Childhood and youth in India: Engagements with modernity By Anandini Dar, Divya Kannan (Eds.), Cham, Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. pp. 295, $159.99 (hardback). ISBN: 978-3-031-31 819-1

Abstract

The book is a useful addition to the steadily increasing body of literature that explores how modernity shapes the lives of children and young people in India. The editors bring together 11, engaging qualitative research studies, united in their argument that young people's enactments of modernity in urban India are fluid, with them partaking in certain modern practices and resisting others. With this golden thread running across the chapters, the book is divided into two sections. The first section focuses on modern discourses that position children as ‘good’, ‘rational’ and ‘autonomous’ citizens who strive to be socially constructive and economically productive members of society, and the state as a benevolent actor, safeguarding children's rights with protective legislation and empowering them to advocate for their infringement. The authors, in this section, shine a light on these discourses by discussing the ideas framing life skill education programmes, early childhood curriculum, print and audio-visual media and the practices of reformatory schools and Bombay textile mills during colonial times. The second section diversifies its focus to show how children are negotiating these discourses. In this section, the authors examine the voices of disabled children in after-school programmes, youth enrolled in personality development courses, young women living in slum habitations, migrant youth working as rag-pickers and children in elite schools, often aspiring for an international education.

Besides showcasing children's varied interpretations of modernity across multiple contexts, the editors of the book also wish to accord attention to knowledge building for and from the Global South. In this vein, they put forward the concept of everyday urban to describe both, young people's fluid interpretations of modernity in urban contexts and the everyday interactions through which this reality is constructed. Doing so, they draw on the work of Indian scholars to identify the urban as the ecological unit within which projects of modernity are expected to unfold in the Global South and for conceptualising the ontology of the social.

The concept, everyday urban, emphasises that urbanity is crucial to the performance of modernity in India and the Global South. It is true that young people's negotiations with modernity are conspicuous in urban areas which are home to many more modern institutions, state and private and people from varied communities, national and international. However, in underscoring urbanity, the concept inadvertently essentialises rural spaces as traditional. This is, suggested by Mary Ann Chacko (in this volume) who argues that with the usage of print and digital media, modern discourses are being negotiated by young people in both rural and urban homes. Furthermore, education and health services in rural areas are predominantly delivered by the modern state, and young people migrating between rural and urban areas cannot be immune to modern thinking. So, the usage of everyday urban does potentially position young people in rural areas as orthodox in comparison to their urban counterparts.

In conceptualising the everyday urban, the editors also draw on an Indian interpretation for understanding social reality which they suggest is relevant for research across the Global South. However, they do not discuss how the situatedness of their interpretation enriches the readers' understanding of interaction in this part of the world. Arguably, a discussion on how an Indian perspective on the ontology of the social augments our analysis of social interaction in the Global South would be beneficial in advocating for knowledge building from the South.

The book is a resource for students and faculty of childhood and youth studies in not only the Global South but also the Global North. With its focus on modernity, it holds relevance for various disciplines and inter-disciplinary fields of study like Sociology, Anthropology, Gender Studies, International Development and Education. It offers students wishing to undertake qualitative research, a glimpse of some of the prominent ways in which this can be done, namely, ethnography, discourse analysis, interview-based research and archival analysis of documentary and video data. The book also allows functionaries in non-governmental organisations, international development organisations and officials leading state programmes for children and young people to appreciate children's daily struggles with modernity.