Inhabiting Childhood: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India

© Sarada Balagopalan 2014

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vii

Contents

List of Figures viii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1 Re- forming Lives: The Child on the Street and the ‘Street Child’ 26

2 Sedimenting Labour through Schooling: Colonial State, Native Elite and Working Children in Early Twentieth- Century India 59

3 Memories of Tomorrow: On Children, Labour and Postcolonial ‘Development’ 87

4 The Politics of Failure: Children’s Rights and the ‘Call of the Other’ 122

5 ‘A Magic Wand’: Reading the Promise of the ‘Right to Education’ against the Lives of Working Children 155

Conclusion Growing up, Moving on … 181

Notes 189

Bibliography 212

Index 228



1

Introduction

On that hot summer afternoon as I walked down busy Chowringhee Road, the large billboard had caught my eye. It was a message from the police, implicitly addressed to the city’s literate and civic- minded residents. Any child 5– 10 years of age found on the street during school hours should be brought to the nearest police station. Given that for even such privileged residents actual contact with the police or the legal sys-tem had historically been an ambivalent and somewhat reluctant event, the billboard was unusual. It looked as if it indicated the beginning of a new urban temperament in which the police and the bourgeois middle class were reinventing their relationship in an idiom of civic- minded camaraderie. In this new idiom, one could also temporarily forget that street and working children have particularly tense and difficult relations with the police. As the billboard spelt out, the matter was now a simple one: it was public service to help truant poor children by bringing them to the police station. Of course, alternative policing of poor children – away from the usual blunt punitive practices – had some presence in Calcutta.1 Since 1999, several of the city’s police stations had begun to house an alternative education programme that targeted working chil-dren from adjoining slums. However, such initiatives only worked within the confines of these poorer neighbourhoods. Being local initiatives, they did not – unlike the proposal advertised on the billboard – address the rest of the city and its literate public sphere as their audience.

A more plausible explanation for the police billboard lay in an initiative that had gained much kudos with the city’s middle- class residents three years earlier. Beginning in 1999, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation had undertaken a citywide programme to enrol all out- of- school children in the city’s government- run schools, including making efforts to set up new schools and train new teachers. As the first comprehensive



2 Inhabiting ‘Childhood’

urban initiative of its kind in India, it marked a radical shift in the ways the futures of out- of- school or working children were being imagined. This initiative in Calcutta signalled a fundamental recasting of official discourse on the most useful trajectory for labouring children. No longer were such children to be abandoned to the logic of ‘child labour’ in the informal economy, rather they were to be offered up to their ‘natural’ location in the school. Within this more urgent imperative to universalize formal schooling in the city, the police, as revealed by the signboard, were being paradoxically cast in the role of a crucial and benign facilitator.

Ten years later, by 2009, this small eruption of urgency had culminated in the monumental passing of a national law that made elementary education free and compulsory. A decade in the making, this law is widely viewed as allowing all children in India to realize opportunities through access to schooling, which has been unavailable in their lives till now. Coinciding with its emergence as an important force in the global scale of things, the Indian nation- state has felt an enormous compulsion to recalibrate the lives of poor children in order to prove its claim to globality. There is constant anxiety related to India’s ‘arrival’ on the global economic stage. The country’s reputation as a rising economic powerhouse is propelled by its phenomenal growth in the international IT and biotech sectors, with the educational excellence and savvy of its professionals and entrepreneurs highlighted in the media. But this focus on the success of India’s knowledge workers has also brought a greater and uncomfortable visibility to the large population of uneducated masses and their stunning poverty, the so- called ‘real’ India that viv-idly discloses the deceptive foothold of the nation’s economic success. Post- liberalization India continues to have the dubious distinction of the world’s highest number of working children despite the six- decade old Indian constitution explicitly expressing a desire to make elemen-tary education compulsory (Naik, 1975; Weiner, 1991). Even though government schools did not formally restrict access, a range of factors, including cost of schooling, cumbersome admission procedures, the need for children to work to supplement family incomes and the lack of adequate school spaces, had worked to effectively foreclose children’s universal enrolment and retention. Now, through the passing of the Right to Education Act (2009), the Indian state is signalling its commit-ment towards ensuring that each child receives quality schooling.

The pressing claim of this legislation is not only about the question of education in each child’s life but also about what it implies – as a cumu-lative effect of all children in school – for the contemporary nation at large. As a crucial modern civilizational milestone, the separation of the



Introduction 3

child from labour through compulsory schooling takes on an immense urgency, and the present moment of making elementary education available to all is the most vivid sign of this modernization. The cur-rent broad- based resoluteness in securing elementary education for all is strongly shared by the state and the nation’s ruling classes, the country’s media networks, corporate networks and an active citizenry. This law, then, is caught up in broader affects of arrival and anxiety. Projecting the image of a state finally working towards compulsory schooling in the hope that it will put an end to child labour is a central part of this management of being and becoming a global player. The sign outside the Calcutta UNICEF office that reads ‘Let all children be school goers and there will be no child labour’ reveals the insistent anticipation of this new moment in postcolonial India. As part of a

Figure 1 The sign outside the Calcutta UNICEF office.




new discourse of those who are ‘out of school’, the lives of millions of children nationwide are now differently marked, no longer as ‘child labour’ but rather as an epic journey from being ‘out of school’ to the promised domain of ‘free and compulsory education’.

At this critical juncture, when the nation narrates itself through this anticipated fulfilment of its promise of universal elementary educa-tion, this book steps back in time to read this assurance against the dense complexity of two related forms of marginalized children’s lives: a group of street children in Calcutta and a heterogeneous range of historical and contemporary sites in modern India where children are engaged in capitalist production and labour. These forms are over-whelmingly dominant, wherein poor children inhabit the history of capitalism in India. Yet, given the anxiety of consolidating and secur-ing the narrative of arrival, the current Indian middle classes and the associated national and media publics seek to inflect these extensive forms of ‘childhoods’ as a receding past. But the robust persistence of these forms points to the complexity and contemporaneity of extensive everyday practices of dwelling that have emerged as the necessary sup-plement to the fact of these children being ‘out of school’. The tenacity of this weave interrupts the narrative of transition from labour to school in these children’s lives. Their inability to seamlessly be part of school enrolment efforts indicates that the assumed predictability of the transi-tion from labour to schooling is less than obvious; it is this elementary tension that this book seeks to explore.

The fact that this tension is part of a more internationally driven humanist intent with regard to ‘children’s rights’ introduces an added dimension to the discussion. The near unanimous global ratification of the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) during the 1990s brought intense focus on the marginal child in the non- west. This child became both an object of humanitarian concern as well as agential through the global recognition of its ‘rights’. The UNCRC phe-nomenally expanded the global focus on children, institutionalizing not only a new vocabulary to represent these lives but also an international network of funding and policy- setting, whose axis of influence began to govern national- domestic agendas as well. From the mid- nineties onwards, NGOs in India developed a growing awareness of this new language of children’s rights. Trickling in through global campaigns and funding that increasingly mobilized NGOs to adopt this discourse, the language of children’s rights gradually became naturalized in the work with marginal children. The capacious and uncritical acceptance gained by this new language of children’s rights was evident in the Indian



Introduction 5

government establishing a National Commission for the Protection of Children’s Rights in 2007 as well as when the country’s prominent chil-dren’s NGO ‘Child Relief and You’ (CRY) decisively changed its name to ‘Child Rights and You’ in 2006 (The Hindu, 10 April 2006).

Rights and rescue

I first became aware of the weight of this new language of children’s rights towards the end of my doctoral fieldwork with street children living in a crowded railway station in Calcutta. Platform Number 10 at Sealdah’s South Station housed an NGO shelter for street kids, and I had often visited this site since 1990. Started in 1989 by CINI- ASHA, the urban wing of a prominent rural NGO in West Bengal, this shelter for boys consisted of two tin sheds at the end of the railway platform and was popularly referred to as the ‘platform school’. Children who were part of this ‘school’ were from the south- eastern districts of West Bengal, particularly South 24 Parganas, and from neighbouring Bangladesh. As one of the main commuter arteries to the city, Sealdah’s South Station was used daily by multitudes of rural women employed as domestic servants in the city’s middle- class homes. The Kole Market nearby, the wholesale hub for vegetables and fish, additionally attracted hundreds of small farmers from South 24 Parganas who also came in daily to sell their goods. This regular commuter traffic, along with families who had made the station their temporary home, represented a microcosm of the rural dispossessed who increasingly travelled to the city in search of work. The children at Sealdah were part of this distress migration at the rural– urban interface, whose increase over the past twenty years had ironically coincided with the rule of the Communist Party or the CPI (M) in the state of West Bengal (Roy, 2003). The Left Front, which was voted out of power in 2011, had been well known for its agrarian reform, including a critical initiative of redistributing land to landless farmers. But with the advent of economic liberalization in India in the late eighties, a dominant section of the party had shifted gears towards urban renewal, with Calcutta being intensely recast as an urban dream-scape, a possible ‘Paris of the East’. This moment of urban developmental-ism in Calcutta coincided with the increased domestication of discourses on ‘care and protection’ of marginalized children, which had begun to circulate in the early nineties. Sealdah Station’s ‘platform school’ was an embodiment of this concern. Within its four walls a new regime of opti-mism and children’s rights began to gather itself. Replacing the dynamics of distress, this new assemblage started to recalibrate the boys’ lives.




