Abstract
The child has long been a powerfully affective figure in development work – whether as an abject victim or a joyful symbol of brighter futures. While the power of children to produce emotions in donors has been well studied, far less attention has been given to children’s own affective relationships with development organisations. This article explores the role of affect in children’s participation in non-governmental organisation (NGO) programmes in Delhi, India. In particular, by focusing on spectacles of performance, this article highlights the importance of positive affects: happiness, fun, and joy in child-focused NGO programmes. Yet, rather than a cynical critique of the way children’s joy is captured (typically in images) and translated into narratives of successful development, this article seeks to explore the possibilities for sincere ethnographic engagement with happiness itself. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, and exploring the temporal dimensions of positive affects, I seek to engage seriously with children’s joyful experiences in development programmes, while simultaneously questioning any simplistic equation of child happiness with developmental success.
We all take with us an array of assumptions when we begin our research, but my assumptions, were perhaps slightly more sinister than most: don’t trust smiling children. It started innocently enough, as a suspicion of images of smiling children. These images, which exist alongside images of abject suffering – children with bloated bellies and fly-spotted eyes – abound in all forms of what Lilie Chouliaraki (2013) calls humanitarian communication. While images of the abject poverty-stricken child are well theorised in their contemporary and historical manifestations (see Chouliaraki, 2010; Koven, 2004; Manzo, 2008; Pace, 2002; Sinervo and Cheney, 2019), there is increasing recognition that images of smiling children are just as dangerous: their smiles concealing and encouraging a misrecognition of systematic relations of inequality. Likewise, these images offer a tantalisingly simple picture of development success, gratifying donors with the sense of how wonderfully their contributions have worked. This latter effect forces us to grapple with the affective power of these images and to ask ourselves: is their happiness actually just our happiness with ourselves?
Embarking on my fieldwork in Delhi in 2013, I knew that I must remain vigilant and critical when confronted with these kinds of happy images and their smiling subjects. You can imagine my distress, then, when shortly after commencing my fieldwork with a small NGO working with slum children, I not only found myself frequently surrounded by smiling and laughing children, but they also began to appear in my own photographs. These images continued to multiply and at one point during my field work I joked that I had enough images of smiling children to start an NGO of my own. Thinking about these images today, I’ve begun to realise that what continues to trouble me about them is not just questions about representation – how development uses these happy images – but questions about how to engage ethnographically with positive affects. In particular, I am interested in thinking about the ways in which we, as ethnographers of development, can better understand these emotions while remaining critical of, but also committed to these positive affects. While I remain mindful of Sara Ahmed’s (2010: 7) warning that: ‘If we have a duty to promote what causes happiness, then happiness itself becomes a duty,’ I also seek to acknowledge with Anjaria and Anjaria (2020) the embodied pull of fun, pleasure and happiness. Writing about mazaa ‘a Hindi-Urdu word that can mean fun, pleasure and play’ – Anjaria and Anjaria (2020: 232) argue that it is ‘mazaa’s embodied, unwieldy and seductive properties that can generate new ways of knowing, analysing, critiquing and writing’. This article is thus oriented towards fun, pleasure and happiness, and adapts Anjaria and Anjaria’s (2020: 234) sentiments to advocate an openness to development whose ‘direction is neither inevitable nor foreseeable’.
The subject of this article is the kind of events that in my field site seemed to be most associated with positive affects: spectacles of performance. Ranging from plays performed to middle-class crowds in up-market theatres, to dance performances on dusty tarpaulin stages to celebrate Children’s Day, opportunities for performance and spectacle for the slum children I worked with were abundant. Aradhana Sharma (2008: 93) has written that, despite being under-studied, performance techniques and spectacles are commonplace in development work. But these are not just singular acts, in fact Sharma (2008: 93) argues that performance is not just a tool utilised by development but that ‘development itself is performative and a performed practice’. Drawing on the extensive literature on the role of spectacle in modern state formation (Anderson, 1983), we could argue that, like the state, development is imagined and indeed created through spectacle. Just as spectacles of the nation state operate to incorporate a particular group as citizens and exclude a foreign alien ‘other’, spectacles of development become theatrical, as theorised by Chouliaraki (2013: 31), when they produce a separation between those who watch in safety and those who suffer at a distance. For Chouliaraki (2013: 30) spectacles of development thus play a pedagogical role, cultivating particular virtues and affective relationships, such as altruism, in their audiences. But what if these spectacles are not of suffering but of joy? And what kind of virtues and affects do these joyous performances create amongst those who perform them? Furthermore, how do these spectacles of happiness, joy, fun and skill orient these actors towards particular kinds of futures?
