Animals, Children's Literature, and the World of Rays

Abstract: This paper studies the politics of representation of animals in Bengali children's literature by analyzing select texts of three generation of Rays—Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury (1863–1915), Sukumar Ray (1887–1923), and Satyajit Ray (1921–1992). The paper investigates how Indian animals were symbolically used in the works of the three Rays to disseminate anticolonial and imperial discourses as India evolved sociopolitically from a British colony to a postcolonial independent nation.