This book explores the tensions involved in this recalibration and is a marked departure from more traditional ethnographies of street chil-dren. Several of these have evocatively studied the creative dwelling of children in varied and hostile urban circumstances in different cities of the world (Aptekar, 1988; Burr, 2006; Davies, 2008; Hecht, 1998; Kovats- Bernat 2006; Swart, 1990). More recent efforts to improve the lives of this population through the global circulation of a new sentimentality around the figure of the street child have also been critically interro-gated in terms of their deployment by NGOs and the state (Manzo, 2008; Nieuwenhuys, 2001; White, 1999, 2002). The specific circulation of school enrolment as the most critical of children’s rights and the elementary tension in marginal children being unable to make real its promise foreground a complex range of issues that exceeds the imme-diate lives of the children at Sealdah. The most crucial issue is being able to locate the common sense of labour in these lives within the longer story of colonial and postcolonial modernity, highlighting the

Figure 2 This shelter for boys consisted of two tin sheds at the end of the railway platform.



Introduction 7

imperative to work on the lives of those who inhabit the economy’s margins.

This book investigates the current approach to marginal children’s lives in the non- west in order to both attend to the disjunct I witnessed between the platform and the ‘platform school’ at Sealdah and to employ it as a recent historical counterpoint to this moment of certainty about being on track to eliminate child labour through education – not to disagree with what this moment proposes but to use it to reflect on the continuing predicaments of the past. To what extent does this present moment of ‘urgency’ related to reforming the lives of marginalized children in the non- west reflect a larger global politics of ‘victimhood’? How has the discipline of ‘childhood studies’ intellectually engaged the diversity of children’s lives across the globe, while keeping in mind the hegemonic circulation of the singular framing of an ideal childhood within global policy discourse? Conceptually, what might a framing of children’s lives in the non- west in the context of colonial/postcolonial modernity add to the current framework of ‘multiple childhoods’? Given that as subjects of the ethnographic gaze marginalized children in the non- west are usually marked by their ‘resilience’, while international policy discourse signals their ‘victimhood’, how might we read this binary in conjunction with the increased anxieties around safety and sexual abuse that currently frame children’s lives in the modern west?

I address the aforementioned questions in this Introduction neither to reiterate nor to offer a synoptic rendition of what has already been more than well articulated in the two- decade- old existence of ‘child-hood studies’ as a discipline. Instead, I try to engage what seems to me to be a continuing tension within this field, namely, the ambiguity that endures around framing the lives of marginalized children in the non- west. Given the moral resonance that this figure currently inheres, the tension is broadly between the particular and the general: animated eth-nographic studies that defamiliarize children’s lifeworlds and research that emphasizes a singular normative ‘ideal’ with which to compara-tively measure their lives. While this ambiguity has been variously engaged (Boyden, 1997; Burman, 2008; James, 2010; Nieuwenhuys, 2010; Qvortrup et al., 2009; Wells, 2009), in this book I emphasize what these authors have overlooked, namely, the more historically situated analytic of postcolonial modernity. This analytic, I argue, disentangles both the authoritative web of ‘cultural’ representations and the truth effects of policy discourse, revealing these apparently opposite formula-tions as complexly interconnected through the workings of the state, the market and a global humanitarianism.




The pragmatism of victimhood

The landscape of ‘childhood studies’ contends with the aforementioned ambiguity primarily because its rise as a discipline parallels the growing hegemony of the UNCRC within international policy discourse (Burman and Stacey, 2010), producing a complex interrelationship between the open- endedness of academic interrogation and determinate policy concerns. The UNCRC phenomenally expanded the global focus on children by institutionalizing a new vocabulary to represent these lives. Early on in its circulation as a global ideal, several scholars critiqued the bourgeois hegemony that underlay its universalist claims of children’s ‘protection, provision and participation’ (Nieuwenhuys, 1998). Sharon Stephens (1995) was one of the first to recognize children’s lives as highly contested and mired within new cultural assertions of a poli-tics of gender, state modernization and neo- liberal consumption. This scholarship notwithstanding, the increasing attention that marginal-ized children in the non- west received was within a larger global politics of sentimentality related to their assumed ‘victimhood’.

Victimhood has more recently developed as an object of research in an effort to depoliticize trauma, re- politicize victims and understand redres-sal in more substantive terms. Anthropologists have worked to unpack the increased universalization of a humanitarian psychiatry and a more generalized idea of trauma as an irrefutable reality that requires empa-thy (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009; Malkki, 1996;). Political theorists have called attention to the problem of the particular politics of human rights having become a ‘fighting creed’ defended by internationally sanctioned military intervention (Meister, 2002). Within this politics of victimhood, children have always functioned as a central object of compassion, both in the aftermath of traumatic events like the genocide in Rwanda or tsu-nami relief efforts and in non- traumatic everyday accounts of violence in the lives of child labourers, street children and child soldiers (Hart, 2006b; Janzen et al., 2000). Linda Gordon (2008), in her examination of the history of social policy in relation to custody, immigration, vio-lence and family, writes about policies that carried great intentions and prioritized children’s welfare but were not necessarily beneficial to chil-dren as a group. Through several microhistories, ranging from a white vigilante attack on Mexican Americans in nineteenth- century Arizona to more recent twentieth- century efforts of the Australian state to separate aboriginal children from their parents, she cautions against the goal of providing children a better future through the increased circulation of discourses on their ‘innocence’, ‘best interests’ and the idea that they should not have to bear the weight of their parents’ poverty.



Introduction 9

The UNCRC’s effectiveness in generating the global circulation of dis-courses of children’s victimhood, within which the marginal non- western child could become a spectralized object of humanitarian concern, is part of the broader terrain of ‘human rights’. Consolidated in the nineties, ‘human rights’ is an optic, a biopolitics focused on the recognition of the victim’s rights. Here ‘rights’ work powerfully as a moral- political project that displaces other political projects and their imaginations of justice with a particular vision of what justice should be (Brown, 2004). This has been variously discussed by David Kennedy (2004) as a ‘pragmatism with-out politics’ and by Wendy Brown (2004), who highlights the morality that undergirds rights as an ‘antipolitics’. She characterizes this as such because its discourse is focused on pain and suffering rather than on a political imagination of comprehensive justice. The naturalization of human rights in terms of the pure defence of the innocent and powerless against power, with power being understood as the despotic and cruel workings of different forces, including culture, law, patriarchy and state, frames humanitarian interventions within a moral urgency that leaves the pragmatic means behind these projects largely uninterrogated.

To further pursue this point concerning the ‘pragmatism of victim-hood’, it might be worth dwelling on the effects that the victimhood of the poor child in the non- west exercises on the formation of subjec-tivities in late liberal societies, including the use of this figure to mask the condition of children within these societies. Lauren Berlant (2001) writes about the creative deployment of images of child labourers in the non- west to construct a larger and more pervasive sentimentality in the US. This particular deployment, she argues, helps renew a US national self that is protected from pain or from history’s unwelcome changes. She analyzes how these representations of labouring children generate a compassionate liberalism, which leaves existing unequal structures intact and instead constructs femininity as an intimate sphere embody-ing good intentions, through which the ‘feeling self’ is created as the ‘true self’. The discussion within this intimate sphere of working chil-dren’s trauma, the need for their rescue, the construction of these vic-tims as the grounds of hope – all of this, according to Berlant, makes the circulation of the moral reasoning around child labour take on a similar form as foetal rights discourse. This liberal sentimental imaginary of the labouring child helps maintain the hegemony of a US national identity in the face of cultural and economic cleavages, which include the incon-venient facts of increased violence, child abuse and poverty that are a growing part of children’s lives in the present- day west.

Before the very recent collapse of Euro- American capitalist mar-kets, the limits of western liberalism and its material progress were




most commonly registered in the race and immigrant- specific maps of socio- economic inequity, including dismal statistics on children’s school completion rates and the increased racial profiling of young criminals. These limits were also more sensationally disclosed in the dangers of child abuse, child abduction and child pornography that have increasingly overwhelmed the lives of children and their everyday fears. This has produced the paradox of the enormous apparatus of surveil-lance and parental anxieties that continually perform the difficult work of keeping children ‘innocent’. A strange combination of anomie and fear marks children’s everyday lives, with parents increasingly withdrawing children from public spaces. Parental anxieties revolve around the fear of sexual assault and the risk of a traffic accident, as a result of which chil-dren seldom walk to school alone or play on the street (Watson, 2005). The haunting of these spaces by dangerous adults epitomized in the figure of the paedophile and the kidnapper has replaced earlier landscapes of children’s fear populated by witches, trolls and goblins (Tudor, 2003). Sensationalized media reports that mark these dangerous adults in terms of their race, class and gender identities reveal the less than unitary dis-course on public space and children, and make parents more comfortable with increasingly commercialized private areas of play, like that offered at McDonalds (Blackford, 2004). In fact, the Gill (2007) report, using evi-dence from the past thirty years in the UK, reveals that children, prior to reaching adolescence, have experienced a loss of freedom of action and mounting adult control and supervision. It contends that contrary to the widely held idea of children now growing up faster, they are actually maturing more slowly in a risk- averse society.

