towards work and schooling, especially within urban spaces (Chakraborty, 2016a). The mixing of youth at quasi-­democratic college campuses, shopping centres and multinational office spaces is glorified in Bollywood films (Phadke et al., 2011; Sinha, 2013), public discourse (Lukose, 2005) and policy (Mody, 2008) and is utilised as an example of India’s modernity, with youth positioned as key players in the modernisation of the nation (Jeffrey, 2010). On the flip side, gender, cultural and social norms across class, ethnic and religious communities remain steadfast in many ways. Both at the policy level and on-the-ground, public discourses of “keeping our culture” and “Indian values” pepper any discussion of a changing youth culture. Marriage is a site of adult-child tension throughout India. Entering an arranged marriage allows both young men and women to maintain izzat (personal and family), and arranged marriage actors are often discussed as “good” boys and girls within adult circles. They are youth who help to maintain collective ideological practices, and can also help to reinforce an Indian patriarchy that continues to favour working men, even in places where employment opportunities are poor, as Grover’s work has discussed in detail the slums of Delhi (Grover, 2017). Pursuing one’s own marriage, in particular where there is love and romance before marriage, can be seen as breaking the rules in many societies across India. Many social scientists, however, have documented strong evidence of youth moving away from, or desiring to move away from, arranged marriages and towards love marriages which include inter-­culture and inter-caste marriages (Netting, 2010; Donner, 2008; Mody, 2008; Kapur, 2010; Patel, 2010; Trivedi, 2014). Indeed, this shift is one of the defining characteristics of a modernising youth culture in India (Chakraborty, 2016a). In discussing premarital relationships, romance and love marriages, it is important to recognise the complexities of all relationships. As Osella argues, “many commonly drawn oppositions: ‘love’ versus ‘arranged’; ‘companionate’ versus ‘economic-pragmatic’; ‘till

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death do us part’ versus ‘easy divorce’, are representational fictions requiring sharp critique” (Osella, 2012, p.  241), particularly in India where there are many attempts at blending different relationship styles (Mody, 2008). Without a doubt, growing acceptance of marrying for love within the framework of gaining family support prior to marriage is now much more tolerated than even one generation ago (Allendorf & Pandian, 2016). This process is facilitated by what many actors across the nation argue as examples of “modern” behaviours. For example, family and community support for a young person “going out with friends”, “meeting up with colleagues” and “studying at college” (Nakassis, 2013). These examples of independent mobility are rooted in a globalising Asia, where markers of modern middle-class status, including extended higher education, migration for employment and increased travel and leisure activities, are expanding. These mobilities are some of the much discussed examples of a “modern” and “shining” India used in public discourse. In some families, this mobility and associated relationships become code for mixed-sex meetups, with the potential (but often not explicit acknowledgement) of seeking one’s own marital partner; in other families, this is not the case (for example Patel, 2010). Independent romantic dating continues to be a source of deep social stigma, often associated with loose sexual morals (Aengst, 2014; Alexander et al., 2007). Moving between multiple dating partners is even less acceptable. Lack of communication on matters related to intimacy within family further fuels distrust and continues to foster secret relationships (Abraham, 2001). Unpacking these changing relationships on the ground, then, shows us that being a successful modern young person is to understand the constant moving terrain of “modern” and “traditional” (often discussed as sanskriti) morals and values—and the risks associated with disrespecting culture. It also means one must inherently understand which morals and values are to be embraced, and those to be rejected. Accepting these binaries, then, is another important way young people experience being a modern young person.

“Nobody Wants to Be the Behenji-Type” To understand what it means to be a modern young person in India, we must listen to young people’s own understanding of modernity and make space for grey areas and contradictions to emerge. In the bustees, what I

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have been hearing over the last one and a half decades is that girls and young women understand being modern as one’s ability to direct their own life course. In a culture with a history of arranged marriages, a critical lynchpin to being modern is one’s interpersonal relationships with the opposite sex. These include friendships, colleagues and partners. Many young people view premarital relationships and marriage as a vehicle to being modern. To explain this, I review the experiences of a handful of young people in the community and draw extensively on interviews with one young woman in particular, Raftab. Since mixed-sex socialising is limited and controlled due to purdah, even limited interactions between sexes leads to feelings being formed, “he said he saw me walking to tuitions for a week, and fell in love with me” (Zeenat, female 14, August 2016). Girls and young women have to negotiate a multitude of risks to make relationships happen, as Zeenat explains, I am lucky that my parents trust me and my school friend with going to tuitions without an escort. So we used this time to meet (boyfriends) at (local shopping centre), but it involves a lot of (risk) management, first to make sure you aren’t followed, then changing (into fashion clothes), then making sure you don’t bump into someone you know at the mall. (Zeenat, female 14, August 2016)

Zeenat reminds us that despite of avenues to participate in certain aspects of modern youth culture (fashion, leisure, consumption, education), all participation involves constant risk-taking. As Beck (1992, p. 87) has argued, risks occur when there is “a social surge of individualisation [and] at the same time the relations of inequality remain stable”. When girls enact their desires to participate in a modern youth culture, they challenge the communal traditions of Indian patriarchal society, which expect girls to behave in a particular way. Girls thus place themselves in danger by breaching these normative gender codes that their families and society impose. If girls and young people are successful in managing risks, they use freedoms associated with education, including tuition classes and schooling times, to secretly meet up with partners. As a result, spaces like shopping centres and their food courts have been at the centre of most romance-building. The young people I work with absolutely loved going to shopping centres and have explicitly discussed these as places where

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modern youth are able to have “fun” and “relax” (Pinki, female, April 2016). Lukose (2005, p. 931) reminds us that “marking experiences of pleasure, desire, and leisure becomes one lens through which to understand the differential relationship that young women and men have to globally-inflected consumer spaces”. Phadke et  al. (2011) caution us to remember, however, that while these spaces may look democratic, they are exclusionary. The commonplace of unwelcoming signs that caution young people against wearing their school uniform is a way that explicitly dissuades young people from using the space as a venue for leisure-only. I have also had the unpleasant experience of hanging out with young people when security guards have been called to enforce time limits and group-­ size limits at certain venues. These experiences have been hurtful to my participants, especially because young people felt targeted, “how come they didn’t ask others to leave” (Aasma, female 16, November 2016, after a group of us were removed from an accessories store). Despite the lip service of malls democratising public space, young poor people are often excluded from these meccas of youth culture. The exclusion of poor Muslim youth from the avenues of a modernising India is actually quite an accurate testament to the nation’s hostile relationship with the poor in general. Nonetheless, young people I work with secretly change into fashion tops and jeans in the mall washrooms, wear make-up which gets taken off before returning home and hang out with friends and boyfriends at the food court and not outside of the mall. These are distinct non-behenji behaviours, as Rinku explains, whos (who is) behenjitype is one tat (that is) not cool (in their behaviours) nd (and are) dressin (unfashionable) behenjitype (So) going to mall (and hanging out) wit frens bfens, havng job (with friends, boyfriends and having a job and) educaton, not just shaadi (and) babys. (Rinku, female 19, August 2021, Facebook Messenger)

For Rinku, a behenji is both uncool and regressive. It is not only her fashion and leisure which is uncool, but her intentions to “only” marry and have children that makes her uncool too. Rinku’s comment reminds us that mall-going itself is a fun pastime for all families in the slums, and participation in mall culture is not a signifier of being cool. Rather, the mixed-sex interactions and intentions of hanging out and romancing are viewed as cool. Here, it is helpful to draw on Lukose (2005, p. 931) who shows us that how youth “negotiate new globally-inflected spaces of

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consumption reveals these spaces to be structured by specifically post-­ colonial preoccupations about tradition and modernity” that have gendered consequences for girls and young women. Such participation is rewarded with the reputation of being “fun”, “cool” and “modern”. These meccas of youth culture, therefore, become what Maitra and Maitra (2018, p. 349) describe as a “seamless blending of various consumer bodies sharing the same standards of aesthetics, aspirations and social knowledge about commodities”. Bollywood also inspires many youth to take a multitude of risks to further mixed-sex socialising moments and turn them into full-fledged relationships. Bollywood glamorises Hindu middle- and upper-class youth being young and in love, and it is college-going that opens up possible transgressive lifestyles for girls in the slums. Bollywood hypes up the possibilities of “cool and modern life at college” (Mumtaz, female, January 2019), where young people attend music and sports festivals, join mixed-­ sex group activities and hang out together at canteens. Bollywood depicts college as a time for young people to use their new-found freedom of mobility, longer time away from home and the freedom of pocket money to “live their life” (Noor, female, 20, January 2018). College campuses are away from the prying eyes of community members and are important places to form romantic relationships. At college … you want meet friends, go to fests, have fun, like in the films…most girls here try to make the best of it. Nobody one wants to be the behenji-type at college, they try to go and just live their life there (at college). (Noor, female, 20, January 2018) I really want to do well here (at college) but I also want to enjoy this freedom (college-going) as much as I can…from school days watching films I dreamed of having fun at college so I didn’t want to sacrifice (fun times). (Yasmin, female, 19, January 2018)

For Mumtaz, college is a place to “try to be educated, try and be more modern than the previous generation” (Mumtaz, female 19, January 2019). Here, Mumtaz sees college education as a way for girls to “be more modern”. Young women’s college attendance has increased threefold since I started my fieldwork in 2003; young men’s college attendance, in contrast, is constrained by the pressure of having to work from a young age. College, however, is a privilege. Most young women I knew of who went to college had all, or part, of their college tuition sponsored by

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NGOs or other charitable organisations; “because I was on sponsorship, I just couldn’t do a lot of hanging out like my friends, because I didn’t want to jeopardise my funding” (Mumtaz, female, 19, January 2019). College-going is viewed with suspicion by other members of the community. I have written elsewhere that Bollywood hype around college can put female college-goers at risk. “For many young men in the bustees who have never even had the opportunity to step foot on a college campus, let alone do further studies, local college-going girls are a threat, and are viewed as such” (Chakraborty, 2016b, p.  9). These threats are underpinned by a sense of inequality for boys, as they are hurried into work in their teens. As a result, most of the college-educated youth in the slums are young women. While girls and young women are modernising their education portfolio and trying to make the most of college-going, boys look on from the sidelines. In the face of this exclusion, young men often use eve-teasing and other forms of sexual violence to reassert a dominant masculinity in a patriarchal slum. We see that young women’s college mobility can be met with episodes of eve-teasing, stalking and verbal and sexual harassment.

The “Dump n Dull” Type While most girls and young women relish college-going and secret romantic mall trips, there are young people who participated in college and leisure culture but did not engage in romantic relationships. To demonstrate this, I draw on my longitudinal work with Raftab. kabitadi plz Feb 2021 nikah So u r coming? Hes a C.A and nice (Raftab, female 24, WhatsApp communication, October 2020)

Raftab is one of my long-term research participants. I met her when she was 17, and for almost one decade she has been trying to avoid marriage. To achieve this, she concentrates on providing paid tuition classes for children and working at the local NGO we are both associated with. “By doing good in my work, having my work appreciated, I can actually continue work for longer and not have to marry” (Raftab, female, 22, January 2018). This strategy has indeed worked, as Raftab has been able to put off marriage until past age 25, which is quite unusual in the bustees. She is one

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of my rare participants who is happy to not have any premarital romance experience and was content to enter an arranged marriage from the onset. I never was interested in having a boyfriend, even in college days, it was just not something I ever wanted to do. I was happy to be on my own, and I was happy to work and just do my own thing. It was always my choice to live this way and I never felt lonely or upset about it … I always knew my family would give me an arranged marriage, I am not against marriage, I am not the “no marrying” type so don’t get me wrong. (Raftab, female, 22, January 2018)

I can only think of a handful of girls like Raftab, who explicitly do not want to obtain any premarital romance experience, and who have maintained this viewpoint up until adulthood. Even girls from incredibly conservative families with staunch no-romance views in childhood often end up having boyfriends, especially if they attend college. One of the reasons why this stance is so rare is because there is intense pressure within youth culture to participate in dating and romance. This pressure comes from peers, who can be judgmental about someone's preferences. Some scholars have shown that in urban spaces, a young person’s disengagement in premarital romance can result in the labels of “conservative”, “uncool” or “behenji”. In Iyer’s (2018) research with middle-class youth in Delhi, both girls and boys rejected traditional, mixed-sex interactions such as rakhi, or fictive kin relationships, in favour of “modern”, mixed-sex imaginings that had the potential to lead to romance. On the beaches of Kerala, scheduled caste boys forge their identity as “cool” participants in modern youth culture through independent romances with female Western tourists (Green & Scrase, 2017). Raftab admits that people have assumed that she is “the dump n dull type or conservative too much” (Raftab, female 25, WhatsApp communication, October 2020) because she has never had a boyfriend. This has never bothered Raftab because she is “secure in who I am and what I want” (Raftab, female 22, January 2018).

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A Changing Arranged Marriage Terrain: Love, Violence and Settling While Raftab may not participate in romance culture, by all other metrics, she was “cool”—she worked and made her own money, which she spent on fashionable accessories, and she generously treated her friends to cold coffees and cakes when they hang out at the mall. It was her lack of a boyfriend that signalled she was more “of the dump n dull type”. If a modern youth culture valorises premarital romance formed in spaces away from the prying eyes of the community, youth view traditional arranged marriages as a soft second option in the face of premarital failures. Uff didi I just cannot deal with this, they keep sending me these guys who I know just by their photos, they won’t let me work after marriage. They are from conservative families, what are they thinking? We cannot match, I cannot match with that kind of family. But these are the only ones that are left!! Either conservative, or some guy who is on a breakup, and both choices I just don’t want! You see this is the problem nowadays. It used to be so normal to have an arranged marriage, so all the guys would be normal like me. But now it’s either a last choice or the guy is very conservative. And they think I’m the behenji-type! I don’t want either … I don’t want some guy desperate because of some break-up, or mullah type (super conservative). (Raftab, female, 22, January 2018)

Raftab’s frustration that there are no “normal” guys left to have arranged marriages speaks to a rapidly changing marriage terrain. When I first started working in the field in 2003, the majority of marriages I knew were arranged marriages (Chakraborty, 2009, 2010). Love marriages, and elopements in particular, caused tensions, often leading to violence within families. In 2018, when I was speaking to Raftab, arranged marriages were in the minority. The contemporary discourses that exist about arranged marriages in youth circles suggest that these marriages are a “last hope or the final option one has in order to marry” (Raftab, female 22, January 2018). Since most young people in the community find their own partners, those available for arranged marriages can be perceived as “left over”. This is an astonishing shift in marriage culture in less than two generations, but the currents of this change have been shifting since the mid-­1990s, as discussed by Donner (2008).

