Toying with Childhood: Tracing the Child-Toy Bond from Britain and America to India

169 Pages·2022·1.813 MB·English

by  Usha Mudiganti

TOYING WITH CHILDHOOD
This book studies the dialectic relationship between the image of the child
and the toy in literary depictions of childhood in 19th- and 20th-century
Anglo-American fction. Drawing from the psychoanalytic theories of
Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, D. W. Winnicott, and Sudhir Kakar, it analyses
themes such as the heterogeneity of childhood and the construction of the
ideals of childhood. It explores the linkages between the ideals of childhood
in Britain and its travel to America and further dissemination in British
India. It discusses the established tropes of childhood such as innocence, a
formative period, the centrality of play, and the presence of a toy to argue
that the mores of childhood are culturally constructed and lead to the
reifcation of a child into an image of perfection. The author problematises
the notion of essential innocence and discusses the repercussions of such
stereotypes about childhood. The work also highlights parallels between the
ideals of childhood established in 19th-century Britain and the portrayals
of postcolonial Indian childhoods in 20th-century Indian English literature.
Toying with Childhood will be useful for students and researchers of
education, childhood studies, psychology, sociology, literature, gender
studies, and development studies. It will also appeal to general readers
interested in cultural perceptions of childhood, literary depictions of
children, and the works of Sigmund Freud.
Usha Mudiganti teaches English at Ambedkar University, Delhi, India.
She has designed and taught courses in children’s literature, British
and American literature, and literatures of the Indian subcontinent
at the undergraduate, postgraduate, and research levels. Her research
interests include the study of childhoods in literature, gender studies,
psychoanalytic theory, and popular culture studies. Her interest in the
study of childhood began during her master’s degree in English at the
University of Hyderabad, India. In her MPhil dissertation at the University
of Hyderabad, she highlighted the lack of substantial depictions of
girlhood even in bildungsroman novels with girl protagonists in late
Victorian and Early Edwardian England. She obtained her Ph D in 2007
from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute
of Technology, Delhi, for her thesis on the reifcation of childhood in
Anglo-American literature of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Her latest
publications include ‘Through the Lens of Childhood: Kipling’s Claim to
India’ in Kipling in India: India in Kipling (2021), Eds. Harish Trivedi
and Janet Montefore, ‘Virangana’, in Keywords for India (2020), Eds.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter Ronald deSouza, and ‘“Et tu, Brute?”: The
Child Soldier and the Child Victim in Shobasakthi’s Traitor’ in Childhood
Traumas: Narrative and Representations (2020), Eds. Kamayani Kumar
and Angelie Multani.
TOYING WITH
CHILDHOOD
Tracing the Child–Toy Bond from
Britain and America to India
Usha Mudiganti
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Usha Mudiganti
The right of Usha Mudiganti to be identifed as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
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trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mudiganti, Usha, author.
Title: Toying with childhood : tracing the child-toy bond from Britain and
America to India / Usha Mudiganti.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifers: LCCN 2021043164 (print) | LCCN 2021043165 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367480875 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003093275 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: English literature--19th century--History and criticism. |
English literature--20th century--History and criticism. | Indic literature (English)--
19th century--History and criticism. | Indic literature (English)--20th century--
History and criticism. | American literature--19th century--History and criticism.
| American literature--20th century--History and criticism. | Children’s literature,
English--History and criticism. | Children’s literature, Indic (English)--History
and criticism. | Children’s literature, American--History and criticism. |
Children in literature. | Toys in literature.
Classifcation: LCC PR468.C5 M83 2022 (print) | LCC PR468.C5 (ebook) |
DDC 823.009/3523--dc23/eng/20211129
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043164
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043165
ISBN: 978-0-367-48087-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-55389-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-09327-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003093275
Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
For
Baba, Amma, Sudhir, and Purnayya
because they believe in the efficacies of talking

