Table Of ContentColonial Childhoods
Anthem South Asian Studies
Series Editor:Crispin Bates
Other titles in the series:
Brosius,Christiane Empowering Visions(2005)
Mills,Jim (ed) Sport in South Asia(2005)
Joshi,Chitra Lost Worlds:Indian Labour and its Forgotten Histories(2005)
Dasgupta,Biplab,European Trade and Colonial Conquest(2005)
Kaur,Raminder Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism (2005)
Rosenstein,Lucy New Poetry in Hindi(2004)
Shah,Ghanshyam,Caste and Democratic Politics in India(2004)
Van Schendel,Willem The Bengal Borderland:Beyond State and Nation in
South Asia (2004)
Colonial Childhoods
The Juvenile Periphery
of India, 1850–1945
SATADRU SEN
Anthem Press
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Cover photograph:Boys drilling at the Matunga Reformatory,Circa 1908,
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1. State of the Experiment:Experts,Parents and
the Reformatory 9
2. The Nature of the Beast:The Content of Institutionalized
Childhood 51
3. Experimental Childhoods:Pain and the Reformatory 89
4. Gendering the Reformatory 115
5. Masters and Servants:School,Home and Aristocratic
Childhood 143
6. The Politics of Deracination 187
Conclusion 211
Notes 215
Bibliography 241
Index 249
To Carolyn Ruth Keller,1937–2001
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
While I am indebted to numerous colleagues, friends, editors and archivists
for their help with researching and writing this book,I am particularly grate-
ful to Crispin Bates, who organized the seminars at the University of
Edinburgh where this project took shape; to Radhika Singha, George
Behlmer, Swapna Banerjee, Harald Fischer-Tiné and Ian Duffield; and as
always, to Jim Mills and Elizabeth Kolsky. My student Lindsay Nencheck
deprived me of the joy of preparing the index,and did so with diligence and
care.
INTRODUCTION
In India in 1876, the colonial government passed the Reformatory Schools
Act,providing a common structure of guidelines and rules to a mechanism of
juvenile delinquency that had been taking shape in the provinces since
mid-century.In the same decade,British educators and administrators in the
princely states established the institutions that became known as the Chiefs’
Colleges. Linking these apparently disparate episodes is the child: the crimi-
nalized child from the margins of native society,the effete child of the decadent
aristocracy, and always, in the shadows, the European child that might serve
as model,measure and foil.These childhoods emerged at a particular moment
in the encounter between a western-European metropole, its imperial agents
and people who would be described by Kipling as ‘half devil and half child’.
Reformatories and boarding schools enabled experiments with the relationship
between the devil and the child, and raised questions about whether devilry
and childhood could co-exist. From the outset, as such, colonial child-saving
developed as an ‘investigative modality’.1
In the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant metropolitan assumptions
about childhood were its plasticity and its innocence.2 These assumptions
were hardly uniform, being contingent upon the location of the child on the
metropolitan map of class, gender, race and urban/rural geography.3 Some
children — the poor, the delinquent, the Irish, the gypsy, the girl, the homo-
sexual,the ‘precocious’,the adolescent — were either more plastic and innocent,
or less so, than others; germs of instability were ingrained in the Victorian
child. When the normative model of childhood was taken into the colony, it
was destabilized further.There,the nature of the child and that of the native
not only reinforced each other, they also undermined each other in extraor-
dinarily productive ways. Even as some colonial observers ‘discovered’ the
native child, the sites of discovery produced a widespread conviction that
‘native childhood’ was an oxymoron. Reformatories, boarding schools and
authoritative texts were energized by the putative plasticity of the child, but
they were also paralyzed by an articulation of difference that implied that
native children were essentially small, perverse adults. The juvenile was thus
produced as a deviant and the children’s institution as a failure.
2 COLONIAL CHILDHOODS
The children of the colony were conceived and raised by adults engaged in
a series of political clashes;between the 1850s and the 1940s,they were valuable
to colonial as well as national projects. Indians who sought to decolonize the
institutions of childhood had to reclaim the native child from institutional and
disciplinary spaces in which the lines between child and adult had been obfus-
cated, by appropriating the modern molds within which the recovered child
might be placed. They carried on not only ‘direct’ conversations with their
white counterparts and each other, but also ‘indirect’ conversations with
children,and through the mechanism as well as the content of the conversa-
tions, bestowed and claimed some attributes of nationhood and modernity.
Childhood was thus an important ingredient in the making of empire, race
and nationhood at a time when new meanings were attached to perceived dis-
tinctions between white and black children,girl and boy children,aristocratic
and middle class children, ‘westernized’ and ‘authentic’ children, and
between the offspring of the elite and those of the poor and provincial. One
set was central (as future adults) to the colony and the emerging nation,while
the other was relegated to the fringes.Both were located in what I have called
the juvenile periphery.4
The periphery, in this formulation, is a shifting and productive zone at the
edge of the modern — the colonial horizon of the metropolitan,the universal,
the national,the middle class and the authoritative.It is informed by the mod-
ern but not bound to replicate the modern,because it sustains (and is sustained
by) a pervasive skepticism about the compatibility between natives and moder-
nity.5It facilitates the generation,the containment and the investigation of spec-
imen populations; it generates authority and political imperatives that are
substantially autonomous of the metropolitan and the national. Its products,
such as expertise, deviance, childhood, adulthood, etc. are highly unstable and
subject to contestation, not least because the periphery does not bestow its
rewards equally. While peripheral status is a source of power to some (for
instance,the colonial child correction administrator who seeks to create his own
authoritative space),it is galling to others (who resent their location in second tier
institutions,or in suspect childhoods that lead to second-rate adulthoods).
Childhood itself might be regarded as a periphery in a cultural environment
in which adulthood enjoyed unprecedented and distinctive privileges.To be a
child,in Britain and its colonies in the nineteenth century,was to be excluded
from various forms of political, economic, social and sexual privilege, and
consigned to innocence and dependency.6Within this,native childhood was a
further marginality,deriving not only from notions of adulthood but also from
assumptions about race, moral content and political status, and serving as a
model for the marginality of various segments of the colonized.7At the same
time, to be stripped of the status of a child constituted a more severe
