Mapping Contemporary South Asian Children ’ s Fiction : Contentions and Contestations in Mitali Perkins ’ You Bring the Distant Near and Sowmya Rajendran ’ s The Lesson

The spectrum of South Asian children’s fiction offers an intriguing diversity of content. In recent times, several emerging novelists associated with the genre have made telling contributions to its thematic advancement in relation to the social and cultural mores of the region. Much of contemporary South Asian children’s fiction revolves around socio-cultural and political heterogeneities, and the characters featured in children’s texts are often employed by their authors to reflect on the transformations that have taken place in Indian society. These recent changes in cultural values, the economy, communication technologies, and global connectivity, to name only a few, have led novelists to re-evaluate issues such as societal and individual identity crises, gender discrimination, and cultural hybridization. Rapid advancements in transport systems, coupled with the liberalization of economic frameworks, have ensured that the generic boundaries of South Asian children’s fiction are now depicted as less rigid and more protean. Mitali Perkins and Sowmya Rajendran, each of whom has begun to explore issues such as acculturation in diasporic communities, discrimination, and identity politics, against the backdrop of the dynamic socio-cultural fabric of South Asia, are two such emerging children’s novelists. While in the novel, You Bring the Distant Near (2017), Perkins deals with the problems of acculturation encountered by children, Rajendran focuses on the different issue of the exploitation of the female body in her dystopian novel, The Lesson (2015), which lays bare the insecurities of women living in such a society and has a close relevance to current issues affecting the lives of women in South Asian societies. Unlike other fiction in this genre, Rajendran’s narrative is meant to open the eyes of young female children, many of whom, upon reaching adulthood, must face the harsh and ineluctable reality of the marginalization and abuse of the female body in a patriarchal society. Taking recourse to relevant theoretical insights, this article seeks to examine and question the subjective interventions of both Perkins and Rajendran into understandings of diaspora and the female body, respectively.

cyberworld, frequent diasporic dislocations, and problems in acculturation.All of these developments have invariably impacted, to a certain extent, the growth and direction of the genre of South Asian children's fiction, yet very few writers of children's fiction in South Asia have begun to take note of these transformations in socio-cultural and economic arenas.Sowmya Rajendran and Mitali Perkins are two particularly adept exponents of the genre, who have painstakingly portrayed the subjective experiences of individuals against the backdrop of contemporary socio-cultural events in their respective fictional narratives.Whereas Rajendran examines how the personal exploitation of the female body persists in a structured patriarchal society and how the resistance of its victims fails to displace the prevailing socio-cultural status quo in The Lesson, Perkins underscores how children in a diasporic space opt for cultural hybridization as a counter-discursive strategy to acclimatise to the diasporic milieu.This article seeks to examine and question the subjective interventions of both Perkins and Rajendran in the problems of diasporic settlements and the continued exploitation of the female body, respectively, taking recourse to relevant theoretical insights.

II
There is no doubt that childhood is a crucial period of development in life and, thus, has been explored and analysed from a range of theoretical viewpoints.Children's fiction itself connotes that it primarily centres on particular experiences encountered by children or, in some cases, such novelists opt to explore significant issues which children might face and which may affect their development.A number of notable critics have debated the scope of children's fiction and have produced conflicting views.One group of critics opines that the phrase "children's fiction" is misleading in the sense that this genre of literature concerns itself less with children than with adults because the coded, primary target of such fiction remains the sensible, mature reader rather than the developing adolescent.In order to validate this perspective, one may immediately reference David Rudd's article "Theorising and Theories: How does Children's Literature Exist?", where Rudd asserts: The study of children's literature involves three elementsthe text, the children, and the adult critics.The relation between these is more complex than might be supposed, and there have been extensive debates as to the place of the 'child'actual or conceptual-in both the texts and the criticisms of children's literature.
