Many ways of seeing and being
Iread ferociously as a child, all I ever wanted as a gift was one more book. My parents were happy to oblige and they bought me many. On special occasions, I would ask for expensive books of myths and legends from different cultures and stories from around the world which pushed the boundaries of both my vocabulary and my imagination. Every now and then, I would be told that I needed to be a little older before I could read something. I don’t recall ever being told that I should not read, just that I should delay the encounter with a book whose content my parents felt would be difficult for me to understand.
Because I retell Hindu epics and myths, I am often asked, “What is the message you want to give children?” or, “What do you think myths can teach children?” I am taken aback by these questions. I always imagine that children also read for pleasure, in the same way that adults do, the same way I did when I was as old as the readers for whom I write. I do not retell classical stories with any didactic intent. I think this is because I read and write them primarily as literature and believe that they should resonate with all readers, whether or not they come from the same culture as the stories and whether or not they have faith in the gods who often appear in myth. Children need good literature as much as adults do. Literature helps us all imagine different ways of being and doing. When we read folk tales from Europe, we see that forests are filled with wolves and bears, not tigers and elephants. Witches and ogres live in those forests, rather than rakshasas, though all are equally frightening. Middle-Eastern stories are peopled with djinns, who are trapped in old bottles, and make your wishes come true.
For all that these stories differ in detail and location, each of them reminds us that people are the same everywhere. We express and explore our fears and our aspirations in the stories we tell. While we ask the same questions of our gods and demons, of our friends and families but, it turns out, the answers we find are determined by our particular cultures and our local histories. When we read about others, we are persuaded that there can be different answers to the same question, that there is more than one way to solve a problem, that our perspective is just one among many ways of seeing. Literature’s greatest gift to us is empathy.
The so-called lessons of literature, whether for adults or for children, are not quantifiable. They are often about sensing a truth rather than knowing it with absolute certainty. Literature does not tell us what to think, it nudges us, gently, to think for ourselves. There appears to be a special pressure on stories about gods and demons to “teach us something.” The Mahabharata shows us that good people can do bad things and that seemingly bad people can be honourable. It reminds us how hard it is to be good; it demonstrates that greed and unchecked ambition, the desire for power at any cost, can lead to terrible violence’; that along with the unjust and the unrighteous, the good, the true and the beautiful will also be destroyed; that hatred will kill even those who spread it. These are universal truths and young readers will comprehend them on their own when they read the story. If we retell our epics and myths in all their rich complexity, with their darkness as well as their light, younger readers will surely discern the moral issues that are being explored in these narratives, just as we do. We must trust our children as much as we trust our classical texts.