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Fighting a loss of innocence
Updated On: 15 December, 2019 12:00 AM IST | | Jane Borges
How do you react when a children-s book you have toiled on for months is taken off the shelves, with hatred and hysteria surrounding its launch? If you are Priya Kuriyan, you pontificate and make your next drawing
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In the childrens book Ammachis Glasses, Kuriyan spun a funny tale about a granddaughters crazy day with her unforgettable Ammachi, who Kuriyan says was the archetypal grandmother from memories of my own childhood in Kerala. Pic courtesy/Priya Kuriyan, Tul
November 17 was an eventful day for Priya Kuriyan. That evening, the illustrator received the Big Little Book Award at the annual literature festival, Tata Lit Live in Mumbai, for her contribution to children-s literature. Somewhere around the same time, in Chennai, a storm was brewing. Publishing house Karadi Tales had planned to withdraw The Art of Tying a Pug, a book by Natasha Sharma, which Kuriyan, 38, had illustrated. For someone who has made a career of her child-like exaggeration of reality, the day had been bittersweet. "What happened was unfortunate," she says, weeks after the incident.
The book had sparked controversy over drawings of a little boy helping his father tie the pagdi turban, as his pet pug is seen getting in the way. The idea was to make a how-to book that appealed to children. But, the pun on -pug and pagdi- seemed to have incited sections of the Sikh community, who described it as "blasphemous and hurtful". Bombarded with threat calls and emails, Karadi decided to take the book off the shelves. If anything, the incident revealed how vulnerable the world of publishing is, even children-s fiction. "It all started when Natasha was to take a workshop in Visakhapatnam, and members of the Sikh gurudwara there, felt offended with the way the pun was used in the book," says Bengaluru-based Kuriyan. "Everyone has the right to be offended. This wasn-t something that we could control. Everyone-s experiences are different, too. One Sikh woman, who along with her kids attended a workshop I held, loved the book. She said, -There is finally a book about us-."
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