Of Transposed Heads and Transformed Ontologies: The Case of Chandamama issues from the mid-1950s.

Abstract

Recent scholarship on twentieth-century children’s literature in India has examined these texts to uncover their underlying political commitments and agendas—promoting nationalism and reinforcing patriarchal and caste-based norms, among others. Implicit in such discussions is a shared assumption that children’s literature is self-consciously “didactic”: it either imparts desirable morals, ethical values, and societal norms, or, if primarily entertaining, at least fosters literacy and reading skills. In this paper, rather than focusing on the content of such literature to discern its purported “teaching,” I turn to the form of the genre itself—particularly in the digest-like Chandamama series, which tended to collapse distinctions among various kinds of pre-modern literatures, such as “myth,” “epic,” “history,” and “romance,” consigning them all to the realm of “fiction” or “children’s stories.” I argue that the cultural work of twentieth-century children’s literature in India lay in creating a space for such diverse literatures within a post-scientific, post–Industrial Revolution reality—a space where distinctions among narrative traditions, their associated beliefs, and their discursive realms were largely erased, and the boundary between fact and fiction was drawn more firmly.