Children
Abbu Khan ki Bakri is a timeless tale written by the third President of India Dr. Zakir Hussain, who has written many stories for children. Dr. Zakir Hussain was born in 1897. The story, reflecting those times, is about the situation of slavery, the pain of bondage and the frustration and struggles for freedom. The story takes us to a Himalayan village of Almora where Abbu Khan resides. He rears goats and sheep with care.
Around five-six years ago, it would have been easy to say that nothing was happening in the world of Marathi children’s literature. I would have simply left my comment at that. But since the situation today has changed, it needs a mention as well. It is high time that we acknowledge the bits and pieces of contributions and explorations, initiated and ongoing despite the odds.
This series of 30 early grade readers has been developed in Marathi by Pratham Books to support guided and independent reading in grades 1-3, when children are learning to read.It is now widely recognized by educationists (though not practiced in most of our schools) that textbooks alone are insufficient for teaching learning of language and literacy.
Children’s Literature in Telugu is said to have had a golden period during the decades of 1960s and 1970s when a monthly magazine Chandamama was very popular. It was published in more than ten Indian languages. It had a fairly common structure with two-three serials, a Vikram and Vetal story and other stories dealing with test of honesty, cleverness and spontaneity, finding a successor to the throne or a bride for the son.
A painting could be worth a thousand words but a picture book is worth much more, since the illustrations contribute much more to the story than the text. A series of ten Telugu picture books was published by Manchi Pustakam in association with Telugu Association of North America (TANA) in November 2021. Each of these books, adorned with colourful illustrations, is twenty-four pages long. Here is a sneak peek into what the books have in store for the readers.
If I recall my childhood, we grew up surrounded by books, books of all kinds. Many of them had beautiful illustrations. Children and books were as if integrated.There were many authors in Bangla who used to write for children and all were among the established ones such as Upendra Kishore Roy Choudhury, Leela Majumdar, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Tarasankar Bandopadhyay, Sukumar Ray, Sharad Chandra Chattopadhyay.
True to the genre of science fiction, this volume is teeming with aliens and spaceships, time travel, robots, the future world and amazing scientific inventions that tempt wrong-doers and children alike. A wonderful collection of sci-fi short stories that will tantalize young minds.The stories are told from the perspective of a child-hero who interacts with the adult world or even aliens on his own terms.
Konkani is spoken in four States—Goa and the coastal regions of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala. There are 40 lakh speakers, of which about 16 lakhs are in Goa. There are five scripts used for writing Konkani—Malayalam, Kannada, Devnagari, Roman and Arabic. Recently, the Konkani community from Kerala decided to switch the script from Malayalam to Devnagari. With such diversity, an apparent challenge that one may encounter in Konkani literature is of transliteration.
To comment on the current status of literature in Gujarati, overall and on contemporary literary trends, would be a contentious matter. It would be pertinent, thus, to limit the scope of this write-up to sharing some contemplations on the current status of Children’s Literature (CL), based on our experiences and engagement.The scenario in Gujarati CL is not encouraging.
Language is not only a means of exchange of ideas, it is one of the most reliable mediums of expression. It is also an importance means for the development and social-cultural identity of a society. Without language, humans are incomplete and disjunct from their traditions.
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.
2021
‘It is day 7 of the lockdown and everyone says the skies are blue again.’This is the first sentence of Jamlo Walks, spread over two pages against a blue backdrop, a calendar with the dates from the 24th to the 30th of March crossed out, and a few leaves of an indoor plant beside a window looking out into a blue sky with some wispy clouds.
2021
Isn’t it a fascinating sight to see a one or two-year-old mimicking the elders of the house in the way they talk on the phone or take a dupatta (scarf) across their shoulders? A student in my school similarly tries her hand at impersonating the way her library teacher reads aloud stories in class. She takes a similar tone, attempts pauses, and waits for a reaction from her audience just like the teacher does while reading a story with them.
Pinkoo Shergill has a longstanding dream that grows bigger and bigger till it fills his head and he can think of nothing else. It’s all about what he dreams to be…An astronaut? A fire engine driver? Spiderman? No! He wants to be the greatest pastry chef ever! For him life revolves around buttercream icing, strawberry syrups, rainbow sprinkles… as also whisks and spatulas, pots and pans. His three-tier cakes are masterpieces that are already the talk of the town, and his friends simply drool over all his creations.
This is a story about a little girl Bumoni in an Assam village who sees wild elephants on a fairly regular basis because they come to eat the bananas growing in her backyard that she herself loves and needs to eat. From an adult’s point of view, this is a situation of human-animal conflict. But Bumoni thinks of an innovative, compassionate way to keep the herds away from her family’s banana crop. Then she goes a step further and comes up with a way to keep the elephants away from the village fields.
2021
The book introduces children to the voting process in a democracy. Mini is a class VI student with a buzzing mind that runs in three directions at the same time. Now school elections are approaching and of the four candidates, Mini must vote for the one she thinks will be a good school captain. Everyone is encouraging Mini to decide on her own.
Trumpet Calls: Epic Tales of Extraordinary Elephants by Nalini Ramachandran is divided into nine chapters beginning with ‘What is an Elephant’ and ending with ‘The Keepers of Memory’. Each chapter has a short introduction to the theme in focus, a short ‘ele-fact’ i.e., facts about the elephants and additional information which is connected to the main story. The black and white illustrations are attractive primarily due to sketches and drawings by Annushka Hardikar.
Young readers and budding artists will be entranced by the beautiful illustrations that hit you as soon as you open The Girl who was a Forest: Janaki Ammal by Lavanya Karthik. The words have been chosen with care and are as intense and deep as they are few. It is a book for all age groups with the illustrations being an endearing, additional pull factor.
These are words from Saumya’s last letter to Duaa in the book Postbox Kashmir. This is a non-fiction book holding sixteen brief yet substantial letters between the two girls. The letters are strung together by Divya Arya giving elaborate historical details of events in and around Kashmir and references related to discussions that happen between the pen pals.
It is not unusual to hear children of all age groups chanting the Hanuman Chalisa. They learn to chant it with ease from their elders because of a magical lilt in the lyrics and a charm about the language known as Awadhi, a dialect of Hindi.In My First Hanuman Chalisa, the authors and the illustrator have remarked in the opening pages that they were taught the 40 verses of the Chalisa by grandparents or parents.