A year or two ago someone phoned me, on behalf of the Swedish embassy, to say that Astrid Lindgren’s books were now going to be available in India. This was said in the slightly hopeless drone of publicist addressing bored journalist, but the news was frankly alarming — what, had Indian children not been reading Lindgren all this time?
I remember my first Lindgren book, one of the Pippi Longstocking series. The book’s cover showed a girl in striped stockings and tightly braided orange hair standing bossily on the deck of a sailing ship. I was sitting in a sunny corner of my aunt’s house, and the time was a few days short of my eighth birthday. If Lindgren were any ordinary author, how would I remember all that?
No, Lindgren is terrific. I grew out of Pippi (though she has been compared with Lisbeth Salander, another fictional Swede), but there are so many other characters. There’s Ronia, daughter of Matt, boss of a band of robbers in a tumbledown castle, in Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter. Pippi came into being in the mid-1940s; Ronia in 1981.
In between there is Mio, of Mio My Son, a memorably lyrical quest tale. There is Emil, a creative and good-hearted nuisance of a boy, who lives in Småland, the region of Sweden where Lindgren was born and raised. There are The Brothers Lionheart, Jonathan and Karl, who died (yes, died) and went to Nangiyala. There are many others I have not read.
Happily, there is (or used to be) a crisp air of controversy around some of Lindgren’s characters. Pippi lives an independent existence free of adults; this does her no harm, though it offended some parents. The brothers Lionheart actually die twice, once by suicide. Who writes a book for children where the protagonists have to kill themselves?
Lindgren, that’s who. She’s so wildly popular (80-plus titles, 100 million copies, dozens of languages) that she became a national treasure. She did not hesitate to use her influence. Sweden’s humane animal laws are partly her doing. In 1976 her tax rate reached 102 per cent, and she wrote a satirical story about it for a magazine; she can take some credit for the downfall of the Social Democrats later that year.
In 2002 she died, aged 94. This month Sweden’s central bank announced a competition to design new banknotes featuring Swedish greats including Greta Garbo, Ingmar Bergman and Astrid Lindgren. Lindgren will go on the 20-krona note. The bank decided that “the persons concerned should have lived and worked during the 20th century, should be popular with the general public and, preferably, should also be well-known internationally. They should also represent different parts of Sweden.”
Well, hello India. Let’s give the Mahatma a rest and get him off all seven of our banknotes. I propose the following rules. Let us change the faces on our notes once a decade. The seven figures will not be politicians of a more recent date than 1900. No more than three can be from the distant past, like Ashoka, Shivaji or Akbar. At least four must be from the 20th and 21st centuries. At least three must have lived at least one day in independent India. All must be dead at least 10 years. They need not be of national renown but must be of national importance. Once a person goes on a note, he or she cannot be used again. There will be a worldwide design competition. What face goes on what note happens by blind pick.
We do need a canon of national heroes from outside the political realm. I like the way Sweden has gone about it. I like Lindgren. So to start with, I propose Munshi Premchand and Muthuswami Dikshitar.