Happy children archive
While performances and spectacles are a key part of most development interventions, my argument is that they play a particular role in development programmes targeting children. This is, it is worth saying, by no means a new thing and a brief look at the history of efforts to save or develop children in the West – an important archive for understanding efforts to develop children elsewhere – demonstrates the historical importance of such spectacles. As early as 1704, students of charity schools in London were annually paraded through the streets in highly choreographed anniversary celebrations. Neatly dressed in their school uniforms, children walked for over a mile before attending a special church service in which they sang hymns rehearsed for the occasion (Lloyd, 2002: 34–5). By the 1780s these lavish celebrations had grown in size, becoming ticketed events, and in 1782 moving to St Paul’s Cathedral (Cunningham, 1991: 39). Although it was discipline rather than happiness that was primarily on display in these early spectacles, Hugh Cunningham (1991: 45) argues that the emotional pitch of these events was reached in the moments when children raised their voices in song. The affective nature of these spectacles becomes clear when reading accounts from the time. William Blake, depicting one such procession in his poem ‘Holy Thursday’ (1789), described the children as having a ‘radiance all their own’. Likewise, The Times, in 1796, in the context of the French Revolution, noted that alongside children’s exemplary conduct, it was their cheerful looks that demonstrated ‘the beneficial effects which the poor derive from a well regulated state of society’ (see Lloyd, 2002: 37).
By the 19th century, positive affects such as happiness emerged as key to staging spectacles of child rescue (Ash, 2010: 433, 437). Sarah Ash (2010: 435, 437), describing the seemingly endless chain of annual events discussed in Dr Barnardo’s periodical Night and Day, notes the ways Dr Barnardo placed humour and pleasure at the centre of his ‘frenetically energetic spectacles’. By 1890 Barnardo had shifted his Annual Meetings to the Royal Albert Hall, a venue that could accommodate his 3000 child performers (Ash, 2010: 437). In these spectacles, Barnardo sought to offer compelling proof of the transformative nature of his programmes, demonstrating discipline, children’s capacity for work, but also joy: on one occasion staging a confetti fight between children and the audience (Ash, 2010: 437). Although Barnardo regarded ‘dancing’, ‘theatricals’ and the use of babies for begging on the street as ‘distasteful’, his productions made use of the affective power of all three elements: dances were re-branded as drills, dramatic performances were labelled ‘living pictures’ and babies engaging in ‘natural play’ powerfully modelled the happiness and order of Dr Barnardo’s homes (Ash, 2010). Given that Barnardo described the subjects of his rescue efforts as children ‘to whom the pleasures and joys of childhood are empty words’ (Barnardo, 1884, cited in Swain, 2009: 200), it is perhaps unsurprising that happiness and joy featured so prominently in these spectacles of rescue. 1 This effect was sealed, when, at a key moment in the performance, the Albert Hall would be transformed into a reception room for recent recruits, and ‘actual children “caught” in the “dragnet” during the past 24 hours’, would make their way on stage ‘slowly and heavily’ crowding without order or discipline (Ash, 2010: 441). This affective contrast between the bright quick movements of Barnardo’s rescued children, highlights the importance of affects like happiness and joy in producing convincing displays of development.
