Last month, I received a beautiful gift: An exquisitely designed, produced and packaged box of ‘Samay Post’, containing 14 children’s books written by Gulzar with fabulous illustrations by Allen Shaw. Most people don’t know that our renowned lyricist-poet is also one of the finest storytellers for children. My favourites in this series are the nonsensical rhymes in Utpatang (which reminds one of Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol) and Ye Kavve Kale Kale that demystifies how the crows took their colour. This latest offering from Ektara (Imprint: Jugnu) was no exception.

Earlier, too, I was captivated by the range and quality of their publications for children — mega picture books, posters, poem cards, story books and short novels besides Pluto and Cycle magazines — at their stall at the last World Book Fair. This was a marked improvement over the days when my wife and I desperately searched for quality Indian books for our two children, now 25 and 20, so that they do not become monolingual English-speaking kids, cut off from their Bengali and Hindi heritage. We found that Hindi publications then were only a wee bit better than my childhood staple of bland and text-heavy stories of Akbar-Birbal, Chacha Chowdhary, Tenali Ram and Panchatantra or comics like Vetal or Amar Chitra Katha (an occasional glossy Soviet book was a bonus) and magazines like Champak, Parag and Lotpot. We discovered that the two public sector publishers, the National Book Trust (NBT) and Children’s Book Trust (CBT) had some decent titles — like Rupa Haathi by Mickey Patel — for our children. Occasionally, we found some quality books by independent publishers.

Malu Bhalu by Kamla Bhasin remained the favourite bedtime story for both of our kids. They discovered Tulika Books through Ikki Dokki, a lovely folk tale from Maharashtra and audiobooks of Karadi Tales through the valour of “Raja Kapi”, the monkey king. Katha Books brought for them tales from other Indian languages. But we had to hunt for these new publications. Such exceptions aside, the general quality of storytelling, illustrations and production of children’s books in India did not stand up to the........

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