As Siddhartha Sarma claimed the first Crossword Award for the Best Children’s Book in Mumbai this week, a bunch of writers at the Jumpstart festival were asking a key question: Should adults read books for children?
Technically, The Grasshopper’s Run is a children’s book — published by Scholastic last year in the emerging category of fiction for young adults. This is a growing segment of readers in India, and an important one: historically, despite the wide variety of literature for children, we haven’t had much literature for teenagers and young adults, across most Indian languages. But as writers from Paro Anand to Samit Basu know, writing for children or young adults effectively consigns the author to invisibility on the book-review pages. This means that kids, and teens, will read Sarma’s book — but adults will miss out.
And that would be a shame. Sarma’s real audience, as he says on his blog, is “all you closet Commando readers” — or anyone interested in the almost-forgotten Japanese siege of Kohima in 1944. “The (Second World) war touched India in many places, but the only region invaded on the mainland was the North-east,” Sarma writes. “It was a time of great misery, great courage and remarkable events. But if you expect much fiction about India and the war, forget it. Mostly it is because a couple of years after the war we began a bigger adventure: Independence and the rest of the jing-bang. People weren’t really into what their soldiers did fighting for another country in some far-off place.”
Full report here Business Standard
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