ABSTRACT
This chapter examines children's socialization and, especially, their education in religious difference. The re-forming of Pali following repeated uprootings from home and parental attachments and the prohibitions on Habib and Gita in "Chhelemanushi" illuminate the traumatizing of children by the demands of a steadily partitioning adult society. The chapter addresses how, despite the children's remarkable adaptability, a disjunction is created between what they want and what, as members of a particular community, they ought to, and ultimately have to, want. Sahni's and Bandyopadhyay's childhood focus exemplifies the reproduction of communalism at the level of everyday life. Communalism is presented not just as the manipulation of the masses by an elite leadership or the result of the colonial government's policy of "divide and rule", but, instead, as an unavoidable circumstance. Together the writings aesthetically explore the massified, irrational character of communalized identities, censure their fundamental ethical constriction, and suggest moral alternatives.