This happy children’s archive, with its litany of performances, is an important, though under-studied, part of the history of child rights, specifically the reconfiguration of play and its direction towards ‘developmental’ – encompassing both societal and child development – ends. Joe Frost (2009: 5) notes that efforts to ban children’s play on the streets of New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were accompanied by efforts to reform and rescue street children, as well as the emergence of organisations such as the Playground Association of America and the establishment of child-research centres investigating the role of play in child development (see also Gutman, 2013). Barnado's exhibition of babies engaging in ‘natural play’ thus builds on a much longer history of conceptualising play as vital to childhood – a history that features names like Aristotle, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others – that from the19th century sees both the institutionalisation and performance of play as key to projects of child rescue
Play, fun and other happy objects
In 1989, cementing a fundamental association between childhood and play, play was affirmed as a right in the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Similarly, the new importance given to children’s participation in the UNCRC – which was introduced as a third ‘P’ to sit alongside its guiding principles of provision and protection (see Skelton, 2007) – elevated the importance of play. Specifically, activities which encouraged states of play, creativity and movement emerged as desirable and natural ways of inviting children’s participation in development programmes. In pursuing children’s participation through playful activities like drama, drawing, music, dance, sport and so on, development organisations could demonstrate the fulfilment of children’s right to participation, but also their right to play. These kinds of activities were thus reaffirmed in the new discourse of child rights as powerful ‘happy objects’ (Ahmed, 2010), both for children and a range of development organisations. Sara Ahmed (2010: 24) describes happiness as a movement towards objects that produce positive affects. Happiness here is an orientation that not only produces good feelings but also makes certain objects good. Development programmes, by associating themselves with happy objects – music, dance, drama and so on – themselves become happy objects, a status that they affirm through the repeated staging of spectacles of joyful performance.
Part of the appeal of these kinds of performances for both NGO workers and the children who participate in them is that the effect of each performance is instant. Just as The Times recorded in the 18th century that under the dome of St Paul’s children were ‘skreened from the rude hand of misery and shame’ (in Cunningham, 1991: 48), in the moment of performance children do not just perform development, they become developed – even if only momentarily. Here performance produces a vision of childhood that is easily recognised as both developed and desirable. Given normative equations between developed childhood and happiness – being a child is to be happy (Stearns, 2013) – performances of this kind are mutually reinforcing both of development and its connotations of happiness. Yet while spectacles of performance are arguably instrumentalised by development organisations to justify the value of their programmes, fun and other good feelings are also arguably just fun: they feel good, and as a result we are attracted to them. Ironically, it is perhaps this latter quality that makes fun an under-theorised concept in development – perhaps fun is by definition what happens when one is not trying to theorise emotions or affects? Perhaps it is also its association with childhood, non-serious pursuits, or its fleeting temporality that has made fun hard to theorise in a development contexts where suffering and its allieviation have beeen the key focus.
But what is the relationship between fun and happiness? Key to Sara Ahmed’s (2010: 32) conceptualisation of happiness is the idea that happy objects become a ‘prop that sustains the fantasy that happiness is what would follow if only we could have it’. Fun, which derives much of its power from the present tense, seems to disrupt this idea of seemingly endless deferral. This disruption becomes clearer by linking fun to the concept of play. By playing or performing development and happiness, one doesn’t necessarily attain these things, as Hamayon (2016: 8) writes: ‘“playing” does not present itself as a true doing’. Yet play as a modality does also ‘constitute a “kind of” doing’ (Hamayon, 2016: 8). Here the ‘paradoxical’ nature of play, observed by scholars such as Donald Winnicott (1971) and Gregory Bateson (1972), is key to understanding the affective pull of these kinds of performances for their participants. In this article I’m also interested in the temporal dimension of performances that outlive the present tense ‘fun’ of their staging. For example: how do particular performances and spectacles produce affects and orientations that both anticipate and reminisce about their staging? By asking questions about the temporalities associated with positive affects, I explore the ways spectacles of development continue to ‘affect’ long after the events themselves, appearing in children’s story-telling, boasting, dreaming, and even homework essays. Performances thus outlive the particularities of their staging, and continue to ‘perform’ long after all the streamers have come down and the balloons have been popped: but what is it that they continue to perform?
