Children's Games, Adults' Gambits: From Vidyasagar To Satyajit Ray

Societies across the world had their methods of shaping their young. The methods are usually distilled through the stories that create for their children; and these stories are usually written by adults, who constantly craft a path through which societal and familial authorities is exercised over the child. Children's Games, Adults' Gambits studies how childhood was depicted in Bengal, some of whom also wrote for children. 

Late-eighteenth century and early ninteenth-century Bengal fiction for children was influenced by colonial reality. Bengal saw the opening up of the metropolitan space of the West, and the Bengal literate elitr re-oriented their understanding of the world and of themselves in relation to these new Western spaces through books and textbooks that included depiction of new lands. Childhood thus became the foundation for building the new, relative understanding of the world and the self.

This book also traces how this programme was generally enclosed an upper-caste male world and create a privileged space boys. When the space was opened up to girls, they were always fit into the mould of either the chaste wife or the frightened divine.