Editorial Travel Humour Book Review Video Documentary Melting Pots Music & Art Carnatic Music Health & Fitness Poetry Prev Issue Next Issue

Book Name:Saloni’s Adventures in Thailand by Loveleen Kacker Publisher: Harper Collins India Price: Rs. 50

CHILDREN DON’T READ

Roshni didn’t even read Enid Blyton, which most Indian parents are proud to admit their children peruse. Enid Blyton is the height of Indian child literary these days, with paperback editions snapped up by the dozen. We tried to tempt her with the Famous Five and the Five Find Outers for quite a while before we gave up in disgust. The only evidence of any kind of success was a neatly colour co-ordinated row of backs in her bookshelves with pencilled notes in each book that said From Roshni’s Library. She lent them out to her classmates once in a while, I gathered, or if they were the Evelyn Nesbit variety, to me.

I suppose if we had discovered Loveleen Kacker, her mother and I would have had an easier time of it. The green eyed Saloni, who seems to be of an indefinable age - well, probably 15 like Roshni is now, since she traipses around with a boy and his twin sisters - appears to have incredible adventures in exotic locations. The exotic locations can be accounted for by the fact that most Indian parents feel that books should be educational. Loveleen does her best to slip in education under the guise of entertainment, though occasionally, the way it used to happen in medieval literature, the fun takes a back seat. I could quite imagine Roshni flipping through pages like, ‘Bangkok is an ancient city and here you see the three foundation stones of the Thai nation. They are also represented by the three colours of the Thai flag.’

Of course, the blurb at the back, ‘Saloni and her friends are in Thailand for a holiday packed with fun, food and, in Dev’s case, flirtation’ would certainly tempt her into a deeper reading of the 144 pages. However, it goes without saying that the flirtation does not rise to Sweet Valley heights - this is a book written by an Indian for Indian children.

Loveleen Kacker has, in fact, been advertised as the Indian Enid Blyton, in some not so distant past, but she I remember made no such attempts to justify her existence. Which might account for why she’s accused of political incorrectness these days. Saloni on the other hand demonstrates the superiority of the female species with aplomb, rescuing her boyfriend and his twin sisters from the hands of anti environmental trappers who are bent on exporting banned animals and their skins abroad. In fact, the pages demonstrate everything that any normal Indian school child would be familiar with from Star TV. However, kids these days are far too savvy to be taken in by this kind of stuff. When they outgrow Enid Blyton, they switch abruptly to the Sweet Valley series or ghost stories, or just skip reading children’s literature altogether in favour of adult sex and violence. Never having glanced at C S Lewis or Lewis Carroll.

The Saloni series is good if you want to con children into learning. They aren’t very thick, they have an adequate number of difficult words in then, and they do their best to teach. They are books parents would approve of - which makes them books that children would most probably disapprove of.

But hey girls these days slink into spaghetti strap dresses throw a jacket over their shoulders and slide out of the house - so presumably Saloni is right in line with that kind of thinking. At 15 Roshni has a boyfriend called Arnold and blasts loud funky techno music through the flat - she is hardly likely to be interested in sitting down to flip through the pages of Loveleen Kacker.

At 18 they get to strut up the catwalk in Miss India conferences - in fact, all the 8 year olds I know want to be Miss India at some stage in life. It’s a far cry from 13 year olds reading Enid Blyton and wondering whether they were going to explore secret tunnels in the middle of marshy moors. At 13 they’re dancing in the afternoon discos, provided their parents don’t find out.

Loveleen Kacker writes for a generation that has unfortunately forgotten how to read. Or prefers to read things in large print or watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and cool stuff like that. She throws in all the ingredients that are likely to appeal to them, with a dose of stuff likely to appeal to parents and hopes that the whole thing will be a success. India being the country it is, it probably goes down well in certain one-horse towns with no disco where the local politically inclined youth declare a ban on jeans and Valentine’s Day and other such signs of foreign corruption. 12 year olds with no outlet for the imagination can lap that up.

