In the rising scholarship on children and childhood studies in India, Sarada Balagopalan's Inhabiting “Childhood” makes a serious intervention by situating a group of “street children” in colonial and contemporary sites where they were engaged in capitalist production and labor. Through a combination of ethnography, participant-observation, archival research, and theoretical engagement, the book unsettles the presumption of colonial and postcolonial states that “universal and compulsory schooling constitutes an ideal future” for all poor children (p. 27). The study identifies the tensions that emerged in the wake of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the subsequent involvement of the postcolonial state with international NGOs like CINI-Asha, which appropriated the figure of the street child as an object of humanitarian concern to establish a global discourse on children's rights. Drawing on the daily practices of children of 1990s Calcutta, the city with the highest number of street children at that time, Balagopalan calls for a broader reading of their lives that is not enclosed by their precarious existence. Foregrounding the agency of children, she reveals the inadequacy of the term “street children,” a 1970s coinage by the Indian state to replace colonial designations of poor children as beggars and urchins. She documents the negotiating process of how children, through narrativization of their pasts, convinced the NGOs to include them under the category of “street children” (p. 33).

By juxtaposing colonial and postcolonial legislation with lived experiences of children, Balagopalan's book exposes the contradictions in modern schooling and humanitarian efforts that naturalized labor in the lives of marginalized children and uprooted them from their history and culture. Chapter 2 makes a pioneering contribution in unveiling ambiguous colonial attempts to educate underprivileged children in Assam tea plantations, and in Bihar and Madras factory towns. More importantly, it grapples with the paradoxes of legislation such as the Bengal Children's Act (1922) that failed to distinguish between “child beggar” and delinquent children (p. 84) and the anomaly of colonial education with its differential policies and models—its “‘schizophrenic’ agenda where efforts to expand schooling coexisted with a deliberate restraining of the aspirations of children who enrolled” (p. 60).

Locating the experiences of poor children between the paradigmatic polarities of khatni (labor) and manush (becoming human), chapter 3 captures the uneasiness that underscores children's work and schooling, the key areas where developmental efforts of the “colonial modernity” and the postcolonial “developmental” nation-state are played out. Balagopalan's interviews with children, the most endearing and enriching part of the book, not only demonstrate the inextricable intermeshing of khatni and education but also document children's independent ways of learning and sociality and their resilience. However, by using Walter Benjamin's theories of childhood cognition to corroborate her subjects’ resilience, Balagopalan seems to valorize their labor and the risks produced by their sociality. The argument that these children did not systematically work toward becoming a manush as an “aspirational ethic” but “desired this change while embracing life as it presented itself to them” (p. 97) calls for an alternate reading that can claim that these children did not see the stark opposition between manush and khatni that the elite discourse produced for them; khatni was constitutive of their life and humanness.

Focused on postcolonial legislation, chapters 4 and 5 explore the uneven responses of children to the question of their rights. Their forays with local vendors and their complicity with the police in dealing with critical situations demonstrate the farcical nature of children's rights and their infringement. Chapter 4 offers an astute analysis of what constitutes “responsibility” for street children. Instead of posing “responsibility” as an antidote to children's rights, particularly for the child laborers, Balagopalan argues that children are both capable of and obliged to handle responsibility—the networks of trust and noncontractual exchanges that they carve with local authorities explain their simultaneous risk of being exploited and being taken care of (p. 133). The examination of the Right to Education Act (2009) in chapter 5 further reveals the fraught relationship between working lives of children and state-run educational institutions. Claiming that not all agency has to be individuated, Balagopalan asserts that for understanding marginal children, their agential practices need to be examined in their embeddedness in kinship networks and affective community ties.

Ironically, a book so rich in theories elides questions of gender, caste, and religious specificities. Balagopalan's children are predominantly Muslim males, and the caste backgrounds of others are not mentioned. Her subjects provided ample scope to explore connections between caste, religion, and gender and poverty in a specific spatio-temporal context. Responsibility, which Balagopalan explains as “a key element of non-sovereign subject formation” (p. 185), is constitutive of gender roles and expectations that characterize trajectories of male and female children. An attention to girl-children and their absence in public space would have shed light on different cultures of childhood. A treasure trove of child-related policies and an empathetic appraisal of street children, Inhabiting “Childhood” ought to enlighten both specialist and nonspecialist readers. However, its dense, jargonistic narrative sometimes tends to minimize that pleasure.