In Part 1 of her Guest Post for our current theme of Children and their Grandparents, author Swapna Dutta described the importance to Bengali children of the tales collected by Dakshinaranjan Mitra-Mazumdar. Here in Part 2, Swapna retells one of those stories for us. It comes from perhaps the most famous of Mitra-Mazumdar’s books, Thakurmar Jhuli (Paternal Grandma’s Bag of Stories):

Saat Bhai Champa / Seven Champak Brothers

LONG, long ago there lived a king who had seven queens but no children. So he was delighted when he came to know that the seventh queen was going to have a baby.

The queen had octuplets: seven little boys and a little girl. But the other six queens were terribly jealous. They stole the babies while the seventh queen was still unconscious and buried them in the ash-heap. Then they told her that she had given birth to crabs and showed her some. The queen was too heartbroken to protest and thought that someone had cursed her with such a terrible fate. The news reached the king. “The seventh queen must be a witch.” He said, “Throw her out of the kingdom!”

Something strange happened soon after. The birds stopped singing. The flowers stopped blooming. And what was worst, there were no flowers to worship the deity in the royal temple. Everyone scoured the kingdom for flowers. Finally someone discovered seven champaks and a camellia blooming on the ash-heap. “Get them!” said the king, “And I’ll reward you.”

But it proved to be an impossible task. As soon as anyone tried to pick them they shot up higher, out of reach, and sang in a sweet chorus:

“You can’t touch us –
Oh no, oh no!
Let the first queen come.
To her, we’ll go!”

The king sent for the first queen. She turned pale and remembered what she had done at the ash-heap. The flowers shot up higher and asked for the second queen. The second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth queens all came and went. None of them could touch the flowers. The flowers now asked for the king. But he could not get them either. The flowers shot up even higher and sang,

“You can’t touch us–
Oh no, oh no!
Let the seventh queen come.
And to HER, we’ll go!”

“Find the seventh queen!” ordered the king. “Find her at any cost!”

The king’s men scattered far and wide, searching for the queen and found her in the forest, lonely and miserable. They took her back to the palace and to the ash-heap. As soon as the flowers saw her, the seven champaks and the camellia tumbled down from the tree top, crying, “Mother! Mother!” as they fell into her arms.

But they were flowers no longer. The seven champaks had turned into seven handsome princes and the camellia into a beautiful princess. The king soon heard the story and punished the six guilty queens by banishing them from the kingdom. Suddenly the entire garden was full of flowers again. And the birds started singing. And every one lived happily ever after.

Retold by Swapna Dutta

You will also find a longer retelling of Seven Champaks to read/listen to in Begali with an English translation alongside, at Galpo Boli Shono, a fun website for children to immerse themselves in Bengali stories, puzzles and songs. We’re grateful to Galpo Boli Shono for their permission to reproduce some of their gorgeous illustrations by Tarit Bhattacharjee here, to accompany Swapna’s retelling of the story.

We are delighted to welcome writer Swapna Dutta back to PaperTigers with this article about the stories collected by Dakshinaranjan Mitra-Mazumdar (1877-1957) and thanks to him, still known and loved by Bengali children today. I personally have to thank Swapna for introducing me to the work of Sukumar Ray, and I think I’ll now be seeking out some of Mitra-Mazumdar’s tales. Swapna is also a regular contributor to BoliKids .

When I was a child the concept of stories and story-telling was inseparable from my two grandmothers; and it was so for most children of my generation. Those were the days of joint families where the mothers were always busy with household chores or outside work and fathers, too busy in their own world. But Grandma/grandpa/grandparents always had time for us. They were the ones to pet and pamper; listen to our troubles; provide us with pickles and sweets; and most important of all, tell us stories. Our grandparents had a formidable stock of tales that included folktales and fairy tales; stories from mythology and epics; and stories that formed part of common rituals – an integral part of our life. Children who lived in metro cities had access to the radio. But for the rest of us, hearing stories from grandparents was our chief source of entertainment when it was too dark to play outside; during the long rainy afternoons and the shivery winter evenings.

Most of those stories had come down through generations as part of oral tradition. As a result, there were several variations of the same stories. Not that it hampered our pleasure in any way! It was fun to come across two different endings or have the prince/princess face different situations, adventures and dilemmas. One of the pioneers to note down these tales and bring out a printed collection was Dakshinaranjan Mitra-Mazumdar. He patiently collected stories from village women, travelling from village to village as he did so, his main aim (more…)

Indian writer Ramendra Kumar‘s latest children’s books focus on stories of Indian children in a contemporary setting – an area of writing for middle-grade readers and young adults that has been greatly ignored in India: indeed, he would suggest, actively avoided. Though that may be changing: his most recent book, Now or Never (Ponytale Books 2010) has just been selected as a supplementary reader for Classes 7 and 8 by the Central Board of Secondary Education in India. Other novels include Terror in Fun City (Navneet Publications, 2008) and Not a Mere Game (Navneet Publications, 2006), and his book J J Act is endorsed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and Butterflies, a non-profit “programme with street and working children”. Ramendra is also the editor of BoloKids.com, a “complete portal for the young and the young at heart”. We are delighted to welcome Ramendra to the PaperTigers blog.

