ABSTRACT
The concept of agency, which has enjoyed considerable significance in Childhood Research since the 1980s, is not as celebrated in the South Asian context. The debate surrounding childhood in these countries was for a long time primarily centred on issues of policymaking or human rights. Research addressing these concerns did not use an agentive approach for child labourers or children from various marginalised communities as their very situations of disempowerment made them researchable children. This chapter is based on the experience of fieldwork conducted with 10- to 12-year-old children from middle-class families in Kolkata. The discomfort with the concept of agency in the context of protected children from well-off Bengali families has been explored to understand how concepts travel across transcultural academic contexts and, in the process, become entangled with different academic legacies. Central to the chapter is the concern that middle-class Indian children can be a source of awkwardness to scholars trained in India, who are caught between the allure of an approach that favours “agentive children” and the longstanding legacy in South Asian historiography of seeking “protest” only among certain groups that conform to a notion of classical subalternity.
