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.

The Absent Child in Diaspora Discourse

(Taking a slightly different route here ... This is adapted from an Endowment Lecture I delivered recently.)

Sometime ago, I went through the titles of over 500 books on diaspora – I encountered books that highlighted different sides to the diaspora question - identity, nationalism, women, gender, queer studies, race, Islam, Jewishness – or in other words, books that include every aspect of a diasporic existence, except for how such an existence affects the child. Today, we live in a world where we are all diasporic, to a certain extent, even if we have never left the city in which we were born. A child is as much part of the diaspora as is the adult but there seems to be very little research on how children adapt to leaving the homeland, living away from the familiar, living in the borderlands between home and homeland, the culture of the hegemonic society and the culture of the hegemonic family. This is in spite of the fact that the ideal of childhood is based on residence, family, community and society.

The decision to migrate and settle down in a land that is not the homeland is, in cases of voluntary migration, almost always taken by the adult.  The child has no say in whether to migrate, when to migrate and where to migrate to. Marianne Hirsch in her essay, “Pictures of a displaced girlhood” recounts how she unwillingly boarded the plane from Vienna to USA and wept loudly all through the flight to register her grief and her reluctance to migrate. Issues of child migration or diasporic children don’t receive much attention especially in developing or third world countries, where the child is seen as a ‘passive mover’- migrating only because their families have chosen to or have been forced  to. for instance, the literature on Partition offers us very few stories of child refugees. In fact, the exemplary work of Kamla Bhasin, Urvashi Butalia and Veena Das reveals that far from being seen as victims of Partition or a diasporic life, the state and the community victimized the children further by setting up orphanages for children born of forced sexual encounters during Partition and worse, at a time when abortion was illegal in India, the state arranged clandestine mass abortions of such pregnancies. The state was also confounded by the issue of citizenship of these children. Where did they belong? To the father’s nation or the mother’s nation? What about the predicament of the child who was rejected by both parents?

Since childhood is almost everywhere associated with innocence, play and happiness, the figure of the child migrant, who might have faced war, hunger, violence and brutality and who might now face sexual exploitation, becomes a “threat to “our ideas – and ideals – of what it means to be a child and, in turn, the values and responsibilities that we hold as adults”. (Heaven Crawley). It reminds the adult viewer that they have failed to provide for the kind of childhood that is considered idyllic, that their notion of childhood, based on an othering of adulthood is a mere construct, and so raises the question of the falsity of the self. And so, afraid, fearful and guilty, we invisibilize the child and her unique predicament from all discourse.

The nostalgia felt by parents could be alien to the child for whom the host country is home, and the physical home which the parents have immersed in memories of the mystical homeland becomes alien and a borderland. “Questions of home and belonging can be complex for adults who migrate from their place of birth, but even more so for their children” and grandchildren. For those who were born or raised in the diaspora, the ties they have to their country of citizenship and their country of origin are not the same as that of their parents, and often are far more complex and even ambiguous. In The Namesake, Calcutta holds a certain bittersweet nostalgia for Ashima, which her children Gogol and Sonia do not feel.  Children of diaspora are caught in a double bind and experience double displacement. The differing worldviews, values and social mores of the family and the host country become a source of conflict, trauma and identity crises.

Tales from the House of Bunnincula Series

I stumbled on this series, during my periodic trips to those shabby out-of-the-way shops that advertise ‘BOOKS SOLD BY THE KILO’. You enter a semi-dark room, wondering what you will find, and if you are a bibliophile like me, you prepare yourself for an amazing sight. Especially, if you are a vertically challenged bibliophile like me. You are surrounded by books, piled up on the floor, or arranged on rough wooden tables knocked together for this purpose. There are thousands, make that tens of thousands, of books from every genre that one can think of. I love going to such shops as I come across titles I do not encounter in more traditional bookstores. 

And that’s how I found Bunnincula, a pet rabbit adopted by the Monroe family, and said to have strange vampire-like taste in matters of food and drink.