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Young people in the bustees are also aware of how parents, despite their resistance to dating culture and mixed-sex friendships, are forced to change in this shifting landscape, as Madhu offers, Before, the parents were all like “oh you had a love marriage, what will people think”, and then they’d beat you for shaming them or something. Nowadays, as long as the match is at least equal, when your brother is beating you, the neighbours will come and say “don’t beat her! Let us just see how it goes, she is a good girl, the boy is good” so yeah, I can say adults are much more aware and … they are just more aware, I won’t say accepting, but aware. Madhu (female, 18, December 2017)

It is important to note that episodes of control, physical and emotional violence and restrictions are intertwined in adults’ support for love marriages. Young people accept that bouts of adult violence and restrictions— for example, restricting a girl from going to school or college, taking away her mobile phone, not allowing her to step out of the house—are part and parcel to eventually accepting one’s love marriage choice. Accepting the risks of violence is a virtue which allows young people to have modern love marriages. In theorising risk, Giddens (1992) emphasises that uncertainty is a key feature of late modernity. Some of these risks arise from the increasing doubt about “expert” opinions (Balagopalan, 2002, p. 430). Greater love marriages are occurring in the slum because adults are forced to acknowledge that the changing education, employment and mobility opportunities available for youth can make adults not as well equipped to finding a partner, as Farzana’s mother explains, “we don’t know that many college educated boys, and those are the boys that would fit her now because she has passed out of college and speaks English and is doing English tuitions, so that matching mind needs to be there” (Farzana’s mother, February 2016). Families are also worried about how highly educated girls would be accepted, as there have been several cases of violence caused by perceived disrespect “by boys who think that because the girl has gone to college she is thinking she is superior or talking back in the house” (Aamina, female, 20, June 2015). Thus, violence is accepted as a gendered condition of a modern life course. Bollywood further glamorises the trope of violence/eve-teasing/sexual harassment as a ticket to love. We find in the bustees that young people turn to extreme strategies of negotiating premarital relationship conflict.

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I heard of so many (peers) who have affairs, and that’s ok … then have an arranged marriage afterwards, actually that’s very normal. But sometimes you hear they can’t let go (of a former love) and it is so hard (for the new wife) in those times, especially if he continues to meet (the former love). (Raftab, female, 22, January 2018)

In Raftab’s example of a married partner meeting their ex-flame, she describes how this turned into stalking. In the bustees, various iterations of harm are used to send a message to a partner or family, and it is a common strategy for both young men and women in relationships. Language such as hurting oneself to “win back” a partner, to “punish” a partner, and to “prove” their love is normative, even after marriage. Self-harm in the bustees is an important way to gain the attention or sympathy of a lover. As Bhatia et al. (2006) detail, young women in India often turn to suicide and self-injury when faced with problems in their love lives. Their study of suicide in Delhi reveals that a disturbed love affair is the most common reason young women under the age of 30 kill themselves, usually by hanging themselves in the home. Self-harm differs from attempted suicide because there is no intention by the actor to take his/her life (Sidhartha & Jena, 2006). Violence in a relationship sits comfortably in the context of relationship formation within slum communities. My ongoing research on eve-teasing reveals that, depending on the context, young people look towards sexual harassment, stalking and catcalls as signs of interest from the opposite sex (Chakraborty & Sen, 2020). To be clear, this is gendered, with young women reading the eve-teasing acts of young men. Provided that eve-­ teasing is not physically violent and scary, there is much community apathy to this act. In Kerala, Osella and Osella (1998) describe how “tuning”, an exchange of dialogue, which can include disparaging comments about the girl and sexual innuendo, is used by male youth to break the normative gender boundaries (in the case of the bustees, of purdah) and initiate flirting. They correctly argue that “it is often difficult to tell whether a youth’s first remark is intended as harassment or as an opening (to flirting)” (Osella & Osella, 1998, p. 193). In the slums, many romances begin with eve-teasing, but how some eve-teasing ends in romance, while others turn to be read as harassment, is a grey area where consent, gender norms, attraction and patriarchal power collide. Thus, we can begin to understand how accepting the risk of violence exists in a larger framework of “doing” modern relationships.

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Young, Female, Worker The final aspect of modern youth relationships that I discuss here derives from Raftab’s own life experience. Raftab comes from a very poor household, and her parents separated when she was younger. Although her father continues to financially contribute to the family, it is Raftab’s meagre Rs 6000/month salary (approx. US$82), she and her mom manage to keep up with the daily challenges of life. The family has been lucky to have the support of a wealthy extended family member, who provides for their housing and all of Raftab’s past schooling. Her desire to work is one that comes out of the context of poverty, but also of a sense of wanting to be independent. “I always felt determined to provide for my mom and myself, because my father is not that dependable in a financial way. In some ways, I guess I felt that a boyfriend would disturb that (independence)”. For Raftab, engaging in premarital romance had the potential for her to lose focus on providing for her family, and thus she drew on her sense of responsibility to opt out of romance culture. “But that doesn’t mean that girls who are (in premarital) relationships are irresponsible, maybe they have a supportive boyfriend” (Raftab, female, 26, August 2021). Her comment reminds us that in a patriarchal slum where male control of women’s mobilities and income is a normative aspect of cultural practice, Raftab actively rejects having a boyfriend for fear that she may end up in a relationship where she would be the object of such control. This control is a normative part of all women’s lives, married and unmarried. “Some girls, when they marry the family knows right away, this is a working girl, she is modern and independent. Maybe after marriage they accept (she is working) or maybe not…but it (her employment) always becomes a big problem in her house. Anything goes wrong like there is less shopping (food or toiletries in the home) then it is because she is working, or she was a working girl (before marriage)” (Raftab, female, telephone conversation, August 2021). Similar to accepting the risks of violence in choosing one’s own marriage partner, or going to college, violence is accepted as a condition of modern changes in female employment trajectories and their working life. Within the bustees, Raftab is exceptional in her working life and desires for no premarital experience, but it is her desire to continue to work post-­ marriage that is highly transgressive (Romani, 2016). In the bustees, once the stress of poverty is addressed, women’s paid employment is considered

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to be unnecessary. But the world of work is changing, and Raftab is optimistic that she can continue to work, Here only poor ladies who are married work, adults don’t think you work because you like it, they think it’s because you’re poor … but I like it and I told (future husband) that I’d like to continue. He said he will discuss it with the family, but it should be okay. He also said in case for me to think of a new career. Luckily nowadays you can do other things like baking cakes and selling clothes from home, these are some jobs you can do from home and he said these are things I should consider just in case…and I think I will (consider them) but I prefer to continue with the NGO because I love it. Let’s see what happens. (Raftab, female, 25, telephone conversation, January 2021)

Raftab reminds us that women’s work that respects gender conventions and that maintains purdah can be considered acceptable work for middle-­ class married women. Although there is a lot of talk amongst young women in the slums of career aspirations, the patriarchal culture of the slums makes it incredibly challenging for girls and young women to participate in public paid work, as Sufia explains, I want to have some part-time job at the NGO like Raftab, or Shenaz or some other girls … I can’t even bring up the topic with my father. I tried so many times to ask my brother but he said “talk to father” and he already told me I can’t go outside of the house to work, that we aren’t that kind of family, as my brothers all work and he is still working. My boyfriend is equally unsupportive, he said he will give me pocket money, no need to work, girls have no need to work if the boys take care of you … this means Raftab has the trust of her family, she is lucky. (Sufia, female, 18, December 2017)

In Sufia’s example, male gatekeepers discourage her from getting a public job. When young women work in public, they challenge the norms of a successful woman as a house minder, and a successful man as an adequate provider (Biswas 2017). Home-based employment, which is hidden and can be exploitative, allows a family to maintain a public face of women being committed homemakers and men being dominant earners. It is unsurprising that Raftab’s fiancé thinks home-based work would be easier to sell to his family members. Interestingly, paid employment within the organised sector is one of the beacons of a “shining” India, one that government rhetoric is proud to remind other global players (Maitra &

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Maitra, 2018; Lukose, 2005). Despite this rhetoric, India’s female labour participation has decreased over the last two decades (Neff et al., 2012; Lahoti & Swaminathan, 2016). Moreover, this occurs as women’s education levels nationwide continue to increase (Klasen & Janneke, 2015). For most girls and young women in the bustee, the world of public work is an area of modernising India that they just cannot participate in. While many young women from lower economic classes across different cities enter retail and other public work arenas (see Maitra & Maitra, 2018), purdah culture and a preoccupation with izzat prevent girls from getting public paid employment in the Muslim bustees of Kolkata. “It is true, we can go to shopping centres, wear fashion clothes there and meet friends and boyfriends, but still cannot even dream of having a paid job like Raftab” (Sufia, female, 18, December 2017). Sufia reminds us that Indian cities are developing differently, and Muslim girls’ experiences of modernity are very different between states. In doing so, I work to “humanize a city that is often reduced to its political economy” (Bradbury & Sen, 2020, p. 431), and complicate public discourse of what it means to be a modern young person in India.

Conclusion Young people remind us that being “modern” is not black and white— one can be a modern young person in different ways and in different avenues of their life. While Raftab is a “behenji-type” for not being interested in premarital relationships, she is a modern wonder and an inspiration for girls who cannot find room in a patriarchal culture to pursue public paid work. In the bustees, modernity is not a zero-sum game. Raftab chooses not to participate in dating and romance culture and has never changed out of her niqab when at the mall. While her peers, like Sufia, choose to have boyfriends, paid work remains elusive to them. What unites both these groups of young people is that they make choices within the context of a patriarchal culture, governed by ideas of purdah and their acceptance of risk and violence. One major source of risk can be traced to globally changing social norms, such as traditional relationships between family, friends and partners (Beck, 1992). Risk is an embedded component of modern society, and as this chapter has shown, individuals are constantly engaged in assessing and managing risks in their participation within a modern youth culture in India.

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sion” (pp.  269–292). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­981-­ 4585-­91-­0_12-­1 Chakraborty, K., & Sen, D. (2020). Shymoli and the Unknown male: The city’s violent margins. Special Issue on Kolkata. Contemporary South Asia, 28(4), 472–484. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2020.1842862 Donner, H. (2008). Domestic Goddesses: Maternity, globalization and middle class identity in contemporary India. Ashgate. Ennew, J. (2010). The right to be properly researched: How to do rights-based scientific research with children. Knowing Children. Giddens, A. (1992). The transformation of intimacy: Sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. Polity. Green, B., Scrase, T., & Ganguly-Scrase, R. (2017). Beach boys do it too: Subculture and commoditised desire in a transnational tourist site in Kerala, South India. Asian Studies Review, 41(1), 99–116. Grover, S. (2017). Marriage, love, caste and kinship support: Lived experiences of the urban poor in India (2nd ed.). Social Science Press. Hutnyk, J. (1996). The rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, charity and the poverty of representation. Zed Books. Iyer, P. (2018). From Rakhi to romance: Negotiating ‘acceptable’ relationships in co-educational secondary schools in New Delhi, India. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 20(3), 306–320. Jeffrey, C. (2010). Timepass: Youth, class and the politics of waiting. Stanford University Press. Kapur, C. C. (2010). Rethinking courtship, marriage and divorce in an Indian call centre. In D. Mines & S. Lamb (Eds.), Everyday life in South Asia (pp. 50–61). Indiana University Press. Klasen, S., & Janneke, P. (2015). What explains the stagnation of female labor force participation in urban India? World Bank Policy Research Working Papers. https://doi.org/10.1596/1813-­9450-­7222. Lahoti, R., & Swaminathan, H. (2016). Economic development and women’s labor force participation in India. Feminist Economics, 22(2), 168–195. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2015.1066022 Lukose, R. (2005). Consuming globalization: Youth and gender in Kerala. Indian Journal of Social History, 38(4), 915–935. Maitra, S., & Maitra, S. (2018). Producing the aesthetic self: An analysis of aesthetic skill and labour in the organized retail industries in India. Journal of South Asian Development, 13(3), 337–357. Mody, P. (2008). The intimate state: Love marriage and the law in Delhi. Routledge. Nakassis, C.  V. (2013). Youth masculinity, ‘style’ and the peer group in Tamil Nadu, India. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 47(2), 245–269. https://doi. org/10.1177/0069966713482982

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National Youth Policy (NYP). (2014). Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, Government of India. New Delhi, India. Retrieved December 2020, from http://yas.nic.in/sites/default/files/NYP%20Brochure.pdf Neff, D. F., Sen, K., & Kling, V. (2012). The puzzling decline in rural women’s labor force participation in India: A re-examination. GIGA Working Paper No 196, May 2012, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2143122 or https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2143122 Netting, N. (2010). Marital ideoscapes in 21st-century India: Creative combinations of love and responsibility. Journal of Family Issues, 31(6), 707–726. Osella, C. (2012). Desires under reform: Contemporary reconfigurations of family, marriage, love and gendering in a transnational south Indian matrilineal Muslim community. Culture and Religion, 13(2), 241–264. https://doi. org/10.1080/14755610.2012.675508 Osella, C., & Osella, F. (1998). Friendship and flirting: Micro-politics in Kerala, South India. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(2), 189–206. Patel, R. (2010). Working the night shift: Women in India’s call center industry. Stanford University Press. Phadke, S., Khan, S., & Ranade, S. (2011). Why loiter? Women and risk on Mumbai streets. Penguin Books. Punch, S. (2002). Research with children: The same or different from research with adults? Childhood, 9(3), 321–341. Romani, S. (2016). Being NGO girls: Gender, subjectivities and everyday life in Kolkata. Gender, Place & Culture, 23(3), 365–380. https://doi.org/10.108 0/0966369X.2015.1013446 Sidhartha, T., & Jena, S. (2006). Suicidal behaviors in adolescents. Indian Journal of Pediatrics, 73, 783–788. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02790385 Sinha, S. (2013). Vernacular masculinity and politics of space in contemporary Bollywood cinema. Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 5(2), 131–145. SSHRC Insight Development Grant. (2014). Eve-Teasing: Young Women and Men Discuss Public Harassment in the Urban Slums of India. SSHRC Insight Grant. (2019). Extreme Love: Young People at the Intersection of Violence and Intimacy in Urban India. Trivedi, I. (2014). Love in India: Marriage and sexuality in the 21st century. Rupa Publications. UNCRC. (1989). United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, G.A. res. 44/25, annex, 44 U.N.  GAOR Supp. (No. 49) at 167, U.N.  Doc. A/44/49 (1989), entered into force September 2 1990. /C/93/Add.5 of 16 July 2003.

