Gender Politics and Indian Children’s Literature: A Comparative Analysis of Adventure Fiction in English and Gujarati

Abstract

Gender emerges as a recurrent theme in debates about contesting merits of Indian Writing in English (IWE) and regional language literature (RLL) becoming a pivot that splits them along “progressive” versus “traditional”, “parochial” versus “cosmopolitan” binaries. This thesis investigates if this literary split is mirrored in Indian children’s literature through a comparative study of Indian children’s literature in English (ICLE) and children’s literature in Gujarati (CLG). It uses materialist feminist approach to unmask the operations of power, focuses on literature post critically hailed watershed of 1990 and looks at the dominant genre of adventure. Several locations where such gender politics are seen to be operational such as representation of femininity and masculinity, and the narrative structure of adventure genre are examined as is the intersection of gender with hegemonic structures such as caste, class and community. The conclusions reveal that hegemonic conception of gender invoked through “parochial” and “traditional”, and its non-hegemonic aspect referred to in “progressive” and “cosmopolitan” are present in both ICLE and CLG, while differences emerge in how hegemonic norms are upheld or interrogated. Texts adhering to the wide spectrum of hegemonic masculinity defined by R.W. Connell exist in both ICLE and CLG alongside those that challenge these definitions using strategies from inversion to reconfiguration. Similarly, texts that embed hegemonic notions of femininity in both ICLE and CLG stand side by side those that attempt feminist revision using strategies from gender role reversal to gender-mix. Hegemonically gendered ICLE and CLG texts endorsing patriarchal conventions and definitions of the quest plot and resorting to patriarchal structuring, spatial and temporal politics, co-exist with non-hegemonically gendered ones re-gendering, redefining, reframing or rupturing these conventions. While these similarities in gender politics undermine the IWE/RLL split, feminist intersectional analysis of gender with other parameters, partially reverses its association. Though ICLE and CLG construct gendered anti-minority community stereotypes and “savarnize” the women’s question, CLG seems more progressive in questioning intersectional class and gender hierarchies and projecting alternative dalit masculinity. These complex conclusions undermine the literary split between IWE/RLL and underline the relevance of studying children’s literature through a dialogue with mainstream criticism.