A return to childhood - Kampung Boy

It amazes me at times that while we share a cultural and social history with several nations in Asia, one would never guess it going by the popular culture and social media that form a large part of our lives. Our bookstores, for instance, display tons of European, American as well as African books, but almost nothing from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam or China.

On a recent trip to Malaysia, therefore, I was on the lookout for children's books by local authors. It wasn't easy, for most bookstores (like the ones in India) displayed American and British children's titles or some Malaysian titles in Bahasa. After some questioning and prodding of the staff at the stores, I was delighted to find children's books by Malaysian and Chinese authors. I bought six and began reading them on returning home.

Lat published his first book for children, Kampung Boy, in 1979. It's an autobiographical narrative in which he attempts to recreate the days of his childhood living in a traditional Malay house called a kampung while growing up on a rubber plantation. 

Two years later, he followed it up with Town Boy, which describes the years he spent in Ipoh where he went to live when he was eleven. A decade later, he published Kampung Boy: Yesterday and Today juxtaposing contemporary and earlier Malay childhood using the same format of brilliantly illustrated pages, largely in black and white, and accompanying text.

  

Kampung Boy: Yesterday and Today by Lat - whose real name is Mohammed Nor - is an absolute delight to read. Lat takes us down memory lane, through homes that were full of love and inventiveness, and playgrounds where every toy had to be created by the children and their parents. The games they played included equal participation by ants, pangolins, cows, angry honeybees and sleepy pythons. Rural life is presented as exciting rather than bucolic, full of adventure and, at times, danger.

Of course, there's a lot of nostalgia and a lot of idealisation of childhood. But there's also a subtle plea to parents to cease being over-protective, helicoptering, competitive mums and dads. 






The artwork of Kampung Boy - a mixture of caricature and evocative detailing - is wonderfully expressive, enabling the author-illustrator to say a lot without using too many words. Lat doesn't follow the graphic novel format favoured by a number of contemporary writers, or the manga style that originated in Japan. Instead, moving as he does from being a newspaper cartoonist-columnist to one attempting an autobiographical narrative,  he uses the page as a canvas and fills it up with a single scene that captures the essence of the tale he wants to tell.   

I introduced the book to a group of students who have learning differences and built a reading and writing activity around it. It was heartening to see that they liked the book a great deal, and would either stay back and try and read a few more pages or come in early the next day to continue with the story. The illustrations helped them make sense of the story and the minimal text and unusual fonts used by the author made it easier for them to read the narration. 

The one thing I did not like about Lat's work was that I detected a certain internalisation of colonial attitudes, though. As the children - depicted with 'non-human' expressions - leave their 'nature-phase' behind them and enter the world of schools and academia, their faces take on more human orientations. I shall probably have to examine the whole of the Kampung series before making very definitive statements.

All in all, a great addition to your library!

On meeting Vidya Mani

Last week, I was at a workshop at Christ, Bangalore, where I met an amazing person called Vidya Mani. She radiated positivity, energy and passion for children’s books, having made it her life’s mission to get children to read. And read some more. She calls herself a children’s books ‘writer-editor-bookclubber-bookshopper’ and leads an incredible life immersed in children’s books.

Vidya is behind several children’s magazines, including Chatterbox, Quest, Junior Quest, Hoot and Toot, a founding member of Bookalore, a children’s book club in Bangalore, managing editor of Goodbooks, a children’s book review site, and a co-owner of Funky Rainbow, a travelling children’s bookshop. Whew, she certainly sounds like she has packed the achievements of several lifetimes into one, doesn’t she?

What I love about Vidya (other than her infectious enthusiasm, her smile, and her vast collection of books) is her belief in and dedication to INDIAN children’s literature. She not only writes for children, she also promotes books by other Indian authors.

And the best thing I like best about her is that she thinks children should be FREE to decide what they want to read, and that adults should let children read for FUN, rather than information and improvement.

