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Young World
Exotic travels with an Indian core
BAGESHREE SUBBANNA
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Suniti Namjoshi is back with a new book and promises more in the Aditi series.
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Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash
At the book launch: Suniti Namjoshi
grew up in India, but I live in England at present and have travelled a fair bit. And so, my characters start in India – that is their centre – and go here and there and look at different places,” says Suniti Namjoshi, explaining why the characters in her famous Aditi’s Adventures series keep visiting new and exotic places in every story.
Aditi and her friends have visited England, Canada, Italy and many more locations. In the latest book released, “Aditi and her Friends help the Budapest Changeling”, they find themselves in Hungary. But the stories in the series, seven brought out so far by the children’s publication Tulika, remain very Indian in their core.
Ms. Namjoshi wrote the first in the series, “Aditi and the One-Eyed Monkey”, because there were not many books in the market that had Indians as their characters and reflected the Indian experience. She wrote the story for her nieces and published it only much later. It was set in a real place, but had plenty of magical happenings packed in too. With her nieces giving constant feedback, she had the advantage of knowing exactly what excites children even as she wrote it.
“As a child I don’t think I had any modern story books that were set in India, and at the time I don’t think it bothered me. Children tend to accept whatever they are given as the norm,” says Ms. Namjoshi. “This doesn’t mean, though, that I did not become increasingly aware of the gap between my experience, which was Indian, and the world and language of the story books, which was English.”
Just like them
Her second book was written for Bangladeshi children in a school in England, who loved her first book and were thrilled that the girl protagonist was brown-skinned just like them. “It was clear that they were looking for someone or something they could relate to, for something that in some way belonged to them,” she recalls.
There has never been any looking back for Aditi and her creator since then. Even as the seventh book is released, Ms. Namjoshi admits she is now addicted to writing for children and promises to bring out many more in the series.
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