KidLit: It's Lit
The face of children’s books publishing is changing, from including more Indian writers, people with more diverse backgrounds, and themes that focus on real life troubles. Shruti Gokarn reports.
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Photograph by Shruti Gokarn
I sat at Kahani Tree, a children’s bookshop in the island city of Mumbai, with a pile of books in front of me, tears streaming down my cheeks, the sound of children and their parents white noise in the background. I had just finished reading Jerry Pinto’s Anya and Her Baby Brother, followed by Aai and I by Mamta Nainy, both picture books. They were a far cry from the books of my childhood: illustrated Mahabharata and Ramayana, Enid Blyton’s Noddy series, or books about fairies and goblins. These books spoke about having a sibling who is born different, or the pain of having to see one’s mother go through treatment for cancer.
Sayoni Basu, the co-founder of Duckbill, a publishing house for children and young adults, and Consultant Editor at Penguin Random House at present, tells me over a phone call, “... you have writers coming from very different backgrounds which gives a lot of diversity.”
Two things are evident at Kahani Tree and Trilogy, a library and bookstore, which has a room dedicated to kidlit--the diversity that Basu talks about and the predominant presence of Indian writers on their shelves.
To understand what has wrought this two-fold change I went down the rabbit hole of children’s publishing.
Once Upon a Time…
On 26th June 1997, a flash of lightning burst into the sky of children’s books—an event whose ripples would be felt in the world of children’s publishing in different parts of the world—the first book in the Harry Potter series was released. Anushka Ravishankar, children’s book author and co-founder of Duckbill Books recalls the impact of Harry Potter on the publishing world, “... I remember the moment when Harry Potter happened because suddenly everybody realised that children's books are potentially huge." For the first time The NewYork Times started a separate bestseller list for children’s books when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone remained on the bestseller list for more than 34 weeks, climbing to the number one spot in August 1999. What’s more is that the same list had both the first and the second Potter book.
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The Potter frenzy caught on in India too, with pre-booking of books, stores setting new precedents by opening at 6.30 a.m., and books being guarded with security equivalent to that at Gringotts. The idea that children’s attention spans cannot handle long books was brought into question with the extraordinary popularity of this series. Although the length also necessitated the higher pricing of the books, parents were ready to pay the extra buck. And where the buck is, so is the bang. Publishers and stores could not afford to ignore children’s books any longer; the red carpet had been laid on children’s bookshelves.
Basu points to this change driven by the market, “...there was a general perception of demand, and as publishers started publishing, more and more authors also kept writing more…and I think part of it is also that internationally because children’s writing became big and commercially successful, there was an awareness in India as well that this is something that one can do.”
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But smaller, independent publishing houses focusing on children’s literature had already made their presence felt pre-Potter. Chennai had become the epicentre of this indie publishing movement. Tara Books, the brainchild of Gita Wolf, was born in 1994, followed by Tulika which was opened in 1996 by Radhika Menon. The same year saw the birth of Karadi Tales co-founded by Shobha Viswanath, Narayan Parasuram, and C.P. Viswanath. This seed sprouted leaves, growing slowly but surely as it attracted talented writers and illustrators.
Photograph by Shruti Gokarn
Priya Kuriyan, a graduate of the National Institute of Design, tells the story of how she became a children’s book illustrator and writer, “I saw a book in our our design school library by a publisher in Chennai called Tulika books, it just intrigued me because, I had seen a lot of children’s books by different publishers but this particular publisher’s books looked a little different, there was, a very Indian quality to them. So, I thought, I also did an illustration course which I enjoyed a lot in college and I thought why not send some of the work I had done as part of my animation work to the publisher and just see where that goes. So when I was in my final year I kind of sent this, all this work on a CD to this publisher and then they immediately wrote back saying that we would like you to work on a story and that happened to be my first picture book, subsequently.”
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These books published by indie publishing houses had characters who looked Indian, had Indian names, and ate Indian food. In contrast to this, in the 1980s and even in the 1990s English-speaking, urban, upper middle and middle-class children were limited to reading books by non-Indian, predominantly white writers whose books had characters whose lives looked starkly different from theirs. The result of this was a whole generation left grappling for an idiom in which they could express their cultural experiences, believing that experiences worth having were available anywhere except in India.
