Storybooks for a Plural World

Here is an article that examines children's storybooks in India, the kind I grew up reading, like the popular series Amar Chitra Katha. I did of course enjoy them as a kid but as an adult, I've had to unlearn so much of their implicit worldview and "wisdom". Indeed, were I responsible for a child today, I'd agonize over exposing her to most Indian storybooks. Others might say the same about storybooks from other cultures, but for years now, I've wanted to write an article such as this about Indian storybooks:

... Yet more than 50 years later, it comes as a shock to find, in book after book ... both protagonist and audience so obviously elite and upper caste. It took the women’s movement and activists raising questions of caste and religious community for the public to realise how systemic, and how related to the nature of power and authority, these representations were.

In India, children’s reading materials were long (and continue to be) addressed to an urban, middle- and upper-caste child in ways that reflected his or her economic resources, family relationships, beliefs, school experiences, food habits and language. They recorded and endorsed the world, the sensibility and the authority of this child, resulting in a self-assured hold over the world that was later a key enabling factor in such children’s success. Other children, however, were not provided with such psychic support. In such books we hardly ever found a child who had come to school hungry and sits there dreaming about food, for instance, or one who had to scheme in order to acquire books for class. Children from different contexts sometimes did find a place in these stories, but were generally forced to establish their ‘smartness’. A tribal boy, for instance, needed to establish that his knowledge of the forest can be valuable for his urban, middle-class classmates; a disabled girl must excel as a craftsperson. Even in the case of middle-class children, only a restricted set of situations were generally admissible, thus glossing over the fact that children often lead complex lives. We rarely encountered a child whose mother was depressed or one who was coping with a death in the family – such children lived with the knowledge that they must anxiously guard such secrets.
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Over the years ... it has become particularly clear that the concept and metaphor of inclusion is inadequate to address issues of marginalisation in India today. Equality and self-respect of minorities requires a rearrangement of the way that the ‘life worlds’ themselves are imagined – a process that involves a critical pulling-away from old certainties. It suggests new frameworks in which we can think about the challenge of education in a plural world, but it also involves the creation of new narrative fragments, new figures, new settings and new dramas – ultimately, a new structure of feeling and knowing, a new idiom of speech. These are radical tasks. Yet they are necessary tasks for a contemporary aesthetic.

More here.

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[Namit]

Here is a Frontline article about a Tamil Play, UPAKATHAI, which "exposes the inherent social biases of and caste oppression by epic heroes." A familiar one is the story of Ekalavya:

Ekalavya was the son of Hiranyadhanus, the king of Nishadas, a community of hunters, which came at the bottom of the social ladder. A passion for archery takes "the dark young boy" to Drona, the Brahmin trainer of the five Pandava princes. Drona declines to accept him as his pupil because he is not a Kshatriya. Ekalayva returns to the forest and makes an image of Drona in mud. In its presence, he practises archery on his own, and becomes an expert. Later, when the Pandava princes are on a hunting expedition in the forest, their dog strays into Ekalavya's territory. Ekalavya seals the dog's mouth with arrows. Angry and astonished and envious of Ekalavya's skill, Arjuna, one of the princes, goes to Drona and reminds him of his promise to make him the greatest archer in the world. Drona, accompanied by Arjuna, meets Ekalavya and demands his right thumb as gurudakshina. Ekalavya readily cuts off his thumb and presents it to Drona. A happy Arjuna returns to the Pandava capital with Drona.
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"UPAKATHAI'' seeks to re-interpret the [story] from the victims' angle. In Pralayan's play, Ekalavya does not present his thumb as dakshina to Drona, but he is forced to part with it. The very base of the story as presented in the epic explodes when Ekalavya asks: "Why, as one born into a family of hunters, should I go to Drona for learn archery?" "For a hunter like me," he says, "bow and arrow are but extended fingers." "Perhaps Drona might have learnt archery from some of my ancestors," he quips.

More here.