Some time ago a journalist dubbed nonsense poet Anushka Ravishankar 'India’s Dr Seuss' and, to her embarrassment, the label has stuck.
She is flattered by the comparison, but believes it to be exaggerated, given that she is the only author of English language nonsense verse in a country where children’s literature has been historically undervalued.
In any case, her real inspiration comes not from the American Dr Seuss, but from the British giants of literary nonsense, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.
Like other westernised Indian children of her generation, Ravishankar grew up reading mainly British authors, but although she was acquainted with the work of Carroll and Lear, it was only when she spent time at the British Library during a university break that she really immersed herself in the genre. ‘It was quite a discovery for me. When I read all the nonsense I responded to it immediately,’ she recalls.
She began writing nonsense for her own amusement, but it was years later, when she had a young daughter, that she began to write nonsense verse specifically for children.
I realised that there weren’t books for children which were about Indian children and which were set in Indian contexts. It was that realisation that made me start writing for kids.
Her interest in the genre grew until she signed on as co-editor of an anthology of Indian nonsense, a job which required her to scour the country for material in various Indian languages. Although there was plenty of it about, she found there was resistance to the terminology she and the other editors were using.
‘You do have a lot of nonsense in Indian literature, but it’s never been recognised as a genre. There are folk traditions of nonsense in India. In the course of collecting stuff for the book, the chief editor of the book asked an Oriya poet about nonsense in the Oriya language, and he was very offended. He said, “We don’t have any nonsense in Oriya”, and then it turned out that he himself had written nonsense verse!
The word “nonsense” is interpreted as a derogatory term. When people ask what I write and I say “mostly nonsense”, they say, “No, you’re just being modest. I’m sure you’re writing good stuff!”’
Although Ravishankar’s work contains some nonsensical elements, it is not always pure nonsense. ‘To Market! To Market! has a frame that is 'sensical', but the verse itself is quite nonsensical. I rely a lot on sound. Sometimes the sound takes you away from the meaning. Then, some of my books are really nonsense. Excuse Me, Is This India? is nonsense in the Carrollian sense.’
Like Lewis Carroll, Ravishankar was originally a mathematician. Her co-editor of the anthology, Michael Heyman, believes her training has influenced her poetry, and she tends to agree.
Some kinds of nonsense are all about playing with logic. Lear’s nonsense was not a subversion of logic. It was more visual. Carroll’s nonsense was very much a subversion of logic. And mine tends to be more like Carroll than like Lear. I do enjoy the surprise of going along a logical path and then falling off it. I like that.
Some of her books, like Catch that Crocodile!, Elephants Never Forget and Tiger on a Tree, were inspired by true events. ‘A tiger really did come into a village. It got scared by a goat and climbed up a tree, and got trapped by the villagers. Up to that point Tiger on a Tree is true, but in real life they sent it to a zoo. I changed that and got the tiger sent back home.
Crocodile happened in a city I was staying in at the time. There was a flood and there was a news item about a couple of crocodiles: one got stuck in a well and another one got stuck in a ditch. The elephant thing is true too.
I saw the visual on a TV programme of an elephant running with a herd of buffaloes. But Today is My Day is completely fiction. I just thought that if I were a child I’d be so fed up of people telling me what to do, so I wrote this book about a girl who decides one day that today is her day and anybody who tells her what to do is going to have nasty things happen to them. I just think children are so powerless.’
You can’t call something like Today is My Day an Indian book,’ she continues. ‘It’s just about children anywhere. Children who live in an urban context in India are not terribly different from children who live in an urban context anywhere else.
The cross-cultural appeal of her books is demonstrated by the twelve awards they have won worldwide.
‘I just tell the story. Sometimes it works for an international readership and sometimes it doesn’t. Catch that Crocodile! has very Indian characters, like the strong man, but they seemed transferable.
'The associations that an Indian child would have would be very different from those that a child from elsewhere would have, but that’s a nice thing. If I said the word “behelwan”, which is the Hindi word for “wrestler”, it would immediately create associations for Indian children.
Children in a city might not have seen a behelwan, but they would have seen it on television or in a film, so they certain associations which you would not expect a child in every place to have. I was trying to see what the parallel would be, and the closest I could come was the WWF wrestlers.’
Adding to the atmosphere are the illustrations. Ravishankar collaborates with artists from South Africa, Switzerland, Italy and India. Some are folk artists, others work in the European tradition. The author believes so firmly in the integration of word and picture that she will do whatever is necessary to help the illustrator produce their best work, even if it means rewriting a text.
‘Almost every book has come about differently,’ she explains. ‘For Tiger on a Tree, the illustrations came first. Pulak Biswas is a very good storyteller in pictures, so I had to have a text that didn’t say the same thing, which is the way I like picture books. Then I did Catch that Crocodile!, again with Pulak. Knowing that Pulak tends to tell the whole story, I didn’t want to give him the text, because then he would end up repeating the text in the pictures.
So I gave him the story in prose, he did the illustrations, and then I wrote the verse. I had the characters, but they didn’t have names until I saw the illustrations. The doctor, for instance, looks very Bengali, so in that sense I took off from the way they looked.
Emanuele Scanziani is Italian, but he lives in Pondicherry, where the market in To Market! To Market! really is. The idea was there was a girl walking through the market, but then he did these fabulous illustrations and the text sounded a bit dry in comparison to what he’d done.
So then I wrote the text again. I completely rethought the whole thing. I tell illustrators not to feel restricted by the text; if they feel like doing something different they should go ahead and do it, and if I have to change the text I will. They like that! The one text that I really had to change quite a lot was Anything But a Grabooberry. It’s typographic, so there were some words which ended up looking like others, and there were some that Rathna Ramanathan said she couldn’t do anything with. So every book comes about differently. I really enjoy the variety of the way a book evolves and working with different illustrators who have different strengths and different styles.’
Although Ravishankar’s verse is firmly rooted in the tradition of literary nonsense, she believes it has differences from other work in the genre. Aside from its specific geographical setting, though, she can’t quite put her finger on what sets it apart.
I don’t know if it comes from the Indianness of my work or just from me. I am quite westernised in my reading and outlook, but having said that, one doesn’t know in what ways their cultural background affects one’s work. There are differences, there really are. There’s something recognisable about the form of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, for example. The children all seem to recognise it. In that sense my work doesn’t seem to follow any kind of form.
But I don’t know if that’s to do with where I come from; I’m not sure. We don’t have that much of a tradition of children’s literature, especially in English, so I don’t have anything to fall back on and compare myself to in that sense. That’s very liberating, because it means I can do anything I like!’