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The National Book Trust and Children’s Book Trust did publish books set in India, peopled with Indian protagonists as Kuriyan recalls, “It was government funded and you know so there were no private individuals who were interested in starting a publisher producing good books for Indian kids specifically.”
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She also identifies another factor which must have acted as a catalyst in changing children’s publishing in India—the liberalisation that happened in the 1990s, with its consequent push towards globalisation and the space for the idea that we could have our own identity as Indian publishers. Liberalisation also gave people the financial wriggle room to accommodate non-academic children’s books in their budgets.
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Photograph by Shruti Gokarn
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And then what happened?
What started with a few independent publishers grew in the new millennium. Pratham Books was started in 2004, and so was the children’s section of Zubaan Books—Young Zubaan. The environmental NGO Kalpavriksh published its first children’s book in 2008. Duckbill was founded by Ravishankar and Basu in 2012, and Speaking Tiger started a children’s imprint named Talking Cub in 2015.
Ravishankar who worked at Tara before she co-founded Duckbill explains the impact of independent publishing houses on children’s literature, “There are a lot of new independent publishers now and that has made a huge difference; a lot of new authors started being published.”
While the opening of independent publishing houses has opened up opportunities for writers and illustrators in India, it is a challenge to turn writing for children into a livelihood. “Most writers or illustrators or writer-illustrators have a day job unless they are employed by a publishing house. They have to do this on the side and balance well-paying work with this kind of work,” says Rajiv Eipe, writer and illustrator. This is a sentiment echoed by other writers and publishers.
Basu takes a long pause before answering my questions about the economics of this venture, "So, let’s say nobody is making a livelihood out of doing it. I mean the author and illustrator, obviously the publishers are getting paid by a publishing company.''
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She explains that since children’s books are less expensive and have smaller print runs, the kind of economic machinery which is employed for marketing of adult books is not used for children's books. Both she and Ravishankar rue the lack of review spaces for children’s books. In a scenario where space dedicated to reviewing books is shrinking, children's books barely get a look in, thus decreasing discussion around the genre and, in turn, awareness of these books.
The fallout of this is twofold. The fact that writing books for children does not pay enough to make a living automatically restricts the pool of authors to upper-class, urban writers. Secondly, it restricts access to everyone other than readers from the same social milieu-families who can afford those books.
Photograph by Shruti Gokarn
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Swati Roy, who has been organising the popular book festival Bookaroo for the past fourteen years refers to this gap, “Lovely books are being produced, but many of these lovely books are also not accessible to everybody, na?” The lack of public libraries and safe spaces where children can develop the reading habit is also a part of the problem. Schools don’t have libraries in general, and school librarians tend not to be involved in much other than administration.
This weighs particularly on independent publishing houses. Basu and Ravishankar successfully ran Duckbill for eight years, and even had a growth rate of twenty to twenty five percent per year but ultimately decided to accept Penguin’s offer to acquire them. Basu explains why they took this difficult but pragmatic decision, “Our growth was restricted by our capital.”
On the other side of this capital coin are big publishing houses. Where small publishing companies are ready to put their featherweight behind books that they love and believe in, the decisions of big companies are dictated by commercial concerns, thus tending towards the conservative.
Lest you think everything is bleak in the world of children’s publishing, there is another side to it. In fact, Basu chose to first speak about the joys of being in children’s publishing before she spoke about the challenges. Although it is in its nascent stages of growth, there are rumblings of disruption–where parents preferred to buy books with mythological or moral tales at one point, today some are buying books which have no didactic undertones but are purely written for fun—as is evident from the popularity of the nonsense verse written by Anushka Ravishankar.
In addition to this, children's book publishing has been infused with new voices. There are books about difficult subjects like death and illness written with extreme sensitivity. There are books which talk about divorce, same-sex marriages, mental health, and physical disabilities. For instance, Neel on Wheels by Lavanya Karthik has a character who has a physical disability. In Guthli Has Wings we meet Guthli, a trans girl, who is told one day that she has to wear ‘boy clothes’ and cannot wear her sister’s clothes anymore, In Sadiq wants to Stitch by Mamta Nainy and Niloufer Wadia, Sadiq is a Kashmiri boy who would rather embroider than take animals grazing as boys are expected to do. Sometimes Mama, Sometimes Papa by Nandini Nayar takes us into the world of Keya who has two homes because her parents are separated. In Red, Sagar Kolwankar portrays what happens to a child living in a conflict-ridden zone.
