Disappearing Children: Colonial Narratives in South Asian Labour History

Emma Alexander, University of Winnipeg

In North American and European scholarship histories of childhood and youth have become more mainstream, and children are granted agency in the histories of welfare, in studies of sexuality, identity and self hood, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, in South Asian studies, while historical research is now expanding rapidly, the centrality of children, childhood and youth has yet to be recognized as central to the overall historical narrative. Part of the complex construction of the colonial narrative was to privilege the ideas of higher caste communities in India and to emphasize their ways of seeing the world. In historical labour studies, children are on the margins. The narrative is that child labour emerges as a ‘problem’ in the late nineteenth-century in the industrial cities of Bombay/ Mumbai, Calcutta/ Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Kanpur and has been eradicated from large scale factories by the early twentieth century. The narrative separates the child as an individual actor, creating a false individuality shorn of familial connections which suited comparisons with early industrialization in Europe. A connected trope was to create a binary between householder male labourers on the one hand and women and children on the other as if that binary were natural and grounded in Indian ideas of family and community. The reality was far more complicated, child labour was not eradicated at all, but children moved into small scale workshops and industries not subject to factory regulation, and were often engaged in very hazardous work, something that was not recognized until well into the 1980s. This paper demonstrates how the colonial narrative was constructed and its importance well into the postcolonial period and thus, how children are still largely absent from the dominant economic, social or political narrative of labour in the industrial period.

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 Presented in Session 75. The Expansion/Contraction of Worker Categories