This presentation draws on archival research which explored how concepts about childhood circulated and were contested in the years immediately following India's independence. In this period, the psychology of childhood became a locus of experimentation, and an avenue through which approaches to postcolonial nation building were expressed. Tracing the ideas of educational reformers, psychological researchers and child welfare advocates, I discuss show how a ‘science of childhood’ in this period emphasised both the inherent potential and the emotional complexity of India's young citizens. This was a science that was connected to the institutional and epistemic capacity‐building efforts of Indian elites which were both distinctly transnational in nature, drawing on strands of North American social psychology, as well as engaged with spiritual and moral frameworks. However, actors involved in establishing this new agenda at times circumscribed the 'potential' of the child by deploying culturalist assumptions about Indian childhood that were linked to a teleology of the new nation state. These were ideas that shaped a ‘pedagogic’ approach to postcolonial modernisation. Nation-building was not just a technocratic undertaking, but an educative project that was scientific, spiritual, and therapeutic in orientation. I reflect on the ways educational researchers might pay greater attention to the 'pedagogy' of the state in analyses of past and present state-citizen relations.

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