11 Child Approved Books for Toddlers and Preschoolers

As my daughter grew, the books we read changed. I read a lot of different books to my daughter not only for her sake but also for the sake of my sanity! I end up reading some books over and over again, but if I read from a wide range, then the number of favourites is high enough to give me, the poor reader, some variety. So this is the system I have developed: I follow online book lists and blogs of book lists, and I keep a running list of books that sound interesting (not in my memory but in an online document!). I then put in a hold for them at the library. Luckily our local library is part of an inter-library system and so almost 90% of what I check is available. Of these books, I buy those that either she loves or I love. Otherwise we just read and return it to the library.

Alongside this system, I kept buying books for her. This is because children need books of their own. I understand that buying books is a luxury, but would still recommend that parents buy as many books as possible. Remember that books lose nothing by being second hand! Children need books that they can play with, drop food on, have read to them hundreds of times, pore over the pictures of and whose characters and stories they can recycle in their own pretend play. This is a list of books that my daughter loved, that we read from age 2 to 4.

1. Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel

This was among the first books that my daughter took to. The stories are very simple and very little happens: a button is lost and then found, frog tries to wake toad up while he wants to go on sleeping and so on. I think children love it precisely for the unhurried pace and the simplicity of the action. We went on to buy all the other books in the series and still enjoy them.

2. Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik and illustrated by Maurice Sendak

I'm always a little conflicted in recommending Little Bear to anyone. It is an old book, and a gendered one, in that Father Bear is away on a shipping trip while Mother Bear stays at home with Little Bear and looks after him and does all the household chores. At that time, our life situation mirrored the books in that I was the primary stay-at-home parent to my daughter. Yet I knew that there were many contemporary picture books with representations of more equitable households. But I still loved this series more than many contemporary books. The reason is simple: Little Bear plays outside with his friends all day. There are very few toys but lots of imagination and co-operative play. I think highlighting simplicity works for children, and I really find very few contemporary books that have the same sense of simplicity and profundity that this one has. When Little Bear tells Mother Bear that he is planning to go to the moon, she says "Be back for lunch" and I have striven to emulate that matter-of-fact attitude ever since! We went on to buy all the books in the series. Not only that, there was a television series, also called Little Bear that is now entirely available on YouTube. When Shabdita first started screen time, for a long time, this was the only series that we would put on for her to watch. The show, like the books, is slow and soothing with very little conflict, and there is much to appeal to toddlers and preschoolers. Another bonus was that because the show was a very old one, there was never any affiliated merchandising that we would have to negotiate over.

3. Ladybird Fairy Tales Box Set

This set has 24 books, and at different ages different books have appealed to Shabdita. When she was younger, she preferred the animal stories or the simpler ones, such as Chicken Licken, The Little Red Hen, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Magic Porridge Pot, The Three Little Pigs, The Enormous Turnip, The Gingerbread Man and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. These stories taught her the names of various animals as well as concepts like above, around, below, under, push, pull and so on. Somewhere between 3 and 4, she got interested in Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Ugly Ducking, The Princess and the Pea, Beauty and the Beast, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Princess and the Frog and so on. Luckily, I had bought this set second-hand off Gumtree, so these are older version, not toned down versions that would avoid mentioning things that are presumed to be unpleasant to children. These stories not just interested her but prompted her to think about concepts like death, step parents and poverty among others. Of course, they are still fairy tales based on princesses being rescued by princes and living happily ever after. I still read them to her because I think protecting children from certain narratives, which do not align with our beliefs, works only up to a point. They live in the world, and have many other sources of input, and I neither can nor wish to control every thing that my daughter comes in contact with. That does not mean that I deliberately read any and everything to her, but there was no way I could keep all princess references out of her childhood, especially because almost every marketing gimmick in this society is structured towards selling princesses to little girls. I am hoping, however, that knowing the original versions of these stories will help her why a book like The Paper Bag Princess is subversive. After all, one needs some context in order to critique things. Another important lesson I learnt from this box set was that individual books are always more appealing to younger children, because they can carry them around. I have a collected stories of Aesop for her, but being one thick book that gets picked less often than these individual stories. And their hold endures. Just this morning, we read Hansel and Gretel before breakfast.