CHAPTER 11

Producing Modern Subjects of Change: Reeducation and Empowerment for Migrant Working Children in Bangalore Valentina Glockner

During the past decades, across countries of the so-called Global South, children have been placed at the center of political action and turned into “key actors” in the agendas of national and international social movements and organizations that seek the advancement of local and global democratic governance. It is often the case that in such interventions, the notion of modernity—although interpreted in variable ways—tends to play a central role, especially when the target audience is made up of rural, indigenous, disadvantaged, “vulnerable,” migrant, or working-class populations. As we will see, the empowerment and participation of children, especially of “marginalized” children, have also become crucial to the endeavor of democratization and modernization. However, childhood studies have demonstrated the importance of placing under a critical lens the promotion of childhood as a space of purity and apolitical innocence

V. Glockner (*) Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas (DIE), CINVESTAV, Mexico City, Mexico © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_11

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and turning children’s “voices” into a natural symbol of the modern commitment to the values of freedom, democracy, and equity (James, 2007). In this chapter, I will engage with the notion of modernity by exploring some of the discourses, practices, and technologies deployed by grassroots and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working for the welfare and well-being of migrant working children in the city of Bangalore, in southern India. It is based on an ethnographic analysis of the experiences of internally displaced migrant child laborers who travel along with their families from rural Karnataka and Tamil Nadu to work as informal and self-employed recyclable waste collectors on the streets of Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka. It seeks to reflect on some of the contradictions and challenges involved in working with a population that, despite being marginalized from the benefits of economic development and urban modernization, performs informal jobs and services that are central to both processes of modernization and capital accumulation in a city characterized by its economic growth and modernization. Following the work of Inda (2008), I will engage with the idea of modernity from an anthropological perspective. That is, not as an abstract object of study, but as an ethnographic phenomenon that complicates and opens new understandings of social interaction in specific social and political contexts. The aim of the chapter is, therefore, not to discuss the multiple ways in which modernity has come to be interpreted in social theory and/or anthropological discourse, but to analyze some of its concrete and contemporary meanings by unpacking the ways in which it is conceived, performed, and (re)produced in a specific context. Modernity is a particularly useful conceptual tool to the extent that it helps us understand the reasons why grassroots organizations and NGOs in India, and in other parts of the so-called Global South, place such an emphasis on the political activities of children, and the promotion of participation and empowerment as engines of individual and collective change. Modernity, I will argue, works both as a conceptual framework to interpret the social and political context in which NGOs exercise their agendas, and as a rationale for seeking the transformation of society through the figure of the child as an ideal citizen-subject. As an ethnographic tool, and a site of anthropological interrogation (Inda, 2008; Appadurai, 1996), the notion of modernity allows us to understand why the crafting and molding of new political and moral child-subjectivities, the reeducation and resocialization of “vulnerable” children, and the rejection of “traditional”/indigenous and/or vernacular ideals and

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practices are so central to the project of democracy, political change, and governance. Such processes are challenging and transforming the very notions of the child, childhood, and the ideal citizen in the context of a highly unequal economic order, where migrant/working children constitute both fundamental economic assets and strong moral and political standpoints. This chapter is based on data gathered during different field visits to Bangalore during the period 2010–2012 for my doctoral dissertation (Glockner, 2014), with the invaluable collaboration and help from several activists, NGOs, and local communities.1 Although the ethnographic data are a decade old, they refer to a moment in Bangalore’s development that allows us to put into dialogue the work of NGOs, the concept of modernity, and what the editors of this book have called “the everyday urban.” It is precisely around this period that it was possible to identify a key change in the ways in which migrant communities get inserted, built, and inhabit the city, as well as in how they deal with the economic, political, and social life of Bangalore. That is, the ongoing process in which migrant communities went from settling in large, relatively static communities (slums) that housed a great diversity of migrant population, located in central areas of the city, to settling in small, highly flexible, and mobile communities located on the sprawling outskirts of the city. Such smaller and mobile “slums”—which I’ve called “flexible slums” (Glockner, 2015)—were mostly made up of about 20–50 families sharing a common geographical origin. Perhaps more importantly, they shared the same contractor or intermediary, who encouraged them to migrate to the city by guaranteeing them employment as construction workers or street cleaners. Once the construction work was completed, these flexible communities managed to quickly move within the city, relocating to the luxurious and newly built residential or office areas to meet the demand for informal labor in gardening, domestic service, street and drain cleaning, or garbage collection, to mention a few—always maintaining close relationships and making possible the reproduction of the ritual, social, and economic life of their communities of origin. It is in this context of rapid migratory cycles, constant change in the sources of income, strong economic pressures knitting together the urban and the rural, and the importance of becoming a flexible workforce capable of meeting the growing and changing demands 1  Research was partly funded by the Mexican National Science and Technology Council (CONACYT), through its doctoral scholarship program.

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of the family, that the NGOs fought to win the attention, collaboration, and enthusiasm of migrant and working children.

Migrant Working Children in the Silicon Valley of India The families that participated in this research can be understood as part of the most vulnerable population within the category of informal street worker described by scholars and international organization reports (Gill, 2010; IPEC, 2004). Being rural migrants who belong to the scheduled castes,2 and as newcomers to the city, these families had few networks and social capital to attain social mobility. Ragpicking children in Bangalore work in what is considered one of the worst forms of child exploitation (IPEC, 2004), which contributes to the perpetuation of their status as “social outcasts,” as well as to the deepening of the socioemotional effects that economic exclusion and marginalization already have on them, as a CWC expert argues (Reddy, 1992). In addition to the context of precariousness and indebtedness that pushes migrant children to work as waste collectors, it is important to understand the economic and sociocultural role that this occupation plays within the family and community order. Although it is considered a dishonorable and dangerous activity, many children and families choose to carry it out for multiple and important reasons. Firstly, in the face of the increasing implementation of national and state laws prohibiting child labor in factories and shops, many children have been displaced into informal, less visible, and self-managed labor markets. Secondly, despite its cost in terms of status, work as a ragpicker can be quite “profitable,” so that under favorable conditions, a child can earn the same income as an adult who works as a pourakarmika or who has only been able to get employed for a few days a week. This explains why this is a preferred occupation for migrant families when there is an urgency to pay off a debt. Added to this is the interest expressed by the children themselves to work in occupations where they did not have a direct employer who could mistreat or exploit them, and where they could manage the pace and duration of their work periods. 2  A category created during the British colonial period that has become the official name for castes that were previously called Harijans or Dalits, also known as “untouchables”—a term declared illegal by the 1949 constitution of India.

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Transformed into self-regulated and flexible workers, forced to become highly competitive in the face of the constant arrival of new migrant populations to the city, ragpicker children represent the paradigmatic figure of the self-employed and overexploited worker, subsisting at the margins of neoliberal globalization and urban modernization. Their exploitation goes beyond the production and extraction of economic value; it extends to the extraction and exploitation of their cognitive and physical development, as well as their emotional, social, and vital energy. Together with learning to work with speed and endurance, always having to pay attention to their own safety, children have to learn to perform their work in ways that do not represent a public nuisance, minding moral norms, and good behavior. Child pickers learn through social rejection and admonitions that they represent a childhood outside the common order, and what society considers a “healthy,” “desirable,” or “normal” childhood. It is also through their experiences of work, selfregulation, and self-exploitation, as well as through their adaptation strategies and solidarity practices, that we learn what it means to “be modern” in the neoliberal globalization of the urban environment, and what children’s engagements with modernity look like. The testimony of Shambu, an eight-year-old boy from Rama Temple, allows us to better understand the relationships between indebtedness, rural-urban migration, and the work performed by children popularly known as “ragpickers.” It shows us that the sense of solidarity and responsibility that children assume for their parents’ financial problems plays a very important role in their will to face and overcome the difficulties of an occupation that is considered “dirty” and “dishonorable”: When I first arrived in Bangalore I felt happy. Before that I was with my grandmother, and she is the one who fetched water, but later she got sick and that responsibility passed to me […] My father did not have a job in my town so that’s why he came [to Bangalore], because my uncle took the land that we used to have […] Then I started going to collect [waste]. At first I didn’t know the difference between plastic and milk bags. Lingappa taught me all that. To separate milk cartons and milk bags, and other plastics. First I earned only a little, then I carried on. It is better to work alone, at first I was going with Lingappa, but then you have to do it by yourself to be able to collect more and earn more. In three days I learned. The first days I earned only 100 rupees […] I gave that money to my father or my older brother, [and I] kept only five [rupees]. If my dad gave me 50 [rupees] one day I would buy ice cream and things to eat. When I return [home] with the

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bags, my dad helps me separate them. My mom doesn’t because she’s doing the housework. […] I give the money to my mother; she buys food and the rest goes to my father or my brother. […] We sent [money] back to pay for my dad’s debt, because he lost a lot of money gambling. It’s a lot of money, that’s why we came here. It’s 50,000 rupees. When I grow up I will work in construction, although I like to collect more, because you earn more. But when you grow up you can’t go; my brother never wants to come. When I get married, I will no longer go to collect […] When I grow up and continue working I will give my money to my mother … to my mother and my wife. But I’m not going to send my children to collect because it’s a dirty job. They have to go to school, only then will they be smart and will have a good job, like yours. Right now, I am not attending school, but one day I will, and I will also have a good job.

Shambu’s experience shows that it is essential to situate and understand children’s work in the context of the economic violence they are exposed to, both in communities of origin and arrival. That child labor must be understood within the ethical and economic responsibilities children assume to help cover their parents’ debts, through which new livelihood strategies and subjectivities are produced. Their ethical commitment and economic responsibility also help to produce a system of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2006) in which the work of children and their families subsidizes urban daily cleaning and maintenance costs. A transfer of wealth from poor migrant families to multinational companies and government institutions also takes place at the expense of migrant children’s work at the center of the modernization process of the modern city, the “Silicon Valley of India”—as Bangalore is known. Every time a transnational company moves to Bangalore to save money and maximize profits, it is because of the “competitive advantages” and the cheap labor force that hundreds of thousands of migrant families and their children represent, in both formal and informal markets. Even though many inhabitants of migrant communities consider waste collection too dishonorable and dangerous for girls, economic precariousness pushes many of them to keep working. Rajika, who was 17 years old during fieldwork, had worked collecting recyclable waste on the streets near her slum throughout her childhood. Born in Bangalore to migrant parents of Tamil origin, she explained three main causes of “ragpicking” labor: the pressing economic precariousness that overwhelms families and leads them to carry out work that is considered undesirable and which, at the same time, functions as a subsidy for the state; secondly, the effects of

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a state that responds to a structural problem (child labor) with partial and paternalistic solutions; and thirdly, an educational system entirely disconnected from the needs of the poorest children who are being driven out of classrooms.3 Rajika: It is easy for the government to say “children should not work, if they work we will arrest them,” but that is not good, because we do not do it for pleasure and it is not enough that they simply force us to go to study. They have to give us something to improve the situation of our families. If they do that, I will definitely stop working and go to school. We also think about our future and we want a good life, it’s not that we don’t care. […] If we all had money and lived in a good situation, no one would work. But also children don’t like school, they don’t like the environment. The children have to be there, sitting, quiet, from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, just listening, writing, they can’t do anything else. […] Many children don’t like that kind of school, we want to learn different things in different ways, with many methods. We are not only interested in what happened in the past, we are also interested in the present, we are interested in the future and what the world is like now […] How can I live in society, know how it works, what people are like if I don’t have [ that] knowledge? If I have no courage, [if] I have no other knowledge, then what is the use of education for me? That’s a great question. Rajika’s analysis allows us to delve into one of the central themes of this work: the discussion on what role the migrant working children should play in solving the problems that afflict them, and in the transformation of their societies. As I’ve stated before, this issue is closely linked to the agendas that NGOs build to try to promote new kinds of child subjectivities, so that children would assume new roles and responsibilities. It is also linked to the perceptions held by children themselves on what these roles and responsibilities should be, and the ways in which they negotiate and resist them. 3  Compulsory schooling is often considered one of the main strategies to combat child labor (Balagopalan, 2014; Close, 2009). Yet several authors—within as well as outside India—have shown that, quite often, schooling programs and school dynamics end up excluding and expelling the most vulnerable and marginalized children (Kurosaki et  al., 2006; Cigno & Rosati, 2002; Saini, 1994; Knaul, 2006; Mayblin, 2010; Parker, 2006; Glockner, 2008).

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Building New Child Subjectivities Through Empowerment and Participation During my fieldwork in Bangalore, I encountered various NGOs that carried out different sorts of interventions among migrant child laborers. Most of them have a long-standing and well-known status in the city, having developed a wide range of programs and interventions aimed at children, their families, and communities. The most prominent being The Concerned for Working Children (CWC), with which I spent more time developing fieldwork, and whose work I will address here. Many NGOs’ impact and contribution in the protection and defense of “vulnerable” children’s rights can be understood within the framework of the enormous salience that the empowerment discourse (Hegar, 1989; Mohanty, 1995; Ryan, 2010) has had globally, and its effect in India (Kamat, 2002; Sharma, 2006; Sharma, 2008; Kilby, 2011; Balagopalan, 2014). Child participation has been hailed internationally as a fundamental right, and as the ideal way to ensure the active contribution of children to society (Gaiha, 1995; Giske, 2003; CWC, 2002b, 2004). Such approaches have led multiple child-centered organizations, in India and around the world, to consider children as “partners” in local governance, development, and democratization processes, posing their participation as a fundamental contribution to making local government more effective and efficient (Cook et al., 2004). In the case of Bangalore, organizations like CWC give child participation such an important place in their outlook that the latter is conceived as an intrinsic element in the fulfillment and construction of individuals. Following this paradigm change in children’s rights, a couple of decades ago, CWC and other NGOs and grassroots organizations transitioned from focusing on the promotion of workers’ unions and supporting the working-class struggles to vindicating the needs and recognition of working children and their individual and collective rights. They conceive children as subjects of rights, “informed participants” and “partners” who, if given the opportunity and the proper tools, can become their own advocates and get involved in the development and planning processes of governance (Giske, 2003).

