“In the books I read growing up, there were always words I couldn’t quite imagine. I remember, with a specificity that surprises me, the foreignness of certain colors: kelly green, strawberry blonde. These were books about girls with doting fathers and best friends named George, books about an adopted boy named Jim and his sister Honey. A series about two best friends from the same street who made room for a third. No one felt alone past the first chapter. A series about twins, one good and one slightly more interesting. Like every girl, I wanted a twin or best friend. Like every girl, I wanted both. Another series: four girls away at camp - it was in truth a boarding school, but I could scarcely imagine such a thing. That’s what I mouthed to myself, then: scarcely. I tried on these words in my head, alone in my room, the bedside lamp on, folded under the covers, escaping into the pages of a book… How these series come back to haunt me now, with their sense of ownership over the world, with the ways in which they defined a world. Kelly green. With all the ways in which they owned words. Strawberry blonde. We read these books, but there was no one like us in any of them.”
-From “Betsy, Stacy, Sejal, Tib”

I remember those books, the books that permeated my childhood. I loved Nancy Drew and Kristy, Claudia and Stacy from The Babysitter’s Club. I adored the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton. I devoured these twenty-one books on months-long summer trips to India; they weren’t published in the United States. As the monsoon whipped the palm tress outside, I stayed inside, splayed across the divan in my grandmother’s house, under a rickety fan that circulated dusty air around the closed room. The Famous Five were two brothers, Julian and Dick, their younger sister Anne, their cousin Georgina (also known as George who dressed up as a boy to the extent that some strangers had no idea she is a girl) and her dog Timothy. The Famous Five attended boarding schools and got into adventure after adventure because their parents had well-paying jobs which took them away on business quite a bit, leaving the children to disappear on their own for weeks on end. They often went on cycling “holidays” without an adult. They went to camp or stayed in a remote guest house. Holidays were usually spent in an undefined place in the English Countryside. For a treat the children ate cake or a “Sunday roast” and drank “ginger beer.”

When I was in elementary school, the only two books I remember that had characters “like us” in them were A Secret Garden and The Jungle Book. (There may have been others, but they didn’t fall into the canon. Very recently, I discovered Dhan Gopal Mukerji, man who was possibly the first true children's writer of the South Asian diaspora. His best-known novel Gay Neck: The Story of a Pigeon won the Newbery Medal in 1928. Mukerji writes “sympathetically, but not sentimentally, about a domesticated bird that accompanies his owner, the young hunter Ghond, during his service in World War I. The bird, Gay-Neck, eludes hawks, tigers, and even elephants in its efforts to remain near his loving owner Ghond, and by tale's end the battle-scarred duo have each overcome their wartime fears and gained inner peace.” He is little known today, although I am trying to remedy that: I am currently working on a biographical profile of him for publication and reviewing Gay Neck for the July/August 2005 issue of Kahani, a new South Asian literary magazine for children.)

In Mitali Perkins’ delightful middle-grade novel, The Not-So Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen, protagonist Sunni is enchanted by A Secret Garden, just as I was. It’s one of the few books in which Sunni can find a representation of India, her parents’ homeland. However, she begins to notice things that infuriate her (just as I did):

“It’s different in India,” said Mistress Mary disdainfully. She could scarcely stand this.

But Martha was not at all crushed.

“Eh! I can see it's different,” she answered almost sympathetically. “I dare say it's because there's such a lot o' blacks there instead o' respectable white people. When I heard you was comin' from India I thought you was a black too.”

Mary sat up in bed furious.

“What!” she said. “What! You thought I was a native. You - you daughter of a pig!”

So why do we need people “like us” in the books we read? Finding themselves in books gives children a sense of their culture, history, and importance - especially when their cultures and experiences have been marginalized by the mainstream. In “Diverse Learners, Diverse Texts: Exploring Identity and Difference Through Literary Encounters” in The Journal of Literacy Research, Dr. Steven Z. Athanases reports, “When students identified with characters and texts, they reflected on personal concerns, including family nostalgia and loss; adolescent challenges; and culture, gender, and sexual-identity formation… Students identified ways in which cultural experiences depicted in literary works sparked identification in them and, at times, a sense of cultural pride and validation.”

