Colonial India in Children’s Literature is the 1st book-length research to discover the intersections of children’s literature and defining ancient moments in colonial India. attractive with vital theoretical and significant literature that offers with colonialism, hegemony, and marginalization in kid's literature, Goswami proposes that British, Anglo-Indian, and Bengali children’s literature reply to 5 key old occasions: the missionary debates previous the constitution Act of 1813, the defeat of Tipu Sultan, the Mutiny of 1857, the beginning of Indian nationalism, and the Swadeshi circulate because of the Partition of Bengal in 1905. via a research of works through Mary Sherwood (1775-1851), Barbara Hofland (1770-1844), Sara Jeanette Duncan (1861-1922), Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), Upendrakishore Ray (1863-1915), and Sukumar Ray (1887-1923), Goswami examines how children’s literature negotiates and represents those momentous historic forces that unsettled Britain’s imperial objectives in India.

Goswami argues that nineteenth-century British and Anglo-Indian children’s texts replicate certain moods in Britain’s colonial firm in India. Sherwood and Hofland (writing prior to 1857) use the tropes of conversion and captivity as a method of awakening young ones to the risks of India, while Duncan and Kipling shift the emphasis to martial prowess, adaptability, and empirical wisdom as defining features in British and Anglo-Indian young children. moreover, Goswami’s research of early nineteenth-century children’s texts written by way of girls authors redresses the preoccupation with male authors and boys’ experience tales that experience principally proficient discussions of juvenility within the context of colonial India.

This groundbreaking e-book additionally seeks to open up the canon via studying early twentieth-century Bengali children’s texts that not just draw literary thought from nineteenth-century British children’s literature, yet whose subject matters are both formed by means of empire.