4. Paddington by Michael Bond

I bought the picture book version of this and at that time I didn't even know that it was based on a series of books for older children. The illustrations were lavish. When I first started reading it to Shabdita, she was very young (less than 2 years) and I could see that she was losing interest because she could not follow the text. So I started 'reading' the picture to her. I started describing it "look here is the railway platform. Those people are Mr. and Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown is wearing a skirt and a top. Look at her necklace and her earrings. Mr. Brown has glasses, like Mama. And look at that man behind them. He seems to be in a rush. Perhaps he is late for his train'. After describing the picture in the utmost detail, I told her a simplified version of what happens on the page, and continued the story like that. She loved it and then regularly brought it to me, pointing to the illustrations and asking me to 'read' them. I have on and off used this method of reading quite often, especially with books that she finds interesting but are too dense in terms of language. And now, after almost two years, she does it on her own. She loves picking up picture books and making up her own story to go along with the pictures. Not only that, she came to like the story for its own sake and was soon so familiar with it that I could read the actual text to her.

5. The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter

Honestly, I didn't get this book for a long time simply because it did not seem interesting to me. The story itself is simple: a rabbit sneaks into a farm even when he's told not to by his mother, eats lettuces and French beans, is chased by the farmer and nearly caught twice before escaping. When I read it though, Shabdita loved it. She was all agog, waiting to see if Peter Rabbit would be caught or not. She was overjoyed when he escaped. And in all subsequent tellings, whenever I read the line "But Peter, who was very naughty", she enjoys that bit of mischief and disobedience so very much. It all holds a vicarious thrill for her, and she likes the book so much that I've started collecting the others in the series. One word of warning though: I'm talking about the original Beatrix Potter series and not book versions of the TV show Peter Rabbit.

6. Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina

We all know this story, and this version is by a Russian author and illustrator. I bought it mostly because I have realised over time the value of having individual books rather than collections of stories for toddlers and preschoolers, though the latter often have more stories and are more value for money. My daughter loves hearing me shout 'caps for sale', which I do in the style of the tea-sellers in Indian trains, but most of all she loves the monkeys and their antics.

7. Bunny Money by Rosemary Wells

This book, more than any other book, showed me how arbitrary the recommended ages for children's books are. This book is recommended for children aged 6 years or over, and usually I would never have picked it up. But my daughter started watching the TV show Max and Ruby, and loved it. This was the only Max and Ruby book immediately available at the library, so I put a hold on the others and got this one for her. And she loved it! There is very little text in the book, so the first two times or so I had to fill in to explain the story to her, but she understood the entire story, including the fact that they had very little money left for Grandma's present by the end of the book. And now this is the only Max and Ruby book that we own, and I can recite it in my sleep!

8. What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry

I got this book from the library because most illustrators talked about the influence of Richard Scarry on their work, and more than one of them mentioned spending hours poring over the incredibly detailed pictures. This book appealed not just to my daughter but to a lot of kids in her preschool, where I had lent it for a couple of days and got back only after they got their own copy! One of the stories is called "A Visit to the Hospital" and this is the story that first cemented my daughter's interest in this book. Other stories include how a house is built, a train trip, a plane trip, a trip by ship, how food is grown, wood and how we use it, and so on. All action takes place in Busy Town, and the detailed layout of Busy Town has greatly expanded my daughter's vocabulary in terms of different shops and professions. It is a great book for a curious child, and again the book will grow with the child, with different stories becoming more appealing at different ages. Just two things of concern though: first, the book is an old one and some things, such as visiting the pilot in the cockpit during a flight (and getting to fly the plane!), are no longer possible. Secondly, the gender roles are pretty old-fashioned here: mother is a worker too, but a worker who works chiefly in the house. What I do usually is point out in conversation, whether reading this or Little Bear above, the way in which things have changed over time.

9. Ling & Ting: Not Exactly the Same by Grace Lin

Shabdita is not a twin, and I was not sure how much a book about twin sisters and their everyday lives would appeal to her. The answer was that it would appeal a lot. This is another book that I can recite in my sleep. Like Little Bear and Frog and Toad, the Ling and Ting books have everyday, commonplace plots: the twins make dumplings together, they get a hair cut, they issue books from libraries and so on. My daughter listens enchanted each time, and I realise anew that it is the simplest books that have the most staying power.

