Adaptation for Children: Unravelling the Child in Colonial India

The concept of the child has always been the source of multiple resonances being the subject of much speculation and discussion. With Wordsworth alleviating the child as the ‘Father of Man’, William Blake as an object in the state of ‘innocence’, with Charles Dickens the child is represented as another instrument of social oppression to Lewis Carroll imagining the child to be a subject of childhood indulgences of the self. The Romantics as well as the Victorians have collectively revealed a fascination with the figure of the child. The child is also the source of much discourse incumbent upon believing the child to be an entity of adult control for a larger social control and concern. What the child reads, thinks, wears, associates with are more or less dominated by society and parents at large. Upon entering a library or a bookshop the shelves have a set of predecided collection of books that designate the reading clime of the child. Control and management of this kind is not new to the commercial control of a reading curve. The eighteenth and the nineteenth century of course ensured the moulding of the child’s mind by allowing the child to read books that would only groom the child to become a socially relevant and beneficial entity. Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll’s with their production of Nonsense literature have delighted generations of young children with their unconventional stories and engaging artworks. Within such diverse approaches to the representation of the child and children’s literature, this paper intends to examine the representation of the figure of the child in the mid nineteenth century in India which also coincides with the image of the Victorian child. My approach also looks at the copious production of books for children which were incorporating stories from collected folktales of Indian origin. A galaxy of Indian folktales was collected, translated and published as books for children which were also available for an overseas audience. These bedtime stories became a popular source for entertaining the young minds and also helped in the process of recreation collaterally framing an image about an exotic India and its people.