Childhood and Youth in India

“This collection powerfully explores the ‘everyday urban’ as a new conceptual and constructively critical approach to studying young peoples’ complex engagements with modernity in the Indian context. The original contributions made by the cross-disciplinary set of essays persuasively confirm the significance of children and childhoods to postcolonial theorizations of modern citizenship, national development, urbanization, and mediatized subjectivities.”

—Sarada Balagopalan, Associate Professor of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University, USA


“The book contains excellent analysis that renders intelligible not just how young lives encounter, negotiate, and transform their social and material world but also adds new theoretical provocations on the effects that media, technology, education, skilling, and the project of nation-building engender on what it means to be a young person in modern urban India.”


—Tatek Abebe, Professor in Childhood Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway


This edited volume advances the conceptual framework of the 'everyday urban' to unpack the ways in which processes of modernity in India shape young subjects and, in so doing, centers the analytical categories of childhood and youth. In rejecting simplistic binaries of agency, and teleological logics of development and modernity, the authors focus on the complex pathways of negotiation and conflict that mark the lives of young people across various historical and contemporary contexts in urban India. Chapters are organized across two key themes: Shaping Modern Subjects and Being Modern Subjects, while spanning multiple disciplines including anthropology, history, sociology, disability studies, and psychology. Together, the contributions aim to advance the field of childhood and youth studies in South Asia and beyond.


Anandini Dar Anandini Dar is associate professor in School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University, India.

Divya Kannan is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at Shiv Nadar University IoE, India.