Children's literature in India in ancient times

Written children’s literature in India has been called “perhaps the greatest paradox of all,” for India is simultaneously home to “thousands of children . . . doomed to illiteracy” as well as “the greatest living oral narrative tradition in the world” that can fulfill the need of every Indian child for a story (Kamal Sheoran). However, written literature for children in India is far older than what is normally acknowledged.

   The Sangam literature which flourished in Tamil Nadu from 3rd century BCE to 3rd century CE contains references to literature produced for children. Manorama Jafa calls the Panchatantra, written in 1st century CE, “the oldest collection of stories for children in the world”. It was translated into Kannada by Durga Simha in 1035 CE and constitutes the first book in Kannada for children. In Telugu literature, the Śataka Sāhitya, a collection of a hundred poems by an individual writer based on a particular theme, has always been popular with children. Two Śatakas  ̶  Krishna Śataka and Sumathi Śataka  ̶  which are seven to eight centuries old are still studied by school children.

        In Assam, in the pre-Vaishnavite period stretching from 1300 to 1490 CE, Sreedhar Kandal wrote a secular work for children titled Kankhowa and Ramasaraswati wrote Bhimacharit for the child reader. Indira Goswami writes of this book that it “is narrated in an atmosphere of overflowing rustic humour. The book is so popular among the children that it has been reprinted several times”.

      Amir Khusro, who lived from 1253 to 1325 CE, wrote riddles and a dictionary in verse called Khaliq Bari for children in Urdu. Another seventeenth-century Urdu didactic poem for children, Maa Baap Nāma, was composed by Shah Hussain Zauqui. The Shree Krishnacharitam Manipravalam and Pancatantram Kilippattu were written in Malayalam in the eighteenth century for women and child readers (!).

        However, only a few such instances of pre-colonial written literature for children exist in India. Prior to the establishment and growth of print culture, Indians were noted for their oral literacy. Oral narrations enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the community. The joint family system also ensured that there was always an adult to be found to narrate a tale. 

Why do we need children’s books?

A majority of us are often nostalgic about our childhood and the books we read then and the stories we heard. However, children’s texts are not necessarily what adults deem ‘literary’. Children read story books, comic books, joke books, picture books, children’s magazines and Pokemon cards, watch television, movies and animated shows, play video games, -- and attempt to relate each of these to their lives.

Should we allow children to ‘waste’ their time reading all the above, or should they only read ‘good’ books?

I like to think of children’s books as the foundational texts of a society.

Every culture has its foundational texts. These are the texts that have helped shape a worldview, a system of ethics, helped mediate the relationship between the individual and society, or the individual and God. Epics like the Iliad, the Ramayana, scriptural texts like the Bible, the Quran, the Gita, legal texts like the constitution of India, the UN Declaration of Human Rights all these belong to a certain culture, and arise from the wisdom of the people, just as they contribute to people’s wisdom.

Similarly, there is a group of individuals here in our society who have their own foundational texts, who draw from these texts to make meaning of the world they live in, who return to these texts time and again, even when they travel from their world into other worlds, who remember their foundational texts with pleasure and longing as long as they live.

I am of course, speaking of children and the books they read. Most of us tend to remember the stories, we read, the songs we heard, the tales we were told, as children. The words, emotions, characters, we encounter in these stories songs and songs become a part of our everyday vocabulary and the way we look at the world. They awaken our imagination and help us live other lives, travel to other worlds, explore the universe. They help us in our meaning-making. I read somewhere that geniuses like Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page and others all loved reading science fiction as children. The act of reading helped them open their eyes to different worlds and different ways of doing things, and they could draw upon the vast reservoirs of their imagination to create the unique products they are famous for. So you see, it would be awesome if more children read, and read more, even though some parents and teachers may dismiss children’s books as silly and insignificant.

Don’t ever forget, children's books can actually contribute to the conceptualization of a better society!

