Children's Games, Adults' Gambits From Vidyasagar To Satyajit Ray

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Societies across the world have had their methods of shaping their young. The methods are usually distilled through the stories they create for their children; and these stories are usually written by adults, who consciously craft a path through which societal and familialt authority is exercised over the child. Children's Games, Adults Gambits studies how childhood was depicted by writers of note in Bengal, some of whom also wrote for children.

Late eighteenth century and early nineteenth-century Bengali fiction for children was influenced by colonial reality. Bengal saw the opening up of the metropolitan space of the West, and the Bengali literate clite re-oriented their understanding of the world and of themselves in relation to these new Western spaces through books and textbooks that included depictions of new lands. Childhood thus became the foundation for building the new, relative understanding of the world and the self.

This book also traces how this programme was gendered, and how these stories generally enclosed an upper-caste male world and created privileged space for boys. When the space was opened up to girls, they were always fit into the mould of either the chaste wife or the frightening divine.

Even as the Sepoy Rebellion raged in north India in the autumn of 1857, the Officiating Deputy of Public Instruction in Bengal, Henry Woodrow, had his own mundane tasks to perform. One of them was to reach a decision regarding the possible commissioning of new textbooks for use in vernacular schools. He had before him a book on the topic of the steam engine and another on geography. As for the first book, Woodrow had no intention of adopting it for use in government schools. Among its chief faults was what he called the mass of 'extraneous matter' it included, not least of which was a lengthy list of ancient Indian rulers going back to Vikramaditya. This was hardly what one expected to find in a book on such a 'recent invention'!

Just a month earlier, Woodrow had requested the Principal of Sanskrit College, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, to offer his own assessment of these same books. From Woodrow's comments, it is clear that he drew upon the advice of Vidyasagar, whom he credited with being a 'great scholar. Just the month before, Vidyasagar had passed on to Woodrow his own summary review of the books, with a terse recommendation against adopting either of them. The volume on the steam engine was beyond debate; it just was not the stuff of a standard curriculum. As for the book on geography, Vidyasagar reported that it was too closely modelled on the existing 'Religious Books of the Hindus' to be suitable for 'school purposes. In the end, Woodrow agreed on all points and the books were not adopted.

At first glance, one might be surprised to find a Sanskrit pandit and Brahmin delivering such a negative verdict on the use of Hindu religious texts. But this was Vidyasagar, and Vidyasagar did not conform to the stereotype of the hidebound or traditional pandit. Although trained in the Shastras, he boasted enormous independence and demonstrated a readiness to embrace the new modes of science and learning that were then being introduced under colonial rule. His own professional goal was in fact to remodel Sanskrit education in order to bring it into harmony with Western knowledge, and then use a cadre of newly trained Sanskrit scholars as the vanguard in an official attempt to promote vernacular education in Bengal. Towards this end, Vidyasagar established himself as a prolific author and publisher of vernacular schoolbooks, among which his Varnaparichay (Introduction to the Alphabet) is one of the most widely known. None other than Rabindranath Tagore read the book as a child and claimed to hear in its simple rhythms the voice of the Original Poet.

This book traces the inception of the opening of a window onto spatial landscapes acquiring new dimensions and contours within Bengali literate communities. After providing a glimpse of the disorienting experiences of the literate elite as they were impelled to straddle different geographical worlds governed by distinctly different political economies, this book shows how a new colonial modernity based on a new concept of space was hammered out in the various domains of public life. The book further seeks to lay out the understanding of a self- consciously constructed indigenous elite identity of 'location' vis-à-vis the metropolitan space in Europe.!

This relativised understanding of location, I argue, spun directly from the global presence of the Western colonial powers. They were, one and all, proclaiming their claims to the discovery of new worlds- geographic worlds found in the voyages of discovery, and conceptual and celestial worlds opened up by natural philosophy or the natural sciences. European cultures had also experienced a similar enlargement of a spatial consciousness from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. These had induced powerful cultural transformations within it. The crucial difference between the European and the Bengali experiencing of spatial dislocation, followed by a reorientation within the physical world, lay in the staggered pace and the mental and technological preparedness of the European over the literate Bengali. Such an advantage allowed the initial wonder of European encounters with non-Western cultures to, over time, be docketed, described, analysed, slotted within its knowledge systems, and framed within powerful visuals which placed strange cultures in familiar, and therefore translatable, cultural idioms conveying European superiority. This study examines the various coordinates that created a different spatial grid which plotted the material world differently for the Bengali literate imagination. This was understood to be so central to the very nature of locating the self, the community and the relative nature of regionality (the nation-state came much later), that it became a reference point for all intellectual cogitations on the indigenous political economy.

**Contents and Sample Pages**