“If we are to teach real peace in this world,” wrote Gandhi, “we shall have to begin with the children.” In its Directive Principles, the Indian Constitution states that children should be given opportunities and facilities to develop in a healthy manner, and in conditions of freedom and dignity. India is also a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is the responsibility of nations to provide for the care, education and freedom of all children.
In 1991, when Myron Weiner published his watershed study ‘The Child and The State in India’, 82 million Indian children were not in school. Primary education was not compulsory, nor was child labour illegal.
Fortunately, in the three decades since then, much has been achieved for the welfare of children. Sustained education policy initiatives have over the years led to the enrolment of large numbers of children in school. Efforts by education and child rights activists led to the introduction of child-related legislations such as the Right to Education Act, the POCSO Act, and the Juvenile Justice Act.
One out of every five children in the world is born in India. Children under 18 make up 37% of the total population, amounting to 444 million children below 18 (Census 2011). This is the largest child population in the world.
And yet, childhood in India continues to be an area of deep inequality and political struggle. The child sex ratio, status of the girl child, and child undernutrition remain matters of deep concern. Two out of five young children (under 5 years) in India suffer from stunted development (NFHS-4, 2015-16). Three out of five young children are anaemic. One in two mothers is anaemic.
How are the lives of our children so deeply different? What are the complex causes of inequality in their lives? How is such inequality perpetuated and what can be done about it? To what extent does birth mean destiny for the child in India?
Childhoods in India: Traditions, Trends, and Transformations , edited by T.S. Saraswathi, Shailaja Menon and Ankur Madan, uses an interdisciplinary approach to look at some of these questions about childhoods in the Indian context. Bringing together the diverse work of researchers across several fields, this collection is structured along four major themes: the history and politics of childhoods; sociocultural perspectives; education and schooling; and issues related to law, policy and practice.
Many reflections
Sarada Balagopalan examines the “child figure” in light of colonial modernity, while Vasanthi Raman looks at childhood through the lens of neoliberalism. In a chapter titled “Did girls have a childhood in the past?” Uma Chakravarti shows how it is necessary to go further than “the charming mythologies associated with the boy child”; that childhoods are shaped not only by gender but also caste and class. She quotes from an account by Muktabai Salve, a Mang girl student in Jotiba and Savitribai Phule’s school: “The Mang and Mahar children never lodge a complaint even if the brahmana children throw stones at them or injure them seriously... Oh God, what agony is this! I will burst into tears if I write more about this injustice.”
Parent-child relationship
Nandita Chaudhary argues for a more nuanced understanding of childhoods and society in India: “A fundamental tolerance of ambivalence, ambiguity, multiplicity and variety is a thread that unites our people.” Ankur Madan, Rajashree Srinivasan and Kinnari Pandya write about relationships between parents and children, including how tendencies to control can manifest as care.
Looking at curricular and policy documents from 1964 to 2005, Shailaja Menon and Rakhi Banerjee analyse how Indian education policy has constructed the child over the years. Using the examples of the Mahila Samakhya women’s empowerment programme on the one hand and conditional cash transfer schemes on the other, Jyotsna Jha unpacks the gendered assumptions and consequences of Indian educational policies. She points out that though most conditional cash transfer schemes with their instrumentalist approach are yet to be evaluated in India, they have shown mixed results elsewhere; in India, a recent study finds some impact on girls’ schooling but little impact on changes in societal mindset.
Life skills education
In a fascinating chapter titled “Childhood as ‘risky’ and life as ‘skills’,” R. Maithreyi discusses how some psycho-educational programmes use what they call “life skills education” to perpetuate an individual deficit account of the child and produce a kind of “responsibilisation” of children from low-income groups, rather than teaching children to interrogate the structural reasons for poverty and inequality.
Rahul Mukhopadhyay and Kamala Mukunda study the role of fear in the classroom, which derives not only from abuse, but also from control and surveillance; exam-related anxieties; and social inequalities.
Asha Bajpai discusses the right to childhood and equitable access to justice. More needs to be done to ensure that there are effective legal remedies for children to obtain justice when their rights are breached.
The epilogue, constructed as a dialogue about child rights, starts by asking who is a child: for there are contradictions in the different laws pertaining to children in India at present.
It then asks the next most important question: whose responsibility is the child? And this is a question which needs us all to reflect deeply.
Finally, Sarada Balagopalan cautions against the frequent use of “child rights” itself (against the ground reality of growing inequality in the world, and increased vulnerabilities of the poor and the marginalised) which may result in producing the phrase as “a zone of compassionate action rather than political reform.”
Childhoods in India: Traditions, Trends, and Transformations ; edited by T.S. Saraswathi, Shailaja Menon and Ankur Madan, Routledge India, ₹1,395.
