When girls were married off before or at the onset of puberty and relegated to household chores thereafter, the naughtiness or irreverence that makes fictional boys so popular was denied to them. For Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, the injunction from the Manu Samhita advising parents to marry off their daughters at the age of twelve neither authorizes the perpetuation of such an unreasonable, cruel practice nor justifies the absence of the girl child in contemporary Bangla juvenile literature. Although child marriage is neither practised nor endorsed in the urban, educated, middle class backdrop of children’s stories, why do writers as progressive and culturally evolved as Satyajit Ray write as if girls do not exist at all? Even Ray’s women characters are either appendages to brilliant husbands or widows marginalized within middle class or elite households. Bandyopadhyay’s book provides some pertinent rhetorical questions about children’s fiction that is mostly about boys and their exploits.
Girlhood that did not last beyond the early teens missed out on subversive acts of mischief at home and school. Bandyopadhyay does not refer to a crucial text that illustrates the girl child’s limits of possibility, in terms of the education she receives as well as in playing truant from it—Bibhutibhushan Mukhopadhyay’s Raanur Pratham Bhaag (1937). It deflects the conflict between the girl child’s studies and her resistance to it by marrying her off. Most girls who show resilience and want a normal childhood, in fact, have consciously been excluded from the wide repertoire of children’s fiction!