Imagining Childhood in Colonial Bengal: Children’s Periodicals, Readership, and Vernacular Publishing, ca. 1880–1920

Abstract: This paper investigates the sociocultural implications of a relatively understudied print medium in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengali literary culture, the children’s periodical. Through a study of Pramadacharan Sen’s Sakhā , Sivanath Sastri’s Mukul , and Upendrakishor Raychaudhuri’s Sandeś , this paper explores how the emergence of these vernacular periodicals was interlinked with the construction of a literary selfhood among the Bengali middle classes and their understanding of childhood and children’s literature from the 1870s onwards. Using Robert Darnton’s circulation model of print culture in a colonial context, it also traces the material basis of these children’s periodicals, the technologies of their production, and their diffusion, transformation, and commercial survival within a larger colonial print market until the 1920s.