(15) Rudd himself has elaborated on the problematic connotations of the term "children's fiction" in the same article, noting that, "This will involve steering a course between on the one hand, notions that there is an underlying 'essential' child whose nature and needs we can know and, on the other, the child is nothing but the product of adult discourse" (16).What this implies is that the loosely-defined borders of children's fiction are porous and are consequently influenced by the surrounding context, which include a range of socio-cultural and economic heterogeneities.Much before Rudd, Jacqueline Rose (1984) had posited that the purity of children's fiction is occasionally adulterated by the interventions of adults in the name of exploring the manifold dimensions of the genre: Children's fiction rests on the idea that there is a child who is simply there to be addressed and that speaking to it might be simple […].If children's fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp.(Rose qtd. in Rudd,16) Yet, another group of critics argues that the term "children's fiction" is not at all a misnomer because this genre is meant to focus upon and examine the subjective experiences of children who are not given substantial space and attention in adult fictions.Carolyn Steedman provides a further variance on Rose's contention in Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780Interiority, -1930, in which she argues that "children were both the repositories of adult's desires (or a text to be 'written' and 'rewritten', to use a newer language), and social beings who lived in social worlds" (96-97).
Whether the "child" is a constructed entity or is self-reflective in nature has also been debated in the domain of children's literature, with some critics positing that adults construct childhood discursively and bind certain traits together with it.According to this viewpoint, it is supposed that adults construct childhood subjectively to explain the individual experiences of childhood.To put this contention into perspective, one may argue that childhood is discursively constructed as a state of mind which an adult may enter by means of a series of discourses.As childhood precedes adulthood, adults cannot turn back into childhood physically.The moment an individual enters adulthood, the act of entry itself invariably causes a rupture with his/her childhood in the sense that he/she cannot return to childhood.As a result of this, adults must rely on discursive means to re-enter childhood.Contrary to this viewpoint, it can be argued that childhood is a lived experience which can neither be reproduced discursively nor be understood in theoretical terms.
Childhood is an experience for limited period of time and therefore, an adult can never return to childhood once he/she has left it behind, discursively or otherwise.At this point, one may be reminded of Rudd's pertinent observation: Ironically, even to make such a claim is to have already separated out 'the child' as a special being, subject to its own rules, distinct from other social groups.
Furthermore, such a universal claim effectively adulterates (forgive the pun) a social constructionist perspective; for if children are merely constructions, social conditions might construct them otherwise.(17) Rudd is openly critical of the "humanistic essentialism" of childhood, which is contrasted with "cultural determinism".The problematic interaction between constructed childhood and constructive childhood leads many critics to the conclusion that in children's fiction, children cannot speak for themselves; rather they are regulated by adult authors who control the "voice" of the child.Subjective constructions of childhood often come into conflict with each other inasmuch as adult authors' interventions into conventional notions of childhood are conditioned by certain intentions.Rudd brilliantly sums up the faceoff between what he calls the "constructed" child and the "constructive" child with the following observation: "The constructed child, as tabula rasa -an 'empty' being on which society attempts to inscribe a particular identitybecomes, in that very process, the constructive child, and sameness is disrupted" (emphasis in original, 22).
Childhood is sometimes viewed as a site of possibility in that adults use it to contest certain markers of conventional childhood.For instance, the inclusion of the character of the unorthodox child is often intended to shatter stereotypical assumptions regarding childhood.Discourses on children's fiction are contingent on various factors including society, culture, politics, child-adult proximity, and behavioural traits, among others.The representation of childhood in children's fiction can be a contentious issue in the sense that adults often impose certain dispositions on children to serve particular purposes, thereby leaving it a matter of conjecture for ordinary readers as to what constitutes the crux of childhood -is an adult's intervention imperative for understanding "the child" or does an adult's intervention spoil the purity of children's fiction?Representations of "the child" in children's fiction are often influenced by the adult author's affiliation with socio-cultural values and are hence problematic.Charles Sarland in "Critical Tradition and Ideological Positioning" cogently asserts: In eighteenth-and nineteenth-century didacticism the promotion of values in children's books had often taken the overt form of direct preaching, and the values to be promoted were an issue.By the 1970s the focus of the debate in Britain and the United States had changed to questions of character representation and character role, and analysis consisted in showing how children's fiction represented some groups at the expense of others, or how some groups were negatively represented in stereotypical terms.The argument was that, by representing certain groups in certain ways, children's books were promoting certain valuesessentially white, male and middle-classand that the books were thus class-biased, racist and sexist.The fact that the protagonists of most children's books tended to be white middle-class boys was adduced in evidence.
