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STORIES TO GROW UP WITH
Sunday Star, StarMag, Aug 28, 2005
ONE publishing house that has taken steps to preserve its culture is Tulika Books of India. The company publishes folktales and children’s stories in English as well as various Indian dialects.
Some picture books come in various versions – the same story with the same illustrations, but in different Indian dialects.
Books from Tulika attempt to illustrate in concrete terms how multicultural societies hold together – in some instances they show how they can and must hold together, say Tulika’s editors through an e-mail interview.
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Tulika's books are produced in various languages. |
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“Tulika’s bilingual books and translations carry forward the celebration of a multilingual society and introduce children to two languages simultaneously,” say the editors.
Currently, all Tulika titles are available in English. Several are published in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi and Gujarati. Tulika hopes to introduce more languages in the future. They can be ordered from the publisher’s website, www.tulikabooks.com.
In the Under the Banyan series, folktales from different parts of India are selectively sourced and retold for the contemporary reader. They retain some of the style and mechanisms of folk tradition and the flavour of the region is evoked in the writing and pictures – words and phrases of the local language are slipped into the text, while the illustrative style of each book is adapted from traditional art forms of the region.
According to Tulika, children need to hear folktales, fairytales, myths, and legends as they receive their cultural legacy through these stories. They are then also exposed to cultural and historical aspects of their heritage. Also, the stories told by a group of people offer a window into that culture that reveals its values and worldview.
According to Tulika, India has the unique fortune of possessing the oldest written oral traditions in the world (Panchatantra, and the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics). If children are deprived of these stories, a very important and crucial element of their growth and development will be left out, say Tulika’s editors.
“Tulika’s books are all about telling a story. Some of the writers like Vayu Naidu (from Britain), Jeeva Raghunath (India) and Cathy Spagnoli (United States) are professional storytellers and their talent for storytelling comes through in their stories,” say Tulika’s editors.
Tulika’s books try to merge the various elements of text and illustrations to produce a unified text. According to Tulika, “the magic of the oral tradition is difficult to recreate. At Tulika, we are trying, in these changing times, to propagate folklore in a form that is both pleasing and accessible to the contemporary reader.”
Founded in 1996, Tulika now has 200 books in eight different languages. They cover much more than folktales: According to the editors, “We publish books on wide-ranging subjects, from serious issues like communal harmony, world peace (the Think About series), democracy and its condition in India, and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy (the In Focus series) to informative books about nature and the environment (the World of Nature series), and more light-hearted contemporary stories (the Simply a Story series).”
One of Tulika’s main concerns is to promote reading, to help children acquire this empowering and versatile skill and open young minds to art and literature. The focus is also to give children images of India to grow up with, images that go on to show how all its little parts come together to make it a rich and changing whole.
“No matter how advanced technology gets, nothing will replace the touch-feel-smell-keep quality of books. Books have immortalised man’s knowledge and they link the past, the present and the future. Books will remain forever our messengers from the longer past to the still longer future.”
Copyright Star Publications (M) Bhd
Related stories:
Death of the Local Folktale?
Have a Tale to Tell?
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