Over a hundred Indian authors who write in English are discussed in Michelle Superle’s Contemporary, English-Language Indian Children’s Literature, which examines children’s literature in India between 1988 and 2008. Because Superle’s criteria for the category of “Indian author” requires them to have at least one Indian parent, the study is unable to include an author whose omission is so striking that Meena Khorana is compelled to mention it in the foreword to the book. Ruskin Bond, ‘India’s most prolific and popular children’s author’ is not studied due to his Anglo-Indian heritage. Discussing Bond’s writing, Khorana asks ‘how an author of Anglo-Indian ancestry can successfully transcend the didactic agenda in order to capture the rich and varied experiences of Indians’.
Bond’s use of humour and translation bear witness to his heritage, as well as his commitment to truly writing for children (and not for the adults who control children’s reading!) After India’s Independence in 1947, Indian children’s writing was largely pressed into the service of nation-building. Children’s books aimed to cultivate a sense of pride in India’s past, or reflect a harmonious, cosmopolitan nation. But by doing this, they subscribed to social hierarchies of class and caste—the popular mythology-based comic Amar Chitra Katha, for instance, created a picture of India’s past that is helmed by masculine, fair-skinned, upper-caste Hindus, as writers like Shaan Amin have noted. Superle’s book notes that most children’s writing in India was ‘aspirational literature with a transformative agenda’, and did not represent the literature of marginalised communities. As a children’s author writing for nearly seventy years, Ruskin Bond has witnessed both pre and post-Independent India, and thus seems perfectly poised to address the social and political changes the country has undergone in order to frame a vision for children. However, his writing is deliberately removed from these discussions: he writes extensively about nature and animals, his own childhood memories, his family and friends. This is a conscious choice, reflecting his understanding of the literary landscape he writes in. In an interview, when asked why he does not write about politics, he answers, ‘Well, since everybody else does, I thought I might be the exception and concentrate instead on birth and death and the interval between’.
An Indian author writing in English has a lot to keep in mind. Bond’s writing displays an awareness of what Perry Nodelman identifies as the Orientalising tendency in children’s literature: ‘we write books for children to provide them with values and with images of themselves we approve of or feel comfortable with’. This awareness reflects in his reluctance to manipulate children’s perspectives. He does so not by avoiding contentious or upsetting aspects of life and literature, but by representing them through humour. He attributes his longevity as a writer to his sense of humour, and his refusal to take himself, or life too seriously: in Funny Side Up, when asked about how he manages to survive when there are so many writers, he says, ‘Yes, but they are all serious writers. I’m just a funny writer. They make omelettes. I make scrambled eggs’. Humour is inherent in his writing, especially in candid accounts of sadness. Bond’s writing is very often autobiographical. From scattered accounts of his childhood, one pieces together a picture of the author as a sensitive young boy struggling to deal with the death of his father, feeling lonely, and at odds with the world around.
In My Father’s Letters, he describes one of the saddest incidents of his childhood. His father wrote him many letters while he was at boarding school. After the death of his father, a violin teacher asked him to hand over the letters for safekeeping. Later, when he went to collect them, the teacher denied having any letters, and sent him off. The trauma of this loss, which reinforced for him the loss of his father is evident. But he sums up his feelings about the incident in an understatement that is poignant in its wryness: ‘I never saw those letters again. And I’m glad to say I did not see Mr Priestley again. All he’d given me was a lifelong aversion to violin players’. The purpose of humour here is not to undermine the sorrow. Neither is it employed to deny the extent of how much the event shook him. The wry humour used here, in fact intensifies his sorrow without demanding that the young reader, too, feel hatred for the teacher in question.
In his Introduction to The Rupa Laughter Omnibus, Bonds elaborates on his views of humour:
‘The wit is funny at the expense of other people; the satirist is funny at the expense of the world; the comedian is funny at his own expense, or he sees the funny side of human existence…Great comedy is immortal. Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Dickens’s Mr. Micawber never cease to enchant. These and others like them are larger than life, just as Chaplin’s tramp is their visual equivalent: converting human frailty into something laughable, loveable.’