Working-class characters were portrayed either as respectful to their middle-class 'betters', or as stupid -or they had the villain's role in the story.Black characters suffered a similar fate.Girls tended to be represented in traditional female roles.
(33) Thus, in order to comprehend the representation of the child in children's fiction contextual specificities need to be taken into account, because adult authors often employ children's fictions to explore a range of issues, including cultural, political, and social debates, supposing that children need to be conscious of these debates in advance so that they might be able to resolve the various problematic issues which may confront them in their future adulthood.M. Myers has referenced this point in "Missed Opportunities and Critical Malpractice: New Historicism and Children's Literature," noting that adult authors tend to employ children's fictions both for examining a range of socio-cultural issues as well as for making variegated experimentations with form and style.More recently, the issue of parenting 1 in diasporic contexts is also being explored because the specific problems of diasporic children, which often also pertain to parental care, need to be comprehended through taking the cultural and political configurations of the "foreign" land into account.In the post-1990s, due to the greater convenience and efficiency of the transport system in South Asia, people from the subcontinent had found it easier to visit distant locations for whatever purposes.Frequent dislocations conditioned by both subjective and socio-cultural needs have unquestionably displaced a priori assumptions of common readers regarding acculturation in the diasporic space.Acculturation problems gained new dimensions with the advent of economic globalization 2 in the 1990s because, in order to successfully settle in a foreign land, migrants now need to negotiate the increasingly complex cultural and political specificities of diasporic spaces.
While adjusting to the diverse and complex situations of the new country, children cannot as easily strike a balance between the cultural disparities germane to the "homeland" and the "hostland".Although these concepts have been theoretically contested by a number of diaspora critics, cultural differences between the "homeland" and the "hostland", in reality, leave an indelible impact upon the upbringing of children in diasporic locations and force children, under these different circumstances, to compromise their individual needs and desires.In other words, children brought up in diaspora must adjust to differences at the sociocultural level between "homeland" and "hostland".Although children may think that if they cross the border of childhood and attain adulthood they will have overcome the problems associated with their childhood, often, having reached adulthood, children then realize that adulthood invariably consists of greater difficulties than they had expected.Consequently, they begin to yearn for a childhood to which they can no longer return.And this impossibility of return to childhood invariably drives adults to construct a discursive childhood to satisfy the unfulfilled desires of that period of their development.The objective of this theoretical discussion is to point out that childhood should not be depicted in terms of simplicity and separation.Though childhood is not devoid of its own problems and issues, it shares a problematic but clear connection with adulthood.

III
The following section will concentrate on two novels, The Lesson (2015) and You Bring the Distant Near (2017), by two emerging South Asian novelists, Sowmya Rajendran and Mitali Perkins, respectively, both of whom have carved out a substantial niche for themselves in the genre of South Asian children's fiction.
Rajendran constructs a dystopian world in her fiction, born of her sheer exasperation at the prevailing genderbiased socio-cultural and political frameworks in India.Rajendran's narrative, unlike other South Asian children's fiction, concentrates on the wretched conditions for women who are subjected to patriarchal hegemony, and thus has seemingly been written to raise awareness among children of the abject misery confronting many women in Indian society.The title of the novel carries with it the idea that the children of this society should learn the following lesson: from the depiction of women barely surviving in a society that has viciously thwarted female emancipation in every respect, they should engage their adult selves in employing constructive measures to escape this patriarchal domination.The dystopian world that Rajendran conjures is an alternative to the corrupt and gendered real world in which women are gagged by patriarchy and exploitative socio-cultural frameworks, and it is the juxtaposition of this fictive dystopian world and the real world that exposes and questions the justifiability of such restrictive societal, cultural, and political structures.At the inception of the novel, readers are informed that the text is set in a world that is governed by the Moral Police and the Adjustment Bureau.The citizens of this world are bound to abide by the rules of conduct proposed by the Adjustment Bureau, and any violation of the Conduct Rules will incur harsh punishments for those found guilty.Despite these draconian stipulations, women, in particular, dare to break the Conduct Rules in order to resist their unethical and illicit exploitation by patriarchy.However, a one-man army, which is stronger in power than the Moral Police, emerges and begins to strengthen vigilance over the rebellious women who have breached Conduct Rules in order to assert their independence.One woman among the many stands up against the authoritative vigilance of the Adjustment Bureau and vows to not yield to its dominance.Although the president of the Adjustment Bureau attempts to entrap the rebellious woman, she manages to resist male pressure and ultimately remains unbowed.
