Bindu Sarkar
Senior Research Fellow (UGC/NET)
Department of Anthropology
University of Calcutta
Kolkata
Arnab Das
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of Calcutta
Kolkata
Abstract
After the UN Convention on Child Rights, 1989 legally and academically the practice of seeing children as complete, independent beings and full-scale members of society has steadily inclined. The present study tries to follow suit in the qualitative study on urban Bengali children in street situations and from ‘middle class’ families in Kolkata metropolis. It explored how gender is performed differentially and relationally among the urban children with ‘differences’.
The present study explores the lived experiences that construct the identities on the basis of gender. In the present qualitative study, consents of available children, engaging responses and the sites of their preference were prioritized for selection. One hundred informed consensual best responded child participants in three age categories were selected for this study. Structured, Semi structured, unstructured interviews, free-flowing conversation and observations have been recorded, transcribed and thematically analyzed in order to reach how and why their childhood identities get structured and they themselves structure.
The emergent themes are relationally analyzed principally on the basis of the narrative data for gender the voluntary and critical submission and as well as challenge to gender differentiation done principally by ‘symbolic violence’. The diversity of the childhood as gendered within an Indian metropolis is seen relationally dispersed and distanced among the micro-social settings.
Key words: Childhood(s), Lived Experience, Gender, Street-situated Children, Middle Class.
