Try reading these books to your kids and watch them get creative
Children’s titles don’t get their dues; blame publishers and parents
Abest books’ list, even restricted to India, seems difficult to draw up because you might like two different books for two different reasons. You can’t compare apples and oranges, and I would be hard-pressed to give my five favourite fruit of 2018. Much easier are the disappointments, without getting into commercial fiction, from the high expectations of the subject matter or established authors — my biggest waste of time this year was Shashi Tharoor’s
The Paradoxical Prime Minister, a long, data-rich book about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that gave no insights into the man.
Though I don’t come across children’s books anymore (my own have grown up), they seemed like a worthwhile category to explore. I found that children’s books — which come in varieties because a picture book for someone below 10 will not appeal to an adventureand prose-seeking 12-year-old — are among the most neglected in India, despite so many written. Publishers don’t push sales, complained my local bookshop owner who specialises in children’s books; they focus on international best-sellers which anyway sell by themselves. Airport book vendors don’t display children’s books, and the publishers don’t request them to. Publicity is left to the authors, shamefully, for whom their books are not surprisingly like their own children, such is the labour of love.
In any case, here are some titles of children’s books from India that made a humble mark this year:
1. Machher Jhol by Richa Jha and Sumantra Dey: This is perhaps the most beautiful book of 2018 of all that I encountered. It is a picture book, for all ages, about a small boy Gopu whose father is ill, so he sets out, for the first time in his life, to navigate the hustleand-bustle of Calcutta streets to get dad his favourite dish. Both authors produce something sublime — Dey’s illustrations turn each page into a painting, while Jha’s story will surprise
Publishers don’t push sales, complained my local bookshop owner who specialises in children’s books; they focus on international best-sellers which anyway sell by themselves.
you and leave a large lump in your throat. Independently published by Pickle Yolk Books, it is something that belongs in every family’s library.
2. Indira by Devapriya Roy and Priya
Kuriyan: A graphic novel that takes three to four page breaks for a prose meta-narrative — the fictionalised story of the writing of such a book — it introduces India’s third prime minister Indira Gandhi, and the highs and lows she
took her nation through. It is surprising that India had its first woman political leader over 50 years ago, whereas America still has not elected a woman as president (or vice-president). There are lots of biographies of the Mrs Gandhi, but it is to Roy’s credit that she searched through material (and travelled to erstwhile Allahabad) to find little-known detail that also complemented the drawn-panel format. She obviously had help from Indira’s daughter-in-law Sonia and grand-daughter Priyanka, and the book is all the more interesting for it. It is worthy of Joe Sacco (Palestine) and of Guy Delisle (Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and Burma Chronicles). Your young daughter will treasure this masterpiece.
3. The Adventures of Padma and a Blue Dinosaur by Vaishali Shroff and
Suvidha Mistry: The attraction here is a mind-blowing one for kids who have been raised on Jurassic Park, etc: that India was also a significant home for dinosaurs. It turns out that the world’s third-largest fossil site is in India, along the banks of the Narmada river in Gujarat. At the site at Rahioli, Indian paleontologists have discovered the fossils of dinosaurs from India, such as Titanosaurus, Indosaurus, Laevisuchus, Isisaurus, and Jainosaurus. How many Indians do you know who know that these dinosaurs walked their homeland hundreds of millions of years ago?
And while the book is illustrated in lovely pastels colours, the writer tries too hard with the tale of an orphan and her grandma who, while tending cattle, have an adventure with a blue dinosaur. Still, half the book is thankfully non-fiction, and no doubt another reason for youngsters to feel proud of their heritage.
4. Delhi Thaatha by Chitra Viraraghavan: This is a mixed-art story of the author’s great-grandfather, an eminent philosopher who became India’s second president: S Radhakrishnan. Illustrated by Sunandini Banerjee and with sketches from P Balasubramanian, it charmingly tells the story of a great man without bombast or hagiographic exaggeration. Here, the great man is simply an elder loving relative who, though living in a palatial house in Delhi, brought to his personal relationships the same qualities that made him a towering public figure.
Other memorable books include: The
Little Rainmaker by Roopal Kewalya. Set in 2027, 10-year-old Anoushqa has never seen rain, but sets out to make it rain to fulfil her dying grandfather’s last wish. It is Indian dsytopian fiction with a much-needed warning about climate change. The Tree Boy by Srividhya Venkat, about a boy named Sid who turns into a tree and has an entire ecosystem depending on him. And lastly, Amrita Sher-Gil: Rebel with a Paintbrush, by Anita Vachharajani, a wonderful biography of the artist of Indian and Hungarian parentage who defied social convention and lived her art. It makes one optimistic about Indian children’s books to come in 2019.