Remember sharing midnight feasts with blue-eyed English girls in boarding schools like St Clare’s and Mallory Towers, and deriving vicarious gastronomic pleasure from such mysteriously exotic fare as potted meats and anchovies? Or navigating misty moors and clambering stormy Dover cliffs in the breathless trail of adventurous children watching for secret signals from lighthouses?
Well, take a look at your child’s bookshelf today, and you’ll find all that has changed. And not just because fantasy is the new...well, everything, but because children today have easy access to a colossal array of authors and genres from diverse geographies.
Thirty years ago, contemporary literature available to children growing up in India consisted of a handful of British authors led by the impossibly English-sounding Enid Blyton. But then India went and liberalised its economy, and it was a game-changer for Indian kid-lit as much as anything else. The genre finally came in line with international trends, rather than remaining ossified in the remnants of its colonial past.
Suddenly, Indian bookstores and libraries were stocking what children across the world were reading—Judy Blume, Lemony Snicket, R.L. Stine (Goosebumps), Dav Pilkey (Captain Underpants), Francesca Simon, Mary Pope Osborne, Jeff Kinney, Terry Pratchett, Rick Riordan and Stephanie Myers, not to mention the ultimate game-changer, J.K. Rowling, She Who Should Not Even Be Spoken Of in the same breath as the others, since entire statistics can get skewed by the mere mention of her name.
Booked And Mobbed Robert Sabuda, leading pop-up book artist, at the Bookaroo
Rowling may have hit the sweet spot and re-triggered an entire industry, but more importantly, she can be credited with bringing more readers into the fold and reviving the hopes of children’s book publishers and parents alike, united (for very different reasons) in their battle to beat the always-lurking Electronic Game Monster and the Digital Bugbear.
The dark...er...digital side may yet win. But there is no doubt the other side is getting stronger, too, thanks not just to the Rowling effect, but a robust Indian economy, bolder publishers and imaginative events like the Bookaroo Festival of Children’s Literature in New Delhi last week.
Paro Anand, who has been writing for children since 1980, finds herself feeling more optimistic about Indian kid-lit than ever before. “Authors always wanted to write and push boundaries but could not find publishers—but now bottomlines are changing and publishers are willing to take more risks,” she says. Roopa Pai, the creator of the imaginary world of Mithya and author of the Taranaut series, goes a step further. “Finally, children’s literature (in India) has found a voice. It has come of age, primarily due to awards like the Crossword Award (which has a children’s fiction category) and festivals such as Bookaroo,” she says, predicting an Indian-brand internationally selling author within the next five years.
There is a degree of hope embedded in that prediction, but if Indian writers can rise to the occasion with better-written, more polished and inventive content, it may still come true. Meanwhile, foreign authors, sniffing opportunity, are clearly keen to be part of the action. The rock-star of the three-day Bookaroo festival, bestselling writer Anthony Horowitz, said the chance to glimpse India, “one of the most interesting and significant countries at this juncture, with such a huge, booming, economy”, made the festival unmissable for him.
Not just authors and publishers, Indian children are finding their voices too. As they travel (and surf the net) at younger ages, they are becoming more discerning and demanding in what they want to read—and in which format. Indeed, it is they who have impelled publishers to begin investing in market research and longer-term strategies like spending on book launches and supporting festivals such as Bookaroo.
For those who complain that such festivals depend on foreign writers to pull in the crowds, rather than Indian ones, consider this: Despite confirming attendance in August, three of the top Indian crowd-pullers invited for the event—Gulzar, Javed Jaffrey and Ruskin Bond—pulled out at the last minute. With no Bollywood or Bond to balance the star power of Horowitz and to lesser degrees Australian Wendy Orr, Robert Sabuda (the American creator of magical pop-up books) and Lian Tanner (Tasmanian writer of ‘low fantasy’), it was natural that the focus would default to a greater degree on foreign authors. The Indian topguns may have good reasons for not being there, but the collective disappointment of readers at their absence was tangible. “This lack of commitment shows exactly how seriously children’s literature is taken by the (domestic) industry,” said an author-organiser-volunteer. Undaunted, however, the organisers are planning to take the festival, three years old now, to other metros and then to smaller cities and towns.
It is a sound strategy—from preaching largely to the converted, they will be evangelising, too; and helping to move readers from, so to speak, literacy to literature. But even in its lone New Delhi avatar, Bookaroo, free and open to all, was strikingly inclusionary. Children from Taktse, a small school in Sikkim, mingled with children with special needs and poor kids of migrant workers. It took a non-Indian guest to point out the value, in international terms, of what was on offer. Said British parent and New Delhi resident Anne Philpott, who was there with her two kids: “I wouldn’t get this in London. And if I did, it would be £5 per ticket.”
The festival also scored with its strategy of making creative fiction exciting through book-based activities, games, shadow-puppetry, make-your-own-graphic novel and a very popular doodle wall. This year, the biggest hit was performance story-telling, exemplified by Dastangoi, and a presentation by the talented Jeeva Raghunath (a children’s performance storyteller from Tamil Nadu). Despite language barriers (Raghunath incorporated Tamil songs, and Dastangoi a high-level of Urdu) kids sat enthralled. Meeting writers in the flesh added another dimension to the experience, and autographs and photos with authors were in high demand.
Unsurprisingly, Horowitz, bestselling creator of the Alex Rider teenage spy series, was virtually mobbed during book signing sessions. “Something magical happens when you read,” he told a dhurrie-full of spellbound children, hanging on to his every word. “You can build worlds in your head, create an entire universe. It is like a film only you can see.”
Cindy Jeffries, Jeeva Raghunath and Anthony Horowitz at the New Delhi Bookaroo
A positive trend, visible at Bookaroo and beyond, is that parents, with more money in their own pockets, have not just loosened their grip on the purse-strings; but have also segued from being prescriptive and coercive to turning ‘pro-choice’. “They are moving forward from buying just ‘safe’ literature that is educative and didactic, and letting the fun element come in. I see many more children choosing their own books at stores today,” says Anand.
Publishers and authors at Bookaroo said children’s literature was the fastest expanding segment in the publishing industry, growing annually at an estimated 15 per cent. There are few hard numbers available to back that estimate because, as Vatsala Kaul Banerjee, who heads the children’s books’ division at Hachette, explains, “There has been no comprehensive or conclusive research effort in children’s publishing.”
However, the setting up of independent children’s bookstores like Eureka—its multiple sales counters at Bookaroo had long lines on all three days—and growing footfalls at the festival (an estimated 11,500 this year, more than double last year’s, according to the organisers) seem to bear out the assumption that children’s books are selling better.
Boosting book sales apart, festivals like Bookaroo may also help to create tomorrow’s Ruskin Bonds and Paro Anands, and who knows, a Horowitz or two, if not a Rowling. Avid reader and writer-in-training Rhea, a confident teen, has attended every Bookaroo festival, participated in workshop sessions and reads books without a pause. “I’m an author myself,” she says, a little self-consciously, “and it’s just so inspiring to be here.”
