The history of the children’s periodical in Bengal can be understood as a narrative of the evolving idea of childhood and juvenile reading practices. As an ephemeral cultural commodity, it recorded the various contentious ways in which generations of Bengalis responded to colonialism and anti-colonialism, nationalist pride and transnational exposure, communalism and social unity, war and climate disasters, Independence and Partition. In all of these cultural and literary responses, the child-appropriateness or child-suitability of texts was a central question. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as childhood literacy increased with the expansion of primary and secondary education, literary concerns pertaining to children’s holistic development such as their reading habits,…
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Citation: Bose, Titas. "Early Bengali Children's Periodicals". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 November 2023 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19734, accessed 22 November 2024.]
