Of animals and people

Title: Animalia Indica: The finest animal stories in Indian literature

Edited by: Sumana Roy

Illustrations by: Rohan Dahotre

Published by: Aleph Book Company

Year of publication: 2019

ISBN: 978-93-88292-57-3

Thanks are due to the team at First Post

The piece on First Post here

Some weeks ago a friend shared a poster bearing a poem and illustration of the elephant. The eight line ‘simple’ poem and the ‘evocatively’ done elephant in water colour touched me like few posters have done. It told me something about elephants, their actions and emotions and – in a way – enabled me to connect with the species. In this it did more than most, if not all, posters on the species that I have come across. Majority of the posters, for example, highlight the pachyderm’s weight, age, height and other statistics including difference between 2 species – African and Asian.

The friend and I got on to discuss how good literature – stories and poems – can play a pivotal role to connect readers to animals in a way that statistics and technical publications cannot. Animalia Indica: The Finest Animal Stories in Indian Literature, edited by Sumana Roy and published by Aleph Book Company, holds that potential.

The book is a collection of 21 separate stories from different parts of the sub-continent ‘written in the last one hundred years or so’. Most of these stories focus on human – animal interactions though there are a few devoted to the animal world as well. The later include stories by Moti Lal Khemmu and Paul Zacharia. Similarly, most of the stories are in prose other than couple of poems by Vikram Seth and Rudyard Kipling. One of the stories, by Habib Kamran, lucidly describes natural history of bulbuls in great details.

The book also has stories by the ‘big names’ in Indian writing including by R K Narayan, Perumal Murugun and Premchand. One realizes how  writing about the society back then also included writing about animals, for, animals then were an integral part of it.

These stories boast of a diversity that comes with culture and language. They talk of a time when human and animal worlds were far more intertwined and not as distant as they are today. The tales hark back to a period when humans had ample time on hand, shared spaces with animals, and observed and respected them. As a result, the book reads like a culmination of all these factors, successfully touching a range of emotions. It also serves as a good reminder of perhaps better days left behind. These stories, in other words, are not just about animals but also about the humans they depict, the worlds they live in.

The delightfully detailed ‘introduction’ is creatively titled ‘An animal on animals’. In ‘How I became a tree’ the author does not leave any room for people to doubt the fact that she has her way with words, or that she’s comfortable taking risks. Here she sets out an eloquent platform for the collection to blossom on - a platform which does justice to the stories that follow.

She describes the collection in the following manner; ‘These stories by modern Indian writers, about goats and cows, birds and dogs, horses and snakes, and various other animals, give us unexpected pleasure in the discovery of a self within us of whose existence we are mostly unaware or even forgetful.’

One line – however - did make me wonder. ‘Animalia Indica: The finest animal stories in Indian Literature is the first anthology of its kind in the Indian subcontinent’. Given the vastness of the subcontinent, diversity of the languages it boasts of and the sheer scale of literature available the usage of ‘finest’ and ‘first’ here left me surprised.

Illustrations are of high quality and they do what the stories do; entice the reader to invest more time with the book. If the idea was to move away from heavily edited colour photographs and computer sketches, one frequently comes across these days, and yet touch the reader - the team has succeeded. And how. Saying that each of the full-page black and white illustrations adds value to the text is an understatement. The stunning depth and realness imparted to the eyes of the various species mentioned in the books is testament to the illustrator’s brilliance. Each story begins with an illustration, barring a few in which illustrations have been skipped completely. I wish that hadn’t been the case.

The editing is crisp and production values high. Towards the end space has been devoted to the stories, authors and translators, besides the acknowledgements. This is a book for your collection, that you can pick up once in a while when you want to read up about animals, or even when you are not exactly sure about what to read.

Of course, elephants have been granted due space in the book as well. Both the stories, one by George Orwell and another by Kanishk Tharoor - warrant multiple reads, to say the least.