Chapter 5 - ‘One fifth of the world’s boyhood’ : American ‘Boyology’ and the YMCA’s work with early adolescents in India (c. 1900–1950)

Summary

Abstract Using age as a key analytical category and building on recent research on childhood and colonialism, the chapter analyzes the activities of the Indian YMCA's ‘Boys’ branches’ established in all major Y branches in India, Burma and Ceylon between 1901 and 1950. The Y's boys’ work scheme, designed to channel the energy of Indian males in the age group 10-17 into the healthy direction of ‘useful manhood’, reached the peak of its influence during the two decades preceding the independence in 1947. The chapter reconstructs the wider transnational trends that led to the Y's increased attention to boys rather than young adults. The focus is on the medico-sociological American discourse of ‘boyology’, a specific body of educational and disciplinary knowledge that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century and was designed to solve the so-called ‘boy problem. The influence of U.S. boyology can be discerned in contemporary manuals designed for social workers and educators in South Asia as well as in their practical programs.

Keywords: YMCA, Indian nationalism, American Missionaries, boyology, history of childhood and youth, scouting

Echoing a global tendency among Christian and secular organisations that became discernible shortly before the First World War, the largely US-led and financed Indian Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) launched a separate Boys’ Department in the first decade of the twentieth century. It gradually widened the scope of its activities in order to attract young males aged ten to seventeen. This trend gained further momentum during the interwar period, when boys’ work became increasingly popular not only in North America, but in various ideological and political quarters all over the globe. In the South Asian YMCA branches, it reached the peak of its influence in the two decades preceding the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947.

In this chapter, I will first reconstruct the wider transnational trends that led to the new focus on boys. I will then flesh out the genesis and specificities of the Indian Y's boys’ work schemes. In this context, I introduce the two main pillars of the association's secular program for boys, namely ‘physical work’ and camping and scouting, and discuss their ambivalent relationship with Indian nationalism. This analysis of these “adult-sponsored children's leisure activities” places particular emphasis on the way YMCA boy experts oscillated between an idiom of universalism and the impact of cultural and racial stereotyping.