Happy spectacles: A hygienic premiere, an upcycle puppet show and an Annual Day celebration
During my fieldwork in Delhi in 2013 I encountered many small, often mobile, NGOs that differentiated themselves not by the development problem they targeted, but by their medium of programme delivery. Here there were media NGOs, drama NGOs, sport NGOs, art NGOs, and many more. Organisations of this kind, which I call ‘extra-curricular NGOs’, typically augment service-driven programmes that focus on remedial education, vocational skills or the delivery of health care. Often utilising the space and community contacts of these more ‘fixed’ service-driven organisations, extra-curricular NGOs typically offer opportunities for children to develop the kind of extra-curricular skills and subjectivities usually only available to middle-class children. My fieldwork was conducted in one such organisation that described itself as a media NGO. 2 This mobile organisation held weekly 2- to 3-hour media clubs with children aged 12–16 in four different slum communities. In these classes, children engaged in a range of narrative and performance-based activities that typically involved working towards larger media projects such as films or street plays that would be screened and performed around Delhi. Children in these media clubs were typically involved in multiple NGO programmes with several different organisations, some of which were based in their communities permanently, others which visited weekly (using the space of the permanent organisations like the media NGO), and still others that came in for specialised activities or delivered their programmes intensively. To get a sense of the diversity of spectacles associated with these different forms of development, in this section I discuss three different spectacles each associated with a different format of programme delivery.
A hygienic premiere
Much of the early months of my fieldwork was spent working with the media NGO on their annual feature film, which in the year of my fieldwork was to be about handwashing. Preparations for this film involved baseline educational activities, story-writing competitions, script-writing activities, auditions and rehearsals, all of which finally culminated in about two weeks of filming in two slum communities. 3 Once the filming was complete some NGO staff busied themselves editing the film, while others began preparing for the film premiere. This would be an invite-only event at a hired theatre in South Delhi, and preparations involved producing posters, inviting guests, arranging travel from four slum communities, preparing additional performances, arranging catering and gathering decorations – one of which was a canvas display through which one could poke one’s head to be photographed as the hero of the film holding a bar of soap. As the day drew near we showed the trailer of the film in all four communities and, having been told by several groups of girls that I must wear a sari to such an event, I quickly reached out to my landlady for some assistance with both buying and wearing a sari.
Much of the joyful anticipation surrounding this event was indeed sartorial. Here, like the children in the 18th- century charity school anniversary celebrations who, despite opposition from trustees, wore flounces, bonnets, ribbons, feathers and fans as ‘anniversary ornaments’ (Cunningham, 1991: 45; Lloyd, 2002: 39), children’s outfits on the day attested to how clothing is used to mark and augment the pleasure of special occasions. Whether it was the group of Bengali girls who came dressed in the traditional and auspicious red and white sari (lal paar saree) replete with bangles, bindis and hair ornaments, or the boys with their immaculately styled hair, brightly coloured sunglasses, partially unbuttoned shirts and sleek jackets or vests, all the children were dressed in their best. The pleasure that the children took in wearing these clothes, and the way this was heightened by posing and being photographed, emerges in stark contrast to any cynical reading one might have about the kind of images of smiling children captured by NGOs.
Once the groups of children had arrived and all were seated in the auditorium the premiere got under way. The anticipated high point of this event – the actual screening of the film itself – was actually marked by disappointment for many children who were dissatisfied with their brief and fleeting appearances in this highly edited film that perhaps did not live up to many of their expectations formed during filming. Following the film, each child actor was called up on the stage, given a film poster and a DVD, and many group and individual photographs ensued. At the conclusion of the formal proceedings, children were led outside to the food vendors, who had been hired to produce child-favoured delicacies such as veg chow mein, aloo tikki and momos. Back inside, having eaten, children helped themselves to soft drinks in plastic cups. These quickly became objects of fun for one group of children, who began posing creatively with them. What started as children calmly posing with their heads inside the canvas cut-out, became children posing drinking out of plastic cups in front of the cut-out, and then descended into a blur of cup-holding swirling children. As children began to pick up momentum, twirling themselves around each other, they quickly realised the kinetic potential of this large marble floored hall. Over the next half an hour, balloons and streamers were ripped from the walls and children, ran, slid, popped balloons, and filled the space with movement and joy. It was this more spontaneous performance of fizzy-drink-fuelled skids and pops that to me seemed to mark the high point of the day’s positive affects.
