Peer-reviewed article

Child Labour in India: Literary Representations along the Trajectory of Nation

Sreemoyee Dasgupta · 9 Nov 2018

Abstract

This paper will examine literary representations of children as earning members of society against the history of child labour in India, as a means of understanding the relationship between class, labour, nationalism and childhood. It is part of my ongoing attempt to examine formulations of childhood in the Global South as a way of engaging with the concept of ‘multiple childhoods’ and examining their position vis-à-vis global, universal (and, according to scholars like Emer O' Sullivan, Western) paradigms of childhood. In the wake of The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2016, the historical and constitutional journey India embarks on is examined, beginning with the Indian Factory Act, 1881, along the path of its nascent nationhood, to The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986 and the subsequent Amendment. The focus is on Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie and Anita Desai's The Village by the Sea as texts which portray two different modes of thinking about labouring children. Applying Viviana Zelizer's definitions of the ‘uselessness’ and ‘usefulness’ of children, my paper studies these two literary representations of useful childhood in India, published at different points in India's journey as a nation, in a political and historical continuum within which the futurity of a young country is embodied by the willing labour of youth.