Literary Herstory(?)

I don't really know why I started reading, neither of my parents were very encouraging of this habit, in fact, they rather frowned upon it. The first memory of me picking out a "book" was when I was really, really young, maybe in the second or third grade, back then we had a cartoon version of Kipling's Jungle Book, running on the national television channel in India (DD1). It was everybody's favourite cartoon, so when it ended I was a little heartbroken, I guess. I don't remember if it was for this reason, or because it was a familiar name among so many unknowns, one birthday I demanded to buy a book and I bought Jungle Book. It was pretty expensive and my father was rather put off by the fact that I had wasted money on a unnecessary book!

In school, we used to have something called "the library period", when we would all be required to read books from the school library, something like the silent reading that kids in Singapore have during morning assembly. For us library period was really a period of release, when we could chuck our boring Maths, Science, Social Studies books and delve into a different world. Each class came equipped with a mini library and we chose books according to serial number. Needless to be said, the latter numbers seldom got anything good, most of them got stuck with religious books (my school was a convent) or instructional books. My number being in the middle (we were a class of 60, my number was generally around 30) I never got the coveted books, like the Tintins, the Asterixes, the Nancy Drews or the Enid Blytons or even the Count of Monte Cristos, but I got stuck with something called Black Beauty and later Heidi. These are the two books that I can remember from my 4th and 5th grade. Because the library hour was only once a week and it was a 40 minute class, we took the entire year to read a book (for some of us) or two books max.

I hated school, my maths sucked, science flopped and social studies was so tedious. English was the only subject I liked, I ever did well consistently and Lit allowed me to really enjoy myself at a different level. It became the only subject where I did not have to mug answers, where I could be creative. Lit for us was divided into short stories, poems and a "rapid reader", which was a short novel, mostly written by Indian authors, like Ruskin Bond, or canonical ones like Shakespeare. I don't remember all the rapid readers we had, but we did have quite a few throughout the years, I remember doing Merchant of Venice-the Charles and Mary Lamb version in 8th grade.

The short stories we did were really fantastic, sometimes they were really excerpts from longer novels, I remember doing an excerpt from Village by the Sea in 7th grade and then reading it later and recognizing it from my schoolbook. By 7th grade, which is High School for us, I had fallen into the pit of Romance Novels, Sidney Sheldons, Michael Crichtons, Jeffery Archers, the Robin Cooks...you get the picture? I also read Reader's Digest mag, and they often came up with these little mini books, so, I read about Anne Frank when I was in 6th grade and so, I bought the "real book", likewise, I read Rebecca, and another work by Daphne du Maurier, called The Scapegoat in 8th grade. During this time, I read Charles and Mary's Shakespeare as I had no patience for the real work, I read some poetry, mostly Tennyson, I was in love with him. So, on one hand I was reading pulp fiction and on the other, I was trying to read the canonical stuff, like Austen, Dickens.

I read The God of Small Things when I was in 10th grade and it moved me quite a lot. However, I should say, my most basic reads during this time was, Mills and Boon. The classic ones, a friend of mine had inherited her mother's copies from the 1970s, and she had like thousands of Mills and Boon and I used to read them by the dozen. In fact I became friends with a rather annoying girl when it came to my notice that even her mother possessed such an heirloom and she would be happy to share the books in exchange of notes or clothes.

I began reading Thomas Hardy in 11th grade, I was really inspired by Eustasia Vye and as I read more "literary" books, I gave up on my other "readings", as I decided to study English Literature, the more urgently I read up famous works. I recall reading V. S Naipaul, Nirad Chaudhuri and a few other Postcolonial writers in English during this period (around 11th grade).

It's rather difficult to remember everything that I read, but yeah, basically, after getting into my Bachelor's course, my reading became more academic and I started reading up on critics and theories. I don't know that I like reading theories so much, I still enjoy reading for the sake of reading. Oscar Wilde, whose "Happy Prince", we did in school, was always my ideal, and yes, I think I rather like Art for Art's Sake. I think that students dislike Lit because they see it as a burden, not something they can identify and deal with. I think literature should be something that frees one to into a different plane, and it should be more about imagination than about skills.