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?
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