Anthropocentric Manipulation in Juvenile Literature: The menagerie in Nursery-Rhymes

If mainstreaming an environmental and ecological concern in daily human lives certainly is one of the prior requirements, then certainly the need is to compose more literary stuffs incorporating real environmental concerns within, and also studying the existing ones with an ecological approach, and so do need to be the approach while studying juvenile literature, for kids, children or young adults, and even for nursery-rhymes, as the last being the initiating-tool to education in most of the learning-system across nations, cultures or languages and thus forming a much important bulk to focus on. Nursery rhymes, most of which can find their roots in some ancient era and have survived and evolved through time, nations and languages, (or even the comparatively modern or revamped pieces) portrays quite much in abundance various characters, both human and certainly non-human animals as well. And, if these non-human character ranges from mammals to birds to reptiles or even insects, then the attitude propagated towards these characters or the human-animal relation portrayed also comes in various emotions and actions. If some of the animal names come quite in nonsense mode just for rhyming‘s sake, then there are quite a collection of them where the pieces portray and thus propagate a certain kind of attitude towards those certain animals in particular and all of the non-human living world in general. And this very variety in approaches can be accredited to reasons such as normalising casual violence towards animals, or religious or utilitarian biases playing the operator to teach benevolence towards them etc.. For example, the ― Baby-Bunting‖ piece goes like ―Bye, Baby-Bunting,/ Father‘s gone a hunting,/ To fetch a little bunny‘s skin,/ To wrap Baby Bunting in.‖, which not only attempt normalising hunting, and to talk of that period it used to be considered so as well, but normalises the act of violence for a kid as well, reeking very much of a anthropo-colonial attitude. Whereas considering another quite famous example of ― Ding,dong , bell, pussy‘s in the well‖, one may find it to be teaching kids good values and compassion towards animals, but the anthropocentric twist comes with utilitarian approach to value that particular animal, and here the pussy‘s act of killing mice in the barn upped its brownie points, bettered its prospects to be valued by human beings, or at least the rhyme suggests so, and there are many more rhymes, the nonsense ones or the fablelike ones with some moral lesson being the content, which somehow tends to manipulate, knowingly, unknowingly or habitually, the juvenile minds in to an anthropocentric bent. A counter argument can obviously be posed questioning the validity of scanning for ecologically irresponsible approach in juvenile rhymes meant for kids and toddlers which are primarily purposive of being the very beginning step to learning and education and initiating children being capable to good memory, good pronunciation, and some good moral values, and all of it coming in a package of fun to make it entertaining for the kids. But, the fact is that, juvenile literature is a space, equally important and even more than any other literature, which can prove to be a bigger help in building up an ecologically responsible behaviour, an ecologically responsible generation and an ecologically responsible future, and thus in a serious need to be cultivated and provided accordingly, and which certainly needs to address the existing problems in the same where anthropomorphized animal characters are presented to the little people where anthropocentric manipulation exists in abundance and contributes in cultivating an attitude and approach, a binary power-matrix, where human beings continue to think of and treat themselves in superlative terms over the ‗others‘ the non-human. The proposed paper offer to analyse and discuss this very anthropocentric politics.