Inhabiting 'childhood' : children, labour and schooling in postcolonial india 2014

Through a rich ethnography of street and working children in Calcutta, India, this book offers the first sustained enquiry into postcolonial childhoods, arguing that the lingering effects of colonialism are central to comprehending why these children struggle to inhabit the transition from labour to schooling. Although 'multiple childhoods' recognizes children's lives as heterogeneous and culturally inscribed, the figure of the 'victimized' child continues to test the limits of this framework. Inhabiting 'Childhood' ambitiously redresses these limits by drawing on the everyday experiences of street children and child labourers in Calcutta to introduce the postcolony as a critical, and thus far absent, lens in theorizing the 'child'. Through capturing a moment in which global, national and local efforts combined to improve and transform these children's lives through school enrolment and new discourses of 'children's rights', this ethnography makes a vital point about the complexity and contemporaneity of their extensive practices of dwelling generated by the exigencies of survival within postcolonial 'development'. These modes of living labour are central to comprehending why these children though desirous of the transition from labour to school, find this difficult to inhabit. This book argues that this difficulty, which can be neither dissolved through a 'cultural' understanding of these lives nor resolved within a more technocratic policy norm, is in fact a very productive opening to re-thinking 'childhood' Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction....Pages 1-25 Re-forming Lives: The Child on the Street and the ‘Street Child’....Pages 26-58 Sedimenting Labour through Schooling: Colonial State, Native Elite and Working Children in Early Twentieth-Century India....Pages 59-86 Memories of Tomorrow: On Children, Labour and Postcolonial ‘Development’....Pages 87-121 The Politics of Failure: Children’s Rights and the ‘Call of the Other’....Pages 122-154 ‘A Magic Wand’: Reading the Promise of the ‘Right to Education’ against the Lives of Working Children....Pages 155-180 Conclusion....Pages 181-188 Back Matter....Pages 189-237