Our members, Dr. Anandini Dar (BML Munjal University, India) and Dr. Divya Kannan (Shiv Nadar University, India), talk about their edited collection, Childhood and Youth in India: Engagements with Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
In the context of the contemporary socio-political landscape, we find that discourses around modernity need to be revisited, through inquiries made across various regions and time periods, while centrally situating the socially constructed categories of children and youth. In this way, the volume critiques the traditional debates on modernity and re-positions what and who is considered “modern” in India and the ways in which modernity is to be performed.
The authors address the fundamental question, i.e, what kind of childhoods and youth are produced and reproduced in the making of Indian society and polity. By locating -- children and youth -- at the center, this volume also offers new approaches to reading modernity/ies and reconfigures the debates on the subject in India with renewed nuance. It moves beyond binary conceptualisations of agency/resistance and makes evident how young people are able to re-negotiate the norms of society in tangentially new ways that were not possible nor overtly present in earlier approaches. In fact, it is this aspect of negotiation and often, the conflictual and ambivalent nature of the “everyday-ness” that remains central to the arguments posed in this volume.
Overall, this volume advances two critical points. First, we argue for the need for a cross-disciplinary approach to studying childhood and youth that can open up new ontological understandings and meanings about who and what is modern in Indian society. By reflecting on how young people engage with structures of power, and institutional apparatuses targeting them in individual and collective capacities—across varied temporal and spatial scales—we propose nuanced conceptions of modernity by centering children and youth as analytical categories.
Second, we advance that the rhetoric of “multiple childhoods” is no longer sufficient to explain young people’s everyday lives (see Balagopalan, 2014) situated amidst persistent inequalities of caste, gender, class, sexuality, and ableism. Instead, we propose the concept of the ‘everyday urban’ relevant in global South contexts. Such a framing departs from paying emphatic attention only to ‘key moments’ or ‘big events’ in the lives and conditions of young people in the global South as per the norms laid down by Western epistemological and political vocabulary. Instead, it allows us to highlight the co-constitution of categories of the urban, childhood, and youth through their entanglements in the realm of everyday and embedded socialities in India.
The scholarly literature in this emerging field of childhood and youth studies has been limited in South Asia, including India. The field has grown in the past two-three decades in the global North, and continues to expand institutionally with new degree granting programmes surfacing in Universities in North America and Europe. Whereas in India the field, primarily understood as the domain of children’s rights, education and development NGOs, has remained uncritical in its examinations of problems affecting children.
While some innovative research and publications exist on the themes associated with children and young people in specific discipline domains/ spaces in India, these have not been brought into conversation with each other so as to ensure cross-disciplinary learnings on young subjects’ life worlds and perspectives about our worlds. Most importantly, South Asian scholars tend to regard childhood and youth as categories/ key terms to be tacked onto existing rigorous analytical categories without evaluating them in their own right.
This has led to haphazard descriptive research rather than a critical engagement of childhood and youth as ideologically contested categories of thought and policy. We also find that very few titles on this theme have been published in India (particularly in the last 4-5 years), but the list of growing academic courses in universities results in the need for such scholarship.
We find the conceptual frame of the ‘everyday urban’ – that is, the critical reading of the seemingly mundane experiences, encounters, actions, performances, and negotiations, within the urban spaces – as productive for our examinations of young people’s engagements with modernity. This idea of the ‘everyday urban’ is configured by adapting two different yet related conceptions. First, the framing offered by Gyan Prakash (2002) on ‘the urban turn’ and, second, by Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarrukai (2019) on the ‘everyday social.’
In his essay on the ‘urban turn’ Prakash (2002) suggests that to understand the modern city, one must move away from the temporal and spatial unfolding of the city as envisioned by planners and policy-makers, and re-think the urban also as “society.” He urges that scholars unpacking modernity and its meanings must think of the urban as constituent of multiple dwellings of local politics, movements, and services of slum dwellers, NGO workers, and activists, and for our case, children and youth, and their incursions on, and experiences in the urban.