During the Asian Conference of Story Telling in New Delhi a few years ago, a key-note speaker with very impressive credentials in the field of Library Science (and an equally impressive personality) was giving tips to children’s writers on how to write for children.

“All writers attempting to write for children should keep in mind that they have to go down to the level of children,” she concluded with a flourish, waiting for the applause which naturally followed.

During the interaction session I raised my hand to ask a question. She transferred her imperious gaze to me and lifted her eyebrows.

“Ma’am, I think you got the direction wrong. We children’s writers don’t have to go down to the level of children, rather we have to rise up to the level of the young and vibrant minds. For, ma’am, children are the closest that you can get to God, and God lives up there, not down below.” There was a stunned silence for some time and suddenly the entire Hall No. 5 of the India Habitat Centre exploded with claps and cheers.

As an MBA in marketing the primary lesson I was taught was to respect the customer. For us writers the customer is the child. However, instead of respecting the child, we patronize her and take her for granted. The books being churned out by writers and publishers in India are a testimony to this fact. Most of the books written for children are rehashes of earlier classics. As far as the publishers are concerned, they consider the fairytale/folk tale/fantasy segment safe.

I would like to put forth a strong case for a different genre of writing; and I would like to take the liberty of naming this segment of writing the Here and Now genre.

What do I mean by Here and Now writing? (more…)

During Poetry Month in April, Mary Ann Dame’s wrote about Imaginary Menagerie: A Book of Curious Creatures by Julie Larios and Julie Paschkis and challenged us to concoct some weird and wonderful hybrids of our own. It didn’t, I have to admit, have the result that I now have a brilliant piece of my own poetry to flourish – however, it did make me think of one of my favorite nonsense poems by Sukumar Ray (1887-1923), whom I first heard of via Swapna Dutta’s portrait of the poet for PaperTigers (and Swapna has also writen a Personal View for our current issue). Here are a couple of couplets from “Haans chilo sojaru” translated from the original Bengali by Sukanta Chaudhuri as “Hotch-Potch” in The Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray (Oxford University Press):

A pochard and a porcupine, defying the grammarians,
Combined to form a porcochard, unmindful of their variance.

A stork upon a tortoise grew, exclaiming ‘What a hoot!
A very handsome storkoise, now, we jointly constitute.’

You can read, or at least look at, the original Bengali poem here, along with the whole poem in a different English translation by well-known filmmaker Satyajit Ray, Sukumar’s son; and the poem is also discussed here. I love comparing the two translations, with the different ways they have combined the animals, and I wish I could reproduce the whole of Sukanta Chaudhuri’s “Hotch Potch” so that you could do so too… And I wish I could read the original so that I could see what Sukumar Ray himself actually wrote – ah, well…

Anyway, the whole book is worth getting hold of: here’s what I wrote about it a couple of years ago(!):

Each poem has to be savored and the sounds enjoyed. Sukanta Chaudhuri’s translations from the original Bengali are truly amazing – lots of delightful rhymes and rhythms; and nonsense that is both nonsensical and convincingly English. Sukumar Ray’s own sketches and silhouettes sometimes give a visual lead into the poems and it hasn’t worried my two that some of the language is archaic: they expect to be baffled because it is, after all, nonsense! I think the word porcochard from “Hotch Potch” is set to become a new family word.

This week’s Poetry Friday is over at Carol’s Corner…

Indian writer Swapna Dutta has contributed some great articles to PaperTigers over the past few years, so we are delighted now to publish an interview with her as an added extra to our January/February update.

In it, she talks about her own stories and the challenges of retelling classic tales. She also makes some interesting observations about the languages of books published in India…

Chicken Spaghetti’s Poetry Friday this week highlights a piggy limerick. I enjoyed the quotation of a limerick interwoven with her line-by-line critique, which seems to be heading towards creating a new form of comic verse… I think Edward Lear would approve! We have been reading and reciting Lear’s limericks on and off over the school holidays, following the visit of a friend who started inventing them at the dinner table. My younger son’s love of playing with words until they are transmuted into something not-quite-completely different is fully satisfied by Lear’s Nonsense Alphabets, which he loves reading aloud with me and then chewing over on his own afterwards:

A was once an Apple-pie,
Pidy
Widy
Tidy
Pidy
Nice insidy
Apple-pie

And so on…

We were also bowled over in a Devonshire pottery (on our way home from Cornwall) when we were regaled with a complete rendition of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky – truly inspiring! By chance, we had been listening to a dramatised recording of Alice’s Adventures through the Looking Glass in the car so the boys were able to join in in parts, thus gaining more kudos than they truly deserved!

Now I really must seek out Sukumar Ray’s collection of nonsense poetry, Abol Tabol, as chosen by Swapna Dutta in a Personal View for PaperTigers. Do any of you have a favorite of his that you would recommend – or any other nonsense poetry for children?