Chosen Families and Self-Transformations in Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Books for Children, 1920s–1930s

In the Indian subcontinent, the understanding of ‘the family’ in numerous narrative traditions has always extended into relationships with non-humans, with a pivotal emphasis on the guru-shishya (preceptor-disciple) relationship. This paper focuses on the highly popular English-language ‘juvenile fiction’ of Dhan Gopal Mukerji to suggest how he reconfigured these narrative traditions for a primarily non-Indian audience in the 1920s–30s. The paper considers Mukerji's young protagonists—invariably male, whether human or animal—in relation to the web of familial and outside social relationships through which the ‘quest motif’ is played out for a transnational readership. The epic form pervades his ‘jungle books’ through the figures of the animal protagonists, the search for a leader/guide/guru, and a re-imagining of caste, ethnicity and gender. Of particular interest is the composite mother figure. Dhan Gopal's oeuvre for children maps out a socialisation that is ‘free’ of the apparatus of the colonial home or of other disciplining institutional sites. Paradoxically, the search to be ‘free from fear’ can only be played in the alternative topos of the jungle, where violence is inescapable. How, if at all, may these narrative tropes be mapped onto contemporary history

Aesthetics · Art · Ethnic group · Jungle · Literature · Narrative · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture · Themes in Literature Analysis

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