The English writer who colonized young Indian readers

What explains Enid Blyton's popularity in India?

Hola Global Jigsaw,

In the early 1980s, India was liminal. We were like Schrodinger’s cat, existing in two different contradictory, but equally true, states. My generation of urban, upper-middle class Indians was post-colonial, having been born three decades after the British had vacated the country. But our tongues remained colonized by English, and a good part of our imagination too.

The principal conquistador of the imagination wasn’t a rapacious asset-stripper like Robert Clive or a quintessential aristocrat like Louis Mountbatten, but the daughter of a cutlery salesman from East Dulwich in London, who had never stepped foot in India: Enid Blyton.

It was through Blyton’s Neverland books of adventuring children that I, and the majority of English-educated young people of my generation, first travelled to elsewhere. We went to places where the summer was “delightful,” rather than the hellish onslaught of heat we knew it to be. We visited worlds where lacrosse-playing schoolgirls forgave errant foreigners for their transgressions, aware that they lacked an English sense of honour. We “ate” scones and crumpets and quaffed ginger ale, exotic foods that seemed to be the essential accoutrement of Adventure.

Blyton’s books never explained exactly what lacrosse, crumpets, or cornflowers were. The result was that although they found a place in the ontology of her Indian readers, they did so in purely imagined form. In those information-circumscribed days, one couldn’t google, so one fabricated. I imagined lacrosse to be a balletic exercise with butterfly-catching style nets, the ultimate goal of which remained hazy. Sardines, I envisaged to be some kind of kebab. At eight, which for me was a St Clare school series- addicted age, I was even convinced that an English sense of honour was a “thing.” And I wanted one.

I recently asked my social media hive mind a question. “Why did we all read so much Enid Blyton when we were kids? What was the attraction?” The thread blew up. Many said it was because we had no other options. One friend, answered, “er, colonialism?” Both of these explanations were partially true. 

We were Indian in lived experience, but having had our tongues Englishified, we read in English. And what bookshops offered in terms of English language children’s literature at the time was Enid Blyton. We didn’t have easy access to stories translated from Indian languages. The only Indian “literature” I consumed at that age were shoddily produced comic books of mythological tales from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. These were even more removed from our urban realities than Dorset – the setting for many of Blyton’s adventure stories.

But many of the responses I received to my query also pointed to how despite the seeming disconnect between the childhood of Blyton’s characters and our own, we found a way to build bridges from whichever Indian city we were curled up reading in, to the southwest coast of England, the stomping grounds of many Blyton protagonists. We made that journey day after day, without moving from our bedrooms. We travelled, like humans did, on the pages of books. 

One friend wrote, “I remember those days when we had very little TV till the late 1980s. I remember being able to relate to tales from EB (Enid Blyton). I remember wanting to be similar, to be empowered to have adventure and fun. I grew up in a small town, which was an overgrown village, where one could drink water from tube wells, fish in ponds, swim in rivers, climb trees, play with birds and butterflies. We were very much empowered to walk bare foot all over the town / overgrown village and then get back to EB. The exact feelings and memories cannot be expressed or explained. Pure innocence and joy.”

Another said, “It was a magical world that I did not have access to in my physical or socio-economic lived reality at that time, but it appealed to my individual formative sensibilities about where I would love to be. It was a world away from worlds — so distant in reality, but so present in mine…My neighborhood friends and I in sleepy Mysore made our own versions of that life — packed cucumber sandwiches and nimbu paani (homemade lemonade) and took off on our bicycles for a “picnic.”

And another comment: “I think what appealed most was the way food was described in those books! From picnic lunches to treats in ‘magic faraway lands.’ But by the time I actually started travelling to the UK, most of it had been replaced by tikka masala ” :-)

xxx

I have two boys. My older son was born in Beijing in 2008, the younger one in Brussels three years later. They went to kindergarten in Indonesia and primary school in Tokyo. As they became literate, I couldn’t wait to introduce them to Enid Blyton’s worlds. Watching them read and wander in their heads, I believed, would return me to being eight again, waiting to sneak away to chase mysteries.

My fantasies around motherhood had always involved bedtime snuggles while reading together with my littles. We would sit together-apart, sharing our physical space while traveling with our own books, and sipping contentedly from cups of chamomile tea. I wondered how their tastes might differ from mine. Who would be their most beloved character amongst the Famous Five? Would the Mallory Tower series have them begging to be sent off to boarding school as it had me?

In reality, neither of my boys made any headway with Blyton. They found the writing stilted, the idea of potted tongue gross. My younger one detests sardines. Lemonade and ginger ale, words I used to hold in my mouth with a shiver of anticipation for a world full of the exciting unexplored, held no power over them.

They preferred the tropical eastern islands of Indonesia to the windswept English coast, having experienced both firsthand. And they were flooded with a choice of reading materials, in addition to the Screen. They were so cosmopolitan and knowledgeable, travelled and bathed in abundance that I realized I was foolish to think Blyton’s tales would be their chosen repast. She had been food for the recently decolonized, pre-liberalization mind. For my cyborgish-children, her books were like offal – sustenance for the deprived.

xxx

What do you think, dear Reader? Why did those of us in India enjoy Blyton so much? And why has she not aged as well as say, Roald Dahl or Tolkein?

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Hasta pronto,

Pallavi