The newspapers are busily hyping the Harry Potter books, though those seem to be read only by those children whose parents want to be with it. Reading them is a sigh of cosmopolitan flair, of someone who has been around the world and wants to bestow that wisdom on a child. Roshni, of course, has not heard of Harry Potter - by now she’s too old for things like that. The Children’s Book Trust of India fights a losing battle every year with their thin paperback editions of tales from the Indian legends, because the definitive Indian writer for children in English has not yet emerged. There are other writers, of course, besides Kacker, like Mohini Kent, or a 16 year old who was briefly in the papers for writing Enid Blyton, doing Mallory Towers set in Bangalore, whose age was more the draw than her style, or Subhadra Sen Gupta .

As she gets older, Roshni drops the pretences = we have agreed that I will only give her clothes or music related things to feed her vanity on. She is, incidentally, studying JC - Julius Caesar to you and claims to have gone through an Agatha Christie. Children’s books for the most part are wasted on children - perhaps the only people who read them these days are adults.

Book Name:The Stupid Tiger. Upendra Kishore Raychaudhuri. Translated by William Radice Publisher: Harper Collins India Price: Rs. 50

WRITING IN TONGUES

Translation is a complex issue - turning one language into another, conveying the sense and the nuances so vividly in the new tongue that the reader forgets that it was originally written and conceived in another language altogether. For a long time, most translators believed in a literal rendition of what was written in the original language. The result was often stiff, pedestrian and plain dull. Very often the writers themselves were unsuccessful in conveying the sense of their work in another language, though Rabindranath Tagore did make some attempts at it with his versions of Gitanjali.

Tagore's work, in fact, as it was 'important' literature was the most often translated among the works of Indian writers. The rest went unread and unappreciated except by the audiences for whom their work was originally written.

Upendra Kishore Raychaudhuri, the grandfather of filmmaker Satyajit Ray, has often been called the Lewis Carroll of Bengali children's literature. His repertoire ranges from nonsense fables to folk tales like Tuntunir Boi or The Tweety Bird's Book. Most of them, because the Bengali language is so rarely translated, are unavailable to the non-Bengali and non-Indian reader. The folk tales are relatively simpler to translate than Tagore's lyricism and in this particular case, Upendra Kishore has met a worthy translator.

William Radice teaches at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies in London. He has a long history of translation behind him. William Radice read English at Oxford and studied Bengali under the late Dr Tarapada Mukherjee at SOAS. His publications on Bengali literature include two volumes of translations for Penguin Modern Classics: Rabindranath Tagore: selected poems (1985) and Rabindranath Tagore: selected short stories (1991). In 1994 Hodder Headline published his Teach yourself Bengali, and he has recently completed a new translation: Particles, jottings, sparks: the collected brief poems of Rabindranath Tagore.

In Bengal, in the 1900s, there was no original children's literature, just folktales or fairytales that were passed down by indulgent grandparents. Upendra Kishore wrote and published the first short stories for Bengali children. He originally wrote them to entertain his son Sukumar and Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, from which Satyajit Ray made his well-known film, was one of Upendra Kishore's short stories. Upendra Kishore based the stories in The Stupid Tiger on the folk tales extant in rural Bengal but gave the tales a totally original slant. He simplified the language so that a child could read and enjoy them without adult help. The retelling retains that original flavour. Radice keeps his language plain and flexible so that the stories come through as they were meant to.

The wily jackal outwits the powerful but stupid tiger. A dumb weaver becomes a rajah thanks to the machinations of his clever cat. They are retellings of stories that have their counterparts all over Europe and Asia, in Old Peter’s Russian Folk Tales or in the Fables of La Fontaine. As a result of the translation, their universal flavour becomes immediately apparent.

The edition also has attractive line illustration which, while they do not capture the original style and richness of nineteenth century Bengali woodcuts, are simple, original and entertaining. Bengali children are used to line illustrations with their stories, since the tradition of woodcuts is a deeply entrenched one. All in all, the book is a good gift for a seven or eight year old learning to read for the pleasure of it.

View and Post comment on this article