May her tribe increase!

Where are the children's books from non-English speaking countries?

It’s strange that while printed children’s literature in India had its origins in translation, today we rarely come across translated children’s books in bookshops. Many of the books first published in India for children in the 19^th or early 20^th century were well known English books such as Aesop’s Fables, Alice in Wonderland and stories from the Bible translated into Indian languages. In the second half of the twentieth century, along with a flood of books from UK and USA, Indian children also enjoyed perusing Russian stories translated into English and made available by the Soviets for throwaway prices. 

As a child, I remember reading the Bobbsey Twins series and being especially delighted with those books in which the twins travelled to other countries. Ironically, my introduction to Japan came through The Bobbsey Twins and the Goldfish Mystery in which the children visit Japan and learn several Japanese customs (heavily stereotyped and orientalized, no doubt), and I learnt to say Sayanora and Konnichiwa. I read the English translation of that most famous of Japanese children’s books, Toto-Chan only years and years later.

Ilan Stavans, a publisher of children’s books says, “It is precisely at a young age … when the strongest impact can be made in terms of exposing people to other cultures. A new sensibility can emerge”. However, if you visit a school library or the children’s section of a circulating library, you will probably find a large collection of books from USA and UK and a few from India, and almost nothing else. I do not recollect seeing books from any of our neighbouring countries such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan or Bangladesh or other Asian countries such as China, Singapore, Thailand or Vietnam. 

Just imagine, if three generations of Indian and Pakistani and Bangladeshi and Sinhalese children grow up reading books from each other’s cultures, South Asians could live without mutual hatred and suspicion. We fear that which is unknown. If we grow up reading stories from other countries, they will become as familiar and beloved to us as stories and people from our own country.

It is true that there has, in recent times, been some recognition of the need to expose our children to multicultural literature. Like Rudine Bishop said, children deserve to read both mirror and window books – books that reflect a culture and society that they are familiar with, and books that offer them a glimpse into other cultures. There have been some attempts on the part of enlightened publishers like Ekalavya, Pratham, Tulika and Tara to offer books that reflect the vast and rich multiple Indian cultures. However, this is not the case with translated books. Forget about translations from other countries, we rarely translate children’s books from one Indian language to another.   The problem is not with publishers alone, as the market reality is such that parents (if and when they buy books) would rather pay for a well-known ‘phoren’ (US/UK) author rather than venture to read an interesting book by an ‘unknown’ author from an ‘unknown’ country.

Sigh!

Reading myself into and through books

I have been reading a lot of picture books lately for the course I am doing on children's libraries. Some of them are absolutely stunning in terms of artwork, innovative fonts, thought-provoking layout, economy of text and multilayered narratives. And yes, I will blog about them soon. 

In the meantime, here is a piece I wrote inspired by a picture book titled A Child of Books by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. Enjoy!

I am a child of books.

I sail across a sea of words, as I read myself into books and read myself through books. Leaning back against the sturdy branches of the bimbli tree in my childhood home, or the warm sunkissed tiled roof of the house where I spent my teenage years, I spend hours making friends with people who live in the pages of books, and come to life in the squiggles that work like magic spells. 

I read books to get through school and college. I read books at parties, too shy and awkward to converse and make friends. When my father books tickets for long bus journeys to visit relatives during the school holidays, I pack my bag with a tome or two and prepare to journey through forests of fairytales.

I come from a world of stories, a place where giraffes browse in my backyard, Goethe’s Faust sinks into despair, and Irving Stone’s Van Gogh paints his madness onto canvas. “Thigele gandi peshi kadetha”, my grandmother laments worrying that my absorption with the book in my hands will prevent me from noticing my surroundings (read housework that I will be expected to do). My mother smiles as she places a third and then a fourth dosa on my plate and, finicky eater that I am, I eat them without noticing, for I am busy savouring Hemingway’s tale of the old man and his battle with the fish rather than the coconut chutney on my plate.