10. Situation-specific books

I have found situation-specific books very helpful in talking about our lives together and what is happening in them. So for example I read at least 5 different books where girls learned how to use the toilet when I was toilet training my daughter, and we read books about going to the dentist before, yes, visiting the dentist. Whether it is preparing to move houses or going to preschool, I've found such books very helpful. It is not necessary to buy such books, however, as they usually end up becoming obsolete after the experience. Also, it is better to stick to versions that have a matter-of-fact tone rather than a celebratory one. Ideally, you want your child to see these things as a normal part of life and not turn them into exceptional situations that require lots of separate preparation. It might be best to read them alongside the usual books that you read together rather than making them the sole focus for a few days.

11. Science and non-fiction books

It seems really unfair to lump a lot of books in this category. I'm wary, however, of recommending science and non-fiction books. This is because they often become a means to an end. The assumption is that reading these books is the same as your children understanding these concepts. Learning doesn't usually work like that. If your child has a good memory, she may remember the names of the planet, just as some other child knows all the lyrics of a song that they hear often. Developing conceptual models, however, be it the solar system, the extinction of dinosaurs or the basic outlines of a world where cities are parts of states that are in turn parts of countries, takes time. My daughter is inordinately curious, and always asking questions, so I read a variety of non-fiction books to her, including not just science but also geography or history. I read them the way I read fiction to her: when she brings me a book I read it out to her. I don't worry about whether she understands it or not. Nor do I try and teach her things from them. I read them out to her mostly because this world is just as magical as anything else we could read about in fiction and right now all I'm doing is showing her the wonder of it. If the book is more difficult, she will wander off midway and bring something else back to read, and that's fine too. Naturally, through this sort of reading I have found specific series that I like and have purchased for us to get back to when she is older. The two I would recommend to most parents are The Magic School Bus Books (I've only read the original ones and not the ones based on the tv show) and the Let's Read and Find Out books. The former series has around 12 books while the latter has over 80 books, so it is best to figure out what interests you or your child specifically and buy accordingly.

So these are the books that are the most popular in my home. Now that my daughter is exposed to more and different narratives across mediums like books, tv and film, her ability to absorb content is expanding. She now enjoys more challenging books. Not only that, her preferences change more often, and I'm sure that any post about the books she enjoys would look very different even two months from now. Let's just hope that I can keep up!

Of Being Indian

I recently read Pavan K.Varma's Being Indian: Inside the Real India as part of the project of reading my own books. I understand that there are quite a few books that attempt to distill the essence of India into chapter sized generalisations, such as The Argumentative Indian and India Unbound. Like all good social commentators, Pavan K. Varma acknowledges that for every generalisation he offers, the opposite is equally true for a vast country like India. He sets out to break certain myths - that Indians are spiritual or other-worldly and inherently non-violent - and takes on the behemoths of technology and pan-Indianness.

Varma argues that Indians are as materialistic as any other people on earth and that their spirituality co-exists undisturbed with materialism and the quest for Lakshmi. I agree with most of his observations about the pursuit and relentless exhibition of wealth and power in India. I have two main quibbles with these sections of the book though. For one, some of these myths are not as widespread as the author thinks they are. The book was first published in 2004, and by then we were sufficiently into the liberalised economy for materialism to have become a common societal malaise. The idea of India as a spiritual and non-violent cocoon may have been an Orientalist construct, but by 2004 it is more an easy straw figure against which Varma can lay out his argument. One should argue against stereotypes, but neither the stereotypes nor the arguments against them should be simplistic.

Which brings me to my second quibble. Yes, Indians are materialistic, pursue and display power blatantly and chase wealth as an ideal goal without any niggling sense of discomfort. But how is that different from a majority of people anywhere in the world? We do not grow up outside the world, and the world today, whether London or Ludhiana (the problem with easy generalisations is that they are catching!) is a world that extols the virtues of wealth and success, that thrusts the messages of consumption down our throats 24/7. I do not think I can say of any space in the world that the people living there do not pursue power. Yes, I am aware that there is a minimalism movement in the West, and I am thankful for it. That movement however shapes itself as opposed to the dominant culture, and unfortunately the dominant culture in the world today is very similar, no matter what part of the world you are in. If I wax philosophical, I would argue that this is not only about the world today. The desire to acquire and possess has always been a part of the human condition. Merchants found plying the Silk Route profitable because there were men and women desirous of buying silk and willing to pay well for it.

