Feeling Like a Child
Narratives of Development and the Indian Child/Wife
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20087904 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ishita Pande (0000-0002-0191-685X, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Pages | 35-55 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/9781137484840_3 |
| OpenAlex | W2500489847 |
| ISBN | 9781137484840 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
‘Please let me sleep with you, didi [elder sister], don’t make me go to his bed; I beg of you, save me; that weight crushes me; I simply cannot sleep in that room.’1 Thus opens a novella-in-verse, written by a male author, in the form of a series of dialogues between the 12-year-old Sarojbala and a slew of female relatives, who appear in sequence to chide her for her misplaced reticence and to educate her on the duties and pleasures of conjugal sex. While a didi rebukes her with a not-so-friendly threat of a kick to the face, an aunt consoles her that even though the ‘first connection might hurt a bit, that would ultimately melt into the glow of marital bliss’.2 An older relative encourages her with salacious details from her own childhood when, as a young bride, she willingly — no, insistently — slept with her husband starting from the age of 11. Do the words of the reluctant young bride allow us to gauge the feelings of a child, forced into premature marriage and precocious sex, in the late nineteenth century? Do they alert the reader to the greatest scandal of child-marriage — of wives confronted with the prospect of marital rape — a phenomenon that was widely discussed after the death of a child-wife ‘on her wedding night’ in 1889?3 Or does the author’s twisted plot simply offer insights into an emotional regime that saw no conflict in the 12-year-old’s assumption of conjugal duties? Did a 12-year-old feel like a child or was she expected to love like a wife in late nineteenth-century India
Art · BLISS · Feeling · Literature · Narrative · Novella · Psychoanalysis · Sister · Sociology · Theology · Wife · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,11 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2017 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |