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Through a rich ethnography of street and working children in Calcutta, India, this book offers the first sustained enquiry into postcolonial childhoods, arguing that the lingering effects of colonialism are central to comprehending why these children struggle to inhabit the transition from labour to schooling.

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1. Introduction 2. Re-Forming Lives: The Child on the Street and the ´Street Child´ 3. Sedimenting Labour Through Schooling: Colonial State, Native Elite and Working Children in Early Twentieth Century India 4. Memories of Tomorrow: On Children, Labour and Postcolonial ´Development´ 5. The Politics of Failure: Children´s Rights and the ´Call of the Other´ 6. ´A Magic Wand´: Reading the Promise of the ´Right to Education´ against the Lives of Working Children 7. Conclusion: Growing Up, Moving On...

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"This is a book that deserves to become a classic and to be read over and over, including by those who may find it resonates with how contemporary schooling in the west is also increasingly stratified and unequal." (Sara Bragg, Children & Society, March, 2019)

"A book so rich in theories elides questions of gender, caste, and religious specificities. ... Her subjects provided ample scope to explore connections between caste, religion, and gender and poverty in a specific spatio-temporal context. ... A treasure trove of child-related policies and an empathetic appraisal of street children, Inhabiting ´Childhood´ ought to enlighten both specialist and nonspecialist readers." (Swapna M. Banerjee, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 76 (2), May, 2017)

"Sarada Balagopalan´s Inhabiting Childhood is a very welcome contribution, since it reconstitutes the debate on childhood from the standpoint of subaltern children. ... Balagopalan´s ethnography is tremendously rich for allowing the normative understanding of childhood to be questioned in terms of these broad categories. ... Readers will find it a very satisfying and evocative contribution to South Asian childhood studies." (Nandini Chandra, H-Childhood, h-net.org, January, 2016)

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Sarada Balagopalan is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi.

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