Oliver Jeffers and his marvellous books

I encountered Oliver Jeffers’ books recently when I was in Goa a fortnight ago for a Library educators’ course. It was love at first sight – the moment I started reading his books, I knew that this was what I had always wanted picture books to be – a meaningful coming together of words and images to create  a tale that floods your senses, and stimulates your grey cells – all at once.

Jeffers has produced several pictures books, both singly and in collaboration. One that I have particularly liked, is The Heart and the Bottle. It’s about a little girl who loved exploring and discovering and learning new things, until she experiences a terrible loss. Not prepared to deal with it, she locks away her heart in a bottle. What happens next? Does she ever take it out again? As you read on to find out, you learn about the devastating effects of grief, about recovery, healing and happiness. That’s the Jeffers magic for you.

Another of his books that moved me is a book about books, about the magic of stories. Jeffers wrote A Child of Books in collaboration with Sam Winston. The narration begins with a little girl (I am a child of books, I come from a world of stories, And upon my imagination, I float) who sets sail on a sea of words …

And arrives at the house of a little boy and invites him to join her on her journey into the power of imagination. It’s a highly intertextual book and refers to almost forty famous works of literature. The reader thus simultaneously goes on her own journey, as she spots the references and revisits those stories. 

A Child of Books is a homage to all the amazing children’s classics that have been a part of the authors’ growing up years (and mine!). Since Jeffers and Winston both feel that reading is a visceral and sensual experience, the text from the classics form a part of this book. For instance, when the girl sets sail, the sea is made up of words taken from famous sea-faring stories.

Winston with his exceptionally fine typographic art and Jeffers with his hauntingly lyrical illustrations have created a modern children’s classic in this book. 

Books about Books

Two wonderful things happened today.

        First, I read about Aisha Esbhani, a 13 year-old from Karachi, Pakistan, who felt that her reading was largely Eurocentric and decided to correct the slant and read a book from every single country in the world. So she created a Facebook page, @reading197countries and asked people to help with recommendations and suggestions. She has also complied an alphabetically organized list of nations and their books that have been recommended to her. Believe me, that’s a terrific resource we have there. Aisha, you are a star! Thank you for spreading book joy.

Next, I read this lovely little picture book called The Librarian of Basra written and illustrated by Jeanette Winter. It’s a true story of a librarian called Alia Muhammad Baker in the city of Basra in Iraq, who hears that war is due to start soon and works hard to save the books in her library, books that have come from all over the world. While the authorities couldn’t care less, Alia works secretly to take away almost all the books – there are 30,000 of them! Does she succeed? Read and find out. 

The text is simple and lucid. While the story is set in the context of war with its associations of death, destruction and tragedy, by resolutely focusing on how one person can make a difference, war is presented to the young reader in a fairly non-threatening manner. While it appears to be a simple story, it brought back images of the burning of books ordered by Hitler in 1932, the burning of the library at Alexandria in Egypt by the invading Roman army, and other such confrontations between intellectuals and autocratic rulers. Dictators and military-based governments everywhere seem to dislike books intensely.

The illustrations borrow from the techniques of folk art. The clever use of colours help to create the appropriate mood.

There are many such delightful books about books, stories, libraries and librarians. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few:

Tomas and the Library Lady by Pat Mora and Raul Colon

A Child of Books by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

I am going to write about some of them in the next couple of days. Any suggestions from you? Please do write in.

The Story of Babar

In today’s post, I am going to take up a really old picture book, one that continues to sell in large numbers, The Story of Babar by Jean de Brunhoff (1931). First published in French, and later introduced into the English language by A.A. Milne, it has proved to be one of the world’s longest-selling and extremely popular picture books. It features an orphaned baby elephant who escapes to the city (Paris) and is raised by a rich old lady. Babar wears a green suit, eats with a fork and knife, is literate and plays the piano. One day, he returns to the forest, and is crowned King of the elephants. 

