FACE TO FACE

Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash

Gentle and sharp: Sunithi Namjoshi.

Using fable, fairy tale and myth to her own device, turning them inside out (or on their heads) to look at old things in new ways is something Suniti Namjoshi has done ever since her first book Feminist Fables in 1981, which imaginatively retold stories from the Arabian Nights, English nursery rhymes, fairy tales and Greek myths. “I have always been fascinated by myth and fable,” she says. “For a long time, I have been subverting them or changing them. The notion that there is a standard myth is incorrect. Every time someone tells a story, they change it and the power of a myth is that it mutates and can be used in many ways.”

Namjoshi was in India recently for the release of two more books in her Aditi series. Aditi and Her Friends Help the Budapest Changeling and Aditi and Her Friends Meet Grendel feature the usual motley group — a little girl called Aditi, Siril the ant, Beautiful Ele the Elephant and Monkeyji as well as a couple of dragons. Though clearly Indian, Namjoshi’s characters are reflective of a global sensibility that is at home in different places and in seemingly disparate skins, much like their creator and the current generation of readers.

Peopled by eastern and western characters and archetypes, these books nimbly mix Beowulfian monsters with Indian queens and sages. They demand an ability to make imaginative leaps and lithely cross cultural boundaries.

“Aditi and her friends live in Phaltan, a small town in Satara district of Maharashtra,” Namjoshi explains. “That is the location they start from. That is their consciousness. The descriptions are exact because I spent my childhood there. Most other places I have described, I have been to at least twice. If I like a particular place or there is something that interests me, I think it might interest the children as well. We look at these places through Indian eyes because Aditi and her friends are Indian.”

The stories accommodate ruminations — both gentle and sharp — on identity, perception, memory and reality. “But if a thing has a name, does it exist?” ponders Beautiful in Aditi and her Friends meet Grendel. “And anyway, how do you know it’s the right name?” In Aditi and Her Friends Help the Budapest Changeling, they meet a changeling who becomes whatever she is perceived to be, provoking questions on the nature of identity and what it depends on.

Namjoshi is confident that children are fully capable of handling these questions. “I’m not an expert on children’s literature but in general, I think that grown-ups have a vested interest in maintaining certain notions about children that don’t particularly fit what any child is really like. It seems to suit us to think that they are children; therefore they can’t understand, think or do such-and-such thing.”

Questions of identity, perception and power have always preoccupied Namjoshi. The politicisation of her writing is evident in adult works like Sycorax, a sequence of poems that centre around Caliban’s mother (heard but not seen in “The Tempest”), and The Mothers of Maya Diip, a study of power relations in a mythical matriarchy. She has consistently used her writing to postulate ideological viewpoints. But when it comes to children’s writing, this is done in a subtle and unobtrusive manner. “It’s done as quietly as possible because one should do things gracefully rather than with a cudgel,” she laughs.

Though she considers writing lyric poetry one of her strengths, she never writes for children because it is “too intense”. She is also careful not to unleash on them the quick-edged satire and irony that is one of her specialities. Instead, she adopts a more questioning mode. “With children, one of the things I can do is to ask questions very gently and lightly so that they don’t realise that they are being made to think and reconsider and wonder if this way of looking at things actually makes sense.”

“In an unobvious way, I talk about certain kinds of privilege or ability or lack of them. Syril is tiny. Compared to Beautiful Ele, the elephant, he doesn’t have any kind of strength. But for his size, he is much stronger than any of the others. So that’s one idea — proportion. The other idea is that sometimes people who bully you are stronger than you. It doesn’t matter. Use your brains.”

In Aditi and Her Friends Meet Grendel, Namjoshi subverts conventional notions of attractiveness and monstrosity. “Grendel and his mother are referred to simply as G and Madame G because everybody thinks they are monsters because of the Beowulf epic. But their appearance is not monstrous. They are quite beautiful. Their skin has a greenish tinge. So what?”

Namjoshi has already completed all 12 books of the series, six of which have been published so far. The rest will be published by next year. She is also working on a new series of poems called Magpie, inspired by meditation sessions at a Vipaasana course. “While you’re trying to keep the mind still, you become very aware of how unstill it is. So, the image that came to me was of a magpie that keeps bringing stones into my head, stones from the past out of which it makes stone things for the future and seems to be trying to weave a half-known past into an unknown future.” She stops, asks: “Am I making any sense at all?” Of course she is, in her usual pictorial and fabulated way, just the way we like it.

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu