Silent Conversations in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Ruskin Bond’s Rusty novels

The essay undertakes an analysis of the connections and conversations between Rudyard Kipling’s Kim(1901) and Ruskin Bond’s largely autobiographical Rusty(1955-) novels. Kipling’s Kimhas evoked many literary responses and reactions across India. While writers such as Sarath Kumar Ghosh, Rabindranath Tagore, T.N. Murari,and even Sashi Tharoor have boldly written back to Kim, Ruskin Bond silently acknowledgesit in his Rusty series of children’s fiction. At times, Bond’s pointed and conscious avoidance ofKipling becomes his means of accepting Kipling’s influence on him. The essay traces the implicit dialogue between thesetwo Anglo-Indian authorsand their protagonists.It undertakes a close reading of theirnovelsto analysethe evolution of English literature and Anglo-Indianism in India, whilealsoexaminingthe divided identities of the authors and their fictional protagonists.

‘Never Just a Game’: Storytelling, Gaming, and Death in Luka and the Fire of Life and Joseph Anton

Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life and Joseph Anton both reflect on his concerns with death along with an attempt to keep the process of storytelling alive. This article explores Rushdie's addressing of the literal threat of death in the memoir and the metaphorical death of storytelling abilities in the children's fiction. The emphasis of this article is on Rushdie's usage of gaming and virtual reality to retain his authority in the storytelling world.

Children’s fiction and anime: The case of Shōkōjo Sēra

This article considers the case of Shōkōjo Sēra (1985), a Japanese animated series based on the novel A Little Princess, within the context of the World Masterpiece Theater, a television staple that popularized the practice of adapting classic children’s books into long-running anime. The analysis identifies the changes occurring in the adaptation, casting a light on the creative and productive choices undertaken by the Japanese staff. In doing so, the original novel and its reception in Japan are taken into account, with regard to the role of translated literature for local children’s and girls’ fiction. The study thus demonstrates that the alterations found in the series are both genre-related and explicable in terms of cultural-filtered interpretations, as can be seen in the negotiation of the protagonist as a Christian damsel-in-distress, combining melodramatic tropes, a signifier of westernization and a domesticating rationale of her alleged passivity.