Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The Horn Book Magazine

Anushka Ravishankar's Indian nonsense.

Article Excerpt
In the West, we have become familiar with the genre of literary nonsense through works such as Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussy-cat" and, of course, Lewis Carroll's Alice books. But in India this often unrecognized genre is finding new audiences through the work of Anushka Ravishankar, an Indian children's author, poet, and playwright. Literary nonsense is the world turned upside-down, the Mad Hatter's twisted flights of logic, and the Jabberwock's linguistic adventures. Usually part parody and part fantasy, it transcends these modes, leading us down a path of sense, only at the last moment to turn away from the expected destination. And yet nonsense is at least as creative as it is destructive--as meaning-full as it is meaningless.

Ravishankar takes up this tradition in half a dozen nonsense-flavored picture books in India, where she is published by Tara Publishing, a brilliant but woefully underdistributed publisher. Her nonsense comes from gut instinct, from her childhood reading of Lear and Carroll, and, like Lewis Carroll himself, from her background in mathematics. Ravishankar has been writing nonsense for quite some time in a market where it is a rarity. Though nonsense has a rich history in India, in both folk and literary forms, it is only popular in a few limited regions, particularly West Bengal and Maharashtra. Even there, however, nonsense is rarely translated...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!