Reflections on Childhood Studies Research in Context of India

In this paper, I reflect upon how the study of children and childhood in postcolonial contexts need to be examined through two moves: one, a trans-disciplinary inquiry, and two, as produced in context of ‘everyday urban brutalisms.’ For the first movement, I briefly discuss the trajectory of research studies on children as located largely within departments of education and child development, or in publications by child welfare organizations in the context of India, resulting in an apolitical examination of children’s lives and conditions. Based on recent emerging critical scholarship, I consider a need to move beyond these disciplinary and institutionally guided inquiries and to study children and their conditions as a transdisciplinary endeavor. The second move I argue requires examining children’s lives in India as configured through what Achille Mbembe (2024) calls ‘brutalism’ that affects our current planetary condition, straddling the local, regional, national and global in their ‘everyday urban’ socialites (Dar & Kannan, 2023). This is to suggest that for the field to be critical and relevant, beckons a reading of children’s lives as political, imbricated in the everyday negotiations, relationalities, and contestations of their needs and aspirations that are made both legible and precarious through processes of modernity, neocoloniality, capital, development, and dehumanisation. Hence, to study children and their futures as situated in the everyday urban encounters of violence and resistance, implies also a study of larger structures of governance, systems and institutions, and a study of collective futures as well. This kind of examination is central to a trans-disciplinary agenda, contributing towards imagining a distinctive trajectory of childhood studies research.