‘Converting human frailty into something laughable, lovable’ is what he attempts to do as he describes the people and places he encounters in India. Like most writers, Bond writes often about the lives of others, and records specifically Indian experiences. He sets out not only to translate verbally expressed humour into writing, but also converts humour that arises out of various cultural contexts and situations into English, the language of global hegemony. How does he navigate this precarious situation? Arthur Koestler coined the term “bisociation” to refer to the mental process involved in perceiving humorous incongruity. According to Koestler, ‘bisociation occurs when a situation, event, or idea is simultaneously perceived from the perspective of two self-consistent but normally unrelated and even incompatible frames of reference’. Thus, a single event ‘is made to vibrate simultaneously on two different wavelengths, as it were’. An example is a pun, in which two different meanings of a word or phrase are brought together simultaneously (e.g., Two cannibals are eating a clown. One says to the other, ‘Does this taste funny to you?’). Thus, in humour, ideas and activities are playfully manipulated so that they are simultaneously perceived in opposite ways: for example, real and not real, important and trivial, threatening and safe.
The perception of a single idea along two different wavelengths is exactly what translation aims to achieve, and it is thus a cultural translation that Bond is attempting. Certain forms of humour, which are a part of our daily lives, and arise spontaneously in the course of our interaction with other people, can be sensitive to context, and require information about the situation to be funny. The translation of this type of humour is further complicated by the presence of non-verbal cues, such as the tone of voice, the history behind the joke, and accompanying gestures. When we try to relate a funny incident to someone, and they are not amused, we blame it on the absence of context: ‘you had to be there to get it’, we often say. That the reader was in fact not there at the site of humour is what Bond has to negotiate with in his writing.
He does this, not by trying to shoehorn regional languages into the more powerful target language, English, but by emphasizing the incongruities that arise when two cultures are joined together. When situations arise in which small children call him ‘Uncle,’ and he wonders how to represent the cultural discrepancy, he writes about the humour of the situation. Thus, instead of translation resulting in a loss of humour, sometimes a funny situation becomes funnier in translation. In doing so, he is able to avoid not only the Orientalist, adult-imposed idea of childhood cited by Nodelman, but also refrains from deriving humour by mocking the source language:
‘One gets used to being called ‘Uncle’ by almost every boy or girl one meets. I wonder how the custom began. Perhaps it has its origins in the folktale about the tiger who refrained from pouncing on you if you called him ‘uncle’. Tigers don’t eat their relatives! Or do they? The ploy may not work if the tiger happens to be a tigress. Would you call her ‘Aunty’ as she (or your teacher!) descends on you?’
The places he records are often unknown, replete with ironic situations, and deceptively ordinary. In Tales of Fosterganj, he writes about a lonely little town: ‘it was quaint, isolated, a forgotten corner of an otherwise changing hill town; and I had always been attracted to forgotten corners’. He attempts to bring out the magic in the mundane, and the sleepy little Fosterganj becomes a looking-glass world of chaos, and a strange sunlit sense of menace. Situations at once tragic and comic occur, and everything is not what it seems, and Bond writes about dark themes, such as death and accidents, in a light, comic manner. One of the inhabitants, Professor Lulla, who has a penchant for attending funerals, is likened to the White Rabbit. In a delicious bit of irony, he is eaten by a man-eating leopard on his way to a funeral. Bond’s only comment on the situation is: ‘Help came in the form of half the population of Fosterganj. There was nothing they could do, as the leopard did not return. But next day they gave the professor a good funeral.’
Why is Bond so careful to represent India accurately, and as Khorana asks, why does he refuse to be directly didactic? To answer this, we must go back to why he was excluded from Superle’s book: his Anglo-Indian identity. As Debashish Bandhyopadhyay writes, ‘The psychological anxiety that engendered the Anglo-Indian mind due to the socio-political consequences of hybridity is little represented in contemporary fiction’. As a writer of British descent who is born and based in India, and writes about ‘the India he loves’, Bond is in the slippery situation of belonging to two sides at odds with each other. During the British colonial occupation of India, the sentiments of Anglo-Indians were often exploited. Frank Anthony records how the British government discriminated against Anglo-Indians with darker skin, creating a hierarchy of racial superiority within the community.