While we are discussing the themes of some of these books at Kahani Tree, Sanobar Ansari who works there makes an important observation, “There are the ones (parents) who are discerning and those who know how to make conversations after the book is ended which is what is needed when you're doing that kind of book.”
There’s a segment of parents who is ready to put in the effort required to do research before buying books. Mrinalini D'Souza, a 37-year-old teacher, whose son is now fourteen, says, “I didn’t know Indian writers back when he was a child, but now when I give books to my friends' children, I look for books by Indian writers.”
It also helps that schools are doing their part to create awareness about Indian writers. Ravishankar reiterates this, "One big change I find in my own experience over the many years that I have been in children's publishing is that schools have become much more proactive about acquiring books for the library, getting children to read, calling authors to do sessions with their children." Bookstores also do events at schools to promote books and writers. Children’s books have become important enough to get their own stand-alone lit festivals which are curated especially for children.
Another significant change which has set the ball rolling for children’s books in India is that discussions around books have moved into the digital space. There are a number of blogs on the subject—some of them written by people who are buying these books for the children in their lives and some by bookstores who have got onto the digital bandwagon with full gusto, making use of Instagram, conducting interactive sessions with authors for children on platforms like Zoom. For instance authors Bijal Vachharajani and Maegan Dobson Sippy have an Instagram handle called bam_books which curates books for children. Funky Rainbow, based in Bengaluru, live streams an event called Book Buzzaar in which they discuss new arrivals in their catalogue.
So is kidlit slowly coming into its own in India? The proof of this lies in the sales of books. About four years ago Bookaroo decided to stock only the books of the visiting authors at their festival and what happened was a bit of a surprise to the organisers themselves. Roy was very happy to tell me, “To my mind, it was a revelation because, our sales did not dip. We were able to focus on the participating authors and thereby focus on Indian authors. And, it was a very heartening thing to see that the sales did well. Authors were extremely happy to sign so many more books.”
Photograph by Shruti Gokarn
Will they live happily ever after? Maybe…
Kidlit in India is most definitely growing, both in terms of the themes and the number of writers. And independent publishers have a huge role to play in this. Sangeeta Bhansali of Kahani Tree agrees with this. “But basically we love the indie publishers because we find that they add a unique flavour to children's literature.” At the warmly lit Kahani Tree the shelves are lined with books by around twenty independent Indian publishers including books in Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati, with some of them being bilingual. “We help with library setup work across the country. Since the publishers we work with publish books in eight or nine different regional languages, we are able to customise our collection and include books in different languages, like for example in Bengali, Punjabi or in Oriya, as the requirement may be,” adds Bhansali.
Parents too want their children to read books in Indian languages. Dr. Jui Mandke, a 43-year-old paediatric surgeon, whose daughter is now five, reads books to her in Marathi and Hindi, particularly books by Madhuri Purandare.
Independent children’s publishing is almost out of its teenage years and is poised on the brink of adulthood. The next step now would be to get voices which are not just urban, upper caste, and upper class. Basu hopes this will happen over the course of the next few years. “There are still lots of gaps where one feels like one would like to publish, but one hasn’t found the right books, or the right writers to write them. So, I am hoping that over the next five years or ten years, the increase in the number of books being published will encourage more people to write.” She hopes that more Dalit voices, and voices from the northeast will be heard in children’s books and that the diversity that we see in India gets reflected in these books too.
Rajiv Eipe laughs while talking about the future of children’s books in India, “Where do I see it (children’s publishing) 10 years from now? I would like to see children's book creators, earning salaries on par with doctors and lawyers, and readership going up by many times by what it already is. Yeah, and people telling, more fun, silly, humorous stories not necessarily cause-related or extremely serious.”
I couldn’t agree more. Now that I have discovered the joys of reading children’s books as an adult, I know I am going to read them again. Manjiri Dhotre, who also works at Kahani Tree, echoed my sentiments when she told me how joyful she finds children’s books. She recalled that when she was reading to a child a book called Nani’s Walk to the Park, written and illustrated by Deepa Balsavar, she was struck by how the attention of the child was caught by a tiny, black cat which appeared on every page although so much else was happening in the book. And she said to me with the simple wonder of a child, “Follow the cat.”
I think I will follow the cat indeed!