Bringing old stories to life

Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed's new book is a splendid retelling of the Panchatantra tales.

Surgeons by profession, they know a thing or two about straight lines and cleanly made incisions. But Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed have also been writing together for years now, and using the pen is very different from wielding the scalpel.

"Stories are not straight lines connecting A to B," says Swaminathan, "They are necessarily mazes, labyrinths, where one must get lost without any intention of escaping."

It's easy to get lost in their new book Nyagrodha: The Ficus Chronicles, a wonderfully imaginative retelling of Vishnu Sarma's beloved Panchatantra tales.

These are stories that many of us first encountered in the Amar Chitra Katha comics, or in slightly more prosaic versions, but too often they are reduced to straightforward morality tales aimed at providing young children with easy-to-digest Lessons about Life.

This, as Swaminathan and Syed point out, takes all the joy out of them and is counterproductive, for children don't like being talked down to. "We have attempted to bring the magic and the thrill back into these tales," they say.

That's an understatement. For starters, Nyagrodha (written under the pseudonym Kalpish Ratna, which the authors use for their collaborative work) has an instantly gripping framing device.

Three unhappy, runaway children, accompanied by Makhmal Khan the talking monkey, wander deep into the woods together and come to a large banyan tree "that shakes down stories when you call out its ancient name". The venerable langoor Hanumanta then starts telling the children tales about the forest and its inhabitants.

The authors use one story "" about Simha the young lion king, his friend Jeev the bull, and two crafty jackals Charak and Tarak, who conspire to turn the two against each other "" as the anchoring narrative and build the Panchatantra tales around it.

The way this typically works is: one animal tells another a story in order to illustrate a point (about friendship and betrayal, for instance, or the importance of counsellors, or how the weak can overcome the strong).

In places, this structure gets delightfully complicated: the creatures in the stories-within-the-stories tell each other impromptu yarns in turn, and so it goes until the narrative approximates the Tree of Stories itself "" all gnarled roots and entwined branches.

Interspersed with the text are charming little illustrations from each tale. But best of all is the authors' treatment of the familiar stories from the Panchatantra. They've spruced up the language, made it snappier and more irreverent.

Some stories are presented in the form of clever little rhymes, the characters' names are changed (a goat becomes Roghan Josh, a sweet-talking jackal is named Jalebi, an acid-tongued crow is Karela) and there's plenty of neat wordplay (an astronomer owl discovers a red star and names it paan cheent, which translates into English as "betel juice" "" but scientists will naturally want to spell it in a way that makes it look more learned, hence Betelgeuse!).

Revisionism has its little snares; it's easy to get carried away by your own cleverness and disregard the spirit of the original story. But Swaminathan and Syed have retained the gist of the tales "" their delicate humour, their ability to trade in morals without being cloyingly moralistic.

There are tongue-in-cheek asides about how seriously human beings take themselves "" in "The Nature of the Beast", for instance, the title of which comments not just on animal behaviour but on human whimsies.

Other highlights include the smart exchanges between Jenny and Bosco Braganza, a pair of kingfishers whose eggs keep getting smashed by the wicked ocean, and the tale of the bedbug who is seduced by a lissome mosquito.

One of the notable things about the book's structure is the effort to make the Panchatantra tales relevant to youngsters who have serious real-world issues to deal with (parents getting divorced, the insecurity of moving to an unfamiliar country, the inadvertent betraying of a friend).

What this also means is that Nyagrodha isn't meant for very young children. Some of the content is clearly targeted at mature readers, words like "sybaritic", "diaphanous" and "prescience" are sprinkled through the text, and there are some scary passages (e.g. a reference to a tigress eating her prey's eyes for dessert "" "popping them like grapes").

But Swaminathan and Syed have an interesting perspective on this. "As far as we are concerned there is no blur between children's and adults' reading," they say.

"Our parents never stopped us from reading anything. A book is a friend and, like the picture of Dorian Gray, it mutates and becomes different books at different times of our lives and readings."

"We never consider the 'target age' when we write. Writing a book is an exploration, and who knows what dangers lurk in ambush?"

The ending of Nyagrodha seems to point towards a sequel. "Of course!" chime the authors, "In fact, there will be four." As they point out, the Panchatantra, Jataka, Hitopadesh and folktales from other traditions form something very like a Pentateuch: "That's the advantage which comes to us Indians as a birthright, doesn't it?"

There's little chance that they'll run out of stories, or inventive ways in which to tell them, anytime soon.