Hanuman Singh - Questioning revisionist readings of a contemporary British children's book

Abstract

Traditional British Children's Literature was an Imperial propaganda tool, with didactic aims to instill the Empire's valued norms and behaviors into a young readership. Although contemporary British Children's Literature encompasses complex, subversive narratives that address problematic issues and ideas, an academic intervention becomes important to investigate whether narratives purported to be revisionist are indeed as liberated and reformist. The Scholastic UK children's series titled My Story, is a series of historical novels meant to introduce child readers to important moments in British history and features a format of personal narratives of imaginary young protagonists. One of the novels in the series, published in 2002, is titled Indian Mutiny, Hanuman Singh, 1857-58 written by Pratima Mitchell. The child protagonist, Hanuman, plays the role of the observer and documenter, as the main plot revolves around Rani Laxmibai's historical decision to join rebel soldiers. This title in particular has been called "revisionist" by readers, bloggers, and reviewers, where the book is hailed as telling both sides of the story of the 1857 Mutiny. This paper makes an attempt at an academic analysis and demonstrates the shortfalls of the revisionist reading of the text. It will employ narrative analysis, close reading, post-colonial theories, and examine and contrast the school textbooks of India and United Kingdom, to illustrate that a contemporary children's book like Hanuman Singh still uses colonial tropes and does not revise the colonizer's understanding of their own colonial past.