A Literature of One's Own: British Literary Influence on the Development of Indian Children's Genres

Abstract “We become writers before we learn to write. The rest is simply learning how to put it all together.” Ruskin Bond “The 1835 English Education Act of William Bentinck,” states Gauri Viswanathan in Masks of Conquest (1989) “which swiftly followed Macaulay’s minute of that same year, officially required the natives of India to submit to the study of English literature” (45), thereby establishing its presence as an ineluctable result of colonial rule. English literature played a pivotal role in the colonial project and according to colonialists like the former governor-general Lord Hardinge and James Mill, would both “control” (Viswanathan, 91) and endow educated natives with “a chance of having their understandings better enlightened” (Viswanathan, 91), thereby ‘rescuing’ them from the realms of ignorance. This thesis argues that Indian children’s literature draws on the influence of English literature and takes shape in accordance with English genre conventions, while adapting these conventions to produce a distinct and unique canon of juvenile writing (for children privileged enough to read), which is far removed from colonial, ‘civilising’ intentions. My research demonstrates how the consumption of and engagement with British literary genres by Indian writers of juvenile literature helped define a local literary identity of the colonised child.Significantly, Indian children’s literature from the 19th century onwards is not merely a derivative discourse, which would have only furthered the colonial agenda. Instead, its complex interactions with English literature result in a range of localised adaptations, radical appropriations, and subtle subversions of British genres, all of which developed in accordance with the evolving notion of Indian childhood. This thesis focuses on, but is not restricted to, the literature emerging from Bengal, since Calcutta was the Imperial capital until 1911 and the seat of colonial education. The chapters on science fiction, the adventure story, detective fiction and the ghost story set out to survey the field in Bengal before focusing on close readings of Bengali texts by writers like Satyajit Ray, Leela Majumdar, Premendra Mitra, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Hemendra Kumar Roy among others, all of whom acknowledge their debt to English literature. The next two chapters titled “In the Jungle” and “The Anglo-Indian Conversation” study the lasting influence of Kipling’s legacy on the English writing of the Bengali-American expatriate Dhan Gopal Mukerji and the Anglo-Indian writer Ruskin Bond. The final chapter offers a close reading of “Bhondar Bahadur” (1926), a short story in the vernacular by Gaganendranath Tagore which is inspired by a classic text of English literature, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The conclusion presents a short reading of Ruskin Bond’s novella, The Blue Umbrella (1980) to reinforce the arguments of the thesis, meditates on whether Indian adaptations of English genres have successfully rescued juvenile readers from the peripheries of readership and offers some insight into the current energies of children’s writing emerging from contemporary India.