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Broadly speaking, the programs and activities of some of the most salient organizations in Bangalore by the time of fieldwork, such as the Association for Promoting Social Action (APSA) and CWC, ranged from conducting raids and operations to rescue children in dangerous situations and exploitation and providing temporary and permanent shelter and formal and nonformal education to promoting and facilitating the formation of children’s assemblies and unions. I pose that such interventions must be understood as programs of reeducation and resocialization, in the sense that they not only aim to offer children new knowledge and skills but also look to promote new subjectivities through vocational training, financial education, self-esteem, behavioral change, personality enhancement, life-­ skill courses, and political training to address local authorities and make them accountable. This is to promote new ways in which working children understand and relate to their own social and economic problems, but also toward officials and government institutions intervening in their lives. These are new ways of relating to the state and the nation as a sociopolitical project. But they can also be thought of as new ways of understanding and relating to their own life trajectories, families, and communities. Based on a critique of the dismantling and weakening of the Indian developmental state since the beginning of the country’s economic liberalization in 1991, some NGOs and their initiatives have sought to “bring the state back in,” and to make it accountable for its responsibilities as provider and guarantor of the welfare of the most marginalized segments of society. Children’s mobilizations and public initiatives are seen as key strategies in this process (CWC, 2006). CWC postulates that no one knows what children want and need better than the children themselves. They should, therefore, not only be listened to, but also be empowered to organize, identify, and solve their own problems (CWC, 2013a). It is, of course, crucial to understand that the agendas, struggles, and programs like those of CWC and similar organizations take place in a context of extreme inequality and marginalization. Rejecting welfare interventions and promoting rights-based programs instead, CWC sees individual and collective organization and participation as the few tools that migrant/ working children, as well as their communities, have at their disposal to cope with economic exploitation and the political and social exclusion to which they have been subjected. Therefore, criticism of the state and the market, and of the neoliberal model itself, necessarily involves proposing an alternative society in which those who have always been excluded and subordinated—for example, children, and especially “vulnerable” and

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left-behind children—can be recognized, take a leading position, make themselves heard, and participate in all matters concerning them. Following a logic in which an exploitative and exclusionary sociopolitical and economic order must be confronted and contested by empowered and participative individuals, promoting new power relations and social dynamics, becomes essential. Therefore, children’s communities of origin, often marked by the prevalence of a patriarchal, hierarchical, and authoritarian order based on precepts of gender, caste, class, and age that add to the oppression and exclusion that the state and the market impose on children and their families, are often a starting point. In this context, organizations like CWC and others operating in Bangalore, like APSA, bring together the critique of the neoliberal state with the critique of local culture and vernacular tradition. Their discourses and interventions intend to promote strategies of empowerment, organization, and social transformation, hoping these will allow children to participate and intervene in local governance structures, such as panchayats, local elections, and assemblies, as well as to champion the values of participative democracy. At the same time, they aim at the critique and eradication of those cultural traits and traditional sociopolitical structures that violate children's rights and exclude them from participating and taking part in the decision-making processes. At the core of this approach lie certain practices considered “cultural” and “traditional” that are the root of inequity and subordination, such as child marriage, alcoholism, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and corruption (CWC, 2002b, 2003). Therefore, along with the goal of bringing the state back in, combatting structural inequality, and shifting existing power relations, the goal of crafting the new democratic and modern subject through cultural reeducation and resocialization of children arises. Reeducation and resocialization agendas often take place through a series of programs which include, but are not limited to, working children unions, child-led research initiatives, job training, organized protests, and welfare committees, aimed to educate children on the mechanisms of participative democracy, as well as individual and collective responsibility for social change. In the long term, it is expected that such strategies will transform structures of inequality in children’s home communities, and radically change the local/regional balance of power. In public campaigns, organized actions, and published reports, children are portrayed as morally superior to adults, and as intrinsically legitimate and apolitical actors, often mirroring representations by international NGOs and humanitarian

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global campaigns (Malkki, 2010; Manzo, 2008). Conceived as “innocent individuals,” children are pictured as exempt of prejudice, free from political agendas and ideologies that distort their actions and decisions (CWC, 2002b). They are also perceived as kind and morally righteous subjects, since they do not manipulate, exploit, or discriminate, and are naturally inclined to pursue the common good (Lolichen, 2006). As Mankekar (1997) has shown, childhood has often been constructed as a period of innocence capable of transcending both politics and culture, especially when what is at stake is the meaning and the symbols of the nation and/ or the community. In this scenario, while some organizations are only able to offer working children savings programs and self-employment training, organizations like CWC seek to question the economic and sociopolitical system. To address its goals of “bringing the state back in” and “making it accountable” to those marginalized and left behind, CWC has implemented two children’s initiatives that have been crucial: Bhima Sangha, a union of child laborers, and Makkala Panchayat, a children’s council that operates at the level of the panchayat or local government (CWC, 2013b). Understood as democratic organizations that “facilitate the participation of all children in governance” (CWC, 2003, p. 15), both have headed different initiatives. According to CWC records, during previous years, the Bhima Sangha union, together with organized groups of children from different Bangalore slums, had carried out campaigns, demonstrations, and plays to promote gender equality and access of children with disabilities to elective bodies; discussed the permitted and prohibited forms of child labor; assessed the performance of local authorities; and exhibited their negligence and/or publicly pressured them to respond to community demands. During fieldwork, the activists encouraged and accompanied the organized groups of children to address different requests to the local authorities, such as the local police and the area corporator, on behalf of their communities that sought to improve security, sanitation, drinking water, and drainage services—sometimes without attacking crucial social and political system structures, such as caste, and its contemporary groundings, and rather providing soft, partial, and individualized tools to overcome its violence and exclusion that would sometimes place too much pressure on children. However, over the course of many years, these programs had also contributed to some child laborers achieving a critical self-­ positioning within the social order, and a radical transformation in their

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identity and self-perception. As Rajika’s testimony shows, this is achieved through interventions in which criticism and transformation of the sociopolitical and economic system are combined with multiple practices and tools for self-regulation and self-improvement: Rajika: Before there were not many options […] before they [e.g. employers, and people living outside the slum] did not give jobs to the people of the slum, because we are poor. They did not give us good jobs, for example, in companies and stores they did not hire us. […] in my area we can only do rag picking and construction, but now people get jobs in shopping malls, in factories, companies, in many jobs. Because now people can live a little better, they look cleaner, before we were always dirty. We joined Bhima Sangha [children’s union] and there they gave us information and we began to wash our hands, our faces, to change our clothes every day. Before we did not do it because we did not know that it was necessary to do it, that this is why you get sick. We did not care either that people saw us badly, because in our area it was not like that. Only when we had information we begin to think about [those] things. It is not that in Bhima Sangha they told us: “you have to be like this,” but they gave us different information and we discussed about that, what is good, what is bad. Before all that, when we went somewhere people saw us badly and did not speak to us, they only looked at us from afar and said things about us, but when we were clean their faces changed, they even smiled at us, some spoke to us, people changed. Before, when they saw us dirty they immediately thought “they are untouchable,” that’s what they thought. Although these “soft” tools aren’t enough to address and break with structural links between cast and capitalist exploitation, at the time of research, these were transmitted by NGO workers who share the same community and caste origins, which would help child workers to recognize themselves as holders of rights. As Rajika explains, CWC programs had taught her to adopt a more liberal and democratic vision of society, of herself and of others, based on equality and equity, and not caste:

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When I was a child, I felt guilty because they had money and could behave like that to us. But when I reached maturity I was no longer concerned. When I started my experience in life and joined Bhima Sangha I learned many other things. In my point of view caste is not important, we have to look at the qualities of people, respect them for what they are. Not for what they have, or for the caste to which they belong. We must respect them for their life, their mentality and their ideas. Respect the person for who they are, not because of your social status or who your father or mother is, but for her. Before I was afraid to speak, now I can speak because I know that I have not done anything. I can know that I am fine, and that people are just discriminating against me. I know everything about myself, people don’t know about me. Now I am able to speak, before I could not. This is the courage that Bhima Sangha taught me. Now I can speak to people with courage.

Rajika’s experience is extremely important as it teaches us the multiple and complex links that are being drawn between the critique of the caste system and neoliberal state on one side, and modern human rights agendas and liberal democracy on the other. At the center of this relationship lies the subject and the new subjectivities to be constructed. New self-­ regulation tools result from this process, as well as empowered individuals who position themselves in different ways vis-à-vis an unequal social order which, however, they cannot completely transform. They show the emergence of the “everyday urban” (Dar and Kannan, introduction) through the negotiations and encounters shaping and transforming children’s lives and identities, as self-improvement tools and programs contribute to building new forms of agency and enhance and propitiate new capacities to “speak” and “make themselves heard.” During this process, individuals must also take responsibility for transforming their immediate social environment, distancing themselves from “cultural” and “traditional” ways of life to assimilate the values and needs of the modern democratic nation, which, in turn, will erase and assimilate them in other ways. Presented as exemplary citizens and individuals, children are met with huge expectations, for example, being capable of leading social transformation by creating new relationships with the state and the market. They are also supposed to identify the harmful practices and undesirable features which must be questioned and changed within their own communities

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(CWC, 2002a). Portrayed as social actors who seem to “instinctively know” which are the most effective and sustainable strategies, they are expected to challenge local politicians and government officials to change traditional governance practices so they will be able to exercise their citizenship rights and participate in the exercise of power (CWC, 2002a). Although CWC’s agenda of social transformation aims at changing the structures of inequality and the status quo, the operationalization of such initiatives constitutes an enormous challenge, in which the borders between structural change and the self-improvement of the poor and disadvantaged through culture and personal habits seem to blur. This blurring between the structural and the individual is not rare, and surely is not a minor component of governmentality processes in interventions with the most disadvantaged populations. Recent research shows that both academics and organizations targeting inequality and poverty among “street children” and working children and their families continue to place individual responsibility, “lack of awareness,” and “ambience at home” as central elements explaining the lack of access to education and health (Dutta, 2018).

Challenging Tradition Through Child Governance and Participation In parallel with the aforementioned programs conducted through Bhima Sangha, other initiatives led by children, which are facilitated and supported by activists, have been developed by CWC, such as the Makkala Panchayat. Here, the objective is not only to influence certain governance and decision-making processes, but also to transform local traditions and culture. An example of this is the action taken in a small village in the Keradi Panchayat, where, according to CWC (2002b) reports, “alcoholism was a way of life and a big problem.” Identified by the children not only as an individual and family nuisance, but as something that affected the community and the entire town, they intervened to inform the panchayat authorities with no avail. However, it was not until the children themselves carried out an investigation process to demonstrate the large economic losses that alcoholism implied for families, and the embarrassing and potential dangers that adults were incurring into, that authorities and residents reacted and banned the sale of alcohol in the community (CWC, 2002b). On different occasions, children corroborated the moral, legal,

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and economic damage caused by the “deeply rooted traditional practice” of child marriage (CWC, 2002b). In the two cases mentioned, what seems to be at stake is a process of struggle between the predominance of the law and the rights of the child, over certain cultural practices, and “traditions.” Based on this intervention, the empowerment and participation of children in public affairs is sought to achieve the reeducation of adults and the resocialization of their communities in the values of democracy, modernity, and human rights. The triumph of child empowerment and participation, added to the moral legitimacy that children possess as “innocent and apolitical actors,” is opposed to an old, authoritarian, and exclusionary social order. The successful intervention of children in the public affairs over undesired cultural practices is equated to the triumph of the modern and autonomous child-subject upon tradition and authoritarianism. With this action, certain organizations not only stress the importance of leaving behind customs and traditions that contravene the rights of children, but also advance the argument that children’s participation in governance is not only critical for children to realize their rights, but that it is also fundamental to protect, nurture, and strengthen democracy (Ratna, 2011). These actions should not be understood only as part of an ideological struggle for the transformation of democracy. They must also be seen within the context of deeply unequal and precarious socioeconomic dynamics that exclude marginalized rural and urban populations in India, which deny them the right to participate and decide on critical issues that affect their own survival. In a context in which the most vulnerable populations have been relegated to what Veena Das and Deborah Poole (2004) call “the margins of the State,” the work that NGOs and grassroots organizations carry out with migrant and working children is essential. Therefore, the strategies of recognition and negotiation discussed here become crucial subaltern political alternatives, and valuable strategies of democratization “from below.” In other words, they must be thought within the framework of what one of the CWC leaders considers the “highly precarious state of democracy in India,” happening “when […] corporate governance and privatization are preparing to sabotage democracy and satisfy the personal aspirations of the elite. Those who are marginalized are becoming even more impoverished [and] the governments closest to these groups either do not exist, or are constantly under pressure from the centers of power” (Ratna, 2009, p. 5).

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The programs and interventions discussed here must be understood in the context of the role that grassroots organizations and NGOs have had in the defense of democracy and civil society in India, as well as in the transformation of public policy aimed at children. The role that childhood was given in India’s modernization project is crucial to understand such processes. During India’s first years as an independent nation, children were considered adults under construction, a product of state intervention, and a fundamental resource for national development. Later, with the 1959 Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child and the creation of the National Policy for Children, progress was made toward the recognition of children as social subjects and potential actors useful to the nation, as Balakrishnan (2011) has shown. It was this shift in the conception of childhood that made it possible to position children as a specific group that could claim their own rights, as other marginalized social groups such as indigenous people, Dalits, and women had done before. Intellectuals and organizations, critical of the state, advocate for a direct and independent relationship between children and the state, where they could negotiate and be recognized as social actors with full rights. As children’s well-being became synonymous with the nation’s welfare, the new awareness of childhood became a central component in the construction of modernity and the modern state, as well as of democracy and development (Balakrishnan, 2011).

The Challenges and Complexities of Crafting New Subjectivities The CWC workers and activists I was able to collaborate with were inspired by a strong social commitment that transcends the aim of simply providing benefits and protection to migrant and working children. Behind reeducation programs there is a desire for social transformation that seeks to challenge tradition and teach children that their problems do not derive from divine design or a predetermined destiny, and to demolish the idea that caste and class differences respond to an immutable situation. They teach them that organization and collective pressure is one of the greatest powers they possess in the face of the abandonment of the state and acute inequality. One of the most relevant and interesting aspects of the organization interventions were the encounters and debates activists sustained with children to discuss and teach them about such issues, a process that

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was not devoid of challenges and contradictions. Teaching children to adopt a radically different stance toward tradition, caste, and the paternalistic and authoritarian state requires helping them to adopt a completely different perception of themselves, especially regarding the authority, needs, and precepts of their parents, families, and communities. Something not easy to achieve at all. Particularly illustrative were the encounters with the children of the Rama Temple community who, being much less socialized or educated than others in CWC programs, or the principles and advantages of democracy, collective organization, and participation, made the difficulties faced by activists evident. Male Activist: What do you think about the lives of children, children your age, like you and like your friends? Harish: I feel sorry for them, they shouldn’t become like us. They must be good. They should ask the government to take responsibility. Male Activist: What must be done to change the lives of all children? How can change be achieved? Harish: We have to tell them not to work, to go to school, that after ten or twenty years the government will give them a job. Male Activist: But that’s not safe ... What should the government do? What does the government need to do to help all children? Harish: Poor people don’t have any wealth; they should help them. The peasants must be helped. Male Activist: But instead, the government, in the name of doing good, sends officials [police] to raid the children who are working. Methu: Yes, because the children should be studying... The activist then elaborated on the electoral process and the responsibilities elected officials had toward “the poor”: Male Activist: Who do you think then should solve children’s problems? Methu: God! Male Activist: Are you sure God? Methu: It is the Panchayat, the great officers.