As far as technology is concerned, Varma argues that the almost universal emphasis on a certain kind of higher education - engineering and English (the language and not the literature) for example - makes Indians better at being the outsourcing capital of the world. He also discusses how they are usually software coolies, doing the more manual of the work while the creative work is done in the West. Some Indians working in American environments are able to tap into creativity and compete alongside the first citizens of the online world. Varma states that "Indian society encourages status-quoism and tolerates mediocrity" (p. 122). As a student and a teacher in India, I came up against the vagaries of the system often enough to sympathise with this idea. At the same time, I would argue that these phenomena are as much about colonialism and structures of power as about systems of education. When you praise Indians for their 'jugaad' in the chapter on business but declare their inability to be creative in the chapter, you are not only undermining your own argument, but also demonstrating that perceptions change as context changes. Current perceptions in technology rest along the Orientalist axis of Western work as inherently superior to Eastern work. After all, it is American freedom that sets glorious Indian minds free! I have studied in both Indian and Australian universities, and I would argue that a lack of resources is as much of a problem as the lack of innovative thinking. Universities in both India and Australia have good and bad thinkers, and I am sure both Indian and American IT companies have similar pools of creative and not-creative thinkers.

The final section of the book focusses on the idea of pan-Indianness. This topic is of special interest to me, given that my thesis flirts with the ways in which ideas of India are constructed. Varma attributes greater cohesion in Indian identity to the usual suspects - popular culture, which is mostly Bollywood, and greater mobility within India, courtesy transportation and the new jobs of a liberalised economy. I am just surprised that he does not mention cricket. It is a familiar argument, and I do not oppose it in the sense of 'no, this is incorrect'. Yes, Bollywood does interest a large number of people in India (except me, of course :P). At the same time, the rise of the vernacular television channels and movie industries show that both these seemingly contradictory arguments - "Bollywood brings India together" and "the rise of regional cinemas shows that regional identity is not dead" - are equally valid and relevant. They bear each other out even as they cancel each other out.

It is in this section that Varma brings up the stereotype of non-violence. He argues that Indians can be violent when it has social sanction, and prefer to compromise when the opponent in superior and there is the prospect of annihilation. The violence perpetuated on a regular basis against Dalit, minorities and poor people certainly makes the notion of Indians being nonviolent seem like a cruel joke perpetrated on those who live with the routine violence of everyday Indian life. At the same time, Varma argues that violence levels are relatively low because of a certain kind of pragmatism in the Indian fabric. Violence is bad for business, and different religious communities find ways of living and working together that work for them and keep violence at bay as exceptional rather than the norm. Again, I do not disagree with the argument per se. I do have two quibbles again. One is that 'not too much violence' is a slippery slope kind of an argument. In a nation of a billion people, how many people have to die before we think that too many people have been killed? (yes, I badly paraphrased the song) What I mean is this: the idea that India is relatively peaceful works in certain contexts, wherein we look at violence and deaths in other countries or at an abstract number that seems large, and so we derive notions of relative peace and relative goodwill. Just like everywhere else in the world, religious identities are far more complex, and ways of living and working together enmeshed in these identities in far more complicated ways than 'we are all a relatively not so violent family' would suggest. Yes, people from different communities work together, but who owns the business and who is the labour?

My second quibble is similar to the one I made above. Violence is endemic to the human condition, as 'natural' as natural can be. These instances - of violence against specific communities or groups of people, as well as co-existence - are not exclusive to India alone. Across history, in all sorts of conflicts and wars, we have seen the best and the worst of human behaviour on display. This brings me to my central problem with the book, and probably with other such books, with the idea of such books. Whatever the aspects identified as being Indian, whether positive or negative, are ultimately narratives created to serve their purpose in arguments. They may or may not be true, but their truth or falsity is not the point. Any series of circumstances or phenomena can be woven together to present one picture, and we can go on creating multiple such pictures. Some arguments are more compelling than others. I am sure some books on Indian realities are more insightful than others, and I hope to find and read them. At the same time, all these books create realities as much as document them, and there is not an Indian reality that exists outside of such documentations.

Unpacking My Library

I have started a new project. I am going to read the books I own. Yes, I am admitting to the almost blasphemous: I have not read all my books. I have flagrantly put on display knowledge that I actually do not yet possess. In my defence, buying a book is my tribute to the idea of a future. I have bought it today, and someday I shall read it. For the present, there are always books borrowed from the library.

This resolution came about when a visitor looked at my gleaming bookshelves admiringly. "So you have read all of these books?" he asked. The guilt that I am ready to feel at just about anything immediately floated to the front of my consciousness. "Erm... Most of them" I said. A knowing grin came to his face, and this of course compelled me to keep explaining "The ones that I have read were things I was either studying, teaching or researching. And I have read almost all the detective fiction and fantasy that I own.... and a few random ones here and there". I gave up the attempt, and I am sure that he now thinks that I never read. Sigh. It is true. My likelihood of reading a book increases drastically when I have borrowed it from the library rather than purchased it.

