Environmentalism is no longer just a fable in Southasian children’s literature

FOR THOUSANDS OF years, storytellers have been concocting moral tales with animated animals. These continue to survive in the form of Aesop’s Fables, first conceived more than two millennia ago in ancient Greece, the Panchatantra, a collection of animal stories originally compiled in Sanskrit, and the Buddhist parables of the Jatakas, among others. Tracing the history of environmental narratives in children’s literature inevitably leads to these ancient fables – some of the earliest known stories featuring wildlife, shared with children not just in Southasia but also around the world. In these fantastical narratives, a motley crew of animal characters, ranging from singing donkeys and smug hares to cunning foxes and clever crows, dispense timeless wisdom on the ways of the world.

These stories were not conceived exclusively for children, nor were they originally deemed to be environmental literature, even though many of them display an environmental sensibility. For instance, in ‘The Monkey and the Crocodile’, a story from the Panchatantra, the monkey is shown as a land animal, living on trees and feeding on fruits, while the crocodile lives in water – revealing subtle observations of the natural world.