The books are written with cracking humour by James Howe and illustrated magnificently by Brett Helquist. 

The House of Bunnincula series is a spin-off by the original series purportedly written by the family dog, Harold. In this new series, the story is narrated by a puppy, Howie, who sees himself as an aspiring writer. The first book, It Came From Beneath the Bed! is, in Howie’s words, “about how a talented and lovable (not to mention smart) wirehaired dachshund puppy named Howie saves the world from a disgusting, evil menace named...oops, that would give away the story”. Howie soon discovers that a writer’s life isn’t easy. “My friend Delilah stopped speaking to me because I put her in my book. Uncle Harold stopped speaking to me because I didn't put him in my book”.

The fun never stops as long as Howie is picking up writing . 

He also enjoys himself playing the hero and saving the world from a science experiment gone wrong. There are six books in the series, and they are all enjoyable. 

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

Alice in Wonderland in Konkani

(While I have co-translated Alice into Konkani, this article is not about my translation. This post is adapted from my essay published in Alice in a World of Wonderlands Vol I, published by Oak Knoll Press, USA, in 2015)

The mid-nineteenth century in India witnessed the growth of written children’s literature in English and Indian languages. Most of these early publications comprised Bible stories, textbooks, or translations of Western classics. One such translation was of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Konkani by Suresh Kakodkar in 1970 and was titled अेलीस आनी ताचो अप्रूप संवसार [Elis and her Topsy Turvy World].

Lacking a script of its own, Konkani is written in five different scripts: Devanagari, Kannada, Malayalam, Arabic, and Romi/Roman. Konkani speakers use several dialects influenced by different languages, including Marathi, Portuguese, Kannada, and Malayalam, and the religion they belong to, including Hinduism, Islam, or Christianity. As a result, the Konkani literary language is still relatively undeveloped. 

Alice in Wonderland is a book that is enjoyed both by adults and children, as evidenced by the Alice Fan Clubs that thrive in several countries. When my son was five years old, his favourite bedtime reading was Carroll’s Alice. However, when I read a few Indian translations, I was intrigued to see that the translators had carried out their task within a didactic framework, and attempted to remove several subversive elements in Alice to make the translated text “suitable” for “Indian” children.

Carroll’s belief that childhood is burdened with schoolwork, as expressed in Alice’s fears— “‘but then – always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like that!’”—did not meet with the translator’s approval, and he deleted this statement. Carroll’s satirical remark about the importance given to “book-learning,” as when Alice looks for “a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes,” was also left out. Similarly, when her adventures land her in a tight spot in the Rabbit’s house, Alice wishes for a moment that she had not gone down the rabbit hole, but then retracts, saying, “‘and yet . . . it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me! . . . There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought!’” This sentiment was not translated either, denying the child reader an opportunity to imagine, to desire adventure, to even envision the possibility of being in one.

Kakodkar’s Alice is a passive girl to whom things happen, while Carroll’s Alice learns to think for herself and to anticipate events. She drinks from the bottle at the Rabbit’s house, saying to herself, “‘I know something interesting is sure to happen . . . So I’ll just see what this bottle does’”; but in Kakodkar’s translation, Alice drinks automatically without concerning herself about possible consequences. “She examined it closely. Neither ‘Eat me’ nor ‘Drink me’ was written on it. She uncapped it and held the bottle to her lips” (my back translation). The child that Kakodkar writes for is expected to be rather prim and proper, studious and polite to elders, unlike the young Crab, who snaps, “‘Hold your tongue, Ma! . . . You’re enough to try the patience of an oyster!’”—this outburst was not translated either.

In the chapter “Pig and Pepper,” the Duchess sings a lullaby which begins, “‘Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes.’” But in India, the male child is valued greatly, and therefore, instead of translating this lullaby, Kakodkar chose to use a different song which praises the child’s beauty rather than talks of inflicting violence.

