Different Tales brings us stories from the lives of children who rarely find place in mainstream children’s literature. This series of thirteen stories addresses issues of marginalization—along the axes of gender, caste, minority, disability. However, the stories are not prescriptive, focusing instead on details that enliven and refresh these issues with the magic of different childhoods.
The fictional and visual worlds in these stories are peopled by spunky children who tend the fields, study and play at the same time. Here, we find a family cooking and sharing a Sunday delicacy of meat, a boy who schemes to wangle a deal for the second hand notebooks that he will recycle and use, a child who goes to school and becomes the cynosure of his whole community, and so on. Several of the writers draw on their own childhoods to depict different ways of growing up in an often hostile world, and finding new relationships with peers, parents and other adults.
The stories perform a double function. On the one hand, they provide a mirror where children from marginalized groups may find new and enabling self-images, helping them engage with the world around them with confidence. On the other, they enrich and expand the imaginative worlds of middle class children by introducing them to new characters, new settings, new dilemmas, new sources of laughter and strength.
The artwork, produced by a group of distinguished artists from Baroda, extends the pleasures and insights of these stories to the realm of the visual. They offer thought provoking images that delight the eyes, making them return to the text again and again. The illustrations provide a parallel education in looking, seeing, feeling and thinking about images and art. These vividly illustrated storybooks make a major contribution in proposing a different aesthetic in children’s literature.
Different Tales funded by Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai and undertaken by Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies, Hyderabad, is a three-language project. Original stories from Telugu and Malayalam have been translated into English and into Telugu/Malayalam as the case may be.
The Telugu series is published by Anveshi and the English and Malayalam series by DC books, Kerala.