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Male Activist: Yes, it is the government, and the officials. Ribhu: Those who won the votes. Male Activist: Yes, those who won by obtaining the votes have the authority to lead the government. they have to help you with your problems, with the houses and the water. They have to help them with everything. Following this dialogue, Methu and Shivilingamma reported that “Geeta Madam,” the elected “corporator” of the area, had built a well for the legal residents of the area and was sending water pipes to their buildings. But when they, who were considered “squatters,” had asked the driver to fill their water jugs, they were met with insults and threats. This led the activists to talk about some of the problems children and their families faced. They stated that if children themselves did not demand the government to solve them, no one would. The activist who was leading the session on that day explained that it was they who had to take “responsibility” and to “speak up” to “inform the government about their problems.” Subsequently, the activist explained that on prior occasions, the children of Bhima Sangha had organized theater performances where they represented the problems faced by their communities and invited government officers as “guests of honor.” Initially, the children seemed enthusiastic about the idea of putting on a play, but they wanted to act out the request of a girl in marriage by the family of the future husband instead. The activist recounted that, during a play on child marriage previously performed by the children of Bhima Sangha, they had reflected on why this was a harmful tradition. But the children showed no interest and changed the subject. Another activist, a woman, intervened to tell them they could use plays as a means to communicate their problems to the government and ask the elected officials to solve them. But Lingappa argued that a play was something they could do in their village, but not in Bangalore, as they would feel embarrassed. Then, something surprising and eye-opening happened. Given the insistence of the activists, Methu, one of the older boys, sensed that our concern went beyond the play: Methu:  akka, anna (sister, brother), listen up. You taught us games, you taught us everything. Now the chief minister is coming. When he asks us, “who taught us all this?” I will tell him that it was you. You are going to have more respect and thus you are

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going to get better paid. They are going to ask you to sit in the chair and they are going to give you five thousand rupees a month, more than enough! When we heard this, all three of us burst out laughing. Although the activists, visibly mortified, tried to explain that money was not the reason we were there, to which Methu replied that surely the government gave us money for doing what we did. My presence as a white foreign woman only made things worse, as children associated me with short-term interventions helping people out of poverty. At that point, the male activist tried to explain that the government did not give money to the organization they worked for, or at least not directly: Male Activist: They [the government] help different organizations like us who want to work with children like you with some donations. We work with that money. The government does not give us money directly. What I am saying is that you have many problems, and who is the one who has to find the solution to those problems? Methu: You guys! Activist: We? But who are those who have the responsibility to care for the poor and to care for the city and the state? If your problems are solved, who will benefit, you or us? Ribhu: Us. Methu: Well, okay, we’ll do it. The next time you come you write us a play. Male Activist: No, but you are the ones who have to write the play. Lingappa: But Sir, we weren’t thinking of such big things. We just wanted to do a play to have fun and that’s all. Male Activist: Doing a small work is fine, we are going to do both. But this is an attempt to find solutions for your problems. Have we tried to find solutions before? No, right? Well, the other day you said that the government does this thing, and you continue to suffer, so do you want the situations to remain the same or do you want them to change? We are here to support you. If there’s an immediate problem, we will try to fix it. But you have to think how to prevent the problem from continuing and try to reduce it, right?

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The activist then continued explaining about the Bhima Sangha union and the things that children from other slums had achieved in the past by pressuring the authorities and demanding the resolution of their problems. But it was already dark, and the children were tired. It had been a long time since the last girl had left the conversation, and the remaining boys began to get up from the mat that we had spread on the floor. As we have argued, the discussions on the empowerment and participation roles that children must assume to change their environment are closely related to the kind of subjects that children must become to exercise such capacities. In this context, reeducation programs focus on issues like the advantages of schooling over child labor and the limits of the economic responsibility of children toward their parents and families. On a different occasion, when activists were trying to convince children about the importance of stopping work (at least during the morning) to attend school, they tried to explain the importance of thinking about school as an opportunity to change their life, to seek social mobility, and to help their families in the future. An important discussion arose on the type of economic and symbolic barriers in which children perceive themselves trapped: Lingappa: No, akka [sister], let me explain. We would have to go pick up the paper [the waste], then take the bag home, bathe and get ready, and then go to school. But what about other people? We pick up trash, right? We cannot show our face to others. We feel ashamed. Female Activist: Why? Lingappa: Because we are rag pickers. And do you know what happens? People point to us and say it, that we collect garbage. Harish: They make fun of us. Female Activist: there are many children who work in the fields before going to school, who also get dirty and have to bathe before going to school. Lingappa: Akka, that’s not the same. That is different, and this is different. Female Activist: But it shouldn’t be seen differently. Lingappa: Akka, you are not understanding. Female Activist: What do you mean it’s different?

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That we collect what is thrown away. You can’t do that and go to school. It’s one thing or another. we have been spoiled. I used to go to school (in the hometown), but now we can’t. We work picking up trash and ruining our lives.

The daily encounters between activists and children often reveal the many difficulties children have in recognizing themselves as subjects with the right and the ability to speak up and question the authorities, hence the importance of Rajika’s experience, which, evidently, was not generalized. There was also the challenge of children accepting that investing time in lobbying and addressing authorities was as important as helping their families by earning an income. Perhaps the greatest difficulty was getting the children to agree to sacrifice part of their working hours, and income, to raise awareness among authorities, put pressure, and negotiate with them. For this, activists had to question and challenge children’s given and self-assumed responsibility to earn an income to support their families.

Final Remarks Faced with an extremely unequal and exclusionary political and economic order, the empowerment and democratic participation tasks that child-­ centered NGOs carry out are crucial to try to break the subjection and oppression dynamics for the new generations. The challenge is of course enormous and complex, as NGOs seek to hold accountable a developing state that was never properly in place and is now in fact disappearing. However, attempting to build participation platforms based on the ideals of liberal democracy and the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, these logics are often alien to the political and social order of children’s communities of origin. In this context, the notion of the modern subject becomes crucial as it allows us to analyze how new struggles for power and recognition arise from the margins of the state, based on, and inspired by, a critique of the “traditional” order and the harmful elements of “culture.” It is precisely in this idea of culture as a “feature” of society that must be modified or eliminated to achieve a different and more developed society, where lies one of the crucial elements of the project of modernity. The notion of modernity as an ethnographic tool allows us to understand the role that

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the new democratic and participatory subject must play in a project in which empowerment, autonomy, and individual responsibility are crucial elements for the prevalence of democracy, justice, and inclusion over a traditional, patriarchal, exclusionary, and unjust “old order.” However, working children often respond with questioning and resistance to the ideal of the empowered, autonomous and participatory subject proposed by CWC and other NGOs. Showing the difficulty of (re)producing the project of participatory democracy and political modernity. They also reveal the many challenges involved in trying to construct new (modern, democratic) political subjectivities among children who are subject—as well as affectively and morally bound—to complex relations of interdependence, reciprocity, honorability and affection. For this not only binds them to a particular social, political and economic order that reproduces inequalities, but also to certain regimes of affect, belonging and self-determination. As we were able to ascertain, the children that the NGOs try to empower and transform into active and participatory subjects are acutely  aware of the different dynamics of inequality and oppression to which they and their families are subjected (e.g., indebtedness, exploitative child labor, dishonor, school dropouts, and migration to the margins of the economy and society). But sometimes they are also highly skeptical of some of the solutions proposed by the organizations, which require a radical change in the way they perceive themselves, and their role and responsibility within their families. Some programs require them to consider themselves autonomous subjects, making individual decisions and choices, which sometimes might mean putting their interests before the problems their families must face, even though this might benefit them and their families in the future. The aforementioned interactions between children and activists reveal that empowerment and participation must be understood in relation to the weight that the existing social and symbolic order places on children as “migrants,” “garbage collectors,” and—as we saw at the end—“school dropouts.” Of course, this does not go unnoticed by activists. However, the agendas of autonomy and participatory democracy preclude the possibility that child participation may occur under other norms and ideals than those of liberal democracy. The “voices,” “needs,” and “demands” of children have become the de facto symbol of the modern commitment to the values of participation and liberal democracy (James, 2007).

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References Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. University of Minnesota Press. Balagopalan, S. (2014). Inhabiting ‘childhood’: Children, labour and schooling in postcolonial India. Palgrave. Balakrishnan, V. (2011). Growing up and away: Narratives of Indian childhoods, memory, history, identity. Oxford University Press. Cigno, A., & Rosati, F. C. (2002). Child labour education and nutrition in rural India. Pacific Economic Review, 7(1), 65–83. Close, P. (2009). Making sense of child labour in modern society. Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, 12, 167–194. Cook, P., Blanchet-Cohen, N., & Hart, S. N. (2004). Children as partners: child participation promoting social change: prepared for The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) Child Protection Unit. International Institute for Child Rights and Development. CWC, The Concerned for Working Children. (2002a). Children and their research: A process document—The story of how working children decided to improve the lot of their entire community through a massive survey. CWC, Bangalore. Retrieved from www.workingchild.org CWC, The Concerned for Working Children. (2002b). A journey in children’s participation. CWC, Bangalore. Retrieved from https://www.concernedforworkingchildren.org/wp-content/uploads/A-Journey-in-childrensparticipation.pdf CWC, The Concerned for Working Children. (2003). Bhima Sangha and the Makkala panchayats: Chronicles of our own histories. CWC, Bangalore. Retrieved from https://www.concernedforworkingchildren.org/wp-content/uploads/ Our_Survey_Story_by_Bhima_Sanga_and_Makkala_Panchayat_-_2001.pdf CWC, The Concerned for Working Children. (2004). A unique revolution: Children lead the way to decentralisation and civil society participation. CWC, Bangalore. Retrieved from http://www.doccentre.net/docsweb/Education/ Scanned_material/New-Folder/new_childlabour_n21.32.pdf CWC, The Concerned for Working Children. (2006). Taking a right turn: Children lead the way in research. CWC, Bangalore. Retrieved from www.workingchild.org CWC, The Concerned for Working Children. (2013a). Children’s unions. Retrieved from http://www.concernedforworkingchildren.org/empowering-­ children/childrens-­unions CWC, The Concerned for Working Children. (2013b). Children’s citizenship. Retrieved from http://www.concernedforworkingchildren.org/empowering-­ children/childrens-­citizenship Das, V., & Poole, D. (2004). Anthropology in the margins of the state. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe.

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Dutta, N. (2018). Street children in India: A study on their access to health and education. International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies, 9(1), 69–82. Gaiha, R. (1995). Poverty, development and participation in India: A progress report. Asian Survey, 35(9), 867–878. Gill, K. (2010). Of poverty and plastic: Scavenging and scrap trading entrepreneurs in India’s urban informal economy. Oxford University Press. Giske, A. (2003). The Toofan model of development: Building better communities through children’s participation. The Concerned For Working Children, Bangalore. Glockner, V. (2008). De la montaña a la frontera: identidad, representaciones sociales y migración de los niños mixtecos de Guerrero. El Colegio de Michoacán. Glockner, V. (2014). Trabajo infantil y regímenes de gubernamentalidad: slums flexibles, ongs y producción de subjetividades en la india contemporánea. Tesis doctoral. Departamento de Antropología, UAM-Iztapalapa, Mexico. Glockner, V. (2015). Slums flexibles. In F. Besserer and R. Nieto (Ed.), La Ciudad Transnacional Comparada: Modos de Vida, Gubernamentalidad y Desposesión. UAM—Juan Pablos. Harvey, D. (2006). La acumulación por desposesión. In C. Bueno & M. Pérez-­ Negrete (Eds.), Espacios Globales. Universidad Iberoamericana—Plaza y Valdez. Hegar, R. (1989). Empowerment-based practice with children. Social Service Review, 63(3), 372–383. Inda, J. X. (2008). Anthropologies of modernity: Foucault, governmentality, and life politics. John Wiley & Sons. IPEC, International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor. (2004). Addressing the exploitation of children in scavenging (waste picking): A thematic evaluation of action on child labour. IPEC, Geneva. https://www.wiego.org/ publications/addr essing-exploitation-childr en-scavenging-wastepicking-thematic-­evaluation-­action-ch James, A. (2007). Giving voice to children’s voices: Practices and problems, pitfalls and potentials. American Anthropologist, 109(2), 261–272. Kamat, S. (2002). Development hegemony: NGOs and the state in India. Oxford University Press. Kilby, P. (2011). NGOs in India: The challenges of women’s empowerment and accountability. Routledge. Knaul, F.  M. (2006). El efecto del trabajo infantil y la deserción escolar en el capital humano: diferencias de género en México. In L. F. López Calva (Ed.), Trabajo infantil: teoría y lecciones de América Latina (pp.  397–437). México FCE. Kurosaki, T., Ito, S., Fuwa, N., Kubo, K., & Sawada, Y. (2006). Child labor and school enrollment in rural India: Whose education matters? The Developing Economies, 44(4), 440–464.

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CHAPTER 12

Family Life, Schooling, and Modernity: Examining the ‘Everyday’ Experiences of Elite Adolescence in India Adrienne Lee Atterberry

Introduction Life for Varuna Lawrence began in 2000 in Foster City, California. She lived there for a year, before her father, an IT professional, received a two-­ year work assignment that would cause her family to relocate to Tokyo. After completing this assignment, Varuna’s family moved back to Foster City. However, four years later, her grandfather’s demise and her father’s need to take care of his mother and sister, would once again cause the family to move—this time to Bangalore, a city in Southwest India. Varuna was six years old. Once in Bangalore, Varuna’s parents enrolled her in the Richmond Academy of Science (Academy)—one of the premiere international schools in the city. As an Academy student, Varuna is heavily involved in several

A. L. Atterberry (*) SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_12

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school activities. She sings in the choir, volunteers for cultural festivals, and serves as a school prefect. Through these activities, Varuna learns important leadership skills, such as how to work with different people and how to give orders without sounding ‘bossy’. Outside of the Academy, she volunteers at a local school for autistic children. Additionally, she participated in summer programs at Brown and Stanford where she completed courses in filmmaking, computer programming, psychology, and creative writing. She also conducted biomedical research at two US hospitals. After graduating from the Academy, Varuna anticipates completing her undergraduate studies at either the University of Chicago, Dartmouth, Rice, Stanford, or Johns Hopkins. She feels that she can achieve this goal because she believes the Academy does a good job of preparing students to go abroad for university. Varuna’s story is like those of the other 30 Indian American adolescents I interviewed. Like her, they were born in the USA and later relocated to India as babies, young children, or preteens. They are the children of hyperselected immigrants who came to the USA to meet the country’s demand for skilled STEM labor in the 1980s through early 2000s (Chakravorty et al., 2016), before returning to India between 2002 and 2013. The adolescents I interviewed hail from affluent, socially privileged families where their parents work as skilled professionals whose jobs require a degree of transnational mobility. These adolescents’ experiences of family life and schooling include stories of international exposure, leadership, social service work, and comprehensive college preparation support. It is through my discussions about these experiences of ‘everyday’ elite adolescence that I engage with the concept of the ‘everyday urban’. As described by Anandini Dar and Divya Kannan (this volume), the ‘everyday urban’ concerns itself with the critical examination of the mundane aspects of daily life through an investigation of how the urban context shapes our understanding of what it means to be young in the Global South. This chapter engages with the ‘everyday urban’ through its focus on the banal, but socially consequential, experiences of elite adolescents growing up in Bangalore, India. The urban setting of Bangalore is particularly important to understanding how this study’s respondents experience elite adolescence. According to AnnaLee Saxenian (2006), India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, referred to Bangalore as the  country’s ‘City of the Future’. To that end, Nehru aimed to make Bangalore the intellectual center of India by building government research labs and public

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manufacturing firms in the city. More recently, Bangalore has earned the moniker of India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ (Sudhira et al., 2007) due to the presence of a sophisticated IT industry. Those who live in Bangalore can enjoy working in Western-style office spaces, receiving an education from premier learning institutions, relaxing at malls, multiplexes, restaurants, and pubs (Sudhira et al., 2007), and living in Western-style gated communities (Upadhya, 2013). It is the opportunity for skilled and high-paying employment within a comfortable and well-resourced city that helped attract my participants’ parents back to India. The resources available in this very specific social space shape this study’s participants’ understanding of what it means to be an elite adolescent. By analyzing interviews with 31 socially privileged adolescents, this chapter addresses the following questions: How do socially privileged adolescents experience their family life and schooling? What are some of the activities that they engage in? How do they see their families and schools as preparing them for the next steps in their education? In exploring these questions, I argue that transnational Indian American adolescents experience a form of adolescence designed to cultivate them as future leaders within the global economy by preparing them for the multiple forms of modernity they may encounter as college students, and later as professionals, wherever they may study and/or work in the future. In other words, transnationally mobile Indian American adolescents experience an adolescence designed to give them the tools for future transnational mobility to secure their upward social mobility. The social, cultural, and structural underpinnings of their adolescence include coming from socially privileged, typically upper-caste and upper-class, families that have the resources necessary to secure their access to ‘good’ private, English-medium schools, ‘quality’ enrichment activities, and broad college preparation support. Therefore, transnationally mobile adolescents’ experience of elite adolescence is buttressed by the rearticulation of historic privileges and social inequalities within the context of intensified global capitalism.

Parenting and Modern Childhood The transnational mobility experienced by elite professionals on account of changes within the global economy affects how parents raise their children. First, because of globalization and its attendant processes such as neoliberalism, the responsibility for social reproduction has shifted from the state to families and individuals (Cole & Durham, 2008). Second, due

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to the increased mobility of people, commodities, and information, parents begin to imagine their children’s futures on an increasingly global scale (Anagnost, 2008). In other words, they see their children’s futures as not necessarily tied to one nation-state (for discussions of transnationalism and parenting see Anagnost, 2008; Cole & Durham, 2008; Lukose, 2009). In the case of India, this has resulted in the fracturing of children’s experiences of childhood as those from affluent and educated backgrounds experience a childhood that is closer to the norms and values of Western society (Raman, 2017; for a similar discussion see Prout, 2005), while those from less privileged backgrounds experience what Vasanthi Raman (2017) describes as an ‘Indian childhood’. In other words, a child’s social location—informed by their caste and class background—is determinative of the type of childhood they experience, which has a direct bearing on their life chances within the global economy (Prout, 2005; Raman, 2017). To help their children navigate the global economy’s ever-changing reward and risk structure, affluent parents have adapted their childrearing practices. This has resulted in relatively affluent parents engaging in laborand resource-‘intensive’ parenting strategies (e.g., see Atterberry, 2021; Lareau, 2011; Katz, 2008; or Tan, 2017) designed to give children access to the resources they need to achieve future success (Katz, 2008). As a result, children become sites for investments toward a ‘secure’ future (Anagnost, 2008; Nandy, 1984). One way that parents seek to improve their children’s life chances is by enrolling them in competitive and well-­ resourced primary and secondary schools.

Schooling and Modernity Schools are significant to the development of modern adolescents insofar as they facilitate their cultivation of the skills and resources necessary to navigate the global economy. In such an economy, the skill sets necessary to traverse multiple national contexts, cultures, and social norms are increasingly important. These skill sets include fluency in different languages, international travel, and being exposed to people from different countries (Forsberg, 2017). Scholars conceptualize the skills needed to traverse a more globalized world as transnational capital (Forsberg, 2017) or transnational cultural capital (Carlson et  al., 2017). They argue that acquiring transnational cultural capital facilitates the reproduction of an individual’s social position within the parameters set forth by globalization (Carlson et al., 2017; Forsberg, 2017).

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Therefore, parents take great care when considering where to educate their children. To best prepare their children for a transnationally mobile future, many families—and especially those with information-rich social networks and ample financial resources—select a highly coveted Western-­ style education for their children (Bowen & Hinchy, 2015). The schools seen as the ‘best’ are increasingly those that are English medium (Sriprakash, 2015). Arguably, because of the different aspirational futures (Mathew & Lukose, 2020) that different board examinations prepare adolescents for (Forsberg, 2017), and the increasingly transnational character of modernity (Lukose, 2009), the ‘best’ schools are not only those that are English medium but also those that offer an international curriculum such as the International Baccalaureate (IB). The growing popularity of the IB is evidenced by the proliferation of IB schools within Asia generally (Gardner-McTaggart, 2016) and within India specifically (Mukul, 2015). Importantly, access to these schools is reserved for those who are relatively privileged (for a discussion of school access within India, see Choudhury, 2020; Jeffrey et  al., 2005; Raman, 2017). This means that only adolescents from socially privileged backgrounds have access to the ‘quality’ schooling options that are seen as central to navigating the global economy, and the cultivation of modern adolescence (Lukose, 2009; Sriprakash, 2015). It is a segment of these privileged adolescents whose experiences of family life and schooling are the focus of this chapter.

Modernity and the Case of Transnationally Mobile Adolescents In this chapter, I suggest that due to changes brought about by the intensification of global capitalism in the latter part of the twentieth century (Dirlik, 2003), the qualitative characteristics of India’s normative citizen-­subject-­in-training have changed. Late twentieth-century global capitalism brought about the intensification of interactions between societies (Dirlik, 2003), new forms of social organization, labor relations, and cultural processes (Nonini & Ong, 1996), and increased flows of people, products, values, images, and information (Prout, 2011). One of the micro-level responses to the changes in the global economy includes the return migration of affluent, highly skilled Indians and first-generation

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Indian Americans from the USA, some of whom return to the subcontinent with US-born children. The presence of Indian American adolescents within India affects our understanding of modernity in several ways. First, it challenges antiquated notions that differentiated nation-states in terms of their status as being part of the ‘developed’ or the ‘developing’ world (Prout, 2005) and subsequently characterized Western societies as ‘developed’ and non-Western societies as ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-modern’ (Beck, 2000). This notion is challenged by the increase in highly skilled, professional job opportunities (Bhatt, 2018) in India that demonstrates that the subcontinent can provide a form of modernity on par with the West. Second, transnationally mobile adolescents’ presence in India challenges the notion that to be modern means to be culturally European (Quijano, 2007). One of the motivations parents have for making the return trip is to raise their children within the cultural and social environment that they themselves grew up in (Atterberry, 2021; Bhatt, 2018). Parents feel comfortable raising their children within India because of the presence of well-reputed primary and secondary schools and access to extracurricular resources that provide opportunities comparable to those available to elite children around the globe. Therefore, parents can raise their children within an Indian social and cultural setting, with little worry that they will be negatively impacted by this choice. However, while their presence within India transforms the subcontinent into the site of the production of the modern adolescent, the path prepared for these elite youth ultimately requires transnational connections and the cultivation of skills needed to facilitate their potential departure from India so that they may continue the project of becoming modern through attending college or pursuing professional opportunities outside of the country. According to Choudhury and Gill (2022), this reality may be shaped by the relatively small number of seats available in competitive colleges and universities in the subcontinent. Given the structural limitations present within India’s higher education sector, some parents may feel as if they have no choice but to prepare their children for a transnationally mobile future. With that said, there is some evidence that this trend may be changing. For instance, as will be documented in the findings section, several adolescents are preparing to attend college in India. Additionally, elsewhere (e.g., Atterberry, 2021) I have talked about how parents raise their children in India to give them the skills necessary to pursue professional opportunities there. Therefore, the social, cultural,

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and structural changes taking place within global, national, and local contexts produce a relatively new experience of elite adolescence as parents try to prepare their children for adult lives that may take place anywhere on the globe. This new form of adolescence is shaped by parents and schools. As will be discussed later, parents, in tandem with the opportunities provided by elite, English-medium schools, produce a type of adolescence premised on four practices: international exposure, leadership activities, social service work, and college preparation. These efforts may be suggestive of the cultural streamlining of modern adolescence. Smitha Radhakrishnan (2011, p. 21) originally defined cultural streamlining as “the process of simplifying a dizzying diversity of cultural practices into a stable, transferable, modular set of norms and beliefs that can move quickly and easily through space”. Radhakrishnan conceptualized this term in relation to India’s transnational professional class. I apply this concept to elite parents’ childrearing practices. In other words, I use the term to better understand the cultural and social norms that govern the construction of modern adolescence. By applying Radhakrishnan’s concept to our understanding of modern adolescence in India, I suggest that for those capable of harnessing the relevant resources, one can access global modernity within India. This is best illustrated by the choice of affluent families to leave the USA and move to India, where they can adequately prepare their children to enter top-notch universities around the globe. As such, the presence of transnationally mobile Indian American adolescents in India transforms the subcontinent into the site of the production of modern Western subjects, thereby complicating previous understandings of the locations of tradition and modernity, what it means to be traditional and modern, and who the future leaders of modern India may be. As a result, I suggest that transnationally mobile Indian American adolescents stand on the frontier of a new type of modern adolescence.

Research Methodology The data analyzed for this chapter come from interviews with 31 Indian American adolescents in grades 9–12 who live with their families in Bangalore, India. The adolescents whose interviews were analyzed for this chapter attend either the Indian Academy of Scholars (IAS) or the Richmond Academy of Science (Academy). The interviews featured here

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are a subset of 95 interviews with Indian and first-generation Indian American return migrants, their children, and alumni of Bangalore-based, private high schools. I leverage this additional information by supplementing the adolescents’ interview data with information that I collected from conversations with their parents. I completed the interviews between March 2017 and January 2018. I located study participants through their schools, as well as through my personal and professional networks. All the interviews were conducted in Bangalore, with most of them taking place at family homes. When I did not complete an interview at a family home, they were conducted at an adolescent’s school or in a local eatery. This happened on four occasions. In three of the four instances, I interviewed the participants at school, while in the fourth instance I conducted the interview at a local café. To protect their identity, I use pseudonyms for all participants, and I obscure any identifying information. During the interviews I asked adolescents about their relocation from the USA to India, their experiences of schooling and family life, and their aspirations for the future. As I analyzed the data, I made lists of the activities they participated in, the skills they acquired from those activities, and their aspirations for the future. After drawing conceptual links between adolescents’ varied experiences of schooling and family life, I connected the interview findings to literature on childhood, schooling, and modernity. Research Participants: Description of Interviewees This chapter is based on the analysis of interviews with 31 Indian American adolescents who were enrolled in either IAS (11) or the Academy (20). IAS is a day school that offers the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) curriculum. Parents who enroll their children here pay approximately US$2000 to US$3000 in tuition and fees each year. During the study, IAS had three branch locations. I interviewed adolescents enrolled at two of the three locations: one in the northern suburbs and another in the eastern suburbs. Meanwhile, the Academy is a day and boarding school that offers the International Baccalaureate (IB). It costs parents upwards of US$10,000 in tuition and fees per year to send a child to the school. Both IAS and the Academy have abundant resources, including spacious athletic fields, state-of-the-art educational equipment, and multiple auditoriums—all indicative of their ability to develop students’ non-academic and academic skills.

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The interview participants have a relatively unique background. They were all born in the USA before being relocated to the subcontinent by their parents. The amount of time they spent in the USA ranged from less than one year to about 13 years. Their parents work as entrepreneurs of transnational corporations, doctors, and senior-level IT professionals. As a result of their jobs, some parents make several trips abroad—most often to the USA—several times per year. As a result, interviewees were exposed to a lifestyle where transnational mobility was the norm. The vast majority (28) come from Hindu upper-caste or dominant-caste backgrounds. The other three students are Syrian Christian, Jain, or Catholic. More than half intend to go to college in the USA (19), while four are only considering colleges or universities located in India. Five students are open to attending college in India or elsewhere, one is uncertain, and the remaining two intend to enroll in college in the USA or in another country outside of India, such as Singapore or Hong Kong. While in India, transnationally mobile adolescents lived in apartments or bungalows within exclusive gated communities or affluent neighborhoods. They enjoyed trips with their parents to places around India and abroad, including Singapore, Thailand, continental Europe, and the UK. Some took trips back to the USA where they visited friends and family members, participated in summer enrichment camps, and completed pre-college summer courses or internships. In addition to trips abroad, their lives were filled with co- and extracurricular activities. These include afterschool tuitions, music and sports lessons, social service work, and college preparatory coaching classes.

‘Everyday’ Experiences of Elite Adolescence The literature on contemporary parenting is rife with examples of how relatively affluent parents prepare their children to lead transnationally mobile adult lives (e.g., Lan, 2018; Ong, 1999; Ramos-Zayas, 2020). To explore adolescents’ experiences of being groomed to lead lives as transnationally mobile adults, this section addresses their involvement in activities that facilitate their international exposure, leadership development, social service engagement, and college preparation. In analyzing their experiences, I demonstrate how one segment of elite, transnationally oriented adolescents cultivate the skill sets and dispositions their parents and schools believe are necessary to them to be able to pursue educational and professional opportunities within India and around the globe.

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Cultivating Intercultural Competences: Trips Abroad and Multinational Classmates The lives of the adolescents I spoke to include frequent trips outside of India facilitated by their parents. For example, Kalyani, who is originally from the suburbs of Chicago, has parents who own a home in Florida that they rent out during the academic year and return to during the summer months. As a result, she travels back and forth to the USA often. In the USA, she has attended summer programs at SeaWorld, Rollins University, and Stanford. Another example comes from Anand who was born in South Carolina and has returned to the USA four times  since moving to Bangalore. These return trips were facilitated by his father’s business trips. Meanwhile, Onella, who lived in New Jersey before relocating to Bangalore, travels with her family about once a year to a new part of the world. The perceived benefits of these international trips are best summed up by Onella’s father, Janak, who says: We go on vacation to a new part of the world every year. […] I feel that’s part of life skills and that’s part of what we want to impart to them is that you know you should be able to go to a new country, pick up and be able to live there and really relate to the local people, the customs and everything.

Adolescents also talked about taking trips abroad with their school to places like the USA, Denmark, and Germany. For instance, Kiara, who was born in Florida and lived in several US states before moving to Bangalore, participated in her school’s Indo-German exchange program. When describing her motivations for participating in this program, she says, “I wanted to see if somebody who’s from a completely different part of the world looks at life, or treats life, or participates in different activities in the same way that we do. Like, how do different people do the same thing?” The aspect of the experience that fascinated Kiara the most was the exposure she received to another lifestyle. She later told me that she applies this experience to her education by keeping a broad perspective on what she learns in school. Classmates from around the world provide another form of international exposure. For instance, Pratap gets international exposure through the diversity of pupils at the Academy. Pratap was born in New Jersey, where he lived for less than one year, before his parents moved back to India. He intends to go to the USA for college to study film. When I asked him how

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he felt about the international exposure he received through his school, he said: There’s, I think, out of 124 students, like 115 are of Indian ethnicity, but they’re from all over the world. They’ve lived in Australia to USA to Sweden to UK. That provides some diversity in thought. And then there’s one of my best friends, he’s British, and then there are a couple of students from Korea. That helps in kind of becoming culturally aware and sensitive, which is definitely needed in college.

Pratap believes that the multi-ethnic and multinational community present at his school gives him experience learning with and from others who have a different perspective. Pratap intends to go to the USA for higher education, where he will need cross-cultural competences to succeed in multi-ethnic and multinational spaces. Therefore, being able to engage with others from different ethnic and national backgrounds is a boon. Participants described developing intercultural competences through international travel and exposure to multinational classmates as beneficial; however, these activities are not sufficient in preparing adolescents to occupy future leadership positions within the global economy. It is important that they develop the skills to lead. They develop these skills through internship opportunities provided through their parents’ social networks and the leadership positions available at their school. This is the topic of the next section. Learning to Lead: The Value of Internships and School Leadership Positions To ensure that they have the skills needed to be future global leaders, parents expose their children to experiences that will nurture their professional interests, such as internships. Such was the case for Liyana Choudhury. During high school, Liyana wanted to explore her interests in chemical engineering and food science. To do so, she managed to secure an internship tailored to her specific interests at a weight loss company that makes their own foods and meal plans. She found this opportunity through one of her dad’s friends. Similarly, Nalin, an Academy student who travels to his natal state of California each summer, intends to take a gap year between high school and college. When talking about his plans for the gap year, he states that he wants to learn more about real estate

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investments or conduct financial analysis. He describes how he could do this, by saying: Fortunately, my dad runs a company involved in the real estate market. So, I could use some of his help to look at different real estate markets around the world and look at investment opportunities. One of the possible plans is after doing the analysis is going to a place like Portugal or something and investing in real estate.

Likewise, Varuna was able to use her extended family networks in the USA to secure research internships at hospitals in Maryland and Texas. As illustrated by these examples, family plays a significant role in curating adolescents’ leadership experiences. However, the opportunities to procure valuable leadership opportunities are not limited to the family, but rather extend to adolescents’ schools. For instance, Aarushi is an IAS student with ambitions to become a medical professional. At IAS, she not only studies hard, but also serves as one of the two prefects for the 11th grade. She earned this position after going through a round of applications and interviews, and eventually being selected by her teachers. In this capacity, she lobbies on behalf of students for more school resources dedicated to their mental and physical health. She also speaks with school administrators about providing more review classes or sports activities as per student need, in addition to sitting on committees that govern student conduct. When reflecting on what she has learned in this position, she says, “To be more independent and also leadership qualities. I’m actually developing public speaking skills. I’m not as afraid as I used to be before. And I’m not afraid to go into a staff room without my head beating so bad”. Through this position, Aarushi has gained confidence and independence and has learned how to speak in front of others and those in authority positions. When reflecting on how these skills may help her in situations outside of school, she says, “Public speaking and confidence will of course help me for maybe interviews and also talking to patients and stuff like that”. In other words, she sees these skills as helping her get a job one day, and perform better in her chosen profession. Other IAS students, such as Radhika and Kiara, remark upon how their time participating in clubs such as Model United Nations and serving as a class leader have given them confidence, public-speaking skills, and a greater ability to work with others.

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Students at the Academy also provided examples of school-based leadership opportunities. For example, Gerald Abraham says, “Throughout primary and middle school, I’ve always been very sporty. Throughout primary [school], I was the fastest. In middle school, one of my best friends kept on getting gold for everything and I felt pretty bad because I wanted to be known as the fastest person. Then, I started working hard. That’s when I learned determination and motivation”. Gerald has played football (soccer), field hockey, basketball, and tennis for his school. He has turned his love of sports into a leadership position as House Captain. In this position, he organizes sports-related school events and inter-school sports matches. Other Academy students talked about running school clubs and taking leadership roles in other aspects of school life. For example, Varuna serves as the Academy’s prefect for the primary schoolchildren. Her responsibilities include supervising classrooms during teacher meetings. She also organizes events such as math day and the math treasure hunt, which involves putting math problems around the school for primary school students to solve. The leadership opportunities provided by adolescents’ parents and schools give them the opportunity to develop the skills they may need as they prepare to become transnationally mobile adults. Importantly, adolescents also learn how to wield their advantages in a moral fashion. As such, interview participants described being heavily involved in social service work—the focus of the next section. Lessons in Wielding Privilege: Adolescents’ Engagement in Social Service Work Adolescents’ families played an important role in their engagement with social service work. For instance, Sajan—an Academy student who lived in North Carolina for seven years before relocating to Bangalore—described his social service work by saying, “I have a charity that I started for providing shoes to poor children and I’ve been doing that for the past two years”. He was inspired to start this organization because he and his dad noticed a lot of children walking barefoot. With his father’s help, he started a social service organization that collects and donates shoes to local schoolchildren. This operation has grown such that there are now people in other cities who run branches of the organization. Once he goes to college, his friend and then his sister will run the charity. Sajan’s example illustrates

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how volunteer work can be something that engages multiple members of the family—in this case, his father and sister. When I asked Sajan why he started this social service organization, he said, “I always wanted to do something to help out, but I didn’t really know what to do. So, then I saw this and realized this may be a good way to reach out to people. So, I decided to go forward with it”. Like Sajan’s dad, other parents helped their children engage in social service work. For example, Kajan’s parents run a foundation that supports the education of underprivileged children. Through this organization, Kajan helps organize the creation of libraries in government schools. Similarly, Kalyani’s parents started a school for underprivileged children. Her parents involve her in this by taking her on trips to visit the schoolchildren and their communities. Adolescents also participated in social service activities provided by their schools. Radhika, an IAS student who lived in California before moving to Bangalore, talked about participating in local clean-up drives around different lakes and highways that were organized by her school. When I asked her why she chooses to engage in social service work, she responded by saying: Kids that are my age, we’re going to be the leaders, the engineers, and you know the future. We’re going to be running the world, basically. And, you know, we want to shape it up. There’s a lot of kids in India who don’t go to school, especially like girls, the poverty-stricken people. I think teaching them is really important too. It gives them opportunities to rise. It gives them a part; they get a part in community as well. They have a chance to prove themselves too. If we have a chance to go to school and participate in all these things to prove ourselves, then even kids who can’t afford it should be able to do that as well.

Underlying Radhika’s desire to volunteer is the goal of uplifting others so that they may have a better chance to enjoy the same opportunities that she presently has. Radhika’s statement belies a firm understanding that she is being groomed to become a global leader, while others are being left out of the same opportunities that she enjoys. In some ways, Radhika’s commitment to social service work reflects a wish to bring the less fortunate into a shared modernity. While Radhika has a well-articulated rationale for engaging in social service work, others simply described “enjoying the work” as their

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motivation to become involved in the community. For example, Anand participated in a crowdfunding event that involved volunteering to raise money for a child who needs heart surgery, and a Cancer Walk-a-thon. When asked why he participates in social service activities, he stated that he does so because he likes doing them. Similarly, Aarushi became involved in the National Social Service (NSS) through her school because she simply enjoys “doing stuff”. This “stuff” includes cleaning and painting school buildings, tutoring children, and participating in laptop donation drives. College Preparation: Family Support and School Resources The work put forward by parents, schools, and adolescents themselves ultimately prepares them for the next steps in their academic and professional lives. For all the adolescents I spoke to, except for Nalin who planned to take a gap year between high school and college, the next step in their education involves attending college. However, where they planned to enroll in college varied based on the school they attended. For example, the overwhelming majority of those who attend IAS intend to go to college in India, while keeping the door open to studying abroad in countries such as the USA.  Meanwhile, those who attend the Academy intend to study outside of India. The colleges that participants are considering include the University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, and the University of Chicago in the USA; BITS Pilani, the National Institute of Design, and the Indian Institute of Technology in India; along with HKUST and NUS in Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively. Regardless of their intended college destination, both IAS and Academy students received support from their parents and schools as they prepared for college.  arental Support in the College Preparation Process P Parents support their children’s college preparation process by locating resources that will promote their admission to a reputable institution anywhere in the world. One way that parents do so is by actively seeking out available resources within India. For instance, Aarushi mentioned participating in SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) preparation classes available at IAS and administered by an outside vendor. In addition to the SAT preparation courses provided at IAS, Aarushi’s parents enrolled her in a standardized test coaching program sponsored by the United States International Education Foundation (USIEF). Aarushi’s parents are

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committed to her attending college in the USA—the country of her citizenship—and therefore make every effort to leverage the resources at their disposal to make that possible. The efforts of Aarushi’s parents are reflected in numerous stories from other adolescents about enrolling in local coaching classes as they prepare for admission to institutions such as the National Law University and the National Institute of Design. However, some families support their children’s college preparation needs by using resources available outside of India. This most often occurs in the case of college tours. For instance, Kajan described to me his involvement in his sister’s US college tour by saying, “I remember we visited after I finished my seventh grade, my sister was done with her eleventh. She did sort of a college tour around the USA to see the places that she really wanted to go”. They visited several cities and universities on the tour including Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Columbia in New York City, and Cornell in Ithaca. His sister would eventually enroll in CMU, while Kajan would go on to attend Cornell—his father’s alma mater. While some parents keep their college tours to one specific country, such as the USA, others have more ambitious plans. For instance, Sowmya describes her and her husband’s plans to create an international college tour for their daughter, Radhika, by stating the following: She’s thinking, ‘I want to go for studies to Paris or like Korean countries or China’. So, we’re thinking that in like the next 5 or 6 years we’ll take our vacation to those countries so at least they can see around and get exposure. Now she’s saying, ‘Can I figure out which university I can go for? And I want to take a round of [tour] that university’.

Like Sowmya and her husband, Karun and Malvika Choudhury decided to take their daughter, Liyana, on a college tour through countries within Central Europe. Therefore, before deciding where to apply, Liyana had the chance to visit universities in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Parents provided their children with comprehensive college support that spans beyond supplying them with test preparation assistance and facilitating international college tours. In the case of Liyana, her parents became her college counselors. She describes how that decision was made by stating the following,

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Like that’s just how I felt. From what my friends had told me about their external counselors is that they just kind of make it seem like the weight of the world is on you and this decision will determine the rest of your life. I just, I just don’t like that. So, I figured, my parents have enough experience that I think I can just do that with them.

Liyana’s father is involved with undergraduate and graduate admissions at his alma mater—the University of Chicago—so he is familiar with what it takes to have a competitive application to an elite university. Meanwhile, for others, the support to attend a specific college or university came from a less explicit place. For instance, many adolescents mentioned having an interest in applying to a college or university that one of their parents attended. These institutions included CMU, Cornell, UC Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Overall, parents provide adolescents with comprehensive support as they prepare for the next step in their academic career; however, they are not the only source of college preparation assistance. Schools play a significant role in preparing elite adolescents for their educational futures as well, which is the focus of the next section. S chools’ College Preparation Support IAS and the Academy prepare students for the next steps in their career in a multifaceted fashion. Students reported that their school’s extracurricular opportunities, college counseling, and pedagogical practices collectively provided the support needed for them to be prepared for and then excel at their future college. Importantly, those who talked about their school providing them with great college preparation assistance were oftentimes those who planned to attend college outside of India. Meanwhile, those who planned to attend college in India did not find their school to be very supportive of their post-high school plans. For example, four IAS students were only considering an Indian institution for their undergraduate studies—even though they may attend a university abroad for graduate school. For these students, they felt that while their schools provided great support with mastering the curriculum and passing the 10th- and 12th-grade board examinations, they did not necessarily provide the resources needed to pass college entrance exams at reputable institutions in India. They often had to seek extra support—such as coaching classes—to get the assistance they needed to reach their college goals. Therefore, the stories of all students, excluding these four students, are

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featured in this section. Additionally, IAS’ reputation as a school is not heavily dependent on its college placement results to the same degree as the Academy—which is well-known for sending students to premiere colleges and universities outside of India. Therefore, this section focuses relatively more attention on the experiences of adolescents who attended the Academy. IAS and the Academy provide a broad range of extracurricular activities that adolescents felt would help them in college. For example, while Divya is considering attending the National Institute of Design in India, she is also contemplating attending Pratt or RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) in the USA. She believes that her extracurricular involvement will enhance her college application and, consequently, her chances of being admitted to her desired college or university. It is not surprising that Divya remarks on how much she feels her school is helping prepare her for the future through its extracurricular offerings. Her father, Vihaan, chose IAS because he wanted a school that supported her interests. He says: I think it was a good decision from the opportunities’ perspective. Like what she said, this musical and fashion designing and all those. I’m not sure she would get [these opportunities] in any other school. Because that’s her taste. That’s where she wants to be in the future. So, from that angle, it is a good decision.