I know some of the reasons for this sorry state of affairs. Brought up in a middle-class household, book-buying was reserved for the 'best books', the ones that one 'should' have read. And the frivolous stuff was meant to be issued from the library. I have read all of Agatha Christie's books, but never bought one through my childhood. Similarly for P. G. Wodehouse and a myriad of detective and fantasy fiction. As I began to earn my own money, I always bought books that I felt that I should read, mostly literary masterpieces or theory. I have nothing against them and have come to enjoy reading philosophy and history more than most other things I read, but it has created a large bank of 'someday' books that I bought willingly, almost dutifully, but resisted picking up as I was unconsciously prejudiced against them.

My book buying really took off after I came to Australia. For one, books are more easily available here than in India, and the second hand stores are endless sources of treasures. The joyless Puritan in me still bought two kinds of books: 'those that I will to keep forever' and 'those that I will read and then donate'. The latter were, of course, variations on the library theme, but mercifully without a deadline. So I kept reading and recycling books like the Game of Thrones series. Once in a while, I liked an author so much that I decided to keep the book (Raymond Chandler, I will never say farewell to the lovely you!) I also kept adding to my collection of someday books.

Not any longer. I have already started reading some of my own books and find them fascinating, and wonder at myself for holding on to my fear of uncharted waters for so long. I have come to terms with what I like, while also accepting that I may like something else, but will never know that until I try it. I think I am in for an exciting time. The title of this post is a homage to/plagiarism of an essay by Walter Benjamin from Illuminations, available on this link as pdf. The essay is a delightful read. Naturally, I especially enjoyed the idea that the non-reading of books is the characteristic of all true collectors. Of late, I have been reading quite a few books, blogs and articles around simplifying one's life. Most of them have resonated with me. At the same time, as Benjamin says "Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects". How does one reconcile the wish for simplicity with a love for objects, books in his case? For me right now, the answer is to keep what I love and consciously choose to keep. I am unpacking my library in two ways: by reading it and then by giving away that which I do not love or do not choose to keep. Knowing myself, this is most probably not going to result in a substantial reduction. But then that is not my aim anyway. What I wish to do is far more ambitious: to know myself by getting to know my library.

Creating narratives of Creation

“In this old world, there is nothing new but ourselves”

I was saddened to read of the death of Gore Vidal last week. It is difficult to know exactly what to say when one reads of the death of someone one is only just discovering through his work, except that the usual platitudes sound silly. I’ve started reading his 'Narratives of Empire' series, and they offer a fascinating insight, not just into American history, but into historiography, and the way in which a nation comes into being, which give me all sorts of interesting ideas about my work.

The line above is from Creation by Gore Vidal, that was my first introduction to his work. The ‘old world’ quoted in the line above is the world of the 5th Century BCE, and the speaker rues that everything that can be thought, said, imagined or invented, has already been done so. While this may make twenty-first century reader feel suitably superior to the naïve fifth century narrator, who does not yet know how many new things are yet to be discovered by this old world, it is equally true that by this time certain questions have been asked and certain issues have been raised that, across the centuries, we have returned to rather than invented anew, such as questions about human society, religion and the meaning of human existence.

The book follows the travails and travels of Cyrus Spitama, grandson of Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism. As ambassador of the Great King Darius, Cyrus travels to ‘East’, i.e. to certain kingdoms of present-day India, and to ‘East of the East’, i.e. to Cathay. Both diplomat and religious seeker, in India Cyrus converses with Mahavira, the 24th Tirathankar of Jainism, with Gosala, the founder of the Ajivika movement and with Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. In Cathay, he learns from Master Li, founder of Taoism and from Confucius, founder of Confucianism. I discovered to my surprise that this is historically possible - most of these thinkers were contemporaries, and the German philosopher Karl Jaspers has referred to this age as an 'Axial age', a moment in time when certain philosophies and religious ways of thinking came into being that influenced entire civilizations.