But to get a sense of the longer temporal effects of this spectacle we need to look beyond the event itself. For the media NGO, the film, which constituted its main project for the year, could now be screened in slum communities all over Delhi, in fulfilment of its education and outreach programmes, and used internationally to attract donors and financial support. Yet the professional success of such an event also radiated far beyond the media NGO itself. One of the media NGO’s partner NGOs proudly reported in their next newsletter that their students had acted in a movie and at its ‘world premiere’ delivered a ‘scintillating performance to a huge round of applause from the audience’. The newsletter, which described the performance in a tone similar to that used by Dr Barnardo in his reports of his own 19th century spectacles, also noted that their children were invited on the stage and presented with a DVD of the movie ‘by the producer’. While many children would not have had the ability to play a DVD in their homes, the material objects associated with these kinds of events remained significant. In the weeks after the premiere, media club classes were partially consumed by looking at photos of the grand event, some printed and distributed to children, others on laptops. One group of girls were particularly excited to find that an image of themselves posed in their finery had become the background of one NGO worker’s phone. Here we can see that just as the NGO was able to use the success of their premiere and the many happy images that it generated to make claims to both their partners and their donors about the success of their programmes, the happiness of this event also defied professional boundaries, emerging as deeply personal for the development workers themselves.
For the children, happiness emerged in their orientation to particular objects: the food, the clothes, the balloons, the opportunity to mix with girls or boys from another community. Other positive affects emerged through the kinds of claims that could be made: ‘I’ve been in a film’ or ‘I performed in a theatre’, For others the premiere was an unhappy event marking the culmination of the NGO’s failure to see their talent, a snub that originated in the audition process in which they had been cast in a minor role. Yet, as children began their own process of circulating affects, objects and stories about the film and its premiere, these were often met with some level of scepticism. Far from Delhi, in a village in Uttar Pradesh, Manoj, who, in the weeks after the premiere had returned to his home village for a family wedding, struggled to convince his village friends that he had acted in movie. Unwilling to accept their disbelief, he quickly borrowed a family member’s smart phone, downloaded the NGO film from their website, and was thus able to gleefully produce the undeniable evidence for his friends.
An upcycle puppet show
The next spectacle I want to discuss was the grandest of them all. Held at the American Centre in Delhi, the prestige of this event was immediately evident for audience members like myself who waited for more than half an hour for security and ID checks before entering the auditorium. While some middle-class families had no doubt been drawn to this event by the advertisement in the newspaper, others waiting in line around me had various connections to the organisations that had come together to create this event. Once inside, the man sitting next to me informed me that his organisation had been helping the kids with their make-up. I explained to him that my connection to this event was anthropological, and came through my work with a media NGO that partnered with the environmental NGO his company supported. During my fieldwork I visited the environmental NGO every Monday with the media NGO for their boys’ media club, but I soon began to attend on other days to observe their other children’s programmes (English classes, boys’ club and pre-teen eco club). It was in these programmes that I started hearing news of the environmental NGO’s upcoming festival, in particular a grand puppetry performance that would be facilitated by an outside organisation. This facilitating organisation – I later learned as I read through their brochure after the performance – described their mission as: to spread awareness about various social issues while refreshing all the senses and creating joyful experiences that help in discovering our happy, passionate, cheerful and authentic selves through dramatic expressions.
The high production values of the play were evident from the outset, as was the skill with which children played their parts. The visual spectacle was enticing: children looked amazing in their costumes which, alongside the set, were all made from recycled materials – CDs, records, plastic bottles, newspaper. Yet as the play continued I began to focus not on the story, but the children I knew. There in silver gumboots, black pants and shirt with a bright white vest, playing a guard leading a person by the neck, is my much teased young friend Shiva. Of the boys he is the only one to wear lipstick – pink and beautiful, and later after the show when I compliment him on this, he beams. Another boy, known in the media NGO classes as Big Suraj, is, via a puppet, playing the role of the old and regretful Onceler. Watching him I remember how a month earlier I witnessed his unhappiness in a class when one NGO staff member explained to the gathered boys that several of them had important choices to make. For Suraj, who had been attending Taekwondo classes on Sunday hosted by the environmental NGO, this was a choice between a Taekwondo tournament he had been invited to compete in and the NGO festival. The NGO worker made it clear that this was a choice between a chance for one boy and a festival for forty children. Emphasising his responsibility to his community, she stressed that missing multiple rehearsals for a Taekwondo tournament would be both selfish and have negative ramifications for the NGO festival. She stressed that the Taekwondo tournament would come around again next year, though presumably the same could have been said for the NGO festival. Emphasising his position as one of the oldest boys in the NGO’s programme, she told Suraj he had a day to think about it, but made it clear she expected him to make the ‘right decision.’
