Inhabiting 'Childhood': Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India

Sarada Balagopalan is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi.

"Sarada Balagopalan's Inhabiting Childhood is a very welcome contribution, since it reconstitutes the debate on childhood from the standpoint of subaltern children. ... Balagopalan's ethnography is tremendously rich for allowing the normative understanding of childhood to be questioned in terms of these broad categories. ... Readers will find it a very satisfying and evocative contribution to South Asian childhood studies." (Nandini Chandra, H-Childhood, h-net.org, January, 2016)

• 1. Introduction 2. Re-Forming Lives: The Child on the Street and the 'Street Child' 3. Sedimenting Labour Through Schooling: Colonial State, Native Elite and Working Children in Early Twentieth Century India 4. Memories of Tomorrow: On Children, Labour and Postcolonial 'Development' 5. The Politics of Failure: Children's Rights and the 'Call of the Other' 6. 'A Magic Wand': Reading the Promise of the 'Right to Education' against the Lives of Working Children 7. Conclusion: Growing Up, Moving On...