Speaker
Description
The turn of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of a widespread challenge to early developmental theories of childhood as an imperfect, transitional phase leading to adulthood. Progressive educationalists such as Rabindranath Tagore and John Dewey emphasised children’s situational and embodied experiences, rather than seeing them merely as vessels for future potential. This paper will explore how this new perspective found expression in the writings of Anglophone modernist Mulk Raj Anand as a means of defying prevailing nationalist and imperialist ideologies. In presenting childhood as fluid, processual and affective, not as a safeguard for the nation’s future and strength, Anand undermines the idea of linear progress and division on which the British Empire was built.
In On Education (1947), Anand calls for a reformed educational system that respects the child’s personal needs and interests—its “vitality” (12)—as a means to improve the socio-political state of India. He rejects the idea of education as a tool for assigning children a predetermined vocation and instead envisions a system that allows them the freedom to simply be. My paper will examine how Anand’s experimental oeuvre, including Untouchable (1935) and Seven Summers (1951), foregrounds this vision. In Seven Summers, Krishan’s experiences with colonial education are marked by corporal punishment and peer hostility, but his life outside of school offers him greater autonomy and small opportunities for resistance against British colonial rule. Through his sensory and affective engagements with the world around him, Krishan subtly crosses hierarchical boundaries—class, race, nationality—that were entrenched by British rule, mirrored in formal innovations, such as shifting perspectives and fragmentation.
By focusing on the child in Mulk Raj Anand’s work, this paper will (1) revise the critical commonplace of modernism as an adult-centered phenomenon and (2) examine a hitherto un(der)explored context for modernist expressions of anti-imperialism and anticolonial resistance. This paper will read Anand’s texts in light of 20th-century progressive educational views and imperial history to show that modernist children were far from innocent in their perspective of the world.
| Principal domain of study | English literary studies |
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