The Children’s Literature sector in India has seen many positive shifts in the last two decades. The market has grown, the work of the existing not-for-profit and for-profit publishers has strengthened, new voices and publishers have emerged, and efforts to strengthen the sector like children’s book awards have increased.
According to a recent article in The Print, there are currently over sixty-five literature festivals in the country—in different shapes, sizes, and colours. Most of them are centred in particular cities and venues; others are more versatile, some are peripatetic. Some focus on celebrities and particular genres, and for some the dominant theme is the promotion of a brand.
In Asoca: A Sutra, Irwin Allan Sealy attempts to present the ‘real man’ behind Emperor Ashoka the Great. He uses the spelling ‘Asoca’ to suggest a soft ‘k’, highlighting the way simple villagers pronounce the name, for his mother was not of royal birth. The ‘s’ is pronounced as a sibilant (‘assoka’) in place of the palatal ‘s’ of Sanskrit. Sealy employs the Pali forms for all the names, corresponding to actual usage, rather than written records—Susima, Mahinda, Sanghamitta rather than Sushumna, Mahendra and Sanghamitra.
Anees Salim’s The Odd Book of Baby Names is an expertly conceived novel comprising nine voices relating nine autobiographical narratives, all of which have one thread in common—each narrator has been begotten by the same kingly patriarch. The speakers, progenies born of legally wedded wives, or out of wedlock, many of them unknown to one another and unaware of their common paternity, narrate their quotidian experiences.
Koral Dasgupta’s Kunti is not the willful mother who apportioned a common wife to her five sons. She is the young, vibrant, beauteous and superbly intellectual woman who is wooed by the Gods. The book swings along the path of a celestial love triangle: Surya, Indra and Kunti. The offerings match every expectation of such an imperial romance—peevishness, jealousy, wile, guile, manoeuvrings and manipulations—melting the boundaries between the humans and the devas.
As the blurb on the attractive book cover says, Sonal Kohli grew up in Delhi and lives in Washington DC; she studied at the Sri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi and went on to do her MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, UK and The House Next to the Factory is her first book. These details are important because they help readers understand not just her writing style as a trained creative writer, but also her ability to capture a Delhi, and a world beyond, that we may all know and yet we get to know all over again when we encounter it in her simple yet evocative prose.