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From the mid-nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth, Bengali subjects, to their great surprise, found the world around them changing and changing so fast.
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Thirdly, the formative years of this branch of Bangla sahitya when the writers were trying hard to find their own voice and diction were also the same years in which this part of India witnessed an unprecedented inroad of the marauding forces of modernity into a culture steeped in millennia-old traditions. A return, through the creation of imaginative literature, to an almost irretrievably “lost past” of childhood- “childhood divested of responsibilities”-as a kind of “wish fulfilment” (something very Freudian in nature, one must say) has been a conspicuous motif in the world of Bangla children’s literature since its early days. Secondly, as it so often happens in literatures in many other parts of the world, adult individuals who took up pens to write for children in Bangla also gave way to a strong fantasy element and a desire to revisit childhood in their efforts to assume “child-like” (in contradistinction to being “childish”) personae so that they could address their young readers in an effective manner. Writers who started to write with the idea of children and young boys as readers in their minds were also, in a way, time travellers searching for the past glory of a precolonial India. First, this strand of Bangla literature, like a few others, took definitive shape in colonial times a period in India’s history when creative artists were trying hard to come to terms with the ignominy of the foreign rule. Lowenthal’s view can be used as an entry point for a discussion on the origin and development of Bangla children’s and young adults’ literature. For him, they often end up creating a past out of a childhood divested of responsibilities and an imagined landscape invested with elements they find missing in the present-day world. According to him, the golden age the travellers revisit bears little resemblance to any time that ever was.
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David Lowenthal, in his famous book The Past is a Foreign Country, makes an interesting observation about time travellers.