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The Father and the Child : Fatherhood as a Vector of Masculinity in Colonial India
| India’s encounter with the West through British colonialism produced a socio-cultural climate that fostered a new group of intelligentsia in the nineteenth century who began to question the past and the continuing social customs and envisioned a series of social practices and behavior that pertained to men, women and children in the domestic domain. Bengal, with Calcutta (now Kolkata) as the imperial capital until 1911, was particularly prolific in spawning this social group known as the bhadralok or the educated middle-class who envisioned a new model of womanhood, family, children and the new nation. These early intellectuals as founding fathers of an incipient nation left ample documents of their newly evolved notions of an ideal family, the roles of the new woman—an ideal mother and a perfect wife and normative codes of how to raise a child. My paper is an exercise to reverse the gaze and examine [through autobiographical writings of men and women] how these founding fathers, the members of the intelligentsia performed fatherhood in real life. What role model did they conform to and what was the message they were imparting to children of the future generation? Through an examination of a variety of literary sources such as letters, memoirs, and autobiographies my paper will examine the new visions that were attached to the performance of fatherhood—from the early social reformers writing for children to Jawaharlal Nehru writing to her daughter Indira (Gandhi), later to become the Prime Minister of India. My paper aims to analyze how the practices and notions of fatherhood was produced in colonial India through an intersection with the colonial state and to what extent were they tied to the projects of colonial modernity. Can the use of discipline and punishment in performance of fatherhood be seen as vectors of masculinity? A critical examination of the notion and performance of fatherhood by the intelligentsia of colonial India and its bearings on children’s lives will shed light on the cultures of childhood and the national culture of India.
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