About the Book: Contested Childhoods
Contested Childhoods traces a complex history of caste, race, education, and
Christian missions in colonial south India. It draws upon the vast Protestant
Christian missionary archives of the London Missionary Society, the Church
Missionary Society, and the Basel German Evangelical Missionary Society to
showcase the processes of negotiation, tensions, and underlying violence in the
encounters between European outsiders and local populations on the question of
education. It examines the interplay of caste and education in reshaping ideas
and norms of modern childhood and lower-caste community building in the regions
of Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar. Set against a comparative historical
perspective, the book