Children’s Literature Joins The Conversation On Climate Change

In the book Cuckoo Capers by Bijal Vachharajani, as the pied cuckoo, the harbinger of monsoon, refuses to make an appearance after an excruciatingly long summer, nine-year-old Kiana and 11-year-old Subhir decide to go look for the bird in order to make it rain. In another book The Rain Harvesters by Stephen Aitken and Sylvia Sikundar, as elusive rains make crops fail and wells dry up, siblings Sunita and Rakesh embark on a mission to save their grandmother’s vegetable garden. And in The Little Rainmaker by Rupal Rashomani Kewalya, the world has gone without rain not for a few months or a year but a decade. As her Grampa’s health takes a turn for the worse, ten-year-old Anoushqa enlists the help of scientists and magicians to honour his wish to see rain again.

These books are part of a growing genre of green literature in India that is introducing young readers to the urgent realities of climate change and environmental degradation. Kewalya’s The Little Rainmaker was one of the earliest books in the genre, published months before the then 15-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg shot to international fame in 2018. The same year, Siddhartha Sarma’s book Year of the Weeds, offered young readers a fictionalised account of the Dongria Kondh community’s historic fight to save their sacred hills from bauxite mining. In 2019, Vachharajani’s debut climate fiction A Cloud Called Bhura spotlighted the Asian brown cloud phenomenon and a devastating flood that was reminiscent of the 2005 Mumbai rains. Veteran writer Ranjit Lal’s Budgie, Bridge and Big Djinn published in 2019 saw four teenagers take on a developer bent on razing thousands of trees to construct a golf course.

Since then, the number and diversity of these titles have expanded, says Meghaa Gupta, publisher, author, and co-founder of the Green Literature Festival (GLF) in India. “We started in 2020 with 32-33 titles, and were able to locate over 40 new releases in 2024. This is just based on the English language publishers of children’s books in India and does not include regional literature,” says Gupta, who curated the children’s programme at GLF up until last year.

The Hyderabad Literature Festival (HLF) has similarly been organising sessions with the likes of Romulus Whitaker, Janaki Lenin, Yuvan Aves, and Bijal Vachharajani over the past two years. “These sessions drew large audiences of parents who came with their children, so there is definitely interest and enthusiasm for these subjects,” says Usha Raman, one of the directors of the HLF.

The genre’s expansion has also given rise to platforms dedicated to climate and environmental writing for children. Azim Premji University’s Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability runs a newsletter called Nature Writing for Children, that regularly reviews children’s green books. “Till date, there has been no month where we have not had more books than we could carry in terms of new releases in the environmental space,” Gupta, who co-edits this newsletter, tells Mongabay India.

Children’s green literature is not a new genre in India. In the early 2000s, naturalists such as Romulus Whitaker, Zai Whitaker, and Janaki Lenin wrote books that introduced children to the wonders of the natural world. While their writing focused on appreciating wildlife and habitats, the current generation of authors like Bijal Vachharajani and Rohan Chakravarty are incorporating a sense of responsibility about the planet while telling stories that are fun and engaging, says Raman, who also teaches media studies at the University of Hyderabad. The young protagonists of their books confront epic floods and uncontrolled deforestation, but rather than being passive observers, they challenge their communities, inspire action, and steer the world towards meaningful solutions.

What’s driving this new wave of children’s green books?

Internationally, the genre got a boost from Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement that gave young people a stake in the climate change debate. Nandita da Cunha, author of titles like The Miracle on Sunderbaag Street and Pedru and the Big Boom, also attributes its popularity to the growing consciousness and awareness about climate and environmental issues among children and educators. In 1991, the Supreme Court had directed that the environment be taught as a subject at schools and colleges. While its implementation has been patchy, da Cunha insists that teachers, librarians, and parents are increasingly recognising the need to have these conversations with children. “I have librarians and school teachers calling me and saying we’re doing a unit on recycling and plastic pollution, or changemakers and community action. We believe your books fit in with these themes. Can you come and do a session?” she says.

The serendipitous timing of some of these books also made them more relatable to readers, notes Gupta. “The year A Cloud Called Bhura came out, air pollution was hitting the news headlines in a big way. I was in Delhi at the time, and the book spoke to my lived experience,” she says. Vachharajani, who has taken the book to schools across the country, remembers being at a school in Ahmedabad last year and asking the attending children which part of the book they wanted her to read. “Literally everyone said can you read the flood bit because they had just experienced a flood in Ahmedabad,” she recalls.

Softening grim climate realities with hope and humour

Anxiety and grief brought on by such extreme climate events is a recurrent theme in these books. In Vachharajani’s Savi and the Memory Keeper, the 13-year-old eponymous protagonist is grappling with her father’s passing when she discovers her ability to talk to a giant ficus tree that is the keeper of her father’s memories. As Sharjapur’s citizens start cutting down trees in pursuit of ‘growth’ and ‘progress’, the ficus weakens and the town’s “happy climate” starts to change “like it was depressed”. Savi’s personal grief thus comes to mirror a collective grief over the deliberate destruction of Sharjapur’s environment.