Later in the class the NGO worker offered the same boys a chance to go to a more conveniently timed two-day football tournament, where for half a day they would learn skills from a top football coach and, on the second day, play in a tournament against other teams of slum children from across Delhi. Watching Suraj perform on stage, I’m reminded of this discussion and the ways in which these opportunities, regularly described using the Urdu word mauqaa (chance or opportunity), function as key ‘happy objects’, used both to attract children, but also produce the kinds of spectacles associated with successful development. While these chances function in a similar way to Ahmed’s ‘happy objects’ in the sense that the opportunities they promise – a career in Taekwondo or football – are often unattainable, we must also consider these opportunities as chances to ‘play.’ Play here not only involves the ‘kind of doing’ described by Hamayon (2016: 6, 8), but also belief and hope. For Hamayon (2016: 25) ‘playing allows us to naturally test our limits while suspending the constraining conditions of reality in order to imagine other paths’. Noticing Manoj, standing on the sidelines working as an usher, having missed his mauqaa (chance) on account of his sister’s wedding clashing with the rehearsals for this play, I wonder about what kind of ‘chances’ this spectacle might have offered him, and what it must feel like to miss these.
At the end of the performance each child is named to applause from the audience. As the crowd files out, the children gather for a group photo then jump around singing and dancing, a joyful release made more marvellous by the textural array of the costumes. The next morning, I read the following article in the Times of India, Delhi edition: ‘Young Environmental Crusaders Take the Audience on a Journey of Adventures’. The article, which describes the NGO’s work as a ‘non-formal learning programme for marginalised children’, goes on to briefly describe the story of The Lorax as chronicling ‘the plight of trees facing constant threat due to human greed and aspiration’. Yet in the very next sentence, seemingly without irony, the report notes that the NGO festival was supported by KHD, ‘a global leader in cement plant technology, equipment and services’. This raises the question of what the spectacle of slum children performing a play about trees produces for a company in the cement industry. About the children the article is clear: the event seeks to ‘build the capacity of the kids in theatre and puppetry’, and to ‘celebrate their learning through creative means’. Yet this event is also a chance to wear lipstick; to be admired, or even envied by middle-class children; it is a chance to be covered in glitter or to perform in an up-market auditorium; but it is also a difficult decision and a missed Taekwondo competition.
Celebrating Annual Day
The third event I want to discuss takes place in another of the media NGO’s partner organisations: the organisation whose newsletter proudly declared after the film premiere that their children had delivered a ‘scintillating performance’. Throughout my fieldwork I attended a number of celebratory events at this organisation. The first of these was a three-hour long Indian Independence Day celebration where dignitaries handed out certificates and children engaged in an array of musical, dance and dramatic performances, predominantly with patriotic themes. Later in the year I also attended a far more informal celebration for Children’s Day, in which children performed on a canvas mat in front of a white background simply decorated with paper chain dolls and the English words: Children Day celebration (sic). Yet it was this organisation’s Annual Day celebrations that, throughout my fieldwork, I heard the most about. Unlike the other two events discussed in this article, I did not attend this event, but choose to describe it here in order to demonstrate the power of development spectacles to outlive their staging. However, given that the accounts of this event took place at a temporal distance from its staging, children’s written reflections about this event can themselves be conceptualised as a kind of performance. These narrative performances generated their own claims about fun, happiness and the role of development in these children’s lives.
I first heard about the spectacle of Annual Day through a homework activity set by the media NGO for their girls’ club. In my role as a kind of informal translator of children’s written texts from Hindi to English,
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I found myself, after the media club one day, being handed a bunch of pages with the pre-printed English title: ‘The Best Day of My Life’. This, it is worth noting, is by no means a neutral request; following Sara Ahmed (2010: 5): ‘if happiness is already understood to be what you want to have, then to be asked how happy you are is not to be asked a neutral question’. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that some students chose to write about NGO activities for this task, although by no means all: many children wrote about their families or Hindu festivals, several writing about Raksha Bandhan
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which had only recently occurred. Yet those who wrote about their NGO’s Annual Day did so in a way that seemed to go beyond any simple endorsement of the development programmes in their lives to emphasise the enjoyment and fun these days offered. Jyoti 2, as she was known in the media NGO class, wrote: ‘On this day we have such fun (masti).’ Another girl, Bharti, described how it was not just performances that children produced on this day, but merry-making (mauz kiya). She wrote: We were very happy (khushi) and because of this we had had even more fun (mazaa). We didn’t want to go home! I wish everyday could be like this, we had such fun (khubmasti).