As a reader (of every children’s book I can get my hands on) and a writer (of children’s literature in which I explore South Asian American culture), I am deeply interested in representations of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora in books available to children in the United States. I found several resources online, including an extensive list at South Asian Women’s NETwork and a list on Indian- and Pakistani-Canadian titles from the University of Saskatchewan Education Library. However, the SAWNET list includes books only available in South Asia and does not include “crossover” titles, books that may have been published for adults, but appeal to younger readers as well. The University of Saskatchewan is not exhaustive enough. (I found many, many lists on Asian-American books for young people, though. In fact, Scholastic’s Instructor magazine, invited five children's literature specialists to give candid advice on “How To Choose The Best Multicultural Books.” Not one of the ten Asian-American selections is a book about the South Asian experience.) In addition I often see emails on various teacher/librarian/writer/academic listservs to which I belong asking for books about South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. So, I decided to create this online resource for teachers, librarians and parents, because I saw a need for it.

As you scroll through, be advised that I had my own biases. I did not collect non-fiction titles (i.e. I is for India and Holi, World Of Holidays) and was most interested in middle-grade and young adult novels as well as contemporary picture books. I tried to include as many folk and fairy tales as I could find, but I do feel this section is the most incomplete. In addition, I haven’t read every South Asian book for adults, and so the books in the crossover section are culled from the books that I have read.

Just some observations: In the YA category, I have compiled twenty-six (26) books. Of those, about half are contemporary novels written by South Asian writers. The rest are a mix: YA literature by non-South Asian writers (mostly historical fiction), fantasy, chicklit (i.e. Bindi Babes) and series (Neela: Victory Song from the Girls of Many Lands series by American Girl and Jahanara: Princess of Princesses from The Royal Diaries series by Scholastic). As an article in Book Links stated: "The increase in [the publishing of] multicultural books has resulted in a wide range of folktales, some historical novels, and a good number of nonfiction books about African Americans, Asians, Latinos, and native Americans… Yet there are still far too few high-quality novels and picture books featuring children of these cultures (especially Native American and Latinos) as protagonists in contemporary settings." There's still a need for realistic contemporary stories, set in specific South Asian cultures.

What's even more interesting: there is a dearth of “boy books” depicting the South Asian experience. “Generally speaking, boys seem more attracted to books about boys, and I've rarely met a boy who willingly reads a story without boys in it,” Sharon Grover, youth services selections specialist at the Arlington Public Library, said in an online chat with WashingtonPost.com. Yes, there are “crossover” titles like Harun and the Sea of Stories and Funny Boy which work for both boys and girls. In my research, I could only find one (forthcoming) novel for young South Asian boys, Lowji Discovers America by Candace Fleming, about a spunky, funny boy from India who adjusts to his new life in suburban America. (Of course, I could go off on a tangent here about boys and literacy, but that falls out of the scope of this project. But I want to say, in short: in his web-based literacy program, GuysRead.org, children's author Jon Sczieska says, “Many books boys are asked to read don’t appeal to them. They aren’t motivated to want to read.”)

I recently read Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire for what is likely the sixth time. J.K. Rowling has been censured for her “tokenism” (Richard Adams writes in The Guardian, “[Harry Potter] includes obviously Asian and black characters as students… but there are no feasts for Rosh Hashanah or Diwali”) and praised for including characters of various ethnicities, which many readers believe reflect an increasingly multicultural England.

I couldn’t have been more thrilled to see the name “Parvati Patil” in Book 1 and noted (yet again) that Parvati attend the Yule Ball with Harry in Book 4. What’s so great, to me, about Parvati is that she is vain, a bit of a flake, and not a goody-two-shoes. And she and her twin sister are beautiful. (“‘I still can’t believe how you two go the best-looking girls in the year,’ muttered Dean… She looked very pretty indeed, in robes of shocking pink, with her long dark plait braided with gold and gold bracelets glimmering at her wrists.”)

Ultimately, I’d like to uncover all such representations in books for young people. (Another example: many readers have suggested that Leo Lionni’s Tico and the Golden Wings takes place in India, based on his luscious illustrations.) But I know that will take a lifetime of reading. In the meantime, I invite you to suggest, comment, question, advise on what’s here. I make no claim that this is an exhaustive list of children’s books that depict South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Even after weeks and weeks of research, and reading every book that I could get my hands on, I am sure that may have missed something. But this is a work-in-progress. A collaborative work-in-progress. You can reach me at sakidlit@poojamakhijani.com; I look forward to your emails.