Abstracts Category : Other

Come on powerful, come on my fresh green: Representations of the Child and Constructions of Childhood in Rabindranath Tagores Writings for Children

by Sabrina Sharmin Kamal

The present study investigates Asias first Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagores (1861-1941) writings for children, situating his work in the tumultuous time of colonial India marching towards independence. The study makes an original contribution to Tagore scholarship and the field of childrens literature arguing that Tagores designated protagonist, the Bengali child, subverts social and political structures of power and authority, and is a vehicle for the authors hopes for future. The discourse of Tagores literature for children posits, hopes for, and construes an implied child reader - the imagined nations future citizens. His constructions of childhood, the study claims, are symbolic, oscillating between the reflective and the transformative and synthesising the authors intentions, fears, desires, values and attitudes towards childhood. In order to reach its overarching conclusions, the present study has considered the political and social contexts of the original production of the texts which is reflected in the studys theoretical assumption - the historicist reading of childhood informed by postcolonial and power-oriented theories of childrens literature. Close reading of a selection of Tagores writings for children suggest that Tagores own ideologies about childhood were decisively shaped by the colonial time and the colonised place in which he lived, and his images of childhood concentrate on physical landscapes of the indigenous Bengal in order to construct an imagined decolonised landscape, and form consciousness of national identity. The present study has also argued that Tagores fictional world(s) of children are a result of restorative re-imagining and re-inventing, not just manifestation of his personal grief and experiences. Additionally, Tagore has employed fictive children for a variety of conflicting and complementary uses: mighty and empowered children in fantasy critique fascist regimentation, but their images are juxtaposed elsewhere with realistic portrayals of helpless and disempowered children who are unable to seek agency against societal oppression. Tagores persistent but persuasive portrayals of uninspired children in mechanised colonial education and of coercive teachers and teaching methods illuminate his educational ideologies and confirm a prescriptive authorial presence in the narrative. Yet, the present study has contended that Tagores imagined childhood is an empowered time and space in which fictive children are able to acquire agency and self-awareness through a variety of pleasurable and unpleasurable experiences, functioning as a democratic channel where child-adult power relations are constantly being negotiated.