Interview with Jamila Gavin
By Julia Eccleshare

Posted: November 2003

Jamila Gavin was born in Mussoorie in the foothills of the Himalayas in 1941 and spent the first five years of her life growing up on the border between India and Pakistan. Her English mother and Indian father had met as teachers working for the Christian Mission Society and her father went on to found and run a teachers’ training college near Amritsar. By 1946 it became obvious that it was too dangerous to stay in India so Jamila and her mother and brother came to England while her father stayed on, despite the risks, right through Partition. In 1949 the family was reunited in Poona but by 1953 Jamila's mother had begun to worry about her children’s education and the whole family moved to England for good.

Indian, but English also
“I never found it difficult to adjust to being in England because I had been brought up with entirely English Christian values,” Jamila says. “Inside, I thought of myself as English. My mother had taught us not to be thin-skinned so even children calling me ‘blackie’ didn’t seem abusive. It was just what I was. Mostly people thought I was ‘exotic’. I rather liked that.”

Early Study
Jamila never had much interest in school in England describing herself as "scatty, enthusiastic or rebellious depending on the subject", (though she remembers lessons on the veranda with her mother in India with considerable affection). Instead she lived for her Saturdays which she spent studying music at Trinity College in London. She was a gifted pianist and went on to study the piano full-time, first staying on in London at Trinity College and then on scholarships in Paris and Berlin. But, it turned out that she never really wanted to be a concert pianist because she lacked the confidence that it took. It did, however, lead her to making programs for the BBC Music and Arts Unit in London, which she loved.

The Idea of Writing
It is because of her childhood on two Continents and her sense of belonging to both cultures that Jamila has a particular interest in writing the kind of books that she does. She has first hand experience of India and, as a mother, she has observed what it is like to grow up partly Indian in the UK as her children have. The idea of writing came late to her and it came through rethinking her own and others’ experience of racism. It was a time when attitudes to race were changing very fast in the UK and Jamila realised that her innocent, un-racially aware view of her own childhood was rather naive. “In the late 60s and early 70s I begun to realise how much racism there was. I read a newspaper story about a class in which the black children drew themselves as white in their self-portraits. It made me realise there were not enough stories about ‘black’ children, which, for me, meant any non-whites. Then my own children were born and I began to realise that there was nothing that really reflected them in the books we had. Unlike me, they see themselves as very multi-cultural. So I wrote a short book for young readers about an Afro-Caribbean family discovering its history.”

Multicultural Writing
Jamila's first book was The Magic Orange Tree which fitted well into the then emerging multi-cultural writing for children. She followed it up with others of a similar kind making a reputation for herself as someone who could write authentically about different cultural backgrounds. Gradually she came to realise that her own childhood with its twin strands in India and England gave her the opportunity of writing from first hand experience for many contemporary children. “I did know that my Anglo-Indian background was interesting to other people but I didn’t know how to write about it. I didn’t want to write an autobiography and I didn’t have a specific story to tell.”

It was a publisher’s request for a story about migrating families that triggered Jamila to write The Wheel of Surya, the first in a major trilogy about the Partition of India. Its starting point is the relationship between an English and an Indian family with the youngest child in the Indian family helping with the children in the English family. “The English family is quite like my own, especially the mother who is very like my own mother.” Jamila says. “She was very good with staff and had lots of Indian friends.” The subsequent titles, The Eye of the Horse and The Track of the Wind are less domestic and more political, including a passionate and understanding account of a young man’s involvement in Sikh terrorism. The Wheel of Surya and The Eye of the Horse were both shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Book prize (in the UK) and The Wheel of Surya is now a set book for high school study in the UK, important for covering an historical period which relates closely to many students’ own family histories.

Other titles such as The Singing Bowls and Three Indian Princesses also draw directly on Jamila's knowledge of India and on the idea of children having identities and attachments from more than one place. Some stories (such as Grandpa Chatterji) reflected what it was like for Indian children in the UK when they meet up with their Indian relatives and were also useful in informing all children of the importance of keeping cultural and family roots while also assimilating into the society in which they live.

Much later, Jamila wrote the first part of her autobiography, Out of India, which gives an evocative picture of the lush Indian countryside and especially the exotic fruit available everywhere in contrast with the bleakness of London during the Blitz. Her memories give readers another chance to understand what it was like growing up in India at a time when India was still part of the British Empire and, for families like Jamila's at least, when how things were done in the UK still mattered.

Recent Work
But Jamila also uses her knowledge of India to write quite different stories - like Coram Boy for which she won the 1999 Whitbread Children's Book Award. “I can use what I know about India and transfer it across to another time or place or situation, being fairly sure that it’s the same experience. My link to Coram Boy lies in understanding a different view of childhood from that of the twentieth-century European.” Coram Boy is the dramatic, interwoven story of how two babies survive, thanks to the philanthropic work of Thomas Coram, founder of the Foundling Hospital in London. Their survival, which is largely a matter of luck, is in stark contrast to the dismal plight of most illegitimate babies at a time. Shocking in its portrayal of a brutal and callous way of life, Coram Boy is a deeply compassionate novel reflecting Jamila's contempt for a society riddled with corruption at every level which holds the lives of individuals cheap, whether children or adult, unless they have power.
The eighteenth-century children Jamila describes are shown taking on physical and social responsibility well beyond the capabilities of their modern counterparts. At times it stretches credulity that children could do so much but Jamila has based this on her current observations of children in India, or any third world country. “Very young children in India have to take on adult responsibilities, not just by earning but also in the domestic tasks they have to do. Exactly the same thing happened in the eighteenth century here. Children of the poor were treated terribly if they lived but a great many of them just died in infancy.”
Since writing Coram Boy, Jamila has continued to write stories set both in India and the UK as well as science fiction stories such as The Wormholers and Daisy and The Intergalactic Travelling Salesman. Her forthcoming title, The Bloodstone, is a dramatic adventure set in Venice and Hindustan.

about us | downloads | site map | search | testimonials | pt blog
©2006 Pacific Rim Voices