Jean de Brunhoff trained as a painter and his illustrations for the book are detailed, beautiful and comic as well. Maurice Sendak observed that Brunhoff’s “freshness of vision ….. forever changed the face of the illustrated book”. Brunhoff created a series of seven books about Babar before a tragically early death at the age of 37. Years later, his son Laurent continued the series.

However, the book has also run into a lot of controversies and there have been several demands to ban it. It has been called an allegory for French colonialism. The naked Babar is ‘civilised’, ‘clothed’, ‘acculturated’ and made into ‘a proper gentleman’. When he returns to the forest, he is offered the crown for, as the council of elephants tells him, he has “lived among men and learned much”. Thus, the ways of the metropolis or the colonizing power are considered to be superior to the ways and wisdom of the native.

  The illustrations which have been praised for their aesthetic value, have also faced a lot of flak from postcolonial critics. The pictures associate the city with order, harmony and peace, whereas the forest and its denizens are correlated with shame (naked, unclothed inhabitants), disorder (the old elephant king dies on eating a poisonous mushroom), violence (Babar’s mother is shot dead there, and later the rhinoceros and the elephants go to war against each other). Since children spend a lot of time looking at the illustrations, critics worry about the ideas children are likely to take away from picture books such as The Story of Babar.

           

 I shall leave you with these questions: Do children’s books have a lasting impact on young readers? Do we need to ban such books when they also give great joy to children? 

Make Way for Ducklings!

A couple of years ago, I was in Boston and taking a walk in the Boston Public Garden while I came across an interesting sculpture. It featured America’s most famous mallard family, with Mrs. Mallard leading the way and her eight little ducklings following.

The sculpture is inspired by a popular children’s book Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey who wrote the story and illustrated it. The story is about a couple of ducks who look for a suitable place to raise their family, and later, the mother duck takes her family of eight across Boston to meet their father, and they have various adventures en route (Like Shakespeare often did, McCloskey is said to have drawn inspiration for the story from a newspaper report he read). First published in 1941, and awarded the Caldecott medal in 1942, this beautifully illustrated book is still in print.

 It’s a remarkable book for several reasons.

In terms of plot and characterization, the narrative presents a strong and independent mother figure who is also caring and concerned. During the II World War, many young children in America were growing up without a father, and the book assured them that it was alright to have a mother in charge, and gave them hope that they would one day be reunited with their fathers.

In terms of the illustrations, they present the reader with an amazing view of Boston from the perspective of a duck – a duck-eyed view of the city (or a very little child’s). It offers an interesting way of getting a child to learn about her surroundings, about perspective, about traffic issues and road safety, and about a host of other things. An interesting anecdote about McCloskey tells us that after spending several days watching ducks in park ponds and learning about them at the Museum of Natural History and making hundreds of sketches, he finally brought home a family of ducks, filled up his bathtub and housed them there. That is how his drawings look so lifelike and evoke such an air of authenticity.

This book is a must-read for children everywhere to get them to reflect on their city’s landmarks, think about habitats, and ponder over the symbiotic relationship between humans and animals.

Footpath Flowers

Last week, I was in Goa attending a Library Educators’ Course. The brainchild of Sujata Noronha (Bookworm, Goa), Parag (Tata Trust) and Usha Mukunda (formerly of CFL, Bangalore), the course brings together librarians, educators, and others working with children and literacy and aims to “construct a shared vision of why library work is critical to the human race and how relationships with a collection can foster some of the most humane and necessary ideas about life”.

