Very few people in this country grew up with access to books, and those of us in that group whose diet of Indian children’s literature constituted Panchatantra folktales, Amar Chitra Katha mythologies and an assortment of Mulla Naseeruddin or Tenali Raman stories, tend to look at the new wave of Indian children’s literature with awe. Interactive books, wordless books, and graphic books offer children and adults exciting entryways into literature. Fantasy novels, and tales of mystery and adventure published by Indian houses create hope that children don’t have to turn westward for variety.
But is what is new and exciting for well-meaning adults necessarily exciting for a child who is growing up with this normal? Are the vast majority of these books worth children’s time and the library’s shelf space?
Prior to joining the Bookworm Library team, I was swept away by the novelty and production quality of contemporary Indian children’s literature too. Interactive books of stunning quality such as those by Art1st shifted the imagination of what a picture book biography could be. But in this awe, the lens of criticality and scrutiny that I was trained to apply while reading literature for adults was unknowingly dropped while reading these genres and formats and contexts that I did not have access to as a child. I repeated the adage that books act as windows into different worlds and hold up mirrors that showcase our own worlds (Rudine Sims Bishop, 1990). But by giving this affordance to all literature for children mindlessly, I started to hold children’s literature to lower standards than literature for adults. When children’s books hold open windows, why do we not ask whose lives we are seeing and how authentically those lives are shown?
Wonderfully crafted children’s books from around the world have shown us that they have the power to move, evoke and touch a reader’s heart in spite of and sometimes because of its simplicity, sparseness and silences. Why do we not hold homegrown literature for children to the same standards? Why do we think that for children less is also acceptable? In a recent scholarship session held in preparation for a book review committee, we talked about how the inception of a non-fiction book for an author was a passing conversation she had with the driver of her taxi. We read this against the fact that this is an author who publishes multiple non fiction books of different themes and in different formats in a single year. This led us to question the intent of the author in writing the book and the degree of her immersion in its subject matter. Why do we think it is normal that one author churns out over five books over the span of a year? What happens to quality when an author values numbers?
At Bookworm, a latent critical lens was nurtured and allowed to nourish and grow, because the library believes that children deserve the best stories, the most unique stories, the most authentically told stories, the most joyful stories, the most moving stories, and the most intelligent stories. The library curates its collection with a strong sense of social justice, because a library’s work is not neutral.
In an early collection curation meeting, a colleague pointed out that a child’s muddy feet had been exoticised in the book, though it was an entirely normal thing for the majority of the children growing up in this country. We decided to keep the book out of the shelves because it had an urban, upper caste gaze. Why do we not ask who is writing the story and whose story is being written? In another instance, a book set in Goa was not added to the collection (though books on children of Goa are few and far between) because the representation of Goa in the illustrations—the casual addition of a tattooed-father clad in a printed shirt and the repeating presence of nuns on the road, for instance—betrayed an external gaze. Responses like these from the team at Bookworm allowed me to read without having to be neutral and without fear of offending. Book curation huddles helped me see that themes like caste continue to be absent in mainstream publishing even as books are produced to fill gaps in the market. While we are quick to call out tokenistic representation in popular media, why do we not do the same for writing for children that seeks to fill a gap in the market?
In many ways, I learned to read again in the library. The library, though affected by the market, is not guided by it. It is guided by its children and their reading diet and the worlds that books open out reign supreme in the library. As an adult who works in the library that became my lens too, and helped me unlearn patterns of indifferent and neutral reading.
Blog written by: Samantha Kokkat