My childhood memories date from my nursery and kindergarten years and as far back as I remember, my reading habits began with Blyton and her Noddy books, graduating from there to the Famous Five, The Find Outers, the Adventure stories, St. Claire and Mallory Towers (the last two were girl school stories but were devoured equally by boys and girls) to fairy stories involving wizards, fairies and goblins. Not only did the kids in them have a whale of a time, they ate what to me seemed like scrumptious food - scones, toasted muffins, potted meat sandwiches, ham and eggs. It helped of course that I didn't really know about any of these but those kids had so much fun eating. By the time of my senior years in high school I had moved to another fictitious British world -- that of Wodehouse and also of Dickens and many others. But my years of Blyton have always seemed special -- perhaps because it is where I picked up a love of books and a love for reading.
Enid Blyton's reputation, has, in the recent more complicated politically correct world, fallen on hard times. She has been accused of racism (think gollywogs), class consciousness (an unfair charge since most of the kids in her stories belonged squarely in the middle class and often reflected the difficult post war years in Britain), a bias against foreigners (Frank Richards shared this trait with her, a fact for which Orwell once chided him in one of his columns only to have the wind taken out of his sails by being told by Richards that foreigners are funny -- as in weird! ). The present generation has no use for her and her books, while still available, don't sell anywhere like they used to a couple of decades ago. Her books have been psychoanalyzed to death, mostly to their detriment and overall, she no longer has the same fan following.
But for a child growing up in Delhi in the 60s, with the British having left barely 20 years earlier, the terrific adventures of a bunch of spunky kids from the mother country, with no adults to supervise them, were just plain fun and I couldn't get enough of them. And I think this was true of many children of my generation, growing up in a similar milieu.
I can see many of my colleagues, and, I dare say, friends curling their upper lip, sneering at such juvenile reading habits. For them, Reading is for Improving the Mind and Expanding ones' Horizons. Thus they Read Socio-Political History of the Indian Ocean Islands or Contemporary Relevance of Aurobindo Ghosh, or Human Development and the Structure of Language. But while we have all moved on from Blyton to Dickens and thereafter to Marquez and Rushdie all the way to the Ishiguros and Murakamis, the habit of reading and the love of books I owe to a bunch of five plucky kids and a dog who set out with their picnic hamper to solve yet another mystery or get involved in yet another adventure in a far off island.
20 comments:
Interesting. I have not read any of the authors mentioned in the last paragraph exept s few of Dikens mostly in translation. In the villages of A.P. where I grew up, it was mostly Chandamama.
So what did you do with the library after the Chennai flat? Donated it to a local library?
Do write about Tintin next time. Doubtless a learned one such as you must have devoured those also.
I liked Blyton as a kid and admit to it, but I find there are two kinds of children's writers: those you (or, at least, I) can read as an adult, and those I can't. I can happily read Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, and many others whom I enjoyed at the age of ten. I can't read Blyton any more -- I've tried, it's impossible. But I won't begrudge children the pleasure.
Tintin is still enjoyable. As is Asterix (the originals, written by Goscinny, not the recent Uderzo-only attempts).
Indeed all my Blytons were donated to a local library (along with Billy Bunter and Hardy boys) where they are probably collecting dust, given reading habits nowadays :)
About reading Blyton again -- indeed its tough but recently we bought some for our niece and since they were lying around I reread them. They come across as somewhat trivial but then these are children's books.
Asterix and Tintin are different -- you can read them at all ages. Recently in a fit of extravagance, I fell for an offer which gave the Tintin set free if you bought the Asterix set, which I did. I had been meaning to buy all Asterix's but their price seemed to keep increasing at a faster rate than my income. Finally I caved in :(
Rsidd: There is one crucial difference though between the Asterix/Tintin comics and Blyton. Most of us who grew up in an admittedly Anglophilic environment probably identified with the kids and vicariously lived through their adventures in her books - never mind that they belonged to a culture and country far removed from ours. I think it would be next to impossible to 'identify' in any way with Asterix or Tintin :)
Probably today's kids have as much trouble identifying with the Famous Five and Find Outers -- hence her fall in popularity.
Not entirely convinced. I think children appreciate imagination more than reality: a series that did portray a good approximation of daily life would not be so popular. Enid Blyton does supply adventure, and even fantasy. Tintin is pretty realistic in its portrayal of the world, and I think children can identify themselves with the "boy reporter". It's fun to bash the bad guys as Asterix and Obelix do, and children enjoy reading about that (though most of the victims were innocent Roman legionnaires rather than seriously bad characters, and that did bother me a little, even as a kid).
Another series I enjoyed reading as a kid was Biggles, and if my memory of it isn't seriously misleading, I would enjoy it now too. Again, it's an escape from reality, into the world of fighter planes and flying detectives.
But another thing that Blyton and Biggles introduced me to were a peculiarly English vocabulary ("old sport", "chump", "fathead", "golly", etc), and it was amusing in later years to see the same language spoken by Bertie Wooster, Peter Wimsey, Bulldog Drummond and others of that era...
