In Search of Sita
As international delegates meet at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, Prabhu Guptara considers the difficulty of obtaining Indian books in Britain
Indian publishing is a mammoth unknown in Britain. In English alone, Indiaproduces more books than any other country in the world, except the United States and Britain. With 350 million people under the age of 25, it is natural that it should have numerous children’s books.
Why is Indian publishing so little known in Britain? There is variety of reasons. For instance, though India has some very modern presses, and printing is relatively cheap, the production quality of Indian books is not high. The appearance is often poor. Laminated covers and colour illustrations are practically unknown. The binding can be shoddy. But, given these limitations, the quality of the artwork can be lavish; and many of the disadvantages are compensated for by the cheap prices at which these books may be bought, and the joy at discovering a new world of stories – and a new world through them.
The single most important reason why Indian publicationremain unknown in Britain is the simple one of ignorance regarding their availability. Because of the peculiar conditions of the Indian book industry, and its relations with bookshops here, Indian titles are rarely sent to the copyright depositories such as the British Library; few are to be found even in standard booklists such as Whitaker’s or the British National Bibliography.
If one wants to find Indian publications in Britain, then, one has to make contact with shops that specialize in such books. Older establishments such as Soma Books and Books from India are relatively well known within the market, but there are two newish ones that ought to be better known.
The first is Sangam Books (51 Manchester Street. London W1M 6JD) which is the sole agent, outside Asia, for Orient Longman – one of India’s largest houses and, as the name suggests, an Indian-owned firm which grew out of the pre-independence Indian network of the Longman Group. Sangam’s current catalogue lists over a hundred children’s books, though some of these are editions of western classics.
Del Manuel’s five Gopi Stories are fairly typical of Orient Longman’ primary books, which tell a multi-stranded story, with five or six black and white illustrations to 30 pages, on average. The sentence structure is simple, but some of the sentences are unexpectedly long, and the books assume a fairly wide vocabulary; the cultural context of an Indian child is clearly different from that of a British child, but it is also a context that would hardly suffer, by comparison on linguistic grounds, with that in Britain.
This is also clear from the three-book series, Old Time Tales of India by M. Choksi and S.. L. Ludchedkar, which are intended for use as textbooks and have the usual imp-pedimenta of questions, glossary, and so on. The stories are selected from the Buddhist Jataka tales, which are episodes from the earlier births of the Buddha as man, animal, bird, insect, and tree-spirit, as it is believed.
Some authors have made a reputation for themselves as children’s writers, or example Ruskin Bond and Shanta Rama Rao, even though they have written for adults as well – Bond having won, in fact, the John Lewellyn Prize for his first novel. But Western authors rarely seem to write abouttheir own childhoods for children, and Bond’s Once Upon a Monsoon Time must be mentioned as a warm and wonderful re-creation ofan unusual British-Indian childhood. He was brought up in the hills, and his story is by turns humorous, light-hearted, and marked by the pathos of losing his father. When he returns to India 20 years later, he finds the place changed of course, but it is still home, and it was natural for him to decide to stay.
More typical of Bond’s work is Angry River (40p), in which Sita’s quiet life on a river-island is disrupted by floods. When the floods subside, normal life cannot return, for grandmother has died:
"Sometimes the river is angry, and sometimes it is kind”, said Sita.
“We are a part of the river”, said the boy, “We cannot live without it”. It was a good river, deep and strong, beginning in the mountains and ending in the sea.
Shanta Rameshwar Rao is from south India,and her stories have a markedly different flavour. Her most ambitious undertaking is the series Indian Myths and Legends, four of which are collected in The Legend of Manasa and Other Stories (£1.00); Sati and Uma, Savitri, and Ruru and Markandeya are other published titles. Chathu the Elephant Boy (60p) is an expanded version of the Malayalam-language short-story, expanded in consultation with the original author, K. N. Pillai.
Established Indian authors have also written for children, for example the poet Kamala Das (Panna,£1.00), the novelist Anita Desai (Cat on a House Boat), and the dramatist Pratap Sharma (The Surangini Tales). All these books are available from Sangam, at 50p unless otherwise mentioned.
The other bookshop which ought to be better known is Shakti Bookhouse (146 High Street, Southall, Middx.). They are the sole agents for children’s books from Vikas, and though the real strength of that list is non-fiction for adults, Shakti supplements Vikas books with others, so that it offers a balanced and massive collection. Shakti’s own distinction is that it offers these books at the best prices, using a conversion price of 12 pence to a rupee. They claim that it is not their intention to undercut the other shops, and that this astonishing rate offers adequate profit. Market forces may cause them to collapse, or to revise their opinion – but in these straitened times, it is buyers who benefit in the meantime. And if Shakti succeeds in proving its point, a general lowering of prices may result.
The Times Educational Supplement 26 March 1982, page 27
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In Search of Sita