The subject of climate anxiety is a fraught one in children’s literature. Tina Narang, who leads the children’s imprint at HarperCollins, believes that environmentalism can capture children’s imagination without terrifying them, provided the emphasis is on “conveying what is necessary without being alarmist and in a way that children find palatable.”

For da Cunha, that often means drawing inspiration from real-life changemakers. The Miracle on Sunderbaag Street about young Zara who transforms a dump yard into a vibrant garden with the help of her local community is based on the team behind the Mumbai-based Dream Grove who turned a Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation plot into a neighbourhood food forest. The Miracle on Kachhua Beach is similarly inspired by environmental activist and lawyer Afroz Shah’s cleanup drive that turned Versova into Mumbai’s cleanest beach. “These stories are a good way to tell children that one person can make a change or a community can get together and do something,” da Cunha says.

What also helps, Narang adds, is to weave in a call to action. In A Cloud Called Bhura, Mumbaikars wake up to a big brown cloud, the result of unchecked pollution, looming over their city. As citizens gasp for breath and toxic rain floods Mumbai, the government accuses the cloud of being anti-national and an act of terrorism before prohibiting the use of the word brown cloud altogether — in a reminder of some U.S. states banning the term climate change. In the end, the cloud does not disappear but the book’s protagonists Amni, Tammy, Mithil, and Andrew, mobilise children around them to understand its impacts and file a PIL against the government for violating their right to live in a clean environment. Vachharajani says she worked on A Cloud Called Bhura for six years, unsure of how to tell a story of climate change that ends on a positive note. “And then I realised that I didn’t need it to end in a positive way — I needed it to end with hope.”

Hope, along with oodles of humour, is what softens the grim subject of Ranjit Lal’s latest non-fiction book Our Potpourri Planet, which explores how uncontrolled deforestation, habitat loss, and declining ocean health affect wildlife and their habitats. Lal ends on an optimistic note, recounting citizens’ initiatives that are addressing these crises at the local level, and the small steps readers can take in their own backyards.

One of the popular uses of humour and satire in the genre can be found in the work of Rohan Chakravarty. As part of his Green Humour series, Chakravarty has been creating cartoons and comic strips on wildlife and the environment for over a decade, some of which were recently compiled into a three part-anthology Green Humour for a Greying Planet, Pugmarks and Carbon Footprints, and Sea Ice? Now You Don’t! In these strips, gharials endangered by illegal sand mining find a silver lining in it — “no sand left for the government to bury its head into” — while emperor penguins, which could go extinct by 2100, rue the abolishing of the wrong monarchy. Their striking visuals make Chakravarty’s books a big draw for children who are reluctant readers, says Gupta, whose own book Unearthed: The Environmental History of Independent India uses trivia, cartoons, and tales of eco-warriors to chronicle India’s green movements.

Experimenting with formats

Indeed, in telling these stories, publishers, authors, and illustrators are experimenting with diverse visual elements. In P.S. What’s Up with the Climate, written by Vachharajani as short missives by animals complaining about the climate, Archana Sreenivasan’s illustrations do the heavy lifting. Images of kangaroos fleeing forest fires, snow leopards rolling on mud instead of snow, and ants hanging on for dear life during a deluge infuse the text with poignancy and context. In Hello Sun, writer and illustrator Rajiv Eipe is the storyteller. His illustrations follow the child protagonist on a day out, saying hello to a puddle, salaam to a snail, and good night to a forget-me-not, evoking children’s innate sense of wonder about nature.

In When Fairyland Lost Its Magic, Eipe’s sketches elevate Vachharajani’s wickedly funny take on the Grimms’ fairy tales in the throes of climate change, and in the Miracle series, Priya Krishnan’s joyful illustrations anchor and complement da Cunha’s restrained text. Aindri C’s inventive use of graphic elements in A Cloud Called Bhura — each chapter opens with snippets of news headlines, little post-it notes, social media entries, advertisements, and climate-related trivia — injects the story with humour and carries the narrative forward.

However, such experimentation also comes at a cost. “Children’s literature is expensive to produce because you need good illustrations, good paper, and bookstores willing to stock it,” Raman notes. That coupled with a price-sensitive market may explain why bigger publishers are approaching the genre with caution. In an average publishing year, HarperCollins releases two to three green books for children while Pratham Books, which mainly publishes picture books, may bring out anything between five and ten, depending on the grants available. Vachharajani, who is also a commissioning editor at Pratham Books, agrees that publishers in India have been slow on the uptake. “Only now we are seeing an uptick of books on themes around this,” she says.

“Especially when you are talking about climate fiction, our imaginations have to be broader,” says Raman. That means more diverse stories about fisherfolk and desert communities, as well as stories in regional languages. “Because we are looking at it closely, we feel like there’s a lot happening, but maybe there is not enough happening yet,” she adds.

(Published under Creative Commons from Mongabay India. Read the original article here)