It is Bond’s direct awareness of these hegemonic processes that makes him conscious of the implications of his writing. He disowns any colonial associations in favour of an Indian identity: ‘Race did not make me an Indian. Religion did not make me an Indian. But history did. And in the long run, it’s history that counts.’ In spite of British descent, it is India that he considers home, and pines for it: ‘I am now going back in time to a period when I was caught between East and West, and had to make up my mind just where I belonged. I had been away from India for barely a month before I was longing to return’. A short, miserable stint in England convinced him that ‘The link with Britain was tenuous, based on heredity rather than upbringing’. Thus, it is India that he adopts as his own, and India that he wants to translate to the written word. ‘I feel that when the translator is laughing, the humor will manage to get across’, the Greek translator Myrsini Gana wrote, and perhaps it is his sense of belonging that makes Bond’s writing successful.
‘My readership has always been here, and now I can write exclusively for the Indian reader…So away with sensationalism, away with the exotic East, away with maharajas, beggars, spies and shikaris, away with romantic Englishwomen and their far pavilions. No longer do we have to write for the ‘foreign reader’. I can write about the people living across the road, and behold, the people across the road are sometimes reading my books.’
Thus, Bond’s translation considers cultural, historical, social, and political perspectives, and is not just a transfer of languages; it is a transfer of meaning. Seen in this light, it becomes a multidirectional means, not of establishing hierarchies between cultures, but of ensuring the continuity and survival of both cultures. In Bond’s writing, the wish to preserve a culture, and a certain way of living is apparent. In Tales of Fosterganj, he writes,
‘I remembered Fosterganj and thought: I have written about moonlight bathing the Taj and the sun beating down on the Coromandel coast—and so have others—but who will celebrate little Fosterganj? And so I decided to write this account of the friends I made there…to remind myself that there had been such a place, and that it had once been a part of my life.’
The preservation of that which is important to us is also a function of humour. This applies on a larger level, as many lines of psychological evidence suggest that humour and laughter in animals are a product of natural selection. The evolutionary origin of humour and laughter thus suggests that they likely have important social and emotional functions that have contributed to our survival as a species. Although humour can be culture-specific, and take many twists and turns, its end result, laughter, is universal. The sound of laughter is indistinguishable across languages. Translation too, may require the translator to undertake complicated routes like the zigzagging of the mountain roads of which Bond writes. Bond advocates the “Zigzag walk”, a method of walking with no aim in mind.
“The only way you could really come to know a place well, was to walk in a truly haphazard way. To make a zigzag walk you take the first turning to the left, the first to the right, then the first to the left and so on. It can be quite fascinating provided you are in no hurry to reach your destination.”
For Bond, the perpetuation of a certain emotion or thought across contexts becomes the purpose of humour and translation. There is a sense of circularity here, as after years of translating Indian cultures, his works have, in recent times, been translated into numerous languages including Hindi, Kannada, and Marathi, thereby bridging gaps between English and regional children’s literature ‘The world keeps changing, but something, somewhere, remains the same’, Bond writes. That, perhaps, is laughter.
Bibliography
Amin, Shaan. “The Dark Side of the Comics That Redefined Hinduism”. The Atlantic.
Anthony, Frank. Britain’s Betrayal in India: The Story of the Anglo-Indian Community.
Bandhyopadhyay, Debashis. “Ruskin Bond’s “Whispering in the Dark”: A Fantastic Quest for Identity”. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.
Koestler, A. The act of creation.
Nodelman, Perry. “The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature”. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.
Superle, Michelle. Contemporary English-Language Indian Children’s Literature.
Anushmita Mohanty is Senior Editor at ALMA MAG. She has studied postcolonial literature at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, and is interested in women’s writing and book history. When not reading or writing, she can be found taking photos of trees and attempting sit-down comedy.