On the face of it, this coming ashore of ‘bourgeois childhood’ into the shadowy port of fear and heightened sexuality does not come in the way of its global circulation as a normative ideal. The latter is more linked to the heightened ‘sentimental’ value of childhood, a value tied to the idealized absence of children from the world of work, politics and sexuality (Zelizer, 1994). We are, however, compelled to ask if we are missing something fairly obvious by continuing to hold the exem-plariness of a modern western childhood as our sanguine horizon. What I mean can easily be grasped if we turn towards something that is very commonly, but only anecdotally, recognized, a contradiction that stirs our interest when we interact with marginalized children. Namely, the puzzle that despite undeniably appalling daily living conditions, children, like those at Sealdah, display a remarkably high capacity for hope, resilience and mutual generosity. In fact, the paradoxical capaci-ties they embody seem to fly against the fragility of selves in the ‘west’



Introduction 11

emphasized by recent theorists of precarity (Berlant, 2011; Stewart, 2007). This phenomenon, which is not readily explainable, consistently strikes researchers in their interactions with marginalized children (and the marginalized in general) in the postcolony (Burr, 2006; Ennew, 1994a; Hecht, 1998, Scheper- Hughes, 2008). While we have learnt to distrust such projections of hope and resilience in the face of con-spicuous poverty, they potentially disrupt a reading of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘victimhood’ as always more ambiguous than material absences would signal. This situation demands a different way of discussing the ‘precarity’ of subjects like street children. Furthermore, it requires us to recognize how our somewhat simplistic ideas of the ‘abject’ prevent us from paying attention to the ways in which these children have carved out their lives within a longer history in which the state and its welfare provisions were generally absent.

In this book, ethnographic narratives of labouring children disaggre-gate both this moment of ‘children’s rights’ and the ways it sits upon subjectivities produced by these children’s longer engagement with the complexity of postcolonial cities. The effort is to compel us to make sense of these children’s lives as not just another example from the non- western archive but as something that adds to several existing efforts to continually keep open the ethical imperative within universal projects of emancipation. These efforts include an exploration of the tension among emancipation, justice, ethics and agency in the writing of post-colonial feminist scholars, including the relationship between justice and the law (Agnes, 2001; Menon, 2004), assumptions around women’s agency and Muslim piety (Mahmood, 2005), the liberal state’s politics of representation and identity’s problematic investments (Brown, 2005; Povinelli, 2002), as well as perhaps the tensions most trenchantly articulated in the postcolonial critique of modernity and development (Nandy, 1992b; Spivak, 1990). Each of these studies skilfully works its specific examples into a more generalizable critique without proffer-ing any ‘bullet point’ answers to the larger issues they raise. This book extends similar attention to a figure who, though central to modernity’s unfolding, has been surprisingly missing in these explorations, to ask whether its life throws up new challenges for existing critique.

On the limits of ‘Multiple Childhoods’

The discipline of ‘childhood studies’ derived its intellectual energies, following the UNCRC, through an effort to circumscribe the increasing influence of ‘bullet point’ answers or the policy circulation of a singular




normative childhood. Traditional child research conventions had been in the field of developmental psychology and in anthropology’s con-cern with child socialization practices. In a marked departure from the passivity of children that this research assumed, the pioneering work of Alison James and Alan Prout (1997) constructed a new paradigm of childhood sociology. They deliberately moved away from the earlier overestimation of the role exercised by adults in child socialization practices to focus on children’s own conceptual architecture, drawing on Philippe Aries to frame childhood as socially constructed, histori-cally contingent and, therefore, multiple. Centuries of Childhood (1962), Aries’ much cited work, had through the use of French medieval icons argued that children had been understood as miniature adults and that childhood as a distinct stage of life emerged in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. This recalibration of childhood within the new discipline of childhood studies through the framing of ‘multiple childhoods’ produced research that over the years denatural-ized the assumed universality of concepts like biological age, adult– child differentiation, notions of childcare and children’s work and the affective investments that adults make in children.

This particular framing, which had moved away from a model of bio-logical immaturity as passivity, quite ironically continued to be vexed by particular populations of children in the non- west who, on the face of it, appeared as not the least passive. These included the street child, the child soldier and the child labourer, the discussion of whose lives reintroduced psychobiological coordinates. Despite the circulation of ‘multiple childhoods’ as an epistemic frame, these children’s lives were more often recalibrated within the moral ‘weight’ of a normative ethic with concepts like children’s ‘needs’ (Jenks, 2005) or childhood as an ‘enduring structural form’ (Qvortrup et al., 2009). However, such childhood ‘essentialism’ (Nieuwenhuys, 2010) appeared to be absent when researchers deployed cultural registers to read discrete children’s lifeworlds in the lower Himalayas (Dyson, 2010) or those who belonged to specific tribal (Froerer, 2011) and lower- caste communities (Alex, 2007). These children’s everyday lives of work, schooling and rituals of growing up appeared as framed within an older notion that equated cartographic ‘place’ with anthropological ‘culture’. While ‘multiple childhoods’ had conceptually aided in avoiding a pathological reading of children’s lives in the non- west, it had inadvertently placed their cultural worlds as largely outside of history, the state and the market. Delinking these lives from the larger workings of power had simultane-ously parochialized them, inadvertently setting up a ‘separate but equal’



Introduction 13

comparative register for understanding children’s lives in the non- west. The remarkable descriptive details that naturalized these children’s lifeworlds seemed to produce a cultural specificity that simultaneously rendered them more isolated and anachronistic. Even more problemati-cally, in relation to the universal, what this signified was that children’s everyday socialization practices in these communities in the non- west were to be respected but not desired.

As such, a project of liberal tolerance appeared to underlie the concep-tual framing of childhoods as multiple. The limits of this liberal framing as well as its underlying normative impulse becomes quite apparent through Wendy Brown’s (2005) discussion of tolerance as that which hides the universalism that is at the heart of liberalism. According to Brown, the liberal subject’s tolerance of others is based upon an under-standing of those who deviated from the norm as requiring tolerance and who were accorded this tolerance by those who conformed to the norm. This masking of the normative powers of liberalism was made possible by liberalism’s reliance on the double autonomy of the individual subject on the one hand, as well as the autonomy of law and politics from culture on the other. Brown stated that though culture was created as the sphere that regulates, its simultaneous depoliticization allowed the individual to exercise the role of retaining and rejecting aspects of this regulation as suited to the individual’s dispositions. Within multiple childhoods this autonomy of culture in children’s lifeworlds meant that there was no rec-ognition of where in the particularity of the local the working of social, political and economic forces of a larger scale was embedded.

As an object of research then, several populations of children in the postcolony had the distinction of having been viewed as non- modern and largely outside of the spaces of modern law, politics and the market. In effect these ethnographies failed to denaturalize the local. The limits of culture- driven explanations starkly manifested themselves in the material and psychological neglect that ‘displaced’ figures like the street child or the child soldier epitomized. A few eth-nographies denounced this neglect in terms of ‘traditional’ practices.2 In contrast, ethnographies of street children that avoided this norma-tive register sensitively located these children’s moral and conceptual architecture within their everyday material realities and longer life histories (Davies, 2008; Hecht, 1998; Swart, 1990); a viewpoint that also risked being read as a ‘cultural’ account and very much within the ‘multiple childhoods’ framework. Even though these writings engaged with the effects of global politics on these children’s lives they seldom understood these childhoods as embedded within the




national- domestic circulation of law, economy and politics (Burr, 2006; Neiwenhuys, 2001). However, within ethnographies that complicated this cultural reading, like Margaret Trawick’s (2007) research on child soldiers in Sri Lanka, Kovats- Bernat’s (2006) work on street children and violence in Haiti and Cindi Katz’s (2004) multi- sited ethnography on the effects of shifting economies on children in Howa and New York, the empirical contained an epistemic and political deliberation on the ‘local’. The analytical stakes lay in trying to conceptualize the local as that which had been produced as a result of historical- economic forces that pre- existed as well as were transformed by the more recent effects of global politics on children. This book deploys the vastly dif-ferent analytic frame of postcolonial modernity to read current efforts around children’s rights in India against the subjective dimensions of what being consigned to the ‘imaginary waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarty, 2000) has produced in their lives. This is, namely, these children’s circulation outside of modernity’s injunctions of a normative childhood. Their lives are viewed as barely possessing a semblance of modernity with their ‘cultural’ practices stubbornly resisting accom-modation within existing efforts to mimic a normative childhood in colonial and postcolonial India.

In this book, I write the children’s lives in Calcutta through the inter-play of the ‘imaginary waiting room of history’ and the present moment of ‘arrival’, two historical episodes that, because they each inflect these children’s lives very differently, force us to ask questions about the efficacy of existing epistemological frameworks. This includes the prevalent com-mon sense on complex issues like the relationship between children and labour. Unlike the ‘innocence’ of children, which has been increasingly deconstructed as an elaborate artifice that masks adult desire and invest-ment in the child, thereby skilfully evading issues of children’s sexuality (Kincaid, 1992; Rose, 1984), the separation of the child from wage- labour persists as a hardwired truth, still worthy of universal emulation. Having been produced by the drawn- out process of industrialization in the mod-ern west, with its social technologies and political anxieties setting in place a new measure of ‘protection’ as the normative ideal, the abolition of child labour is now being viewed as imminently realizable within a very different historical as well as political context.

