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Childhoods in South Asia Children in major south Asian countries—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal—together form a quarter of the world’s total child population. India has the largest population of children neck-deep in poverty, acute deprivation, malnourishment and extreme exploitation. The present volume seeks to understand the phenomenon of childhood as it exists in South Asia with a rare sensitivity to its diverse contexts and cultural settings. It argues that the macro-parameters and analytical tools of deprivation highlight the wretchedness of the existential world of these children, but fail miserably in capturing the depth and extent of the multi-layered sufferings in various societies and communities owing to their specific value systems. Secondly, rather than treating the children and their experiences as ‘given’, the book overall treats the childhood as a ‘process’ with multiple meanings and thus, attempts to give primacy to the children’s perspective rather than the adults’ view on the subject. Divided into two parts, the book deals with ‘childhood ethnographies’ in the first part and analyses the everyday experiences of vulnerable children in the second. The section on childhood ethnographies tries to explore the much-neglected area of traditional ethnographic research, i.e., the ‘cultures of childhood’, where children create with their own structure and influence one another in ways that adults cannot. The contribution by Jane Dyson, for example, which is based on her fieldwork with children in a remote Indian village in the Himalayas, explores the impact of a new market opportunity, through the activity of collection and sale of forest growing lichen, on the everyday lives of boys and girls. The study shows how gender influences children’s incentives to economic pursuits. Similarly, individual papers by Roland Hardenberg, Uwe, Skoda, Gabriele Alex and Goege Pfeiffer, drawing from diverse cultural settings such as tribal dormitories in Orissa and caste villages in rural Tamil Nadu to a populated walled city in Pakistan, deal with important issues such as the identity of children in a state of temporary pollution, everyday life of children and their mothers from the scavenging caste and the status system, the transitional period between childhood and youth, the rural children’s perception of their workload, the impact the complex social and economic situations have on school education etc. Based on her work in rural Tamil Nadu, Susane van Dillen investigates the influences of socio-economic structure, agricultural productivity and locational factors on patterns of mobility among adolescents and adults. The chapter on young LTTE combatants in a civil war-ravaged country like Sri Lanka by Margaret Trawick goes to show that there is much more to childhood in Asia and elsewhere than just child labour. Thousands of children have been killed in armed conflict in South Asia in the last decade and many others have been forced to take to arms and stand in the thick of the battle with sophisticated weapons. The section on vulnerable children discusses a range of issues which includes the plight of children as domestic servants, the devastating impact of the almost decade-long armed conflict in Nepal, the significant role played by civil society initiatives such as the ‘children as zones of peace’ movement, the life of slum children in Delhi and how the perception of dominant discourse about slums being dirty, dingy and deviant is contested by the children’s own understanding of their immediate world. Brain Milne’s contribution highlights the situation of child labour in India and how despite innumerable laws and constitutional provisions, a vast majority of children in India live dangerously on the edge. Deepak Behera, in his analysis, raises the problem of food insecurity and circumstances leading to the extreme vulnerability of indigenous children from areas such as Kalahandi in Orissa. He asserts that by concerted efforts towards restoring the ecological balance through reforestation and by arresting the land deterioration by mechanisms like crop rotation and improved irrigational facilities, it is possible to minimise the scale of disaster which drought brings along with it. The chapter on the strain that parental pressure exerts on school-going children in Orissa and another one on how adversity affects the fragile psyche of children are interesting despite being takes on much-discussed themes. The study from Sri Lanka on physical punishment meted out to children at home and Tanner’s observations on the problems faced by families, especially children, who are migrating to South Asian countries, are informative. It is a must-read for those researchers and students who are concerned with the theme. On the flip side, the book tries to accommodate far too many chapters and thus, compromises on its analytical rigour. The volume is important for its belief in the beauty of passionate anthropology or sociology and comes across as a formidable campaign to re-establish the sanctity and immense potential of qualitative methods of research in social sciences.
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