Why are children’s books stuck in monochrome? | Sanchita Basu De Sarkar

The joy of seeing someone who looks like you on a page is huge – but some of us have a hard time finding them

It was a long time before I met a character who looked like me. I cropped up in the occasional children’s classic, Indian and odd, wearing my ethnicity on my sleeve. There I was in Hergé’s Tintin, a kindly maharaja. There I was in Enid Blyton, an urchin babbling in broken English. I was a backstory in The Secret Garden and A Little Princess – a snatch of something familiar that made my heart leap. My parents gave me Ruskin Bond and RK Narayan and Amar Chitra Katha’s comics, but the stories were too Indian for a girl growing up in Wembley – my teachers hadn’t heard of them, and my friends were reading Roald Dahl. I left them on the shelf. Once a year, we listened to the story of Diwali in class.

Let the children of colour fall into wonderland. Let the characters have complex names – and let them have a laugh.

Related: Only 1% of children's books have BAME main characters – UK study

Related: 'BAME writers must tell their own stories – and we have to be disruptive'

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from Children | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2uJnPlL