Imagining Family: Childhood in Urdu Children’s Magazines in South Asia

Abstract

This paper examines the conceptions of family and childhood in Urdu children’s magazines in late colonial India. Children’s magazines produced different genres of writing like short stories, poems, puzzles, and jokes for the purpose of moral education and entertainment of children. Like women’s magazines, children’s magazines imagined normative constructs of familial relationships such as parenting and sibling relationships around particular ideals to influence youth and public culture. Emerging in the early twentieth century, children’s magazines in Urdu became a distinct and powerful genre of media in late colonial India, increasingly reflecting changing socio-economic conditions of industrialization, nationalism, and expansion of primary education. They emphasized the cultivation of truthfulness, charity, and service to the nation.  Recent scholarship on childhood has emphasized age as an important category for managing intimate life and for understanding the child as a rights-based subject. This paper builds on that scholarship and argues that the figure of the child as a consumer and a reader of children’s magazines, different from adults, is critical for our understanding of colonial childhood. Furthermore, the child-reader of the children’s magazines that were edited and regulated by adults was gendered from its conception with adventurous stories for boys and domestic tales for girls.