Querying Childhood

Mary E John was formerly Professor and Director of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi. She was Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Women’s Studies Programme at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, from 2001 to 2006. Barbara Lotz studied Indology in Heidelberg and New Delhi, focusing on modern Hindi literature, literary history, and translation studies. She has been coordinating Indo-German academic partnerships under the DAAD format: A New Passage to India since 2010 and is part of the M.S. Merian – R. Tagore ICAS:MP as a module member of TM 5, The Challenge of Gender (University of Wuerzburg). Elisabeth Schömbucher is a former Professor of Anthropology. She has been teaching at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg and joined the Department of Indology at Würzburg University in 2006. Besides teaching Anthropology of South Asia, she has conceptualised the teaching programme Global Systems and Intercultural Competence (GSiK).

Introduction I: Histories of Childhood 1. Chronological Age and the Uneven Development of Modern Childhood in the United States 2. ‘Is She a Child?’ Emergence of Chronological Age in Early Colonial Bengal 3. Age and Marriage: Problems of Girlhood in Colonial and Post-colonial Bengal 4. Reflections on the History of Childhood and the State in Kerala 5. The Travels and Appeal of the ‘Girl Child’ II: Education and Labour 6. Gender, Education, and Child Labour: Reflections on Ontological Issues 7. The Classroom as Sensorium in Mysore, 1840-1930 8. Juvenile Labour in the Beedi Industry of Central India, 1960s-80s 9. ‘Learning to Service’: Vocational Training for Marginalised Youth, Aspirations, Consumption, and Social Reproduction III: Practices of Parenting 10. Disciplining Girls in German Families: Gendered Childhood Experiences of Violent and Authoritarian Parenting in Germany from the 1890s to the 1940s 11. Narrating Childhood: Difficult Memories in Trans Autobiography 12. ‘I Lost My Son Whom I Raised for Twelve Years.’ Anxieties Among Parents of Trans Children 13. Contested Equality: Co-Parenting, Child Welfare, and Gender Politics in Contemporary History