Alice is a culture-specific text and has references to English sea-side towns, English history, local food, poetry, etc. Since Konkani has not been extensively used as a medium of instruction in schools, its vocabulary has not expanded to include objects, concepts, and ideas that are not part of Konkani culture. For instance, Kakodkar calls the footmen “sepoys,” a term used to refer to Indian soldiers of junior rank serving in the British Army. In Carroll’s book, the conversation between the Rabbit and his gardener and other servants makes use of different speech forms arising from the class status of the speaker. Kakodkar either left out large parts of this conversation or used indirect speech to report it. A possible reason for this is that dialects in Konkani vary depending on the religion or geographical location of the speaker. Equating religion or location with class would be unfair and politically incorrect.

While Carroll concludes each chapter by hinting at the events to follow, thereby exciting the child’s curiosity and desire to read further, Kakodkar consistently left out this last bit of every chapter. Each chapter in the translation concludes with a particular event, and the reader has no idea of what is to follow and may not want to read on. It is as if the child’s imagination is being repressed instead of being stimulated, in line with the educational system of the time.

However, Kakodkar’s attempt to partially domesticate the story reflects the importance given to family, and the religious harmony that was strongly prevalent in the 1960s and ’70s. In the Konkani translation, the Mouse becomes Hundir Mama, or “Uncle Mouse,” and the Mad Hatter is named Topey Mama, or “The Uncle with the Hat.”

A children’s book reflects its writer’s and society’s construct of childhood, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is thus transformed in this translation to match adult notions of what childhood should be.

(The images are taken from the original illustrations of John Tenniel)

Moon Mountain

I picked up a copy of the graphic novel, Moon Mountain, a year ago, but got around to reading it only last week. Moon Mountain is an adaptation of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s classic children’s book Chander Pahar (1937). I have always been fascinated by his Pather Panchali, especially his sensitive depiction of the unfortunate Durga. 

The art work of the graphic novel is dominated by dark colours, speaking of a brooding personality, and perilous adventures. At first glance, I wondered whether children would find it appealing, especially since the adaptation has stuck to the linear perspective employed by Bandopadhyay, and begun with Shankar’s disappointment at having to work at a dead-end job in a small town after his college years in the dazzling metropolis of early twentieth century Calcutta.

The story unravels rather slowly in the first few pages, but the action panels on page 2 provide us with a hint of the adventure to come. I especially liked the way in which the illustrator, Mukherjee, has made use of repeated figures to indicate the flow of time. Soon enough, a few pages later, our intrepid hero is in Uganda in East Africa, working for a construction company laying new railway lines.

Shankar faces many adventures both at the hand of predatory and dangerous animals. The excitement picks up when he rescues a veteran explorer, Diego Alvarez, who tells him of how he had traced the fabled diamond mines of Richtersveld. Soon enough, Shankar is infected with the gold-and-diamond fever, and he sets off with Diego to explore the wilderness, and also, find himself.

 Other than the protagonist, Shankar, a central character is Diego Alvarez. Like Kurtz of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Diego is a complex person who also believes in the Empire’s mission and modus operandi of claiming all that the natives own as his. Like a good coloniser, he even draws Shankar into the enterprise of the Empire. But during the resulting adventure, Shankar learns to think for himself and while he loves and respects Alvarez, chooses to strike out a path different from that of his mentor.  

It is interesting to note that while the author of the original text, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, had never travelled to Africa, he researched the place considerably. Thus, the narrative strikes very few false notes. 

When Bandopadhyay first published his novel, it seized the imagination of readers with its descriptions of Africa, its velds, its mountains, its wildlife and, of course, the allure of gold, silver – and diamonds! Chander Pahar was translated into English in 2002, reimagined as a film and as a graphic novel in 2013-14. 

The script for the graphic novel is by US-based Saurav Mohapatra and the illustrations are by Sayan Mukherjee. Children are sure to find this an enjoyable read.

(All the images are taken from the book)