OLO: thanks for the marvellous post. I too was a lover of Enid Blyton. I guess during her time, political correctness had not yet been invented.
Rsidd: I remember Biggles like it was yesterday. They were great fun to read and my 70-year old grandfather used to borrow them from me to read too.
About language, it's interesting, someone just told me that my use of the word 'plucky' in this post was a very 'English' way of expressing oneself. So I guess some things stay with you, though I would hardly use the word 'golly' or 'chump' in everyday writing and speaking. In school we did, probably because we would consciously emulate the kids in the books.
Contemporary relevance of Sri Aurobindo.?
None?
Thrilled to see that so many others loved Enid Blyton. I don't like Tintin so much, probably because I read them only in my adulthood..read to my son. Asterix is for all ages and every time I reread one, I see something I had missed before.
Well, read Asterix and Son recently and it's pretty awful, given the standards of the earlier comics. Uderzo should stop writing them or get a better story teller and stick to the drawings (which are of course superb).
Asterix and Son is good compared to what follows. I haven't read the most recent ones ("falling sky" and "golden book") but the ones prior to that were ghastly.
Here's another Blyton nostalgia article.
I too devoured Enid Blyton and Wodehouse, as also Dickens and Stevenson (and Tintin and Asterix in later years), although I wouldn't have defined my childhood environment as anglophilic. I think her place has taken over now by J. K. Rowling.
My esteemed Rahul (as Hurree Jamset Ram Singh ("Inky") would have said), I can and do still read St. Clares, Mallory Towers (recently bought a 3-in-1 set of the latter at the airport), William, Billy Bunter, the Famous Five, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tintin, etc. Not to mention Phantom, and the rare old copy of Chandamama (which sadly seems to be defunct now). I don't need to read much Asterix any more, as most of it has been committed to memory. I guess I'll be progressing to Noddy pretty soon. The better half has a very definite opinion on what all this says about my mental age, and of course better halves are never wrong, as we know:-)
Bala: why read heavy books when you have the choice of reading Enid Blyton.
I also looked at some of the links to guys who complained about EB. They say that thanks to her they have been brainwashed to imagine holidays only with scones and biscuits, and hence feel culturally deprived. But who stopped them from imagining holidays with curd rice and vengayasambar?
vbalki: could it be the curious case of Benjamin Button all over again?
One thing Rahul pointed out struck an immediate chord. I've often thought about it, but felt that maybe it was just my personal feeling, not shared by others. But Rahul's comment suggests otherwise. It's this:
I read Enid Blyton, William, etc. for the first time when I was about 10 or 11 years old, and of course highly impressionable. (By the time I learnt the English alphabet, I was already 8 years old.) The accounts of "scrumptious teas" comprising---hold your hats---bread! butter!! a "pot of jam"!! a boiled egg!!(will marvels never cease?) absolutely took my breath away. Relatively well fed as I was on dal, chapati, curd rice, sambhar, papads and all sorts of vegetable curries, not to mention the occasional samosas and gulab jamuns and zilebis during festivals, I was sure I had a terribly raw deal. When would I ever eat BREAD and BUTTER, not to mention JAM? And in a pot, too! And what was this thing called CHEESE? Why am I getting cruddy stuff like puris and dosas and vadas and idlis when those kids were eating BUNS?
I didn't realize then (i.e., in the early 1950s) that the English were actually on piddling rations, having been essentially bankrupted by the war. And of course I had no idea that England was absolutely the pits as far as cuisine was concerned, which is why they had to roam the world for centuries as marauders preying on gentler civilizations. One has to admire, though, the gumption of a race that made a virtue out of necessity, and elevated famine rations to the level of ambrosia by the sheer power of description. Something like French cuisine? "Moisson de la Poisson dans un Commode a la Versailles" sounds ever so much better than "boiled tadpoles from a muddy ditch". (Sorry, Rahul, that was just a joke!)
Bala
Bala - no need for made-up French dishes: doesn't "pate de foie gras" sound better than "liver fat paste"? Being of another generation I wasn't deprived of bread and butter, and even cheese (of a sort), but I did wonder what scones were.
Anyway, mid-afternoon "tea" of the Enid Blyton sort is a uniquely English thing and probably has its merits (as I remember, she doesn't dwell much on regular mealtimes); and an English breakfast is held in high regard. And once a French friend, in Paris, ordered "crumble aux pommes" (apple crumble) for dessert. I couldn't help saying, isn't that an English item? And he said with an embarrassed look, well, yes, actually English desserts are quite nice...
vbalki: This is what the natives of the British Isles did to marauders that crossed their path!
Anyway, it can't be denied that we've come full circle. We breakfast on oatmeal (for fibre) with dates, raisins and walnuts (for minerals, anti-oxidants and what-not) in soya milk (for all kinds of health benefits), while the English stick to idlis and chutney (for the same health-related reasons). AND Sachin is the greatest, we found water on the moon, and Ford is working for us now. Jai Ho!
Post a Comment