In addition to the extracurricular opportunities available, students also described how the school personnel were helpful with their college preparation process. This was especially the case for Academy students who talked about the benefits of having college counselors on staff. The benefits provided by the school’s personnel are highlighted by Gerald Abraham, a 12th-grade student who was born and raised in a suburb of Chicago before relocating to Bangalore. When talking about how the Academy supports his college-going plans, Gerald says, “So, we have college counselors. I think they’re very helpful and the teachers are helpful for their recommendations and everything. I feel like [the Academy] does a pretty good job”. Gerald expresses contentment in the support provided by his school’s college counseling and teaching staff. Beyond the support provided by the school’s personnel, students also remarked upon the benefits they derived from the school’s curriculum and pedagogical practices. For example, Pratap talked extensively about the benefit of being enrolled in a school that offers the IB. He says, “I can feel

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myself growing. I can feel myself learning a lot and it inspires me to kind of do more things outside the curriculum. For example, pick up books and start reading, just because I saw the author’s name in the English textbook”. He then goes on to say, “The IB definitely provided me with an opportunity to expand my horizons and open myself up to an extent that I can absorb everything, which is definitely how it’s going to be in college—just even more concentrated”. In other words, Pratap likes how the IB encourages him to learn outside of the textbook. He feels that having this openness towards knowledge will help him as he tackles the challenges of college. Meanwhile, Rian Khatri, a US citizen and permanent resident of Hong Kong, believes that teachers’ pedagogical practices will help him in college. He says: Well, I mean in [the Academy] they prepare you for the worst. They will pull your predicted [scores] down, they’ll give you the toughest papers, [and] they will just make your life tough. Once you’ve gone through that, once you’ve survived that, you learn how to work hard and enjoy as well. I think if I go to the USA and face any challenges, I’ll be able to overcome the challenges and have fun as well.

For Rian, his school has taught him skills that will help him in college. The adolescents’ stories featured in this section reflect the relatively high degree of support they receive from their parents and schools as they prepare for their educational futures. This support ranges from the availability of extracurricular activities to personalized international college tours. With these supports available, elite transnationally mobile adolescents are ready to take the next step on their path to becoming the next generation of leaders within the global economy.

Conclusion The presence of Indian American adolescents in India challenges our understanding of who can be modern and where modernity is produced. As signaled by the increase in return migrants from the USA (Bhatt, 2018), there is a belief that India has the resources necessary to manufacture the trappings of modern, elite adolescence. One of these resources includes the availability of ‘good’ schools capable of propelling adolescents to competitive colleges and universities within India and abroad. As

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such, affluent parents work in conjunction with elite, private English-­ medium schools to produce a form of elite adolescence characterized by international exposure, leadership activities, social service work, and comprehensive college support. These social practices represent the cultural streamlining (Radhakrishnan, 2011) of elite adolescence. By engaging in these practices, parents and schools facilitate adolescents’ development of transferable, internationally recognized skills that they believe will benefit them as they prepare for transnationally mobile futures. While this chapter provides a snapshot of some of the practices elite adolescents engage in as they prepare to become leaders within the global economy, data limitations prevent me from articulating the concrete benefits of these practices to adolescents’ social and economic outcomes. For example, I cannot say that the leadership opportunities that they take advantage of in high school result in highly paid jobs and social prestige. Therefore, future work should consider the effects of parenting practices and schooling on the social, educational, and professional outcomes of elite, transnationally mobile adolescents. One study that effectively does so is Yi-Lin Chiang’s (2022) longitudinal study of elite Chinese youth. Conducting more studies on the effects of elite upbringings on adolescents’ outcomes would accomplish three things. First, they would provide additional information about the experiences of relatively elite adolescents—an understudied population. Second, they would interrogate the trappings of an elite lifestyle and explicate how privilege is reproduced. Third, they would provide a basis upon which to compare experiences of elite childhoods that vary according to country of origin, parents’ occupation, and other relevant characteristics. Overall, conducting studies on elite adolescents would provide a more nuanced understanding of this relatively understudied group that is being groomed to be the next generation of global leaders.

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Correction to: Childhood and Youth in India Anandini Dar and Divya Kannan

Correction to: A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-031-31820-7 The book was inadvertently published with incorrect affiliation details of the editor, Divya Kannan, in the front matter and chapter one as “Shiv Nadar University IoE” whereas it should be “Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence”. This has been updated in the book.

The updated original version for this book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­31820-­7 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7_13

C1

Index1

A Adolescence, 36, 269–288 After-school programme, 22, 179–198 Age, 6, 16, 20–22, 47, 55, 56, 62, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 79, 80, 84, 84n5, 101, 104, 129, 136, 139, 149–152, 154–164, 167, 169, 170, 187, 192, 207, 226, 231, 232, 236, 252, 259 Akhila Kerala Balajana Sakhyam, 81, 84 Aspiration, 3, 7, 9, 10, 14, 20, 22, 23, 39, 53, 78, 81, 91, 94–96, 105, 117, 189, 203–206, 209, 211, 212, 219, 220, 226, 231, 238, 257, 276 Attitudinal training, 208, 212, 220

B Bangalore, 12, 23, 35, 36, 42, 45, 46, 48, 243–264, 269–271, 275, 276, 278, 281, 282, 286 Bhima Sangha, 253–256, 260, 262 Bodily practices, 202, 204–206 Bollywood/ cinema, 106, 225, 227, 231, 232, 235 Boys’ Band, 123, 124 Bustees, 223–226, 228, 232, 235–237, 239 See also Slums C Certification, 149, 151, 154–164 Childhood studies/Children and Youth Studies/children’s ­studies/ Childhoods in India, 4, 13, 16–19, 23, 95, 181, 182, 198, 226, 243

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Dar, D. Kannan (eds.), Childhood and Youth in India, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31820-7

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INDEX

Child labor, 14, 17, 22, 149–150, 246, 248, 249, 249n3, 253, 262, 264 Children’s Acts, 124 Children’s rights, 16, 17, 250, 252, 257 Cities, 1, 3, 5, 9, 11–15, 78, 185, 224, 225, 239, 284 See also Bangalore; Delhi; Kerala; Kolkata Cleanliness, 101–119 Colonial modernity/modernity, 1–23, 37–40, 49, 53, 57–58, 68, 71, 78–80, 85–87, 93, 95, 102–104, 111, 118, 119, 124–126, 128–132, 139–142, 145, 150, 151, 154–170, 179, 180, 198, 202–206, 209, 211, 219, 226–228, 231, 235, 239, 243–245, 247, 257, 258, 263, 269–288 Communication skills, 203, 204, 207–215, 219, 220 Concerned for Working Children(CWC), 23, 246, 250–254, 256–259 Criminal tribes, 124, 125 CWC, see Concerned for Working Children D DAP, see Developmentally appropriate practice Delhi, 2, 7, 11, 22, 180, 184, 185, 201–220, 227, 233, 236 Developmentally appropriate practice (DAP), 54–56, 64, 66–69, 71, 72

Disability/disability studies, 10, 11, 22, 180–183, 180n1, 185–187, 189–194, 197, 198, 253 Disposition, 105, 202, 205, 209, 216, 219, 277 Dystopia/dystopic childhoods, 80, 82, 90, 91, 94 E Early childhood, 21, 53–72 Elite childhood, 288 Enterprise, 9, 34, 35n3, 43, 145 Entrepreneurial, 6, 21, 35n3, 40, 42, 47, 49, 205 Ethnography, 7, 8, 10, 12, 17, 20, 106, 202, 203, 205 Etiquette, 208, 210, 216–218 Everyday/everyday urban, 1–23, 34–36, 38, 39, 41, 48, 49, 57, 60, 69, 78, 79, 102, 103, 104n4, 105, 106, 106n6, 112, 113, 115, 118, 119, 124, 133, 139–142, 144, 145, 151, 165, 180–184, 186, 187, 198, 206, 207, 216, 219, 245, 255, 269–288 F Factory Act, 149, 150, 152–154, 156, 158, 158n4, 168 Factory schools, 151, 153, 165–169 G Globally familiar, 7, 202, 205, 206, 216, 219, 220 Global South, 4, 6, 16–19, 22, 23, 35, 38–40, 39n5, 42, 243, 244, 270 Grooming, 9, 202, 204, 205, 207–210, 215–217, 220

 INDEX 

I Identification processes, 154, 161, 163 Individualization, 44, 65, 229 Industrial child, 150, 151, 161, 162 Inspection, 159, 160 Intertextual, 82 K Kerala, 8, 21, 78n1, 79, 81–83, 83n3, 85–88, 90–96, 105n5, 233, 236 Knowledge production, 15–19, 164, 164n7 Kolkata, 10, 23, 223 L Learning, 1–3, 12, 34, 40n6, 41, 42, 44, 45, 49, 53–72, 81, 87, 88, 105, 139, 140, 180, 181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 192, 193, 196–198, 201n1, 209, 211, 212, 214, 215, 220, 247, 271, 279–281, 287 ‘Life skills’/soft skills, 22, 43, 47, 202, 205–207, 210, 215, 218, 219 M Malayalam, 78, 78n1, 83, 85–87, 95 Malayala Manorama, 21, 78, 79, 81–83, 84n4, 85, 87, 88, 95 Malayali, 77–96 Marriage, 6, 10, 23, 223, 224, 227–229, 232–237, 252, 257, 260 Media panic, 79–81, 91, 94 Middle-class, 1, 3, 9, 10, 12, 22, 23, 35, 44–46, 48, 56, 78, 81, 88–91, 94–96, 102, 103, 106n6, 108, 112–119, 127, 133, 186, 224, 228, 233, 238

293

Migration, 11, 90, 152, 210n4, 228, 247, 264, 273 Mobility, 10, 11, 19, 20, 22, 23, 34, 81, 96, 144, 211, 217, 228, 231, 232, 235, 237, 246, 262, 270–272, 277 Modern, 2–4, 6, 7, 10, 12–15, 20, 22, 23, 35, 37–39, 39n4, 46n11, 54, 57, 58, 68, 72, 77–96, 102–104, 104n3, 111, 112, 115, 118, 124–138, 142–145, 150, 151, 153, 161, 164–166, 170, 192, 196, 198, 201–220, 223–225, 228–231, 233–237, 239, 243–264, 271–275, 287 See also Modernity/modernization Modernity/modernization, 1–23, 34, 35, 37–40, 49, 53, 54, 57–58, 68, 71, 78–81, 83, 85, 86, 93, 95, 102–104, 111, 118, 119, 124–126, 128–132, 139–142, 145, 150, 151, 154–170, 180, 198, 202–206, 203n2, 209, 210n4, 211, 219, 226–228, 231, 235, 239, 243–245, 247, 248, 257, 258, 263, 269–288 Modern selves, 201–220 Multi-sited ethnography, 81, 184 Music, 7, 123–145, 179, 184, 187, 188, 190, 231, 277 Muslim youth, 230 N Nalla Paadam, 81, 82, 87–88, 91–95 The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), 55, 56 National Education Policy (NEP), 21, 54, 58, 60, 63, 71 Naturalization, 54, 150

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INDEX

Neoliberal, 11, 34, 39, 48, 115, 119, 202, 208, 247, 251, 252, 255 NEP, see National Education Policy New media, 78–80, 94, 95 Newspapers, 21, 77–96, 211, 212 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 5, 12, 13, 16, 17, 22, 23, 43, 185, 196, 232, 238, 244–246, 249–252, 254, 257, 258, 263, 264 P Parents, 20, 22, 36, 45, 47, 48, 86, 88, 90, 94, 103, 106, 108–111, 110n11, 114–116, 125, 128–130, 132, 145, 159, 161n5, 166, 180, 184, 186–191, 194–197, 208, 219, 229, 235, 237, 247, 248, 259, 262, 269–279, 281–285, 287, 288 Personality development, 5, 9, 10, 12, 22, 201–220 Protection, 8, 15, 16, 22, 37, 38, 94, 150, 152–154, 161, 250, 258 Psychology/psychological regulation, 9, 17, 19, 21, 34, 35, 37, 41, 54, 56–58, 68, 71, 72, 208, 270 Psy-sciences/psy-disciplines, 34, 35 R Regulation/psychological regulation, 20, 34, 35, 37–40, 42, 48, 149, 156, 166–170 Resilient, 33–49 Risk, 9, 14, 34, 38–42, 44, 45, 47, 49, 119, 224, 226, 228, 229, 231, 232, 235–237, 239, 272 See also Risky/at-risk

Risky/at-risk, 7, 33–49, 112 Romantic, 10, 223, 224, 226, 228, 231, 232 S Salvation Army, 20, 21, 124, 125 Sartorial codes, 105 Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), 283 School uniforms, 21, 101–119, 230 Self, 7, 34, 35n3, 39, 41, 42, 48, 85, 93, 108, 202–210, 215, 218–220 Skills/skilling, 2, 5, 9, 10, 12, 20, 21, 33–36, 33n2, 39–48, 60, 67, 78, 131, 135, 136, 144, 179, 186, 192, 202–210, 215, 218–220, 251, 270, 272, 274, 276–281, 287, 288 See also ‘Life skills’/soft skills Slums, 5, 11, 13, 23, 126, 205, 223–239, 245, 248, 253, 254, 262 Spoken English, 201n1, 203, 207, 210, 217, 220 Streets, 5, 209, 224, 225, 244–246, 248 T Techniques of self, 202 Transnational, 7, 10, 11, 14, 34, 35, 203, 205, 248, 270–275, 277 U Upvaluation, 209, 210, 212, 220 Urban, 2–5, 8, 10–15, 20–23, 34–36, 39, 43, 45, 46n11, 48, 49, 78, 88, 105n5, 106n6, 110, 112,

 INDEX 

119, 151, 204–206, 218, 220, 223–239, 244, 245, 247, 248, 255, 257, 270 Urbanization, 3–5, 8, 11, 39 Utopia, 80, 82, 90, 91 Utopic childhoods, 80–83, 96 V Violence, 3, 8, 10, 41, 139, 223–239, 248, 253

295

Vulnerable, 105, 108, 111, 125, 243, 244, 246, 249n3, 250, 251, 257 Vygotksy, Lev, 69 W World-class city, 205 Y Youth subjectivity, 22, 202