Here, one may argue that the construction of a dystopian world in sharp contrast with the actual world deliberately undermines the often-prejudiced perception of the populace regarding women in general, and the misuse of the political power by ruling governments in South Asia which are, in reality, subjugating women.In the text, a rapist works in liaison with the president of the Adjustment Bureau, using political influence to avoid arrest and to reposition the blame on his female victims: The rapist was taken aback.The president of the Adjustment Bureau was a man Just then, the rapist saw what he had been looking for.A clue.He took it out carefully and put it on his palm.'What's this?' asked the moral policeman frowning.'A chipped nail.With red nail polish,' said the rapist.It's a woman who did this.A very angry woman' […].'We must find her and punish her,' he said, his Adam's apple bobbing.18) At their core, these passages depict not only the inherent intolerance of the system but, even more damningly, a deliberate subversion of justice and reversal of moral codes that substitutes victim for perpetrator.In this way, Rajendran exposes gender inequalities in terms of power, identity, and freedom and lays bare the corruption in the socio-political system, but this dystopian society has also been conceived by Rajendran to expose the dangers for those women who dare to oppose male-dominated society.The dystopian society is a symbolic critique of a physical reality in which women are not allowed to rebel against the oppressive strategies of the ruling government and in which the choices of women are negligible.
One may further contend that the dystopian world depicted in this text is a predictive political construct on the part of the novelist, who exposes the gendered conditions female children will continue to face from childhood through to adulthood.The reader is offered two choices, represented through two of the female charactersrefusal or acceptance of masculine dominanceand this simple binary illustrates the choices confronting female children (and young female adults) in patriarchal societies in South Asia.As one such example in the text, according to Conduct Rules, female school students cannot wear any form of dress that is higher than 2.5 inches above the knee and are bound to use the more conservative "dupatta".Even in universities, certain dress codes are being implemented as a reactionary correlation to the number of molestation and rape cases: "Universities in other cities too were hiring dupatta regulators after seeing the considerable impact that the rule has made on the crime rate" (Rajendran 41).The oblique criticism of a morally corrupt society in reality is clear, for South Asian society often restricts women's choices in how they dress themselves, assuming that such restrictions can lead the society to control violence against women.
Rajendran's dystopian society is clearly intended to inspire women (and girls) to speak out against this oppressive authority.The incorporation of the second daughter in the novel is planned to unsettle the political and social status quo, thereby leading the president to reconsider his position.The final comment of the second daughter at the conclusion of the novel acts as inspiration for those women who may feel that they cannot voice their dissent, and illustrates the forbearance required in such a restrictive socio-political system: "Under the sharp, white light that fell on her face like a slap, the second daughter stood, her eyes staring straight ahead" (Rajendran 190).
Yet, although Rajendran's representation of gender inequality in a dystopian world is powerful on the one hand, it also seems to me to be problematic in the sense that Rajendran has chosen a somewhat indirect route to critique society.Perhaps, given the often oppressive situation for females in South Asian society, this is understandable but by setting her tale in a dystopian world which does not necessarily bear clear organizational congruities to the physical world in terms of culture, society, politics, she avoids the contextual specificities which would carry with them a clearer critique of South Asian society and a clearer directive to female children and young adults who exist in that society.