On labour and learning

Far removed from Sealdah Station, international agencies like the International Labour Organization (ILO) have debated the issue of



Introduction 15

‘child labour’ for several decades.3 One of their recent reports, The End of Child Labour: Within Reach (2006), uses three categories within which to classify and signal a globally appropriate measure of children’s rela-tionship with work. These are ‘economic activity’, ‘child labour’ and ‘hazardous work’.4 For the children at Sealdah, counting labour in hours seemed an absurd proposition because of both the long hours they spent working and the young age at which they had started work. But to stay within the logic of available categories, ‘hazardous work’ appeared closest. However, its definitional terms like ‘an activity or occupation’ that exercised a ‘negative effect’ on the ‘child worker’s safety, health (both physical and mental) and moral development’ appeared as an inaccurate description of these lives. The inaccuracy was not in the deleterious effects of work on these children’s safety and health but in the children’s ‘moral development’ also being axiomatically adversely affected. Interrogating this assumption is to ask whether the universal norm of ‘moral development’ suits situations that are more ambivalent. This norm not only indicts children’s work without enquiring into the adverse impact of economic reforms on them and their families, but it also fails to interrogate the more local effects of this global concern.

Negative effects of child labour reform have more spectacularly come to light through the less than ideal outcomes of the international ‘ban-ning’ of children’s work in garment factories. When children were fired from the garment industries in Morocco in 1995 and in Bangladesh in 1994, in both cases the children did not enter and stay in schools as anticipated. Instead, they were found working in more exploitative jobs or they had joined school only to drop out and enter the informal econ-omy until they could rejoin the garment industry. These bans produced an unintended, though grave, incongruity between the complexities of children’s work in the global south, on the one hand, and transnational activism (Hertel, 2006), consumer awareness and ‘good intentions’ (Berlant, 2001) in Euro- American worlds/liberal capitalist democracies, on the other. The bans were fundamentally premised on an ability to iso-late the children and to work on them as individual entities. Contrary to our usual understanding of individualization as allowing for a greater rec-ognition of a person’s unique identity, efforts to separate the child from labour reduce it to its biological essence as a pre- social being. Not only were the markers of culture and community erased from the child figure, but they were also simultaneously dehistoricized (Balagopalan, 2008). Moreover, the bans foregrounded the child’s biological age as an adequate, legitimate and internationally sanctioned threshold. For these working children, ‘age’ had seldom been calibrated through the secular vectors of




law, state and formal schooling. As Susan Bissell (2003) discussed, work-ing children in Bangladesh had self- made distinctions between being children and being adults and often spoke using words like ‘big’, ‘small’ or ‘in the middle’ – none of which had to do with their physical stature or wealth. Rather, these terms were used to refer to their gradual insertion into greater responsibility through their ability to contribute to the family income and to take on more household tasks.

The more obvious point that the failure of these bans alerts us to is the need to view children’s labour within its existing contextual log-ics (Bourdillion et al., 2010; Mamdani, 1972; Reynolds, 1991; White, 1994). However, such failure also highlights that these contexts can no longer be captured within an isolated ‘local’. Global processes of production and profit, activism and consumerism, international development goals and bilateral loans – all of these complicate the binary between the ‘global’ ‘us’ and the ‘local’ ‘them’. This forces us to pay attention to these children’s continued labour as indexed in more global economic processes, as well as compels us to recognize that ‘schooling’, with its proven function of separating the child from labour in the modern west, will increasingly influence global, national and local projects of re-forming these children’s lives.5 The billboard at Chowringhee signalled the perverse circulation of this new imaginary compelling our attention to processes of transition, which complicate the ‘child labour’ versus ‘schooling’ binary. The ILO’s declaration that child labour and schooling are incompatible does not include a discussion on school quality that, as growing evidence documents (Balagopalan, 2008; Bourdillion et al., 2010; Kingdon, 2006), is a crucial factor in children continuing with school. This book carefully attends to this issue through ethnographic research carried out in 2003 with a group of child labourers in Calcutta, who were part of the citywide enrolment effort started in 1999. The quality of the school-ing made available to these children created tensions between their subpar education and their self- taught learning of lucrative skills. This scenario opens up a more substantial discussion on the highly uneven landscape of formal schooling in India within which the ‘right to edu-cation’ is being implemented.

The terrain of educational policymaking in India has adequately recognized issues of school quality and shifted the terms of discussion from children ‘dropping out’ of schools to their being ‘pushed out’. However, policy has accommodated this shift with a more technical approach: addressing teacher quality, textbooks, school administration, paying attention to girls’ enrolment, etc. This technocratic fix has not



Introduction 17

only further sedimented the class- specific mediation of schooling widely prevalent in the country but has also skilfully hidden its glaring limita-tions by framing all policies as an improvement on what presently exists. The stark differences in cities between the privileged spaces of middle- class private schools and the poor performing government schools are less discussed by the national media as an unacceptable abnormality in the realization of all Indian children’s ‘right to education’. This unevenness has gained increasing global legitimacy as international goal setting around ‘education for all’ and the ‘millennial development goals’ – unrelated to serious discussions on quality – has produced school enrolment as a significant aspect of global ‘ poverty- reduction’ and as a way out of inter- generational poverty (World Bank, 2012).

My argument is not against the need for labouring children to be enrolled. However, the teleology of ‘labour to schooling’, underscored in the sign outside the UNICEF office in Calcutta, operates within an anxious economy of ambivalent and contradictory global and national technocratic compulsions. I instead dwell on how these children’s past and present lives complexly mediate their entry into the space of school-ing. In this regard, the work of Gayatri Spivak is incisive and provocative. In a lecture delivered at the University of Cape Town, shortly after the dissolution of apartheid in South Africa, Spivak (1992) focussed on the significance of past exclusions on the formation of particular subjectivi-ties. Dwelling on the idea of ‘academic freedom’, she was attentive to the tensions between constitutional victories and the ‘inability’ of subaltern subjects to ‘know how to use the (political) structures’ that were made available as a result. She noted that in the fight for the formal cause of academic freedom, one tends to forget the subject of this discourse and assumes that the subaltern, when allowed entry into the university, will be more than familiar with its workings. Usually, one understands the crises of academic freedom as being resolved through a sequential relationship, in which freedom- from- restriction and freedom- to- exercise- freedom often follow each other unproblematically. While one reads the first, that is freedom- from- restriction as the formal phrase of the law, one understands the second, that is, freedom- to- exercise- freedom as its substantive content. Spivak argued that in our unquestioned zeal for the justice of the cause we forget the substantive content embodied in the question of the Subject. What this implies is that, in the fight for the formal possibility of this freedom, we do not question the space of the academy in relation to the populations who enter it for the first time. We, the voices of liberalism, tend to forget the Enlightenment’s uniquely violent reworking of the world: the history of destruction




and remaking of human and non- human collectives under the sign of Reason. It is after all that same history of Reason that underlies the space of the modern Academy and the assumed Subject of ‘freedom’ who is supposed to inhabit it. However, the ones who cannot yet smoothly occupy that space – the figure of the subaltern – are unable to do so precisely because ‘Freedom’ and ‘Reason’ still remain ongoing projects of conquest amongst them. It is not by- chance that projects of pedagogy targeting such populations remain inseparable from the forces of the state, police, war and the armies of liberal strategists. The pronouncements of liberal reason thus produce in the subaltern, a ‘baf-flement’ which can neither be read as ‘resistance’ as such nor as being ‘uninformed’. In thus not being ‘conversant’ with the liberal modality of the public use of reason, the subaltern poses a threat of ‘contaminat-ing’ these structures with their ‘bafflement’. For Spivak, this defining dilemma of academic freedom requires urgent attention and demands an attunement towards learning from this obstinate ‘bafflement’ (Spivak, 1992).

In this book, the children’s complex inscription in a longer process of learning to labour marks their subjective reactions to school enrolment efforts as well as ‘children’s rights’ discourses. The concrete and specific configurations of the translation from these children’s worlds of labour and living to their supposed natural home in the space of schooling as integral to global modernity is often overlooked in the chatter of freedom and equality contained in projects like ‘all children in school’. It was colonial and postcolonial modernity that underwrote the natu-ralization of labour in these lives, albeit with different rationalizations, and this book utilizes this larger canvas to locate what appears as these children’s ‘bafflement’ with projects of reform.

Children’s lives in postcolonial India

‘Postcolonial’ in this book’s title is used to signal both a temporal moment and ‘postcolonialism’ as a set of framing ideas whose theoreti-cal charge has engaged the global academy for several decades now.6 My interest in using ethnographic research to critique the politics of representation of marginal chlidren’s lives in the non- west employs this postcolonial register to re- think the ‘difference’ signified by labour-ing children. Within global policy discourse these children appear to embody a non- modern, cultural working out of lives in which ‘child-hood’ is absent. Postcolonialism has both critiqued the ‘transition nar-rative’ implicit in this particular reading of the non- west and drawn



Introduction 19

attention to its framing of the west. Not only is the non- west found ‘lacking’, but given that the west represents the singular end of this evo-lutionary process, all transformations that happen around the world are viewed as being derived from the west. In contrast to this, postcolonial theory suggests a radical reassembling of this apparent failure to mirror the west within a more politicized framework of multiple modernities. Similar to Edward Said’s work on Orientalism that interpreted the Orient in relational terms, studies on Indian modernity do not assert an autonomous identity but view this as a set of historically contingent formations (Prakash, 1994). This includes the formative role played by colonial modernity in addition to the anxieties of postcolonial develop-ment and entails understanding these children’s lives as constituted by the continuing effects of these dynamics (Balagopalan, 2011).

This opens out the ‘cultural’ framing of these children’s lives to the violence, opportunities, hierarchies and ambiguities produced by the historical workings of this modernity. Included within these workings is a critical reading of the postcolonial circulation of liberal categories like freedom, rights and equality. As categories that emerged from an exclu-sionary colonial past, their repetition in postcolonial contexts is marked by a ‘difference’ (Bhaba, 1994). In their repetition, the categories are made unstable; they become open- ended and fractured. Such fractures when ethnographically performed, as they are in this book, foreground the everyday meanings they bear in young lives who inhabit moder-nity’s margins.

Though we tend to view these margins as neglected, these children’s lives attest to new global forms of visibility, care and accountability that have begun to crowd its everyday. In stark contrast with their cur-rent lives, this new circulation of liberal assurances around improving these lives deploys the ‘universal’ with great urgency to shrink cultural and historical differences. While it finds in the figure of the ‘child’ a fairly uncomplicated biology that heightens its imperatives, this new globality and its agendas unfold within the unpredictability of the local that both unsettles this agenda and surprises us with its excesses. For example, the phenomenal rise in the level of domestic attention paid to children’s issues because of a UN document is unprecedented in India. Critics of the UNCRC have pointed to its privileging and powerfully circulating a western bourgeois childhood as the global ideal (Boyden, 1997; Nieuwenhuys, 1998). While this might be true, this discussion does not provide us with a way to conceptualize how this ideal actually unfolds within postcolonial spaces and reinforces, with a difference, a particular trajectory of the project of modernity.




The national elite’s persistent anxiety around modernity always appearing as an unfinished project in the colony – that desired space- time that has happened someplace else but not here – now resurfaces through the figure of the labouring child. The staging of this present moment of formal schooling rekindles the age- old promises of freedom and opportunity in these lives, and the disjunct that I witnessed at Sealdah was these children’s ‘untimely’ experience of such promises. Engaging the anxieties of postcolonial development, the children’s untimeliness was their inability to fully identify with this new rights discourse and their continually drawing on their pasts to point to its limits. Their disruptions, as I discuss in this book, were neither a critique nor a resist-ance to these efforts, but rather an inhabitation of the tension between an inquisitive desire for the power that the universal policy appeared to contain and the common sense of their everyday lives that it was unable to echo.

Both at Sealdah and at Rajabazar, I was often struck by the paucity of interest shown by postcolonial theory to issues of childhood and chil-dren’s lives within its existing rethinking of the liberal provenance of modernity, democracy and rights. A few notable exceptions, of course, do exist. For example, Ashis Nandy’s (1992a) perceptive essay draws a powerful analogy between the child and colonialism. He distinguishes between the traits ‘ child- like’ and ‘childish’ to characterize the colonial state’s dichotomous framing of natives either as noble savages or as resistant and rebellious primitives. Though by now very well- known, the creative recalibration of the ‘child’ that underlies Nandy’s critique of the ideology of adulthood continues to find a more complicated, though significant, echo within the current new global- national efforts to transform lives. Within these the child- figure endures and appears interchangeably as both ‘mirror’ and ‘screen’, tied to fantasies of cor-rection and national improvement. On the other hand, Sudhir Kakar’s (1978) well- known work on individual psyche, Hindu culture and mother– child relationships appears as too fixed and removed to accom-modate the majority of children who live outside its normative frame. In addition, historical excavations into what constitutes an upper- caste, upper- class bhadralok ideal of good wife and mother (Chakrabarty, 2002; Chatterjee, 1993; Sarkar, 2001) helps indirectly by stabilizing what counts as its exclusions. Instead, research on the role played by religious, caste and gender violence on children’s lives (Das, 2000; Sundar Rajan, 2003), as well as the more recently available Dalit ( lower- caste) autobiographies and testimonies (Moon, 2000; Pawar, 2009; Rege, 2006), seem to be more connected. This is because their discussions



Introduction 21

disentangle the ambivalent workings of the postcolonial state in these young lives by juxtaposing the arbitrariness of state violence, both as historical ‘event’ and as routine discrimination, against the strength that children draw from family and community. This book’s focus is on the playing out of this ambivalence in the lives of labouring children, dwelling on their disruptions of its ‘violence’, ‘neglect’, ‘care’ and their crafting of alternate networks of economic and emotional sustenance. Their disruptions do not necessarily take away from the need for the required protection in these lives; instead, they force us into what Wendy Brown (2006) has characterized as the difficult work that we are stuck with, namely, to recognize the human beings at stake in projects of emancipation and to articulate the complexity of their lives with our political aims.

This book, then, structures its descriptive and analytic terrain differ-ently from existing ethnographies on street children. It finds its point of departure in these children’s engagement within an NGO initia-tive directed to secure their rights, primarily their right to protection and schooling, and is interested in unpacking how these children’s experiences were inflected by the historical and cultural specificity of their postcolonial location. The book draws both on my Ph.D. field-work with street children, carried out in Sealdah Station for a period of approximately fifteen months between 1992 and 1995, and my interactions with some of the same children when I returned to the city between 1998 and 2003. This latter period also includes research undertaken in 2003 with a group of working children who were part of a citywide schooling initiative. The children at Rajabazar lived at home and attended this ‘ club- school’ daily, quite unlike the street children at Sealdah who lived and studied at the station’s ‘platform school’. The official register at the Sealdah boys’ shelter had over seventy names, though usually forty of them were present on any given day. In addi-tion to providing these boys with a roof over their heads, the shelter was also equipped with lockers, a bathroom, some utensils and a stove for cooking. The shelter also ran an informal banking system as well as provided daily literacy classes and weekly counselling sessions. The boys who lived there came and left as they pleased; the main reasons for their leaving was either their taking up some temporary labouring job in the city to earn more money at short notice or a decision to lay low for a while because of a fight with another child or a staff member.

In 1990, when I first dropped by the Sealdah shelter on a preliminary visit, at the behest of a friend who knew of my recent interest in chil-dren’s literacy issues, this ‘platform school’ was about a year old. What




began as a casual visit that afternoon had, by the end of three hours, turned into a longer commitment with the affectionate manipulation of several children. By loudly voicing their doubts about whether I would turn out to be like other visitors who never returned, they ensured that I did. The regularity of my visits before I officially began ‘fieldwork’ meant that when I formally entered the ‘field’ four years later, I already knew some of the boys from my summer visits. My initial interest in their lives grew out of my focus on literacy, not as a traditional learn-ing of the alphabet but something that took seriously these children’s proximity to the streets, their scavenging, their love for cinema and film songs. Learning Hindi and Bengali letters of the alphabet from film posters, recognizing numbers from the signage on buses and memoriz-ing the lyrics of all the songs in a film (there were seldom less than three per movie) by watching a movie twice – all of these marked the everyday circulation of literacy in these lives. However, towards the end of my fieldwork, I observed how their literacy feats were gradually being overshadowed by the increasing ways in which enrolment in formal schools had come to dominate their lives.

I noticed these shifts in how the children articulated their lives in the two sets of unstructured interviews I conducted, with an eight- month interval, with seventy children. In addition, unstructured interviews with the field staff at the station shelter and the staff who worked at the main office revealed the growing force that formal schooling had begun to exercise in ‘reform’ efforts around this population. Interviews conducted with the parents of around fifteen boys, who had either visited the ‘platform school’ or lived in its vicinity, disclosed a differ-ent dynamic at work. There one could read these children’s futures as mediated by what they had achieved thus far. Achievement, failure, exploitation, trust, opportunity, labour, schooling, future – each of these terms had a specific resonance in the lived spaces of the station and the ‘platform school’, with the temporalities of home, station and market mediating these.

By the time I returned to Calcutta in 1998, the ‘platform school’ had shut its doors. The shift in strategy that I had begun to see was now a full- fledged ‘intervention’. In keeping with the need to enrol street children in school, CINI- ASHA had established a new boarding house a mile away from the shelter. The boys who lived there were enrolled in the local government schools, and none of the boys I had known at Sealdah had made it to that space. Instead, I found some of them at Kole Market, some on the station platform and others in the crowded streets between these two sites. Between 1998 and 2003, while I lived in



Introduction 23

Calcutta, I frequently interacted with these older children, all of whom now worked in the city’s informal economy. My return to Calcutta also coincided with heightened citywide efforts to enrol all children in school, and I decided to conduct new fieldwork with a group of child labourers in a Muslim- dominated area of the city. Rajabazar, not too far from Sealdah Station, is well known for housing several small- scale industries that employ children in the making of shoes and paper bags. I spent time with these children at a ‘new’ school, in which they had recently enrolled. The fieldwork at Rajabazar is not a supplement to the ethnography on street children but quite central to the argument being made in this book. I was struck, on my return to Calcutta in 1998, by the technical matrix that had begun to increasingly develop around enrolling out- of- school children. This matrix had phenomenally magni-fied the earlier and more discrete NGO efforts of working with difficult- to- enrol children, like the street children at Sealdah, into an emerging apparatus that included a set of techniques and varied initiatives that had begun to proliferate around the self- evidence of all children need-ing to be in school. Greater confidence in scaled- up efforts included the increasing circulation of ‘bridge programmes’ aimed to speedily improve the academic abilities of older children, ‘study camps’ that periodically reinforced the curriculum once these children were enrolled as well as ‘coaching classes’ or daily tutoring within the residential facilities made available to these children. These techniques, because they carried the authenticity of having emerged out of NGO experiences with marginal-ized children, were viewed as sensitive to the needs of these children. But as is often the case, the techniques had been produced within the instrumental imagination of schooling as the means to end child labour and, therefore, contained a refusal to engage these children’s histories of labour and living on the streets. They also failed to factor in crucial considerations regarding school quality as central to these children’s aspirations around formal education.

This zone of deliberate misrecognition, I argue, is very much a con-stitutive element in current optimism linked to compulsory schooling in India. The various chapters of this book attempt to open up this mis-recognition by allowing these children’s lives to disclose the intended and unintended limitations of this transformative present. Except for the second chapter, in which I take an archival detour to disclose how the schooling of marginal children was variously resolved in colonial India in the early twentieth century, the remaining four chapters fore-ground different aspects of these children’s lives in relation to the local materialization of a global politics of affect (Chapter 1), its mediations




within postcolonial development (Chapter 3), its national consolida-tion through a discourse on ‘children’s rights’ (Chapter 4) and the pre-sent unevenness in the terrain of schooling in India (Chapter 5).

The first chapter captures the local effects of the increasing global concern regarding ‘street children’ and discusses the ways in which it played out at the Sealdah ‘platform school’. NGO efforts to secure this space within a set of more optimistic coordinates are read against these children’s more natural insertion in the station’s larger subaltern net-works. This tension underlined the ways in which children understood their past and present lives and discussed the NGO reform efforts as a series of desired though difficult adjustments. The chapter analyses this difficulty less in terms of the workings of this particular NGO. Instead through drawing upon a broader historical canvas it comparatively dis-entangles the contingencies that marked the differential working out of ‘biological immaturity’ and ‘childhood’ in the modern west and in colonial India. In Chapter 2, this uneven colonial past is more specifi-cally broken down in relation to ‘schools’ set up for labouring children in early twentieth- century India. The current binary framing of school-ing as the antidote to child labour in the non- west tends to forget this earlier resolution of labouring lives within a modern colonial apparatus of schooling. This chapter highlights anxieties shared by the colonial state and the native elite regarding these children’s futures, and details how its working out produced ‘school’ as a less than ideal space. Central to this disparate imagination of schooling was the parallel emergence and fixing of the modern measure of ‘age’ in the colony as a multiple, context- specific determination and the chapter discusses the broader implications of this ambiguity. The third chapter confronts the puzzle of the Sealdah children’s continuing imaginations of their futures as tied to ‘khatni’ or ‘hard labour’ despite the more hopeful horizon cast by efforts to enrol them in school. Through disentangling this paradox, in terms of both children’s individual pasts and understanding these lives as refracting larger postcolonial anxieties of ‘economic development’, this chapter explores these lives as caught within the logics of capital and state, though seldom fully determined by either. The more recent language of ‘children’s rights’ that the Indian state has begun deploying for improving the lives of marginal children is the terrain of Chapter 4. The national circulation of this rights discourse discloses the dynam-ics of processes of ‘translation’, postcolonial governmentality and the children’s exercise of ‘responsibility’, and this chapter highlights the street children’s ambivalent mediation of this new landscape. The last chapter focuses on the most prominent children’s right in postcolonial



Introduction 25

India, namely the recent Right to Education (2009). This ‘right’ which makes elementary education free and compulsory is read through the schooling experiences of a group of working children in Rajabazar. These working children’s experiences with schooling helps push the dis-cussion of their anticipated participation in exercising their new ‘right’ beyond the assurances that statistics on enrolment and retention hold out, and instead foregrounds why their involvement in school might not necessarily diminish their continued immersion in labour.

The story running through each of these chapters is of children’s lives fully lived in ‘the imaginary waiting room of history’. This ‘waiting room’ attunes their bodies to the intensities, miseries, friendships and opportunities of the street, socializing them to how things come, how to look and how to find. If the billboard at Chowringhee that I saw on that hot April afternoon in 2002 was a sign of changes to come, these children’s lives are sentient to what is and had been. This book’s story attends to this distinction.



228

abandoned/abandonment, children, 2, 34, 35, 46, 48, 80–2, 115, 133, 137, 191n8, 192nn9,13

Adam, W., reports, 73, 74adult–child differentiation, 12, 188agency, children’s, 127, 128–9, 138,

139, 148Age of Consent, 54, 55, 78, 79,

194nn20,23All India Women’s Conference, 82, 101Annual Status of Education Report

(ASER), 166, 207n11anti-politics, 9, 123apprenticeship, 70, 93, 118Aries, P., 12Assam, child labour in, 60, 61, 63attuned/attunement, 91, 96, 107autonomous selfhood, 185autonomy, 13, 119, 139, 186

bafflement, 18, 154balwadis, 101Bangladesh, 5, 28, 42, 134, 189n2,

191n7, 204n7child labour in, 15, 16

Baroda, compulsory education in, 77–8

Beazley, H., 40, 46benevolence, 61, 138, 150, 177,

178, 203n6Bengal, 189n1

curricular revisions, 73–5Human Rights Commission, 28Juvenile Welfare Board, 28nationalism, 68

Bengal Children’s Act of 1922, 83–4Benjamin, W.

childhood cognition, theory, 93flaneur, 93spontaneous fantasy, 94, 96

Berlant, L.compassionate liberalism, 9ethics of privilege, 176, 177

best interests, child’s, 8, 36–7, 113, 129, 184, 192n13

biological agecolonial modernity, 53–7fluidity, 56–58metropole, 54modern schooling, 79–80modern west, 56multiple thresholds, 57post-colonial state, 86pragmatic fuzziness, 56

biological immaturity, 12, 24, 38, 51, 56, 85, 98, 102, 126, 129, 147, 183, 184

Bombay, 80Juvenile Branch, 84–5professional beggary, prevention of,

82–3bridge classes, 159Brown, W., 9, 11, 13, 21budget private schools, 165, 206–7n10Burman, E., 7, 8, 139

CalcuttaBook Fair, 31, 32City Level Programme of Action,

27–9, 151, 159, 191n5Engineering College, 75Municipal Corporation, 27, 28,

74–5, 159, 205n5out-of-school children in

government-run schools, enrolment of, 1–2

Rajabazar, 20, 156, 158, 159, 163, 165, 166, 170–2, 183–7

Sealdah, see Sealdah’s StationShikshalaya Prakalpa initiative,

158, 160survey, out-of-school children, 159

call of the other, 144capitalism, postcolonial, 88, 93,

98, 105critique of, 106–7

Index



Index 229

care, ethics of, 139Cawnpore, see factory schoolsCentral Children’s Act of 1960, 199n32Central Provinces

children of agricultural labourers, schools for, 68–73

half-time schools in, 78central schools, 206n8Central Social Welfare Board, 100, 101Centre for Civil Society

School Choice Campaign, 210n24Chakrabarty, D., 14, 20, 51, 130, 190n6Chandavarkar Committee Report, 72Chatterjee, P., 20, 51, 53, 99, 130,

147, 190n6, 193nn15,16child/children

abandoned, 191n8, 192n9abduction, 10abuse, 10Acts, 60, 77, 80–6, 100, 101adult-driven norms, violation of, 137of agricultural labourers, schools

for, 68–73Aid Society, 82, 84beggars, 60and colonialism, analogy between,

20–1coolie, 61–3criminal, 100in danger, 53, 111–17dangerous, 53, 111–17delinquents, see juvenilein Especially Difficult Circumstances

(CEDC), 30, 190n2factory labourers, of, 63fiction, 45lives in postcolonial India, 18–25low-caste, 60, 72–3malnutrition, 204n7marginalized, 50, 150migration, 133–5, 203n5native, 61need for protection, 37pornography, 10preschool, 102, 103, 105protection, 80rights, see rightsas socially constructed, 12socially maladjusted, 100

soldier, 13, 14sovereignty, 44street, see street childtribal, 60

childhood(s)bourgeois, 10cognition, 93–4as enduring structural form, 12essentialism, 12as historically contingent, 12innocence, 10, 14, 37, 38multiple, 7, 11–14, 49–50, 57,

130–1, 183normative, 50, 85non-modern, 49studies, 7, 8

Child in Need Institute (CINI), 191nn5,6

child labour, 189n4in Assam, 60, 61in Bangladesh, 15, 16Gurupadaswamy Committee on

Child Labour, 103–4International Programme for the

Elimination of Child Labour, 107–8

in Morocco, 15National Child Labour Projects, 108National Policy on Child Labour, 104(Prohibition and Regulation) Act of

1986, 104, 105, 108, 204–5n2versus schooling binary, 16, 24, 88,

108, 165Child Relief and You (CRY), see Child

Rights and YouChild Rights and You, 5CINI-ASHA, 5, 22, 29, 31, 40, 107–8,

117, 120, 191n5field staff, role of, 35–9

citizenship, 32, 53, 99, 130, 138, 147, 156, 168, 177, 180, 182

City Level Programme of Action (CLPOA), 27–9, 151, 159, 191n5

club-schools, 21, 160, 161, 163–6, 170–2, 178, 205nn5,6

cognition, 93–4, 95and revolutionary consciousness,

link between, 94



230 Index

colonial schoolingand labouring child, 61–75native preference for manual

labour, producing, 61–3see also school(s/ing)