In college, I discover Kafka and the Russian writers and am drawn to the abyss of despair that their writings open up. “Come away with me” they seem to call out, and I shake my head, knowing that like Theseus, I will find my way through the maze.

I get married and move to Bangalore and my books travel along with me. (“No, ma, I don’t have space for my trousseau saris, I have to pack my Jane Austen collection”) When returning from our honeymoon, we stop over at Calcutta and rush to College Street, where I buy Johanna Spyri’s Heidi for three rupees, and Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitrangada for two rupees fifty paisa! My husband and I set up house, linger over our book collections, and hurriedly arrange the other stuff in some semblance of order. Dusting takes a backseat, as I pick up a copy of Melville’s Moby Dick and upon my imagination, I float.

When my son turns one, a circulating library in my neighbourhood shuts shop, and vulture-like, I swoop on them to buy up their stock at throw-away prices.  Dog-eared copies of Enid Blyton, Bertrand Russel, Robin Cook and A.J. Cronin form a contiguous chain of book joy as they perch spine-to-spine, next to each other in the rough-hewn shelves we have fixed to the walls in place of the floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall mahogany book cabinets of my dreams. I plonk my son into his pram and walk through the Jayanagar fourth block complex, travelling over mountains of make-believe. I notice with a start that the only people I can recognize and who know me back are the people at Nagasri Book House. 

In the school and college classrooms where I pretend to teach, I share my love of books with the students. We discuss Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief and Amitava Kumar’s Bombay London New York, and talk about how books have shaped us. I write plays for the children to perform on Annual Day, and the stories are drawn from Greek myths, Indian folk tales, science fiction and other tales of yore. My reading shapes me and the ways in which I shape the world around me. When I visit Germany, I spend some quiet moments at Bebelplatz, beside Micha Ullman’s installation of an underground library with empty shelves, to remember the horrific night when the Nazis burnt twenty thousand books.  I think back on Bertolt Brecht’s poem "A Worker Reads History" and understand there are treasures to discover, even in the darkness.

I dream of opening a library, a bookstore, a publishing house. I dream of crafting stories that speak, of writing books that will call out to readers, of creating narratives that will resonate with others’ lives, of spinning yarns that will help them escape the banality of reality. I dream. Ah well, imagination is free.

With apologies to Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston - the phrases in bold are taken from their picture book, A Child of Books.

*****

The Complete Adventures of Feluda by Satyajit Ray

Although I was an avid reader in childhood, I never encountered the Feluda books (originally written in Bengali) either in my school library or the public libraries I used to haunt. In fact, my childhood reading was strongly anglicised, and if I hadn’t discovered K.M. Munshi’s Krishnavatara (7 volumes) and immediately begun to devour them, I would have grown up to be a complete WOG. Years later, when my son had moved from children’s literature to newer choices in his reading, I began to spot English translations of the Feluda adventures in the bookshops I went to. Not many copies, and not too often. Among the stacks of moral stories and retellings of mythological tales, the Feluda books shone – but were they like Thomas Gray’s “gems of purest ray serene” – hiding in dark unfathomed caves?  I didn’t pay too much attention to them either, dismissing them as pale copies of the tales of Sherlock Holmes. However, recently, curiosity got the better of me, and after spotting a good bargain on Amazon, I ordered The Complete Adventures of Feluda (2 volumes) and began to peruse them.

A Crossover Novel and an Intrepid Hero

In the 50 years since Feluda emerged in the pages of Bengal’s iconic children’s magazine, Sandesh, he certainly has travelled a lot, beginning with the places he visited in the course of his adventures. But Feluda is also an intrepid traveller, for the books have moved from being considered as children’s literature to reading for adults too.   Within a few years of the inception of the series, Ray began to publish the Feluda tales in Desh magazine and not Sandesh, which was associated with children. And of course, the Feluda adventures have been reimagined as films, television series, animated shows, radio plays and traditional stage plays. Both Satyajit Ray and his son, Sandip Ray, have successfully transformed Feluda into a screen hero. Mostly made in Bengali, the films are also available with decent subtitling in English. The latest of the cinematic offerings is Sandip Ray’s Double Feluda. The stories are also adapted into the graphic novel form.  

