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Science for children in a colonial context: Bengali juvenile magazines, 1883–1923

Abstract In a period of anti-colonial political struggle and conservative reaction against liberal social reform in India, a band of Bengali men and women reached out to children through magazines with the intention of moulding them so that they would grow up to aid their nation's material progress and uphold a society bereft of colonial indignities and traditional injustices. Integral to this agenda was the attempt to explain the physical world scientifically to them, to make them knowledgeable, and to forge them into rational beings capable of looking at society critically. They wished the young to harbour a compassionate attitude towards nature, but they characterized the modern Western scientific way of knowing about the physical world as the only one worth imbibing, thereby infusing in children a bias against all who thought and lived otherwise. This science instruction was the endeavour of the avant-garde, an iconic hegemonic milieu that left its imprint in social reform and political struggle in colonial Bengali society for a long time.