Committee on the Rights of the Child, 190n2

commodities, 50, 56, 94, 95, 97, 182common school, 166, 167Communist Party of India (Marxist)

(CPI(M)), 5community teachers, 158–60,

205n6compassionate conservatism, 177compassionate liberalism, 177compulsory education/schooling, 2–4,

25, 104, 154, 156, 170, 173, 204n1, 207n12

Chandavarkar Committee Report on, 72

legislation for, 77–80see also education

Consortium for Street Children, 190–1n4

State of the World’s Children: Research, 40–1

Constable, P., 73, 198n24coolie extravagance, 61–3Cooper, Allen and Co., 66corporeal memories, 58, 137corporate capital, 156, 173–80, 187critical legal studies, 149–50Cross Commission, 75cultural capital, 35cultural relativism, 130, 131, 203n3cultural translation, 131, 203n2curricular revisions, in Bengal, 73–5Curzon, G., 59, 68, 196n5

danger, children in, 53, 111–17dangerous children, 53, 111–17dangerous individual, 81–2, 199n31debris, 92–8debt, 139–40Delhi High Court, 164, 206n7demographic dividend, 173, 186democracy, 15, 99, 164, 167, 189n6,

204n6

density, 87, 125, 140, 185Department of Social Welfare, 200n2deployment, 6, 28–9, 100

of child figure, 9, 106of schooling, 59, 184of responsibility, 137

depressed classes, 72, 76, 81, 83deprived urban children, 159

see also street childdevelopmental, child-figure, 100,

102, 105dignity

children’s, 117, 183, 184, 188of labour, 65

Dirks, N., 147, 193n14District Information System for

Education (DISE), 207n10District Primary Education Program

(DPEP), 169, 208n14Don Bosco Ashayalam, 202n8Donzelot, J., 52–3, 99duty, 132, 138, 144, 171, 172–3,

209n20

economic activity, 15, 189n4economy

accumulation, 106–7, 173, 183need, 106, 107, 173, 179informal, 2, 15, 23, 46, 89, 90, 98,

107, 142–5, 177, 183knowledge, 173, 174, 179

educationcolonial, 59–75, 79compulsory, 2–4, 25, 72, 77–80,

104, 154, 170, 173, 204n1, 207n12

free, 2–4, 25, 104, 154, 170, 173, 204n1, 207n12

Guarantee Scheme (EGS), 170non-formal, 89, 104–5, 108, 113,

158, 200n1policymaking for, 16–17vocational, 75, 185–7

Education for All, 3, 17, 154, 167Education Guarantee Scheme

(EGS), 170Elementary Education Acts in

England and Wales, 75



Index 231

embodied/embodiment, 108, 114emotivism, 203n3empowerment, 70, 148, 149, 168English Children’s Acts, 83Entally School, 201n8equality, 18, 19, 75, 108, 128–30, 155,

180, 186, 187equity, 108, 164, 166, 179, 183ethics, 11, 49, 132, 138, 141,

168, 175of care, 139of privilege, 176, 177

ethnographic state, 147Europe

Industrial Revolution, 156surplus labour in, 106

Factories Act of 1948, 101, 103Factory Act of 1908, 65, 66factory schools, 79

at Cawnpore, 66–8at Giridih, 64–6at Perambore, 63–4

family, 51–2fictive, 132, 183genealogical, 132, 144joint, 54real, 183sovereignty of, 52, 192n12

Famine Commission, 68fate, 96, 97, 107, 112fictive families, 132, 144fictive mothers, 45, 46, 48, 142first-generation school-goers,

166, 167Ferguson, J., 123, 190n6footloose capital, 144Foucault, M.

care of the self, 51dangerous individual, 81discipline/disciplinary system, 51psychiatric discourse, 52sovereignty of family, 52

freedom, 10, 19, 20, 109, 118–21, 130, 137, 138, 155

academic, 17–18from-restriction, 17of speech, 207n13

supervised, 53to-exercise-freedom, 17

friction, 131, 203n4

garbhadhan, 55, 194n20gift, 136, 140, 143Gilligan, C., 139Giridih, factory schools at, 64–6Gokhale, G.K., 77, 78–9Gordon, L., 8, 192n13government schools, 2, 22, 63, 68,

72, 155, 156, 164–7, 169–72, 174–7, 206nn8,9, 207nn10,12, 209n18, 210n25

governmentality, children’s rights as, 145–50

Graeber, D., 139–40Gram Panchayat, 170Granville, W., 191n7green revolution, 173guardianship, 54, 83, 85Gujarat

school compliance, 207n10gurujis, 209n18Gurupadaswamy Committee on Child

Labour, 103–4

half-time schools, 61, 68, 69–70, 78, 195n3

hazardous work, 15, 189n4Hazaribagh Report, 199n36Hecht, T., 6, 11, 13, 46hegemony, 8, 9, 87, 114, 146, 148,

163, 174, 187, 203n4Hendrick, H., 51 52, 82human capital, 173, 179Human Development Index

(HDI), 145human rights, 8, 9, 126, 138

cultural relativism of, 203n3social Darwinism of, 137in west, 137

Human Rights Commission, 28Hunter Commission, 198n29

Ibbetson, Sir D., 69, 70, 78illegalities, 132Imperial Council, 78



232 Index

Indian Adoption Bill, 201n6Indian Constitution, 2, 147

Article 21A, 208n13Article 39, 103

Indian Council for Child Welfare, 101Indian Education Commission

1882–83, 72, 77Indian Factory Labour Commission

Reports, 65–6Indian Penal Code, Section 317, 80industrial schools, see factory schoolsinfanticide, 62informal economy, 2, 15, 23, 46, 89,

90, 98, 107, 142–5, 177, 183kinship in, 142–5see also economy

inhabit, 4, 6, 18, 19, 49, 51, 89, 107, 108, 133, 150, 162, 174

inheritance, 54institutional homes, 101, 200n2Integrated Child Development

Scheme (ICDS), 103, 200–1n3Integrated Preschool Project, 102International Labour Organization

(ILO), 14, 107, 109, 189n3Minimum Age Convention 1973,

189n4International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Structural Adjustment Programme, 167

International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), 107–8, 120

Inter-NGO Programme for Street Children and Street Youth, 191n8

James, A., 7, 12, 129joint family, 54J.P. Unnikrishnan vs State of Andhra

Pradesh, 204n1justice, 9, 108, 126, 127, 148,

150, 189n6logic of, 139social, 129, 155

juveniledelinquents, 101reformatories, 84

branch, Bombay, 84homes, 84–5Justice Act, 125Welfare Board, 28

karkhana, 158, 162, 164, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177–9

Kendriya Vidyalayas, 206n8Kennedy, W.M., 61–3

Kennedy Report, 1905, 61–2khatni, 24, 88, 90–2, 96–8, 106–8, 112,

113, 115–17, 119–21, 136, 155, 179, 180, 187, 211n27

kinship, 35, 126, 138, 140, 161, 173in informal economy, 142–5networks, 33, 39, 42, 44, 48, 142,

172, 178, 185Klein, M., 48knowledge, 81–2, 94–6, 142

economy, 173, 174, 179intimate, 109, 126, 141, 163practical, 67, 71, 92, 172revolution, 173

Kohlberg, L., 139Kole Market, 5, 22, 123Kolkata, see CalcuttaKothari Commission Report, 166

labour, 14–18agricultural labourers, schools for

children of, 68–73living, 89, 96, 111, 121, 180, 183native preference for manual

labour, producing, 61–3school as forced, 69see also child labour

Larrymore, A.D., 194–5n25late capitalism, 144, 185learning, 14–18legal subject, 125legitimacy, 17, 39, 54, 145, 147, 160liberal subjectivity, 130, 132, 171line classes, 63literacy instruction, 29, 41, 89–92, 96living labour, 89, 96, 111, 121,

180, 183living practice, 150Lok Jumbish programme, 208n14



Index 233

London School Board, 196n3Loreto School, 201n8low-fee private schools, 165

Madhya PradeshEducation Guarantee Scheme, 170government schools, teachers

recruitment in, 209n18Makla school, 68maktabs, 198n25mainstreaming, 108manual labour, 61, 63, 67, 70, 74, 87,

88, 117, 118, 119, 120, 182, 187producing native preference for,

61–3see also khatni

manual work, 61, 63, 67, 68, 87, 88, 119, 120

manush, 87–8, 96–7, 107, 108, 112, 114–17, 119, 120, 156, 165, 180, 187

Massani, R.P., 80–1, 100Mass Education, 117, 202n8Massumi, B., 97Mauss, M., 136, 140medicalization of welfare, 102, 103,

105, 201n6mental work, 87, 88, 165metis, 92, 96migration, 5, 133, 135, 203n5Millennium Development Goals

(MDGs), 17, 145mimetic, 93–5Mines Act of 1952, 103Ministry for Women and Child

Development, 101Ministry of Community

Development, 101Ministry of Social Welfare, 27Minority Commission, 201n6misrecognition(s), 23, 157missionary(ies)

American Marathi missionary, 73schools, 66–7, 75Scottish Presbyterian missionary, 73

modernity, 11, 14, 18, 20, 118child-figure, 49–58colonial, 6, 56, 87, 105

critique, 11delayed, 130Indian, 19margins, 19multiple, 19postcolonial, 7, 14, 50, 51unfinished project, 20west/western, 51

