ABSTRACT
As one of the offshoots of British colonization, a print culture for children in Bengal very conveniently became one of the principal agents of the British imperial machinery and helped to institute a socioeconomic hegemony and strengthened political control. Being an instrument in what Henry Shwarz describes as “aesthetic imperialism,” the genre, emerging in the early nineteenth century, schooled the juvenile readers in the ideas and pedagogies of the West. The children, deeming Western civilization as universal, acquired a “distrust of all things that had come to them as an inheritance from their past” (Tagore, My Life 6; cf. Shastri 102). But by the latter half of the nineteenth century, the authors writing for children in the vernacular began questioning the norms of the Western pedagogies and their validity in the native culture. Gleaning strands of indigenous history, folk life and popular literature and by embodying them through the literary trope of desh (nation/homeland), they forged a sense of a communal as well as a national identity through children's books. As a project that aimed to construct an independent identity and to define a national culture, it was coloured, in part, by the nationalist enthusiasm of the late nineteenth century that shaped the more widespread Swadeshi (literally meaning indigenous) movement against the British rule.
