Literary child subjects and childhoods in Kerala: Agency and intersections in the late 20th century

Abstract

The paper examines the role of literature set in late 20th-century Kerala, India, at the intersections of class and gender, in establishing and propagating new ideals for children and childhood. During this period, Kerala gained recognition from the UN for its Kerala Model of Development, which positioned the state at the forefront of Human Development Indexes within a post-colonial country like India. Simultaneously, this era witnessed the introduction of children’s rights, based on the Western model, into a society where the legacy of colonialism had shaped various contours of modernity. Accordingly, children and childhood of the newly emerged middle class became significant within the developmental rhetoric of Kerala. The paper explores how the literary representation of these middle-class children and their childhood in selected Malayalam literature from Kerala reflects and caters to the construction of the agency a child should possess in a developing society. The paper argues that through the domestication and feminisation of childhood, these representations contributed to constructing a hegemonic model of middle-class childhood that emphasised the ‘becoming’ child, which gradually set the standard in Kerala society at the time. Despite being situated within the discursive practices of modernity, the literature produced during this period remained constrained by the aetonormative ideals of society.