Cyrus' conversations with the people he meets frequently return to two motifs: creation, i.e. “how did the world come into being?” and on annihilation, i.e. “what happens after death?” The different cultures that he encounters have developed their own answers to these questions, their own narratives – tales of many gods, of one god, of cycles of births and re-births, and of ancestors. All the co-existing cultures in Creation, whether they be Persian, Buddhist, Jain, Tao, Confucian or Greek, are charmingly convinced of the superiority of their own narratives and dismissive or indulgent of the narratives of others. What are stories of gods to those who think of this life as but one of many cycles?

As a Zoroastrian, Cyrus believes in and follows Ahura Mazdah, the Wise Lord, as the one true God, opposed to the old Aryan gods, the ‘false gods’ worshipped by quite a few of his Persian contemporaries. In a universally pantheistic paradigm, Zoroastrianism is the only nascent monotheistic religion. As such, the religious opinions that Cyrus voices are the closest that we get to a ‘modern’ monotheistic ideal of the divine, and that too as an upstart contender rather than as the dominant paradigm. Eastern conceptions of the divine comprise ideas of circularity, dispensing with the idea of a definite beginning and an end, and they regularly dismiss Cyrus’ beliefs as juvenile manifestations that their philosophies have already left behind. The text suggests that Cyrus’ sense of certainty in definite and knowable good and evil, and in linearity, is shaken by his eastern encounters, and by their questioning of his ideas.

Gore Vidal by Van Vechten Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, [reproduction number LC-USZ62-103965 DLC], image courtesy wikimedia commons http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/GoreVidalVanVechten1.jpg

Creation constantly plays with history and historiography. The novel begins with the now old and blind Cyrus holding the perilous position of Persian ambassador to Athens. Cyrus’ age and recent blindness allow him to function as a wise and prophetic seer-like narrator, a suggestion heightened by the anecdotal recollection of his having been the only witness to a vision of the Wise Lord at the death of Zoroaster. At the same time, Cyrus is an unreliable narrator. He narrates his life story in flash back as a corrective to a public recital of the Persian wars by ‘a self-styled historian’, the Greek Herodotus. Cyrus’ account is motivated by the desire to provide a counter-history to the Greek version, and to show the Greeks how insignificant they are in the grander scheme of things. Thus, his autobiographical narrative is a fashioning both of himself and of the Persian Empire, a self-conscious attempt ‘to set the record straight’ against the Greek telling of the tale.

This also arguably makes Creation post-Orientalist. At the beginning of Orientalism, Said identifies Aeschylus’ The Persians, ‘the earliest Athenian play extant’, along with The Bachchae of Euripedes, as marking the inaugural moments of the discourse of Orientalism, a discourse that sets up a hierarchy of the West’s superiority over the non-West. Creation is not post-Orientalist because of its temporal or geographical settings. Setting a text in the 5th Century BCE or in the Persian Empire rarely means the absence of Orientalism. If anything, it usually indicates otherwise – most ‘historical fiction’ can be remarkably Orientalist in the way in which in recreates the Orient and the West for modern consumption. What makes Creation post-Orientalist is that it renders a world wherein Greek culture is just one among the various contemporary ways of being in the world. Creation imagines an Orient without positing the West as a superior reference point, and in refusing that hierarchy, becomes post-Orientalist.

Creation is neither a counter-history nor an anti-history, i.e. history written from a subaltern or alternative point of view. Instead, it is a historiographical history. That is, it is a narration of events that does not distinguish between “events” and “the narration of events”, that does not represent reality as existing outside of and prior to the narration of it. The events are constituted within the act of narration itself, i.e. various narratives of different kinds, both mainstream and marginal, together discursively constitute the reality of the world being described. It is not a static medieval period, with all the labels that we retrospectively attach to it, but a dynamic living and breathing history that confronts us. For example, a series of wars are referred to as ‘the Greek wars’ or ‘the Persian wars’, depending on who is doing the telling. How is one to tell the more ‘accurate’ term? Creation constantly highlights the process of narrativization at work in all matters – personal, political and religious. What we label ‘philosophy’, ‘religion’ and ‘storytelling’ flow into and merge with each other. Whether it be Zoroaster, Confucius or Buddha, none enjoys the luxury of unmediated enunciation; there are always interpretations, oral and written, by disciplines, devotees, students, observers and so on.

Creation has so many layers that it is possible to unpack it endlessly, making a book that one can return to over and over again. Even as Creation reinforces the futility of expecting original enunciation, I wish to give Gore Vidal unmediated last words here: “The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely human thought”.

Note: This blog first appeared as an MnM Commentary here. Creation is available for purchase here internationally and here in India.