It is in this way, Prakash suggests, that “the urban turn, then, offers an opportunity to revise the history of Indian modernity, to bring into view spaces of power and difference suppressed by the historicist discourse of the nation” (pp. 6). Hence, it is precisely in the spaces of the everyday that India’s modernity can be understood by centering new subject positions and their negotiations with modern structures, adult frameworks, and institutions that otherwise aim to fix their experiences according to a linear temporal framework.
Furthermore, Guru and Sarukkai (2019), offer in their concept of “the everyday social,” certain valence to everyday lived experience. It is in these experiences that the sense of the ‘social of an individual’ – within categories of caste, nation, religion, gender, or what we include, generation – also gets shaped. Hence, unlike the insistence on reading the experiences of young people through the frame of agency (Prout and James, 1997), which has dominated the global North Childhood Studies discourse, the ‘everyday social’ provides a nuanced reading of experiences through the “socialities” of those oft-forgotten, such as those “of house-wives, maids, children, city sanitation workers…. and processes around us” (p. 4). These socialities are also often left out of the discourses and discussions on society, urban space, and modernity in India. Hence, when we blend these two frameworks in our conceptualization of the ‘everyday urban,’ it is to suggest that young people’s experiences of processes of modernity in the urban world also shape and inform our understanding of modern Indian society.
Moreover, the ‘everyday urban’ unravels the scale of linear temporality, as the everyday is not to be understood as a series of predetermined events but one that is rather informed by multiple time frames – cosmological, historical, functionalized, the sacred, and profane, mythic and real, as well as the cyclical and linear time – that can coexist in our everyday life (Ray & Ghosh, 2016). When young people encounter modern institutions in urban contexts, we find they are able to articulate the problems with the caste system and the inequalities they witness and experience daily, as both a historical and a contemporary problem (Glockner, this volume). They also undermine the set rules and structures of the marching brass bands of the colonial juvenile justice system (Ellis, this volume), question the ableist discourses of institutions (Fernandes. this volume), and challenge dominant mainstream schooling pedagogies as an alternate solution to child labour (Glockner, this volume).
As the ‘every day’ is often understood as a space for the uncritical reproduction of social practices (see critique, Ray and Ghosh, 2016, p. 4), this chapter foregrounds instead, the need to critically read the seemingly ‘mundane’ experiences in the urban every day as a constituent of the negotiations, relationalities, and identity politics of the oft-forgotten social actors – young people. The relation of the everyday with the urban is also very intentional in our conceptualisation of modernity and young people as the urban sphere is a critical site for development agendas and where the project of modernity is imagined to finally arrive. Association of urban cities in India as akin to ‘global cities’ (Sassen, 2005) such as Tokyo, Shanghai, or New York, with sprawling high rises, and markets where globally produced items can be purchased as though anywhere else has resulted in the creation of ‘socially produced aspirations’ (Huijsmans, Ansell & Froerer 2021).
However, when we unpack the urban, by reading everyday experiences, and the temporalities that constitute it, it is rife with risk and encounters with various social structures. Young people risk their futures as they leave their villages and aspire for lives and products available only in cities. Sometimes they risk their affiliations with their communities and families, as they choose pre-marital relationships and ultimately their own choice of life partners. Most often, young men and women are risking their lives in precarious work conditions - as detailed earlier. Hence, it is not possible to unpack a reading of modernity and young people in the everyday, without also recognizing that the ‘everyday urban’ also constitutes the experiences of young people with the “large-scale projects of social engineering” which other scholars, like Ritty Lukose (2009, p. 219) have read as outside of the purview of the ‘everyday’ in earlier examinations of modernity and young people in India.
The ‘everyday urban’ includes encounters, negotiations, and experiences of young people with institutional, transnational, and global conditions of precarity. These have cut across periods and resulted in contestations for claims to varied forms of the contemporary and cosmopolitan citizenry that continuously come at odds with the larger agendas of the state. It is in these conflicts and contestations within the everyday that we can then begin to understand children and youth in historical and contemporary India. Furthermore, while the ‘everyday’ has been a conceptual and methodological frame employed largely in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, we suggest that by extending this framework as a theoretical tool to read the engagements of young people with modernity, we claim it as central to a cross-disciplinary agenda.