CONTENTS
Preface viii
1 Introduction 1
2 Constructing childhood 20
3 Saving the child 48
4 The child and toy bond 87
5 Resonances and repercussions 115
Bibliography 137
Index 147
vii
PREFACE
I embarked upon an academic exploration into childhood when I was a
young adult. Over more than two decades of sustained engagement with
childhood studies, I have learnt much about the slipperiness of defnitions
and categorisations of human phases and conditions. I have come to realise
that all that can be said with any certitude about childhood is that laws set
the ages when a child ceases to legally be a child in different societies during
different epochs. Everything else concerned with childhood is practised and
gets codifed in consonance with the changes in perceptions of childhood in
cultures.
During the fnal work on this book, I was acutely aware of the changes
happening to childhoods in contemporary times when global resources are
focused on battling the virulence of a virus. While writing the fnal drafts
of this book during a long summer of ‘lockdown’ in a corner house of an
urban upper-middle-class residential society in the national capital of India,
I took sporadic breaks by walking on the attached terrace. During these
walks I would wonder how the children of the neighbourhood were coping
with being cooped inside urban apartments. I wondered what they were
playing at or playing with, probably without playmates, sometimes without
siblings, and most disconcertingly – how come I barely heard the voices
of the many children in my neighbourhood. The lives and the childhoods
of children in seemingly normal, presumably well-provided families were
silently changing during these times of staying indoors for many months.
Would I dare to allow my thoughts to move to the social inequities that
children too experience, and would I be able to think deeply about the vari-
ous challenges faced by children who do not have immediate access to food,
shelter, personal safety, and health or live in families that cannot or do
not provide these basic requirements of life? What about the children who
have lost their primary caregivers during this global pandemic? While there
would be a reasonable expectation of global interventions by nation states
to provide some basic requirements to ensure that children who have suf-
fered grave personal losses have a healthy childhood and hope to have a life
viii
PREFACE
of dignity, the immediate work at hand for all those who work with children
would be to try to comprehend the changes children are experiencing in the
norms of childhood. Under such circumstances that demand a renewed gaze
at children and childhoods, it would not be out of place to remind ourselves
that the mores of childhood are constructed by cultures. The changes in the
ways of childhood become immediately evident in institutions like fami-
lies and are incorporated within schools and other spaces developed with a
pedagogical intent to civilise the child.
During the course of my research in childhood studies, I have realised
that the belief in the ‘innocence’ of children and the perception of child-
hood as a formative stage of human life have remained constant from the
17th century onwards in Western civilisations. In India, the ‘recognition’
of these two constants of childhood is seen in the late 19th century but it
cannot be traced to have originated within the culture during a particular
epoch due to many unique aspects of Indian civilisation. Along with the
antiquity of Indian civilisation and its having been an oral culture – in which
transmission of knowledge happened through sruti and smriti for aeons and
carrying within it the inherent acceptance of orality’s multiple moments of
incursions, infexions, and interpretations – contemporary Indian society
holds centuries of multiculturalism and multilingualism in its expressions of
postcolonialism. Therefore, it cannot be confdently said that childhood in
India was ever perceived to be a monolithic, homogenous experience across
regions, social groups, and genders. However, the two notions about chil-
dren – that they are innocent and in need of training to integrate them into
civilised society – are widely prevalent even in contemporary Indian culture,
literature, practices, and policies that are connected with children and child-
hood. The fnal chapter of this work attempts to understand the presence of
these ‘Western’ ideas of childhood in contemporary India through an exam-
ination of the origins of these notions and their iterations through Anglo-
American literature of the specifc period when legislations for Indians,
including children, were formulated in Britain.
In the early stages of the research that fnally led to this book, it was
observed that the depiction of childhood in literature and other cultural
texts usually associates play and plaything(s) with childhood. Therefore,
the frst exploration was to examine the deep bond between the child and
the toy in order to understand adult perceptions of the essentials of the
experience of childhood. While conducting this exploration, it was noticed
that there were signifcant differences between the portrayals of childhood
in the literary texts written for adults and those written for children even
when the protagonists of these texts were children and/or the narrative was
focused on childhood. Considering that both the varieties of literary texts
about childhoods were constructing and disseminating portrayals of child-
hood and that my research was largely focusing on the literary genre of
ix