Engaging with the World: A Historical Study of Urdu and Hindi Children’s Periodicals of Colonial North India

This article seeks to historicise and critically analyse how publishers and editors of Urdu and Hindi children's periodicals produced in colonial North India during the early twentieth century engaged with the world. It argues that they largely engaged with the world in two ways: firstly, by adapting and incorporating transnational influences in children's periodical publishing into their own ventures; and secondly, by seeking to disseminate wide knowledge about the world and foster a discernible outlook towards it through lessons in geography, descriptions of other countries, and coverage of contemporary developments in the world. It attributes this outward orientation to the imperatives of navigating colonial educational discourse and the increased engagement of native intellectuals with the vernacular travel-writing genre. It argues that the knowledge that editors and publishers sought to disseminate about the world was not factual or politically neutral; rather, it was deeply ideological. Thus, on this basis, the article examines Urdu and Hindi children's periodicals as sites of ‘world-making’.