        I met some marvelous people there and made friends with some terrific books. Today I am going to blog about one of those books – Footpath Flowers  by the award-winning poet JonArno Lawson and illustrated by Sydney Smith.🌼🌼

       Unlike most books one reads, Footpath Flowers is a wordless book. So while normally, one reads the text and scans the pictures quickly, here you are taken aback by the complete absence of words and you begin to look at the pictures carefully. A little girl goes for a walk with her father who seems preoccupied and so pays no attention either to her or to his surroundings. But she notices. She notices everything – the flowers growing in the cracks in the pavement, a man sleeping on a bench in the park, a woman waiting at a traffic signal, a dog looking around curiously. 🍀

She picks up the flowers she sees and gives them to the people and animals she passes by. This act transforms her world in many ways.🍁🍁

      Sydney Smith has done a brilliant job with the illustrations – skillfully playing with angles and perspectives to create a cinematic effect, to make us feel we are watching “moving pictures”. The quickening of thoughts in the reader’s mind as she turns the pictures, is deftly represented in the movement of the girl as she walks through different neighbourhoods and in and out of different people’s lives.🌸🌸

       The story works at several levels and to me, at this junction, the flowers are a metaphor for books and the act of reading. The more books you read, the more you spread bookish joy or the joy of reading, the more your world is going to be transformed.🌺 

World Book Day - And the start of a Blogathon!

It’s World Book Day today - "a world-wide tribute to books and authors" which will hopefully encourage "everyone, in particular young people, to discover the pleasure of reading and gain a renewed respect for those who have furthered the social and cultural progress of humanity".

This year, Conakry (capital of Guinea, West Africa) has been selected as the World Book Capital for one year. One of the reasons underlying this decision is that it has "a well-structured budget and clear development goals with a strong emphasis on youth and literacy."

To reiterate my own love of reading and spread "bookish joy" (as Sujata Noronha of Bookworm puts it), I have decided to embark upon a Blogathon. For the next thirty days, April 23-May 22, 2017, I shall blog everyday and write about children's and young adult books.

That's a big promise to make, keeping in mind my procrastinating ways, but hey, I owe it to all those writers who have given me such joy through their books.

So, let the reading and writing begin!

The Children of Kashmir

 

Sometimes, the shrillness and the ‘in-your-faceness’ of news reporters dull one’s senses to the actual events, and the horrors documented and broadcast to our living rooms lose their edge and ability to shock us, simply because that is what we have come to expect from prime-time television news.  But a work of fiction which although purports to be of the imagination/a fabrication can, in the unfolding of the narrative, shock us into realising that the story (an invention of the author) is startlingly close to the truth, maybe even more honest and real than ‘the truth’.

   Reading Paro Anand’s books set in Kashmir brought home to me the uncomfortable truth that the children in Kashmir are living lives that violate the fundamental rights of a child – the right to education, to good health, to nutrition, the right to play, the right to have loving parents or caretakers, the right to peace … Her book, No Guns at My Son’s Funeral (2005) is set against the problem of militancy in Kashmir in the 1990s and features a teenager, Aftab who is lured by charisma of the older Akram, a leader of a group of teenaged freedom fighters. Aftab is exhilarated to become a part of this forbidden group, and enters a web of intrigue, spies, manipulation and betrayal.

Another book by Paro Anand, Weed (2008),  is set in the first decade of the 21st century and raises questions about the inheritance of violence that the children of Kashmir are weighed down with. Specifically, it is about 13-year-old Umer, his little brother Umed, their mother Amina and their father who is seen by the authorities as an atankvadi or a militant while he calls himself a jehadi or a freedom fighter.

        On the one hand, Umer is the adolescent son who feels abandoned by his father and torn between the father and the mother. Should he stay with his mother and be a support to her like a good son? Or should he, as a son who loves his father, follow his father’s footsteps, “even if those footsteps are blighted”?

        Amina exercises tight control over Umer, especially after her younger son, Umed, leaves to join the mujahideen. Her fears and insecurities for his and her safety cause her to tighten her hold so much that Umer feels stifled in this claustrophobic atmosphere where he is watched all the time. Taken out of school, cut off from all human interaction, not allowed to meet anyone other than his mother and the owner of the shop where he works, Umer feels as if he has “become invisible, ceased to exist” – much like the ordinary citizens of Kashmir have ceased to exist for the rest of us in India.