IV
Mitali Perkins' You Bring the Distant Near relates the intricate tale of the settlement of a family that has experienced five generations of domicile in "foreign" lands.The author attempts to explore the problematic issues of diasporic existence through children's fiction and argues that the settlement of children in diasporic situations is of profound importance because failure to appropriately adjust to the hostland adversely impacts on the upbringing of those children.Perkins has delimited the border of South Asian children's fiction through her depiction of the individual problems germane to settlement in the hostland; her novel narrates the story of Tina and Sonia, the two daughters of Ranee and Rajeev, who experience transience and disruption throughout their childhood, frequently shifting from one location to another as their parents seek economic opportunity.
Although Ranee and Rajeev's children are born in India, they move to London in their early childhood and, later, to New York.Frequent dislocations compel the children to confront diverse cultural and social challenges and, while making adjustments to the variations of each hostland, they must also make sense of the heterogeneity they encounter.The story is narrated by the characters featured in it and thus these multiple viewpoints more effectively foreground the various individual responses to issues central to diaspora and hostland.
At the inception of the novel, the author notes: "Home is where the stories are" (Perkins 11), immediately problematizing the concept of "homeland" in this globalised age while also introducing the notion that we, as families and as individuals, narrate our own existence.The concept and definition of "home" is germane to diaspora studies and has been theorized by a number of critics.Salman Rushdie, in Imaginary Homelands (2001), has strongly argued that homeland is a distant reality in the sense that when a person crosses a national border and settles in a hostland, he or she can neither carry the homeland with them nor can they return to the same existence in the future.Once a person leaves their homeland, Rushdie argues, they may never truly return.The homeland slips into perpetual deferral: It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.Which seems to me self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form.It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being 'elsewhere'.This may enable him to speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance and appeal.(Rushdie 12) In Perkins' novel, the children, Sonia and Tara, gradually become detached from their ancestral homeland, evincing the adaptability to transience and dislocation required of a diasporic child: "So we had to shift within London three times.And our application for British citizenship kept getting denied" (Perkins 14).What this implies is that children must strive to come to terms with the cultural and social values of each new location in order to negate cultural shock.Frequent dislocations in early childhood also heavily impact on parenting and on the parents' relationship with each other as evidenced by Sonia, who optimistically remarks: "Here's to a new life in New York!A fresh start for the Das family!Maybe we'll have more money.Which means maybe Ma and Baba won't fight as much" (Perkins 15).Perkins questions the concept of "homeland" in relation to globalisation through the Das family's frequent shifts.Having problematized the concept of homeland, Perkins puts forth the proposition that "home" does not merely exist in a physical context but, rather that it travels with individuals through narratives.Both Sonia and Tara carry "home" with them through their stories and, in doing so, are able to position the culture of their homeland in their new cultural location, creating a space in which a new, hybrid identity may emerge: "Don't forget you're Bengali, too," Baba says."Which reminds me, Star.I've hired our neighbor to keep up your harmonium lessons.And your RabindraSangeet."My sister groans."Do I have to, baba?" "You're a Bengali girl, aren't you?Tagore songs are a must.I'm afraid you're forgetting how to speak our beautiful language".(Perkins 27) Baba insists that both of his daughters should strike a balance between the cultures of their homeland and hostland, and the insistence of their father on issues like food, dress and manners, reminds the daughters of their original homeland but also repositions the concept of "homeland" to a space that exists between both cultures while simultaneously existing within the girls themselves.
