The Hindu Business Line : Same ink, many hues

Feminist writer Suniti Namjoshi has been a teacher and now lives and writes in Devon, UK. Besides numerous poems, fables and articles she is the author of works such as The Authentic Lie, From the Bedside Book of Nightmares and, of course, her first book of fiction, Feminist Fables. That’s why, it’s exciting when such a writer takes to writing for younger readers as it entails much more than just a shift in the target audience or changing styles and presentation of ideas. Suniti, whose Aditi and Friends take on the Vesuvian Giant was released recently, says it took quite a lot to convince her that she was a children’s writer.

“I wrote Aditi and the One-eyed Monkey a very long time ago — around 1982. But it wasn’t intended for publication,” says this former IAS officer. A voracious reader herself, Suniti would buy books for nieces Aditi and Pritha. But what bothered Suniti was that they mostly “tended to be about little children with pink faces living in England. I thought I would write one that was more ‘local’. This was only a private book intended for my nieces, so I gave the little girl my niece’s name and just put my own childhood into it,” she says about Aditi and the One-eyed Monkey.

In January 1988, Suniti was asked to do a few days of story-writing with a class of eight- to nine-year-olds at Blue Gate Fields Junior School in London. “They had just been reading Aditi and the One-eyed Monkey and were amaze d and delighted to learn that Aditi was a real little girl (though by then she was older),” she says.

“I realised that in part they were so happy to have me there because, like them, I had a brown skin. It was clear that they were looking for someone or something they could relate to. The children were desperate to have Aditi and her friends come to visit them in London.”

The book was sent to Sheba Feminist Publishers, who applied for a grant to publish it. “I had thought it would be easy to get published: it was concerned with the environment and the children in it were from an ethnic minority (in that context). But the book remained unpublished,” she says.

And she forgot about it. After all, she wasn’t really a children’s writer. Years later, in November 1998, in Birmingham for the Readers & Writers Festival, she and storyteller Vayu Naidu met Sandhya Rao of Tulika at the Ikon Gallery. “Sandhya said that a prose poem I had done — Baa Lamb Foxtrot — was probably suitable for children.” Suniti was surprised, for it was intended for adults. Ultimately, Aditi and the Thames Dragon was published by Tulika in 2002. Did that make her a children’s writer?

“I kept protesting to Radhika (Menon) and Sandhya of Tulika that I was primarily a poet and a fabulist. Then, without quite intending to, I found myself writing Aditi and the Marine Sage,” she says. “And then I sai d to myself, ‘Oh well, I’ve done a book set in India and another where they go to England and another where they go to Australia. I really ought to do a Commonwealth foursome and have them go to Canada.’ Besides, I wanted to find out what the Techno Sage was like.”

By the time she wrote Aditi and the Techno Sage, she was hooked. “I realised I liked it and it was quite an experience” and, as she adds, “I had fun writing the books and the children seemed to have fun reading the m. It’s true, of course, that I deliberately raised various questions in each of the books. In Aditi and the Techno Sage, for example, I was querying the nature of cause and effect and the blessings of technology; but an email th at Radhika passed on to me from young Kaivalya about the Aditi books has reminded me that what is important is not what the writer thinks about a book, but what the reader makes of it.”

How successful has she been in that endeavour? Kaivalya, a young reader, couldn’t wait for the release of the books. Suniti lets Kaivalya have the last word.

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