Mapping Ideologies to Childhood: Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy and The Surya Trilogy
Keywords:
Children’s Literature, Ideology, Culture, PowerAbstract
Children’s literature is never politically or ideologically neutral. Even though childhood is an apolitical and asexual period of time, all children’s literature is ideological and based on implicit or explicit attitudes, assumptions and world views. It has been harnessed to topical or ideologically motivated causes like abolition of slavery and predicament of working-class during industrial revolution, to more controversial and current trends in the proliferation of science fiction.
Following this line of great tradition, Jamila Gavin (1941- ), a British author of Children’s Literature, mines an authentic episode of British social history in her epic story, The Surya Trilogy. She reveals the contrast between the city life and that of country estates, the wealthy class with the poverty-stricken in the light of contemporary discourse on ideology. As an inheritor of two rich cultures, sharing “half and half”, Gavin depicts the fortunes of two generations of a family showing the impact of colonial rule and the horrors of partition in their lives.
The aim of this paper is to examine how cultural debates on ideology and power find its space in Coram Boy and The Surya Trilogy, which appeared in the third golden age of Children’s literature. There are many competing ideologies around childhood, role and status of children and purposes of literature for them. The questions of whether literature should entertain or instruct is an ideological one, as is the questions of what children should learn through literature
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