Bridging the Global and the Local: Knowledge Production in Children’s Literature through the stereotypes of Good and Bad Women in Late Colonial India

Abstract

This paper argues how Victorian norms of womanhood extended to the emerging genres of fairytales in colonial India and shaped the culture of domesticity and gender archetypes. Drawing on the works of Richard Carnac Temple and Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar, it demonstrates how the construction of feminine archetypes did not follow the monolithic narrative of docility and devotion. The paper focuses on the contradictory metaphors of sati-saddhvi (chaste, submissive wife) and rakshasi (devil woman/ demoness) to examine how these imageries transcended limited cultural stereotypes of femininity in children’s literature. The paper shows how new knowledge production through children’s literature assimilated global cultural ethos in local contexts and produced multiple competing norms of children’s learning and socialization.