So why do I like Feluda?

Unlike a lot of Indian children’s book authors of that vintage, Satyajit Ray neither talks down nor proscribes to the child reader. He uses a descriptive style of writing, and upholds a rational way of thinking, rather than a because-that’s-the-way-it-is-done tone.  With their portrayal of suitably exotic places like Lucknow, Jaisalmer, Gangtok and Kathmandu, the tales open up new worlds to the child reader’s imagination.  And most importantly, after an overdose of campus romances, psychologically disturbed protagonists, paranormal occurrences, and toilet humour, it was refreshing to sit with a book that promised to tell a gripping tale - and did a good job of it too.

With renewed interest in detective fiction – think of Sherlock, Elementary and several other adaptations – I am sure readers will also stumble on Feluda and his quirky brilliance.

The Swapnalok Society Series - The Summer of Cool; Good News Reporter

Having just returned from a short holiday in Mumbai -a city I have always loved :) - I thought I would review these two books by Suchitra Krishnamoorthi, set in a middle-class housing society in that buzzing, teeming, extreme metropolis. The protagonists of the two books are Chitrangana and her friend Sonal respectively.

The Summer of Cool

Krishnamoorthi's first book is about 9-year-old Chitrangana who lives with her mother Kamala and 17-year-old sister Smita, and has no recollection of her father, Sidharth Verma. She is not allowed to speak of him as enquiries about Appa put her mother in a rage and bring on one of her migraines. “There was to be no talk of him and that was that . . . no photographs . . . or memory left of him in their lives”.

     The book also puts forth the notion that a community can take the place of a family. Like children often do, Chitrangana creates a happy world from her surroundings and its denizens are the residents of the apartment building - Underwear Aunty, Khadoos Uncle, the upstairs boy who get romantic with Chitrangana’s sister. She plays games with her friends, has fights with the children from the next block, indulges in pranks on the stuffy and snoopy neighbours, and tells TALL tales. Chitrangana also discovers where her father lives, has an adventure in the process of trying to meet him, and …. Well, I guess you must read the book and find out. All I can say is that while the book is a happy book, it isn’t sloppy sentimental.

        Summer of Cool touches upon issues of gender insecurities and the traumatic effects of parental separation on the child.  However Chitrangana learns to draw strength and support from her own convictions, her friends in the colony and her doll. The narrative thus subtly points out that girls who wish to empower themselves need to only turn to their peers and look deep into themselves. 

Good News Reporter

In Krishnamoorthi’s second novel Chitrangana’s friend, Sonal Wadalkar is brought up by a single parent too, her father. (Interestingly, single fathers appear to have a better support structure than single mothers!)

Sonal tires of listening to and reading about bad news in the media and decides to become a good news reporter. Armed with a concealed camera her father has given her, she starts documenting positive stories from the Swapnalok residents (much like the website The Better India which attempts to bring to our notice “the happy stories, the unsung heroes and heroines, the small good deeds”) 

Sonal attempts to create a positive re-reading of the world by focussing on kindnesses, celebrations, sharing and caring. She works to undo the falsely situated perspective of the dominant order which sees the world empirically, in terms of the number of news-making disasters, tragedies and murders, and shifts the focus to an alternative reading that shows up the limitations of such a perspective. How Sonal wages her several battles and emerges victorious constitutes the story.

     Krishnamoorthi focuses on two pre-pubescent girls who, in line with the quest trope, leave the safety of their homes, venture into the dangerous world of the outside, face their dragons and return home. The Swapnalok society series is about girl power and also about upholding a more innocent and non-cynical world.

Published by Penguin Books