CHENNAI: Fairyland — a place with mystical beings, where there is peace all over with no problems to attend to, a space where everything is hunky-dory and magical! What if all this were lost, would it still be fairyland?
In Bijal Vachharajani’s world, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming live in the same land and have to deal with problems created by humans. In her recent release, When Fairyland Lost Its Magic, Bijal, along with Rajiv Eipe’s illustrations, introduces kids to a world where there is no magic, while dealing with an important issue — climate change.
“I grew up on fairytales. I ended up going to gardens looking for fairies under toadstools and elves in tree hollows! Later on, I realised how much these books celebrated the magic of nature and the denizens are inspired from them. I absolutely love how so many book makers have retold fairytales to reflect the times we live in, especially some fabulous feminist recasting of these stories. It made me think that our human world has influenced these tales, then surely, the biggest crisis we are going through — the climate crisis — must also impact the characters and if they all lived in one place — which is full of enchanted forests and under the ocean, so basically Fairyland,” Bijal explains. Filled with humour, logic, and the beauty of nature, this retelling makes you rethink your idea of a fairyland.
Excerpts follow:
How can stories and humour help kids take notice of the larger issues at hand?
Bijal: I think stories offer hope and fuel imagination in the age of the Anthropocene. I also think the most difficult things can be introduced with humour. Humour has a lot of value. And studies underscore that it is a fantastic tool to fight climate change. In classrooms, children laugh and then have so many introspective questions and comments.
Rajiv: I think humour is one way to talk about serious things. I find myself drawn to humour, in particular self-deprecatory humour, and I think it can bring down some of the walls we put up around ourselves. In an increasingly polarised world, it can be a somewhat effective way of transferring ideas. Silliness and absurdity are also in their own way an attempt to make sense of the world, I suppose.
The book also gives a twist to some of the fairytale tropes...
B: Stories change with time, and as have our fairytales. I love the idea of pumpkins turning into carriages, and celebrating the power of imagination in terms of possibilities. But because fairytales do come with their share of stereotypes, given they are the product of their times, I had a lot of fun recasting them into our time with the vain prince who was absolutely brilliantly depicted by Rajiv, and the princesses, like a lot of modern retelling underscore, don’t need rescuing, thank you very much. And most importantly that wolves are not bad, but awesome! To me it was a testament to the changing times, and being able to smash some stereotypes along the way, and have fun while doing it.
How did you choose these fairytales and the characters?
B: I made a list of the fairy tale characters, the Brothers Grimm ones, to begin with and began thinking which of them would be impacted deeply by climate change. So Little Mermaid was one of the first because of the impact on our oceans and corals, then I thought about anxiety and decided Sleeping Beauty might just suffer from insomnia thanks to it, and of course Snow White would have to be renamed if her queendom was going to suddenly see no snow. But I did want the central character to also be an animal, and given a lot of stories give wolves an unfair bad rep, I decided to make the Big Wolf become pivotal to the story, but drop the ‘Bad’ from his name, because he’s really a good one.
What is your fascination with nature?
B: I think children have a natural affinity for nature, or as Rachel Carson called it, an inherent sense of wonder about the natural world. For me, squirrels, gulmohar and banyan trees, and parakeets were a big part of my growing-up, and yet, we are seeing urban children suffering from environmental generational amnesia. I think I keep revisiting my sense of childhood when I write, and so nature becomes central to my stories. And I love how my readers respond to it — with so much care and love for the environment and animals. They make me believe in the magic of nature again.
What are your special ingredients to garner kids’ attention? What are the challenges?
B: Humour is very important to me, and a silver lining of hope. For me, hope is an essential ingredient when writing for young people, hope that offers imagination and a sense of optimism about the future and also the present. I do think that I struggle with endings, because a lot of my books are about climate change. But I do look to real life for inspiration, and I find that really helps my writing process.
R: One challenge for an illustrator is to be able to come (at least somewhat) close to what the author is imagining for their characters and settings. In some cases these are articulated nicely at the outset in an illustration brief. There are also instances where the author is happy to let go completely and allow the art department to interpret the text freely. In this book, since we all knew each other and had worked on books together in the past, there was plenty of space for everyone’s opinions and room to try out silly things.
I suppose the bigger challenge is to be able to keep a reader interested in the book till the end. While I can’t point to a specific technique an illustrator might use to achieve this, I think perhaps being interested in the work is a good way to (hopefully) ensure the work is reasonably interesting to a reader.
You address inclusivity by using gender-neutral pronouns…
B: I wanted to reflect a world that’s inclusive and celebrates identities, and of course Fairyland would be one such world. Which is why RRR (one of the characters) has a gender-neutral pronoun, and they’re such a wise one; as I wrote them, they just took on their own personality.
The acknowledgements and the author and illustrator bio were unique.
B: The entire team agreed that we wanted to have some fun and have the bios and acknowledgement reflect the story’s spirit. Which is why we decided to give each of the people who worked on the book their own special fairytale which reflects their personality and their work as well in some way. Having done that, we realised we also wanted our bios to talk about climate change but in a humorous and slightly irreverent way. We hope that children read this and make their own mini fairytales as a fun writing exercise.
Your experience of working with each other?
B: When I first thought of writing the book, I asked Rajiv Eipe if he’d like to illustrate the story. Harper brought on Maithili Doshi as the art director on the project, and together they brought such a gorgeous vision for the book. It was genuinely a joy to listen to Rajiv’s vision for the book — the black-and-white classical illustrations with a climate and desi twist. I think he has given the book its own spin, adding a completely new dimension to the story, with each page offering the reader space to pore over the detailed illustrations, find silliness and wonder, and also think about climate crisis.
R: I loved the story when Bijal first shared the manuscript with me. It was funny, sad, thoughtful and moving. I felt that it had a lot of potential for visual storytelling and exploring a different style of illustrations that I’m used to doing for picture books. The idea of adapting fairytale characters to the present time and a local context and setting is just so rich with silliness, and I think this for me was the most fun part of working on this book.
I looked at lots of 19th century Art Nouveau imagery for some of the decorative elements we’ve used in the illustrations — the idea of enclosing bleak scenes of pollution and a world in crisis within pretty decorative borders was something we all thought would work nicely for the book.
Book: When Fairyland Lost Its Magic
Publisher: HarperCollins Children’s Books
Pages: 120
Price: Rs 499