IN CONVERSATION
Opening doors to other cultures
PUSHPA CHARI
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A freewheeling chat with Uma Krishnaswami, an author of Indian origin writing for children in the U.S.
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“A bit of India always comes out in my writing.” Uma Krishnaswami
Photo: S. S. Kumar
Beguiling prose: Uma Krishnaswami.
It is a picture perfect monsoon morning in Chennai. The blazing yellow flowers of the laburnum trees are poised against steel grey clouds. There’s a hint of frangipani in the air and a couple of koels are belting out a jugalbandi in a rising cr
escendo of musical one upmanship.
As I read U.S.-based children’s writer Uma Krishnaswami’s Monsoon to Ishan, my 20-month-old grandson, he is overwhelmed as the happenings in the book spill into the garden. He points excitedly from the colourful tree in
the book to the flower-bedecked tree in the garden, imitates the parrots quarrelling in its branches like the birds in the illustration and holds his breath at the build up of anticipation for the rains conveyed in the liquid, minimal prose. And then, as if on cue, the rain comes pelting down exactly as in the book.
Uma, who is in my Chennai garden sharing this magical-real moment with us, says: “It is moments like this which make it all worthwhile… Like the other day in San Francisco when a little boy came up to me wanting to meet Hanuman. He had seen my book in a store”.
Unique flavour
Krishnaswami is part of a significantly growing band of Indian origin authors writing for children in the U.S., regarded as the Mecca of children’s literature.
To the combination of storytelling, plot, imagination, magic and artwork, the Indian-American writer often brings to children’s writing a unique flavour and sensitivity, a resonance compounded of traces of Jataka tales, folklore and Hindu mythology, nursery rhymes learnt in childhood, the sights and smells of street life in faraway villages and towns.
Uma’s Monsoon came, as she says “out of the smell of mangoes, the just wet fragrance of earth after the first showers. A bit of India always comes out in my writing”.
Indian origin writers of children’s literature have a nearly 100-year presence in the US. In 1929, the Newbery Medal for the most distinguished American children’s writing was awarded to Dhan Gopal Mukherjea for his novel Gay
neck: The Story of a Pigeon set in rural Bengal and moving to the battlefields of WWI.
After a not-too-brief lull, the Indian presence picked up in the 1980s with Mitali Perkins’ The Sunita Experiment followed by Rikshaw Girl with a Bangladeshi setting and First Daughter: Extreme
American Makeover, obviously referring to the Americanisation of the Indian protagonist.
With greater international interest in South Asia and its people in the past decade or so, a crop of young authors of Indian origin have begun to make a significant difference to children’s literature. Anjali Bannerjea’s gentle, funny books Looking for Babu and Maya Running,
Pooja Makhijani’s multicultural anthology Under Her Skin and Mama’s Saris, which celebrate loving family interactions and Vandana Singh’s quirky Younguncle Comes to Town bring
Kahani, a magazine brought out in Boston by Monika Jain, offers South Asian children abroad a way to see themselves in works of quality fiction and non-fiction.
Uma Krishnaswami’s first book The Broken Tusk, written in simple near poetic prose, comprises 17 stories about Ganesha, some known, some not. And they make the reader of any age feel, like the author, that “Ganesha, I
217;d like to meet anytime!”
Presenting Ganesha to American children could have been a daunting task with his 108 names, many stories of his creation, how he got his head and so on but Krishnaswami does it with “a touch deft and light” as TS Eliot would have put it, weaving sights, sounds smells and textures in lovely conversation-laced vignettes.
Among the intriguing little known tales are “Why Ganesha Never Married”, “The Dance” and a Mongolian legend featuring Ganesha called” The Birth of Phagpa”. Critics have hailed the book as “opening perceptual doors (to American children) of a vital and still alive Indian tradition”.
More doors opened with more books. The Shower of Gold presented 18 stories of heroic Indian women bringing Sita, Draupadi, Roopmati, Durga and Jhansi Rani within the intellectual orbit of the world’s children, “through t
he lens of their culture in stunning ways”. And in flowing, beguiling prose.
While Stories of the Flood explored the flood myth in cultures around the world; The Closet God: Moving to a New Place had Hanuman as dispeller of ghosts in a bubbly story. The recent Yoga Story: The
Happiness Tree captures the essence of yoga and how a child learns to be still through its practice.
Each of Uma’s books — and there have been many more — has beautiful illustrations and none is more beautiful than the colour-drenched pictures in another yoga book for 2-5 year olds which explains the various yoga postures featuring a stretching cat, a squatting frog etc.
Uma is currently writing a historical novel for children set in the California of the 1930’s concerning a community of Sikhs who settled and married local Mexican women. The community still exists (in California Singh is thought of as a Mexican name!) and the story is about a child of one such union.
Traversing cultures
So is the average American or Western child ready for books which are essentially Indian in colour, culture and tenor? Do cultural stereotypes such as India being exotic, esoteric, poverty ridden, etc, still exist in publisher’s minds?
Uma says, “Such stereotypes are receding though Americans would still see India as they wish to. As for the average American kid with schoolrooms full of Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese and Chinese the ‘other’ is not necessarily another culture. Besides, neither authors nor children need to carve out a single identity. We can belong to many places. Also, children traverse cultures easily as long as the story is told well…”
And the talented Indian origin writers obviously tell their story well. With universal occurrences “set in the customs and needs of a particular locale” different cultural norms and expectations played out in contemporary scenarios, it is no wonder that their stories are capturing the interest of children worldwide, particularly in the heterogeneous mix that is America.
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