Imagining the New Indian Girl: Representations of Indian Girlhood in Keeping Corner and Suchitra and the Ragpicker
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2010vol20no1art1152Keywords:
India, Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis, post colonialism, girlhoodAbstract
The capacity of young girls to represent a healthy new beginning is nothing new to children's literature. One need look no further, for example, than two classics: Frances Hodgson Burnett harnessed this figure's power with Mary in 'The Secret Garden' (1911), as did C. S. Lewis with Lucy in 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' (1950). Yet the way young girl characters are positioned in contemporary, English-language Indian children's novels by women writers does seem new; these 'new Indian girls' function to represent a modern, postcolonial India in which gender equality is beginning to find a happy home. Setting up a binary which positions societal values from pre-colonial and colonial India as backwards and problematic, these children's novels demonstrate the value of girls in postcolonial India - at least some girls, according to some writers.
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