From our school history textbooks to historical fiction and non-fiction, we have been exposed to the history of our country’s past quite often. But whether we were reading factual accounts of the people who fought for our country’s independence, or it was authors reimagining what it might have been to be alive in that reality, the one thing common amongst all these books was adult protagonists.
Nobody really thought what it would be like to be a child during the time when our country was on the brink of its freedom!
Until Lubaina Bandukwala and Aditi Krishnakumar came up with similar ideas and wrote two beautiful books talking about exactly that!
The Chowpatty Cooking Club
Lubaina Bandukwala
With Mahatma Gandhi’s call to the British to Quit India, the city has become a hotbed of revolutionary activity-student protests, secret magazines and even an underground People’s Radio which broadcasts news that the British want concealed.Sakina and her friends Zenobia and Mehul desperately want to be part of this struggle for freedom. But there is little that they are permitted to do. But at least, they are trying to do something useful, while their mothers are only running a cooking club …
That Year at Manikoil
Aditi Krishnakumar
While World War II rages in Europe and the Japanese army draws closer to India, Raji and her sisters are sent off with their mother to stay in Manikoil, her mother’s family village. But with her brother now a soldier in the British Indian Army and refugees fleeing from Malaya, Burma and other eastern countries back to India, Manikoil is no longer the peaceful haven it once was. And while there is hope of Independence in the air, Raji is uncertain whether it will come to pass-and what it will truly mean for her and her family.
Pick up one of these books today and let your child step back into British India!