Longing, belonging

The story of human migration is a complex and difficult one to tell. But children’s authors are helping young readers understand the idea of home and sense of belonging through stories rooted in reality

Vidya Mani

Illustration by Sharanya Kunnath.

Migration and displacement are significant global issues, often caused by challenges that include political instability, conflict, climate change, natural disasters, and the need to find better economic opportunities. According to UNICEF: “Millions of people, including children, leave or are forcibly displaced from their homes to seek safety and a new life, either within or beyond their borders.”

How do we represent these realities in our children’s books? This is especially relevant because the concept of home in children’s books often represents a sense of belonging, plays a crucial role in identity formation, and portrays “the idea of feeling safe somewhere with specific people” as a basic human need.

Books can clearly serve as mirrors for children to learn who they are and windows to discover the outside world. By humanising abstract concepts and making stories out of statistics on poverty, migration, social justice and more, they hold within them the power to spark conversations, build empathy, find creative solutions and harbour hope of building a better world.

Jamlo Walks, written by Samina Mishra and illustrated by Tarique Aziz, is an evocative picture book based on a real incident — it tells the story of a young girl Jamlo Makdam who had to walk back home with nothing more than a bagful of red chillies when the first lockdown was announced in India. A migrant worker who had left her home in Chhattisgarh to earn a living by working in the fields of Telangana, young Jamlo’s world of hardship and hunger is deftly contrasted with the urban worlds of Tara, Amir and Rahul, children who had to ‘stay at home’ to be protected from the pandemic. As the reader walks with Jamlo, the words and pictures poignantly reflect why our world needs to become more kind, fair and just. 

Poor Economics for Kids, a recently published children’s book by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Esther Duflo and illustrator Cheyenne Olivier, tells the story of Nilou and her friends who live in a village. That village can be in India, in Bangladesh, in Botswana or anywhere in the global south. Life in Nilou’s village is challenging – it isn’t easy for children to go to school, the local hospital doesn’t have all the medicines people need, especially the ones to cure malaria that her friend Afia comes down with, her cousin must go to the city in search of a job where the sudden lockdown makes him anxious and insecure.

From economics to education and inequality, from poverty to migration and environmental crises, the ten open-ended stories accompanied by bright geometric illustrations explain big economic ideas for little readers in an engaging way. The creators hope “that the stories will help readers everywhere understand that children like Nilou are not so different from them, and that they have a right to live with dignity”.

No Ticket, Will Travel by Subuhi Jiwani is a series of six short stories on migrant labourers who travel from Andhra Pradesh to Kerala in search of work, determined to make a living despite the harshness and uncertainty of their lives. Chandrasekhar learns how to travel on trains without tickets to save every paisa for his family and the love of his life back home. Young Aruna lives with her grandmother while her parents work as construction labourers in Kochi. She is eager to meet her parents during vacation even if that means navigating crowded buses and trains and ticketless travel. Sadia is a young mother who nurtures her love for needlework despite her rigorous life as a construction worker. Even as she lifts heavy loads during the day, she waits excitedly to stitch blankets and dolls from scraps of cloth at night. As she gets ready to travel to find more work, her son and handmade dolls at hand, Sadia can’t but help wonder what the future holds. Created in association with the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), founded by P Sainath, one of India’s foremost journalists writing on rural India, these stories shed light on the stark realities and struggles of migrant workers everywhere. 

Anita Desai’s The Village by the Sea, published many decades ago in 1982, is set in a small fishing village called Thul in coastal Maharashtra. Hari, Lila, Bela and Kamal are four siblings who live at Thul with an alcoholic father and a bedridden mother. The running of the home is hence the responsibility of the older siblings Hari and Lila. Their poverty forces Hari to leave his home in search for a job at Mumbai. By taking away the concept of home as a secure place right at the start of the book, Desai explores themes of survival, adaptability and familial bonds in her evocatively written novel, which won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 1983.

Activist-writer Rinchin’s The Trickster Bird and The Gular Flower draw attention to the plight of the displaced Paardhi tribals, who were once the people of the forest but are now forced to eke out a living as ragpickers in the city. Renchu, the protagonist of both books, loves things that most children do – listening to stories that inspire a sense of wonder, forging a deep connection with the forest and its flora and fauna – and yet lives a life of systemic oppression and poverty in the city. 

In Desert Girl, Monsoon Boy by Tara Dairman and Archana Sreenivasan, migration is a way to survive climate change. The girl protagonist in the story lives in Gujarat and faces sandstorms, while the boy protagonist lives in Rajasthan and faces monsoons. Both the girl’s family and the boy’s family migrate to higher land in quest of shelter. The book ends with the two groups coming together in the Aravalli hills to celebrate their safety from extreme weather conditions. In this gorgeously illustrated picture book, inspired by the lives of the nomadic Rabari people, yellow hues serve as the backdrop for the girl’s journey, while blue and green tones frame the boy’s travels, beautifully showcasing the interconnectedness of human lives.

Portraits of Exile by Aaniya Asrani is a three-part non-fiction illustrated series that tells the stories of Jampa, Kizom and Lobdorjee who are Tibetan refugees living in Bylakuppe in Karnataka, India. Talking about the titles of the three books in the series, Asrani, who has both written and illustrated them, says: “Homecoming is for Kizom as she lost her way back to Tibet but found a way to make India her home. Homeland is for Lobdorjee because of an anecdote he shared with me about a handful of earth he brought with him from Tibet. Homebound is for Jampa in the hope that she will be able to reunite with her family in Tibet one day.” 

What Asrani manages to brilliantly capture through her books is the fact that “home is not just a physical space, but an emotional and cognitive reality that we consciously build”.

home is

across oceans and continents,

longing, yearning, waiting and wanting,

distant memory

— Aaniya Asrani

Vidya Mani is an editor and children’s writer. She is a founder-member and chief curator at Funky Rainbow, a Bangalore-based independent children's bookshop and book consultancy that is committed to bringing books and children together in exciting ways. She also runs a content and design studio called Melting Pot that creates children’s books and magazines for publishers and NGOs. 

Sharanya Kunnath is a graphic designer and illustrator