Stolen Childhoods: Intersectional Marginalities in Indian Picturebooks

This paper explores the deconstruction of a universalized notion of childhood through a critical recognition of intersectional marginalities in contemporary Indian picturebooks. By understanding Dalit and indigenous marginalities in children’s stories as distinctly experiential and locating in them the nuances of subaltern resistance and the multiculturalist politics of recognition respectively, it foregrounds the seemingly “apolitical” space of children’s literature as a dynamic site of protest and transformative potential. An examination of the subjectivity of the Dalit/indigenous child and the experience of a non-normative childhood within the larger hegemonic socio-cultural structures not only brings these picturebooks within the purview of Dalit/indigenous critical studies but also subverts the established mode of children’s stories itself—from the western bourgeois bildungsroman and postmodern individualism to a recognition of the individual’s story within the community’s history. Using qualitative content analysis and cultural mapping, this paper aims to bridge the gap between children’s critical literacy and multi-cultural and subaltern studies and examine the scope of contemporary Indian picturebooks within critical Dalit and minority studies.