[Reader-list] How to create storybooks for a plural world

[Chintan Girish Modi]

>From http://www.himalmag.com/read.php?id=4501

Beyond the 'national' child: How to create storybooks for a plural world

By Deeptha Achar and Deepa Srinivas

Any intervention into the field of children’s reading in India must take
into account the new investment in childhood that came following
Independence. This included a major overhaul of the colonial education
system, alongside initiatives such as the Children’s Book Trust, National
Book Trust, Nehru Bal Pustakalayas and Bal Bhavans. Several key literary
figures and artists were part of this endeavour, and a substantial number of
remarkable children’s books were published. Popular initiatives such as the
Amar Chitra Katha comics series also participated in this enterprise. Yet
more than 50 years later, it comes as a shock to find, in book after book
that came out of these projects, both protagonist and audience so obviously
elite and upper caste. It took the women’s movement and activists raising
questions of caste and religious community for the public to realise how
systemic, and how related to the nature of power and authority, these
representations were.

In India, children’s reading materials were long (and continue to be)
addressed to an urban, middle- and upper-caste child in ways that reflected
his or her economic resources, family relationships, beliefs, school
experiences, food habits and language. They recorded and endorsed the world,
the sensibility and the authority of this child, resulting in a self-assured
hold over the world that was later a key enabling factor in such children’s
success. Other children, however, were not provided with such psychic
support. In such books we hardly ever found a child who had come to school
hungry and sits there dreaming about food, for instance, or one who had to
scheme in order to acquire books for class. Children from different contexts
sometimes did find a place in these stories, but were generally forced to
establish their ‘smartness’. A tribal boy, for instance, needed to establish
that his knowledge of the forest can be valuable for his urban, middle-class
classmates; a disabled girl must excel as a craftsperson. Even in the case
of middle-class children, only a restricted set of situations were generally
admissible, thus glossing over the fact that children often lead complex
lives. We rarely encountered a child whose mother was depressed or one who
was coping with a death in the family – such children lived with the
knowledge that they must anxiously guard such secrets.

Recently, the Andhra Pradesh-based Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s
Studies did a study in a few government schools in and around Hyderabad, and
found a disabling gap between children’s home life and the assumptions on
which school culture was built. Most of the children who attended these
schools shouldered responsibilities in their families, and contributed
towards their economic survival; these children’s sense of worth was
positively constituted through the role they played. Yet such lives had no
legitimate space in the education system. In fact, set against this dominant
culture, these childhoods could only appear as deficient, deprived of play,
pleasure and parental guidance. Children often dropped out because the
school remained a forbidding place, identified not only with abuse from
upper-caste teachers but also with the absence of recognition and
endorsement of themselves or their home lives.

The dominant idea of ‘childhood’ is today so firmly entrenched in most
people’s minds that it is difficult to imagine it as historical. Yet around
the world, this naturalised idea emerged as a separate entity only around
the mid-17th century, as a result of key shifts associated with modernity.
Up to that period, there was no ideological separation of the categories
‘child’ and ‘adult’. A child was simply a small adult, an apprentice rather
than a full-fledged worker. In the absence of this distinction, it was
impossible to publish books for a non-existent audience. With the
philosophical focus on the child associated with the European thinkers John
Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, a paradigm shift took place,
suddenly rendering possible a branch of writing for children. From its very
beginnings, children’s literature has thus assumed the responsibility of
moulding a ‘national child’ and, in the process, has taken on a subtly
disciplinary and more obviously normative form. The result, however, is the
marginalisation of non-normative childhoods.

*Different Tales, *a series of children’s books developed in recent years by
Anveshi (including by the writers of this piece), tries to find images and
stories that mirror and dignify the marginalised childhoods of the majority
of Indian children. (This first phase features books in Telugu and
Malayalam, translated also into English, with the plan being to extend
gradually into other Indian languages.) The stories explore conflict without
pushing for secular-national or other established universalist resolutions,
and mark a subtle shift from the norm as they validate the worlds of
non-mainstream children. In contrast to mainstream representations of
childhood as a period of innocence and vulnerability that is marked off from
the adult world of responsibility and work, in these stories children take
pride in working alongside other family members. Even the toys they devise
and the games they play rehearse everyday routines and exceptional events of
agricultural life and community living. While most of the existing
children’s books address the middle-class, upper-caste child, these books
speak from within other worlds.

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