The 'Child' in South Asia: Minor Lives, Major Questions

Undergraduate / Graduate

What does it mean to think about the history, culture, and politics of a region through the figure of the "child"? This course explores "childhood" as a powerful concept that has shaped debates about race, colonialism and development, particularly in the history of colonial and postcolonial South Asia. From the stereotype of the "childlike native" to the infantilization of women, the child figure repeatedly gets invoked to mark social hierarchies. Even in a globalized world, the status of children across the world, measured under the rubric of the UN Child Rights Convention, fuels understandings of "development" and "progress" among nations and communities. We will survey Southern Asia's colonial legacy, postcolonial present and globalized afterlife to examine how "childhood" has been imagined in relation to national and ethnic identities as well as class, caste, gender, and religious affiliations of people. Taking a wide range of visual and textual genres as objects of study - such as textbooks, educational charts, children's literature, advertisements, biographies and films -- this course will enable students to study the category of the "child" through a humanistic lens and see how it's embedded in the cultural history of South Asia.