Salvation Army postcard dated 1932-33 of 'Daughters of Indian Tribespeople--free from the Criminal taint'
The Department of History invites you to a talk titled ‘Fractured Families: Forced Child Removal from Hijra and 'Criminal Tribe' Households in Nineteenth Century North India’ by Dr. Jessica Hinchy, Assistant Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The talk will be held on April 15, 2021.
About the talk: Historians have primarily examined colonial child removal projects in settler colonial contexts. Yet from 1865, the colonial government in north India forcibly removed children from criminalised communities. Child separation began in the households of gender non-conforming people labelled ‘eunuchs,’ particularly Hijras, and eventually extended to socially marginalised people designated as ‘criminal tribes,’ especially Sansis. What does a comparison of these child removal schemes tell us about the colonial governance of the family and histories of childhood in South Asia? Patrilineal, conjugal and reproductive household models marginalised Hijras and Sansis in differing ways, while the category of ‘child’ was contingently defined. Child separation was attempted to varying ends, including both elimination and assimilation. Yet colonial officials could not simply determine removed children’s futures. The colonial state could not sustain such intensified forms of intimate governance in the face of resistance from households.