Eklavya’s four Big Book titles in Assamese—Xui Jua Fesa, Geetor Jadu, Appukutonok Kenekoi Ujon Koribo? and Khisiri—add a new aid in inculcating language in the pre-primary and primary aged children of the region.
Big Books aka oversized picture books designed for sharing, turn reading into a lively communal experience. The enlarged pages enable every child to clearly see the story unfold in words and images. The voice reading them aloud, shifting in pace, tone, and volume, brings the tale to life! The shared experience, wherever it may be, resembles the warmth of home where folk stories are passed down orally by parents and grandparents.
In Xui Jua Fesa, the forest is alive with voices, and an owl is desperate for sleep. All around it, the creatures chatter: the honeybee hums goon-goon, the crow shouts kaa-kaa, the deer goes kotaar-kotaar, and the kingfisher calls teu-teu. Just when silence finally descends at night, the owl takes its revenge—crying niu-niu-niu and waking the whole forest! The tale is filled with sounds that children can easily mimic. This provokes them to play with sounds and connect what they speak and hear to the written shapes on the page, which the child may not yet recognize as written speech. The animal sounds, being onomatopoeic and translated from the Hindi, are also faithful to the phonemic and phonotactic rules of Assamese, allowing the child to easily grasp them. Repetition plays a key role in early language acquisition, and given that the story is alluring and witty, children will keep returning to it.
Geetor Jadu springs from a Bundelkhandi folktale. It begins with a woman who is sad because she does not have a song to sing. She asks a neighbour where she got her songs from. ‘From the market.’ Taking her words at face value, the woman sends her husband out to the market to buy her one. After failing to find any such thing, he begins to make up songs of his own—singing khande khorok-khorok at a rat and susure sorok-sorok at a snake. The woman while practising these playful lines, unknowingly scares away a band of robbers! While this story invites the child to invent similar songs from their immediate surroundings, more importantly, it facilitates a handsomely fun sing-along for the entire class.
Appukutonok Kenekoi Ujon Koribo? tells the story of a kingdom besieged by an unanswerable question—how do they weigh the prince’s elephant, Appukuttan? While the adults scratch their heads, it is a child named Meenu who thinks differently. The Eureka moment comes with her ingenious idea, leading the elephant into a river and using a clever measurement technique based on the laws of physics. The tale sparks curiosity while encouraging children to think logically, experiment, and discover the joy of scientific problem-solving.
Khisiri plays with language just like Geetor Jadu and Xui Jua Fesa, but while the latter are grounded on the productive, communicative aspect of language, the former folktale utilizes the slipperiness of language to create a hilarious story. Bhola tastes porridge (khisiri) at his maternal home and loves it so much that he wants to eat it again. But on his way back, the word undergoes multiple corruptions after his encounter with a farmer, a hunter, and then a hotel—from kha sorai (eat, bird
), ur sorai (fly, bird), to boh sorai (sit, bird). This playful tale shows children how words can bend, slip, and create endless new meanings.
Each of the four books encourages interactivity, especially through recurring phrases that children can echo together. Children can use new words without changing the rhythm of the story. Reading becomes a shared, living experience rather than the slow, isolated task of sounding out letters. These earnestly translated stories will delight and engage the children in the joy of shared reading!