The author has employed the genre of children's fiction to trace the impact of globalization and movement on children, who are often considered to be able to rapidly adapt to a new environment.In a reflection of the increased use of the media in a globalised world, both daughters are inclined to rely on television shows to acquaint themselves with the culture of America: "No, thanks," Starry says."I prefer the telly -I mean television.Do you know any shows that might introduce us to life in America?" (Perkins 33).What Perkins evinces in this passage is the notion that, while children tend to embrace the persuasive forces of globalization, represented in this instance by acculturation through visual media, that same technology may actually inhibit true physical and personal interaction with the hostland culture(s) and may provide only superficial connections.It is also important to note that for many children the reading of culture has been replaced by television culture.As a consequence, although one may argue that globalization has facilitated the ease with which children are introduced to Western (in this case American) culture, alternatively, it may also be contended that globalization ensures that children yield to American culture simply because of its pervasive reinforcement of Western cultural imperialism through technology.If we unpack these assumptions, it becomes clear that the process is paradoxical: globalization exposes cultural heterogeneities across the globe but also problematizes one's adjustments to these different cultures: "We're not in Bengal anymore.There's no caste system in America.The Declaration of Independence made it clear: 'All men are created equal.'And we'll be changing 'men' to 'people' soon."[…] "Sewing is an important art," Didu rants […] "Why is it less important than painting?Or sculpting?"(Perkins 85,229) The interstices that exist between cultures are laid bare by globalization, a process that has had a profound impact on diasporic communities and perhaps may affect older adults even more greatly, because they may be less adaptable than children when coming to terms with the cultural and social differences of the hostland.
Though the processes by which children acculturate themselves into the hostland may be questioned, particularly with reference to technology and electronic media, there can be little doubt that the acculturation itself is more rapid, as evidenced by the children of the Das family who are able to assimilate into the culture of the hostland more quickly than their parents.
Ultimately, although Perkins' representation of diasporic communities in America is compelling, one may also contend that the novel has only partially portrayed the tenuous nature of resettlement and its associated issues through the narrative of the Das family.Thus, Perkins' representation may be critiqued on the grounds that instead of resolving the problematic issues raised by her own text, she has restricted herself to dealing with the notion of "home" while choosing to stay relatively silent on the problematic notion of hostland.In addition, she has given little attention to the acculturation of the parents in the hostland, whose success or otherwise in settling must significantly influence the upbringing and acculturation of the two daughters.Finally, one may also contend that Perkins has taken a highly-gendered approach to her thematic content in exclusively concentrating on females and their problematic settlements, while choosing to ignore the representation of male children in similarly diasporic situations.

V
This article has made it clear that the genre of South Asian children's fiction is continuously being influenced by, and responding to, contemporary socio-cultural and political changes, not only within the region itself but also in relation to broader global movements.The interventions of both Perkins and Rajendran are significant contributions to this genre and raise many important questions, yet they are also selective in nature in the sense that they have approached these respective issues of acculturation and the exploitation of the female body from limited points of view.Specifically, Perkins has neither taken into account the interface between technological advancement and diasporic life nor the intersectionality among race, gender, and class while dealing with diasporic children.Similarly, Rajendran has chosen to exclude specific contextual references in her dystopian narrative of the exploitation of women, which could have facilitated readers to relate more closely to the present social and cultural conditions in South Asia.Yet, despite these restrictions, both of the novelists have provided discussions of salient contemporary issues, and have contributed strongly to the evolution of South Asian children fiction, a genre that merits increasing exploration.

Notes
1. Marc H. Bornstein, in the article entitled "Cultural Approaches to Parenting", argues that childhood is contingent upon flawless parenting which is always in dialogue with culture: Culture is usefully conceived of as the set of distinctive patterns of beliefs and behaviors that are shared by a group of people and that serve to regulate their daily living.These beliefs and behaviors shape how parents care for their offspring.Thus, having experienced unique patterns of caregiving is a principal reason that individuals in different cultures are who they are and often differ so from one another.Culture helps to construct parents and parenting, and culture is maintained and transmitted by influencing parental cognitions that in turn are thought to shape parenting practices (Bornstein & Lansford, 2010;Harkness et al., 2007) The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models.(32)(33) of connections.Politicians, actors, cricketers, musicians, scientists, journalists, corporate bigwigs -he knew them all […].'Teach her a lesson,' said the president.'I can't have this happening in my tenure.Not now' […].
. Children's experiences with their parents within a cultural context consequently scaffold them to become culturally competent members of their society.(212-213) 2. Globalization has been theorized by a number of critics over time.The process of globalization is delineated by Arjun Appadurai in his seminal article "Disjuncture and Difference in Global Cultural Economy": […] I propose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship among five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes.