A fledgling group with big dreams, The Association for Children’s Literature in South Asia (ACLiSA) was created in 2020 by a group of five children’s literature scholars from India. It started out as a Facebook group for sharing information in children’s literature studies before launching as a website aclisa.in in 2021, with the intention to build a community around this much-overlooked research field in India.  

What drove us to take the initiative with ACLiSA was experiencing the acute shortage of resources, access to resources abroad, inadequate archives, and lack of institutional and community support to pursue children’s and YA literature research in India. Seeing what impact access can have in facilitating research in this field for scholars in the Global South when many conferences and events went online during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns served as a further push to creating ACLiSA.  

ACLiSA’s aims are fairly simple: to build a community around children’s and YA literature studies in South Asia; connect children’s literatures produced in the multiple languages that exist in the subcontinent; bring together academics and authors into discussions of children’s literature in South Asia; and bridge the gap that exists between children’s literature scholars globally and South Asia. To this end, ACLiSA is gradually building an online resources archive on the website and encourages submissions by scholars in the field of and on South Asian children’s literature.  

The association has organized an international conference with the Department of English, Jadavpur University in 2022 on “Narratives of Criminality, Punishment, and Social Justice in Children’s and YA Literature”; a YA Writing Workshop with American Centre Kolkata in 2022; and an international symposium on “Play and Playthings in Children’s Literature” in 2023. It also does an annual featured theme blog on literary traditions in South Asian children’s literature and frequently interviews authors and illustrators of children’s literature in India. The Facebook group and X/Twitter (@ACLiSA_) actively share information on children’s and YA literature studies for its members and followers, including CFPs, new publication news, and publisher initiatives.  

ACLiSA also publishes writing by children and young adults under 18 years of age in the blog and the ACLiSA logo was designed and drawn by a then seven-year-old. For us at ACLiSA, there is no talking of children’s literature by isolating and removing the intended audience from the equation. Respecting the creative capacity of young people to write their own literature is as important to the ACLiSA ethos, as is building an academic community.  

In the future, ACLiSA hopes to expand on these endeavours, hold more consistent events with children, young adults, authors, and academics, and develop archives to preserve the legacies of South Asian children’s literatures.  

The Founding Team:  

Dr. Anurima Chanda, Assistant Professor, Department of English at Birsa Munda College, Hatighisa did her PhD on taboos in contemporary Indian English Children’s Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University. 

Dr. Arpita Sarker did her PhD in representations of disability in Indian English Children’s Literature from Pennsylvania State University. 

Titas Bose is currently a PhD Candidate at University of Chicago, working on Bengali colonial children’s magazines. 

Ritwika Roy is currently a PhD candidate at Jadavpur University, Kolkata working on Mental health in Contemporary Indian English Children’s Literature. 

Ahona Das is doing her PhD on girlhood narratives in Indian children’s literature at the University of Chicago. 

Portraits by Tanurima Chanda.

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GLLI’s 2024 International YA Literature Month has been curated by Dr Emily Corbett. She is a lecturer in children’s and young adult literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she leads the MA Children’s Literature: Theoretical Approaches to Children’s and Young Adult Literature programme. Her research focuses on the growth and development of YA from literary, publishing, and cultural perspectives. She is also General Editor of The International Journal of Young Adult Literature and was founding Vice President of the YA Studies Association. Her monograph, In Transition: Young Adult Literature and Transgender Representation (2024), is forthcoming with the University Press of Mississippi in June. You can find her contact details on her institutional website and connect with her on Twitter and Instagram via @DrEmilyCorbett.

Opinions expressed in posts on this site are the individual author’s and are not indicative of the views of Global Literature in Libraries Initiative.