The joy, happiness and excitement associated with these spectacles rather than being individualised was typically described as being shared. Writing about the comedy performance, she staged with her best friend Jyoti (known as Jyoti 1), Jyoti 2 described how their performance made the audience laugh and thoroughly enjoy themselves. Here, the ability to produce happiness in others appears vital to Jyoti 2’s own enjoyment of the day. The enjoyment derived from producing happiness in others, particularly family members, is also key to Jyoti 1’s story, which described her NGO’s Annual Day celebration five years previous, a day that was significant for her because it was the first time she sang on stage. Writing about the presence of her mother in the audience, Jyoti described how her mother was made happy (khushi) by hearing her daughter sing on stage. Emphasising the way this happiness augmented her own she went on to write: ‘I was also very happy.’ This ability to have an effect/affect on a crowd, or individuals in a crowd, appears to be key to much of the excitement, nervousness and anticipation children experience during these spectacles. Perhaps there is also a gendered aspect to this in terms of the way joy is configured in relation to others. But this was also not just a one-way transfer of affect from performer to crowd. Writing about the first time she performed on stage, Jyoti 1, described how standing on the stage in front of thousands of people she was nervous, but when she heard the clapping echoing around her all the fear went from her heart. Rekha likewise comments on how the sound of the clapping increased the elation (utsaaah) of the children. The enjoyment of the crowd is thus just as key to the spectacle’s success as the joy of its performers. Yet this relation, which is at least partly uncertain – ‘Will they enjoy it?’ – creates other affects that precede the event itself. Rekha’s story which describes both the preparations and rehearsals that preceded the event as well as documenting the way the crowd grew on the day as more and more people poured into the NGO grounds excellently captures the anticipation and nervousness that accompanies these ‘special days’ (khaas din). She writes: ‘I eagerly awaited this day. I had gotten everything ready. In my mind my impatience/enthusiasm grew (utsuktaa barh rahi thi).’
Yet it wasn’t just the anticipation and the moment of performing that produced happiness and joy; children’s stories point to the importance of details such as the costumes, the number of performances children were involved in, and the kinds of prizes or recognition they receive for their efforts. The happiness of these spectacles may have been shared and co-produced, but being individually recognised was also crucial. Bharti’s story described how she participated in six dance performances, and notes how beautiful her and her friends looked, and that they had won a prize for the best performance. Children’s joy thus, at least in part, seems to be linked to their ability to stand out and be recognised for their talent and skill. Unlike the 18th-century charity school anniversary celebrations, in which soloing was prohibited and the ‘desired effect was of a disciplined mass’ rather than individual excellence (Lloyd, 2002: 41), joy in contemporary development spectacles is regularly linked to individual skill. Jyoti 2 described how her group was awarded a prize ‘because our play was so good’. Rekha wrote that her group received a medal and a trophy. Skill here marks the ability for play to resemble reality: where acting talent translates into a potential career as an actress.
The relationship between recognition and enjoyment is interesting to consider here, as is the relationship between ‘succeeding’ in development and finding joy in it. One of the things I regularly noticed during my fieldwork was that the children perceived by development workers to be the most dedicated or committed to NGO programmes were also the ones who seemed to find the most value in development itself, and in turn received the most recognition and awards for their efforts. The spectacles of development thus served some children more than others, and becoming part of a winning group was not always easy and often involved factors outside of children’s control, such as where they lived, how their families were regarded in the community, their popularity amongst their peers, their religion, or even their state of origin prior to migration to Delhi. Happiness thus did not flow naturally from these events but depended upon a range of circumstances, many of which remained outside of children’s immediate control.
