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Fantasies for our times
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Suniti Namjoshi’s adventure series for children casts the time-tested genre of fantasy in a contemporary mould
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Photo: R. Shivaji Rao
ON TARGET Suniti Namjoshi: ’I was fortunate in having a strong sense of who I was writing for when I started writing for children’
Suniti Namjoshi’s first foray into children’s writing was a strictly private affair. Her target readers were no more than her two nieces. Like all good aunts she had been hunting for good reading material for them and found that most book
s “tended to be about little children with pink faces living in England.”
So she wrote “Aditi and the One-eyed Monkey”, giving the protagonist her niece’s name and packing in some of her own childhood experiences into it. It was not meant for publication and having already established herself as a poet and a feminist writer, Suniti was not too keen to take on the tag of a children’s writer.
It came to be printed a few years later in 1985, when a London-based feminist publication asked Suniti if she would write a children’s book and she sent them the manuscript of “…One-eyed Monkey”.
A whole series
Aditi has since then been quite a jet-setter going on adventures to many parts of the world. An entire series of Aditi books have been brought out by Tulika, the Chennai-based children’s publisher. The six and seventh in the series – “Aditi and her Friends meet Grendel” and “Aditi and her Friends help the Budapest Changeling” – are just out and will be released in Bangalore on January 25.
The stories of Aditi and her curious assortment of friends, including Siril the Ant and Beautiful Ele the Elephant, are in fantasy mode. Suniti updates the traditional mode by including elements that are sure to appeal to a tech-savvy generation, including a laser-beam spewing dragon. The trajectory of Aditi’s travels, starting out from India and going to many corners of the world, appeal to an urban, English-reading child of today who has enormous exposure through multiple media channels.
But underlying all this, the stories of Aditi are still gentle tales dealing with emotions, relationships and courage. They speak of issues such as gender stereotypes, environmental pollution or racism without sounding moralistic.
Suniti’s ability to balance these various elements might partly stem from the fact that she has constantly sought feedback from children. “I was fortunate in having a strong sense of who I was writing for when I started out writing for children, otherwise I would have had trouble with the tone and the content of the book.”
In fact, the second in the series, “Aditi and the Thames Dragon”, emerged in the course of her interaction with children of Bangaladeshi origin in a school in London. “The children were desperate to have Aditi and her friends come to visit them in London. I wrote what they wanted me to write,” recalls Suniti. When she sent the story back to them, they loved it, but didn’t want the Prime Minister to be the one who comes to the rescue at the end. “In their heads the Prime Minister meant Madame Thatcher and they didn’t approve!”
By the time Suniti wrote the third book, “Aditi and the Techno Sage”, she had begun to actually enjoy writing for children.
“I had fun writing the books and the children seemed to have fun reading them.” The seventh adventure of Aditi is out and more are expected in the series.
Suniti does not buy the argument that contemporary children are too smitten by the visual media to care for the written word.
“In the past few centuries we’ve learnt to associate literature with books. What literature really has to do with is language and what poets can do with it. We do our thinking with language. It really matters. And in some way surely children are attracted to language – otherwise human children wouldn’t learn it so fast and so well.”
(The latest books in Suniti Namjoshi’s Aditi series will be launched at Crossword bookstore, Residency Road, on January 25, at 6.30 p.m.)
BAGESHREE S.
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