INITIATIVE
Stories from the margins
DEEPA SREENIVAS
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While children from marginalised contexts may find new and enabling self-images, middle class children meet new characters, settings, and dilemmas through Different Tales.
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“Time to buy old textbooks? Wondering how to do it? Our young hero shows how to cut an Ambani-like deal,” promises “Three Fourth, Half Price, Bajji Bajji”. There are many more such allurements in Different Tales, a new series of illustrated storybooks for the age group 9-14 that focus on the lives of Indian children from small town or village communities who rarely find a place in the mainstream of children’s reading.
Contemporary theories of education/culture have pointed out that standard reading materials address an urban, middle-class, and invariably ‘upper’ caste boy or girl. Most texts are designed for such children and reflect their everyday routine, emotions, economic resources, family relationships, beliefs, school experiences, food habits, and dialects. Measured against this ‘norm’, children from different contexts have to continually establish their smartness in such stories. A blind boy may have to demonstrate his musical talents in the class; an adivasi girl must prove that her knowledge of the forest could be of use in a modern world.
Such images can have debilitating consequences for children from marginal groups — undermining their self-worth and making it difficult for them to imagine themselves as part of the nation-world. Exposed to such a limited idea of culture or values, even middle class children grow up without the cultural and emotional intelligence necessary to engage with others in a complex society. Different Tales provides a mirror where children from marginalised contexts may find new and enabling self-images, while middle class children meet new characters, settings, and dilemmas as well as different sources of laughter and strength.
Break new ground
There are several stories that break new ground. Mohammed Khadeer Babu’s “Bajji Bajji” is about a boy who wangles a smart deal for the second hand notebooks that he will recycle and use. The reader chuckles at his exploits, yet the story is also a testament to the large numbers of children who must routinely pull together every resource to manage the demands of life and school. When in another story he describes his family cooking and sharing a mouth-watering Sunday lunch of meat, it dawns on us that the pleasure of eating meat is a well kept secret in the world of Indian stories. Gogu Shyamala’s “Braveheart Badeyya” is about the only child from the Madiga quarter to go to school. It is hard to miss the pride that his people have in him; he in turn owes his intelligence not just to his school lessons but to the community where he acquires the skills of everyday living in difficult circumstances. From them Badeyya also learns the art of shaping leather into objects of utility, as also anger and love.
In Shefali Jha’s “My Friend the Emperor” (Spirits from History) 12-year-old Adil, the lone Muslim student in his class, feels uncomfortably implicated during a history lesson on the Battle of Khanua. As he puts it to his father that evening: “History does not like me.” But then a mysterious stranger from another time provides him with a glimpse of a history that does not push him to take sides. The “Sackclothman” is narrated from the perspective of Anu, who is learning to deal with grief and depression in her family after the sudden death of her sister. School is over and she is at a loose end with little to do except the routine ‘describe-your-summer-holiday’ assignment. Though she fancies herself as a writer, the pages in her notebook remain blank until she forms an unlikely friendship with the village madman, who provides her with a rare understanding of her own situation and a story that may well become a children’s classic. Jayasree Kalathil’s account subtly reworks the distance between the mad and the sane, while Rakhi Peswani’s embroidered visuals take another medium of girlhood creativity — and sackcloth itself — on an altogether unprecedented journey.
Parallel look
The art work is done by a group of distinguished artists from Baroda among them Gulamohammed and Nilima Sheikh, B. V. Suresh, K.P. Reji and a number of thoughtful younger artists. It breaks with the idea of illustration as embellishment of the narrative, and offers a parallel education in looking, seeing and thinking. Nilima Sheikh plays with the comic strip style to depict a sequence in the battle between hero and demon. But her lyrical approach resists a linear good versus evil representation. Chinnan draws on the Mughal Miniature tradition to portray the journey of soldiers in the historic battle between Rana Sanga and Babur but re-locates the event in a Kerala landscape, meshing together history, fantasy and the present.
Different Tales was developed by the education initiative of Anveshi, Hyderabad and financed by the Parag programme of SRTT. The stories are available in Telugu (see www.anveshi.org) as well as Malayalam and English (see www.dcbooks.com).
The author is a Fellow, Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies, Hyderabad
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