Mohini Jain vs State of Karnataka, 204n1moral development

children’s, 15stages of, 139

More, H., 82Morocco, child labour in, 15mothers

fictive, 45, 46, 48, 142love, 46–9real, 45, 46

multiple childhoods, 7, 11–14, 49–50, 57, 130–1, 183

mutthias, 90, 112

Nandy, A., 11, 20, 51, 53, 190n6National Advisory Council (NAC),

204n2National Child Labour Projects, 108National Commission for the

Protection of Children’s Rights (NCPCR), 4–5, 146, 148–50, 204n2

National Policy for Children, 1974, 104

National Policy on Child Labour, 104National Policy on Education (NPE)

1986, 105National Skill Development

Corporation, 186nation state, 2, 57, 127–9, 145, 147,

155, 168native elite, 20, 24, 60, 68, 70, 75–82,

84, 98, 193nn16,19, 197n12, 198n30

native preference for manual labour, producing, 61–3

neglect, 32–7, 44, 46, 81–3, 85, 107material, 13poverty and, 98psychological, 13



234 Index

neighbourhood school, 166Nieuwenhuys, O., 6–8, 12, 19, 39,

127, 128, 150, 189n5Newcastle Commission, 196n3New Economic Policy (1991), 167non-contractual exchanges, 132non-formal education (NFE)

institutionalization of, 104–5, 108programme, 200n1see also education

non-governmental organizations (NGOs)

Child Rights and You, 5CINI-ASHA, 5, 22, 29, 31, 40,

107–8, 117, 120, 191n5Inter-NGO Programme for Street

Children and Street Youth, 191n8

non-sovereign subjective formation, 144, 185

non-universal, 130

object lessons, 68, 70, 71, 74obligation, 48, 116, 139, 171, 176oikos, 51Orientalism, 19

para-teacher, 209n18parenting, pedagogies of, 168–73patron–client relationship, 174patshalas, 73–4, 198n25pedagogic, 59, 70, 71, 122, 129,

150–4, 157, 160, 161, 163, 171Perambore, factory schools at,

63–4, 65performative, 150–4person-centred approach, 143physical violence, 126, 135Piaget, J., 93, 138–9Piggot Committee Report, 72Plantation Act of 1951, 103Police Act, Section 121, 80police violence, 122, 126postcolonial

capitalism, 88, 93, 98, 105critique, 106–7children’s policies, 98development, 98–107

democracy, 99modernity, see modernitysubjectivities, 131planning, 99theory, 19, 20

post-liberalization, 2, 156, 179post-structuralism, 130pragmatism, 42, 54, 68, 90, 169

without politics, 9of victimhood, 7–11

precarity, 11, 33, 145preschool child, 102, 103, 105Prime Minister’s Council on Trade

and Industry, 173private schools, see school(s/ing)protection, 5, 8, 14, 21, 37, 77, 80, 82,

84, 85, 126, 150, 186PROBE Report, 208n15public good, 177public–private partnership (PPP), 146,

174, 175, 209n22, 210n25public sphere, 44, 55, 76, 190n3

Raja Bazar, 20, 21, 23, 25, 156, 159, 163, 165, 166, 170, 183–7

karkhana, 158, 162, 164, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177–9

reciprocity, 48, 49, 116, 138, 140, 142, 144, 145, 150, 172, 183, 185

recycling, 94, 152Reformatory Schools Act of 1897, 83–4Report on Industrial Education 1902,

67–8rescue of children, 5–7resilience, 7, 10, 11, 45, 86, 107, 132,

183, 184responsibility, 24, 85, 132–42, 144,

145, 175, 185–6revolutionary consciousness and

cognition, link between, 94rights, 4, 5–7, 19, 122–54, 189n6

as antipolitics, 9children’s, existing terrain of

research, 126–32as governmentality, 145–50human, 8, 9, 126, 138, 203n3implementation of, 128



Index 235

inappropriateness of, 131infringement, 125literacy, 146participation, 128–9pedagogic, 150–4performative, 150–4responsibility, 132–42, 185–6violation, 126

rights bearing subject, 147, 172Right to Education (RTE), 2, 15, 16,

148, 154, 155, 156, 170, 184, 186–8, 204n2, 207n2

equity in, 164–5law’s optimism, disaggregating,

167–80parenting, pedagogies of, 168–73see also education

rite of passage, 95Rose, J., 14, 38, 45

Saisse, W., 64Sanitary Association, 82Sanyal, K., 106Satyashodak Samaj, 73, 77, 198n24scavenging, 88, 89, 91, 96, 97, 116

round, 92–95school(s/ing)

for children of agricultural labourers, 68–73

Central Provinces, 68–73club-schools, 21, 159, 160, 161,

163–6, 170–2, 178colonial, 61–75common, 166, 167compliance, 207n10compulsory, 2–4, 25, 72, 77–80,

104, 154, 156, 170, 173, 204n1, 207n12

enrolment, of street children, 107–21factory, 79

at Cawnpore, 66–8at Giridih, 64–6at Perambore, 63–4

as forced labour (government begar), 69

free, 2garib bacche ka school (a school for

poor children), 157–64

half-time, 61, 68, 69–70, 78, 195n3Industrial School, Beniadih, 64missionary(ies), 66–7neighbourhood, 165, 166out-of, 4patshalas, 73–4, 198n25private

budget, 165, 206–7n10coalition of, 207–8n13low-fee, 165

quality, 16, 23trade, 74universalize, 2voucher’ scheme, 209nn24

School Choice Campaign, 210n24School Management Committees, 171Sealdah’s Station

drop-in centers, 29living at, 39–42night shelters, 29North Station, 123, 191n7origin of, 5platform school, 5, 6South Station, 5, 123, 191nn6,7

selffeeling, 9true, 9

self-civilizing mission, 76self-fashioning, 95, 123seva, 76Seva Sedan, 82Seventh All India Education Survey,

211n27shiksha karmis, 209n18social justice, 129social reform, 76social service, 76Social Service League, 80, 82social welfare, 53, 98social work, 53, 76, 77, 81–3sociality, 95, 107, 116, 121,

126, 131, 137, 140, 142, 180, 185

socially-maladjusted child, 100socialization, 12, 50, 57, 94, 120, 128,

132, 184Society for the Protection of

Children, 83



236 Index

sovereigntyof child, 44of family, 52, 192n12of state, 147

Spivak, G., 130bafflement, 18call of the other, 138, 144, 185, 203n6responsibility, 137social Darwinism, 137subject, 130

Stewart, K., 11, 182street child, 26–58

AIDS, 31case file, 33–5categories and accommodations,

30–1classification of, 191n8ethnographies of, 13hyper-visibility of, 26–7living at shelter and station, 39–49mother’s love, 46–9navigating the city, 92–8as norom mati, 36, 38, 58, 110as peer educators, 31responsibility, 132–42scavenging, 92–8school enrolment, 107–21of the street, 191n8on the street, 26–58, 191n8see also child/children and

childhood(s)Structural Adjustment Programme

(SAP), 156, 167, 208n14structural violence, 131subaltern communities, 17, 18, 24, 98,

111, 130, 131, 138, 150, 168subaltern counterpublics, 44Subaltern Studies, 130subhankari, 73, 74subject/subjectivities

in late liberal societies, 9–10non-sovereign, 144, 185versus ‘objective’ facts, 33worlds, 91

survival, 89, 92, 102, 103

tactile, 93, 94teachers

community, 158–60, 205n6

as paaji, 161para-teacher, 209n18

Teach for America initiative, 176Teach for India programme, 176Teach India Campaign, 176, 211n26thailas, 91Tilak, L., 78, 79T.M.A. Pai Foundation vs the State of

Karnataka, 207n13, 208n13tolerance, 132

liberal, 13transition narrative, 18–19

UNICEF, 3, 27–9, 102, 109, 154, 159, 191nn4,5, 205n2, 208n14

United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), 4, 8, 11, 19, 26, 122, 126–8, 146, 148, 202n1

United Nations Year of the Child, 191n8

United States (US)adolescent morality in, 132civil rights movement, 156voucher system in, 175

Universities Act of 1904, 196n5

victim, 9, 30, 32, 33, 45, 97, 113, 122, 132, 144, 151

victimhood, 30, 39, 44, 45, 113, 114, 116, 133, 149, 188

pragmatism of, 7–11village education committees (VEC),

169, 208n16violence, 8, 9, 19, 126, 130, 187,

190n2caste, 20gender, 20organized, 30, 140perpetrator–victim, 125physical, 126, 135police, 122, 126religious, 20state, 21structural, 131

Vivekananda Ramakrishna Mission, 201–2n8

vocational education, 75, 185–7see also education



Index 237

voluntary organizations, 100, 101, 105, 122

vulnerable/vulnerability, 11, 32, 37, 80, 85, 125, 148, 150

Wall, J., 139Webb, Sidney, 196n3Welfare Extension Projects, 101White, S., 6, 28, 39, 143–4Widow Remarriage Act

of 1856, 54

Willis, P., 118, 119working children, 98–107, 156

postcolonial development and, 98–107

World BankEducation for All, 167Structural Adjustment Programme,

156, 167, 208n14

zamindari, 73zone of intimacy, 96, 177



Inhabiting Childhood: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India

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