While the positive affects of such spectacles were unevenly spread among participating children, that Annual Day celebrations were able to powerfully stage childhood was nowhere more apparent than in a story written for a different homework activity on girls’ safety by 6-year-old Komal. Komal, who stubbornly attended the media NGO girls’ club with her older sister Chandni – despite the target group of this programme being children aged between 12 and 16 – kept her place in the club by undertaking the same homework tasks as the other girls. These tasks, which were probably written by her sister though perhaps narrated by her, were fascinating for the kinds of insight they revealed into children’s understandings of childhood itself. The children I worked with regularly divided childhood into a series of stages, with the first stage often concluding around the age of 5 or 6. Most children described children of this age as always happy, but one boy went so far as to suggest that children under the age of under the age of 5 did not possess brains (dimāg) at all. So, when the media NGO asked their girls’ club to write stories about girls’ safety as part of a broader campaign about gender-based violence, Komal with her trusty scribe Chandni wrote: It was Annual Day. I performed some dances. All the children and all the girls and boys performed well. I was very happy. Thank you. Because I am very small, nothing like unsafe things have happened to me yet.
Beyond spectacle
That each of the spectacles discussed in this article powerfully produced a range of positive affects should now be clear. Yet I also hope to have shown the ways in which these affects were not uniform, straightforward or evenly distributed among all children. They emerge rather in the details of event: the clothes, the prizes, the plastic cups, the pink lipstick and the sound of clapping. In NGO-saturated Delhi 6 these spectacles are many, and in the dense interlocking and overlapping NGO world they may even clash and compete with one another. For the NGOs – and for that matter the ethnographer – what remains beyond these spectacles are albums of photos of smiling children. But it is these objects themselves that force us to return to the question with which I began this article, the question of how to engage both critically and sincerely with positive affects. The answer I think is with an attentiveness to the temporal orientations of positive affects.
Walker and Kavedzija (2015: 15) write that: ‘wherever it is temporally located, happiness seems closely linked to a sense of “right orientation,” a feeling that one is headed in the right direction’. Likewise, Sara Ahmed (2010: 26) suggests that ‘happiness is often described as “what” we aim for, as an end point’. For her objects become ‘happiness means’ or ‘happiness pointers’ (Ahmed, 2010: 26). Ahmed’s argument is that these objects are not neutral and are in fact are constructed by society. This is perhaps no truer than in the case of development, which is assumed to be both a universal object of desire, and one that follows a universal teleology. Yet development’s claims to be an object of desire have long rested on its ability to stage spectacles of happiness and joy and this, as I have shown in the earlier section of this article, has been key to projects of developing the child, right from the early 18th century. Yet while spectacles of performance cement development’s status as a ‘happy object’, the precise meanings of development in any given context are not exclusively defined by the institutions and actors that claim to produce it. Likewise, the positive affects produced in development spaces cannot be entirely absorbed into claims about the value of development. Yet the power of development and development’s objects to persuasively point towards happiness remains. For children, then, moments like performing in a movie or performing on stage at an NGO event are pointers. But what is it they point to? These spectacles may point towards becoming a film star, succeeding at school, making their family proud, or getting a good job – perhaps even in an NGO. Others may point towards guaranteeing the next round of donor funding, while some may point no further than to the next balloon to be popped. Others may point backward appearing as reminiscences about ‘The Best Day of My Life’, while still others may point towards bright futures: this is my first film, there are many more to come.
When considering the way spectacles of development continue to perform long after their staging, as they circulate in children’s accounts, reminiscences and even homework tasks, what becomes clear is that what they continue to perform is not development per se, but children’s own dreams, aspirations, hopes and values. Likewise, what is significant about these spectacles when they appear as episodes in children’s stories about building and developing themselves, is not that they were ‘developmental’ – organised by this NGO, or as part of this campaign or targeting this social problem – but that they were moments in which the status of these children as ‘under-developed slum children’ fell away in a flash of glitter, beautiful costumes, or comedic skill. Here as children’s developmental ‘status’ is drowned out by the applause of the crowd, what emerges is imaginations of a future in which there is no need for institutional forms of development. While this is typically represented by NGOs as marking the success of their programmes, for children these moments mark their own success in ways that defy absorption into any simplistic developmental teleology or hollow celebration of ‘childhood’.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
