- Ellen Butler Donovan
Teaching Sayantani DasGupta’s The Serpent’s Secret
In an effort to more thoroughly diversify the reading list for my adolescent literature course, I adopted Sayantani DasGupta’s middle grade fantasy novel The Serpent’s Secret (Scholastic, 2018). You may wonder why I am discussing a novel published in the US by a US author for a blog devoted to international children’s literature. I do so because my experience highlights two important ideas about the impact international children’s literature has on children’s literature in the US: first, if we are seeking to incorporate texts that reflect cultural hybridity or the diasporic experience as it plays out in the US, we need to understand the ways in which the home culture shapes the hybridity the character experiences, and the way we can understand that is through the expressions of that culture; second, as a teacher I cannot discuss the ways in which the author draws upon cultural traditions in an adaptation unless I know something about those cultural traditions from sources other than the text we are reading.
In The Serpent’s Secret, DasGupta combines the folktales of Bengal, string theory, and New Jersey humor to create a novel that reflects the hybridity of young Indian immigrant teens in the US. Kiranmala is the child of Indian parents who own a convenience store off I-95 in Parsippany, New Jersey. For as long as she can remember, her parents have told her she is an Indian princess. Kiranmala, however, is embarrassed by her parents and their “weird” ways—dressing in saris and kurtas, baking Indian sweets to distribute at Halloween instead of offering candy, digging a ditch at the property line instead of the conventional landscaping of her suburban neighbors. On her twelfth birthday, she returns from school to find her home in shambles and her parents missing, having left her only a cryptic note and a handful of rupees. Two teen Indian princes, Neelkamal and Lalkamal, arrive on winged horses when a rakkhosh, or Indian demon monster, appears and begins to destroy Kiran's house. As the rakkhosh demolishes the house in a search for food and then threatens Kiran's life and the lives of the princes, Kiran cooperates with the princes to momentarily subdue the rakkhosh and make their escape. Thus begins an episodic fantasy adventure in which Kiran seeks to rescue her parents in the “world beyond the seven oceans and thirteen rivers.”
As she relates in her biography on her website, DasGupta is herself the child of immigrant parents who resided and worked in the US. She spent her summers with her Indian grandparents in Kolkata where she heard the folktales of Thakurmar Jhuli (Grandmother’s Satchel). In interviews and Ted Talks she has discussed how important those stories were to her psychological and emotional well-being as a child. When she became an adult and had children of her own, she sought books for her children that reflected the family’s hybridity as part of the Indian diaspora and as American citizens. Unable to find such books, she wrote her own, beginning with The Serpent’s Secret in 2018. She has written two additional titles in the series, Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond. Narrative is not unfamiliar to her. Her own professional hybridity bridges many relationships with narrative: in addition to writing middle grade novels, she is a physician who teaches in programs at Columbia University (New York City), such as Narrative Medicine, Comparative Literature and Society, and the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Also, as a member of We Need Diverse Books, DasGupta is committed to providing North American children a greater range of diversity in their reading.
Why consider The Serpent’s Secret for my adolescent literature course? The course serves as a requirement for pre-service secondary teachers majoring in English. Though my department offers several courses in children’s and YA literature, including a recent addition in Anglophone children’s literature as well as courses in Anglophone adult literature and in multicultural literatures of the US, many pre-service teachers can complete their programs without taking any of those courses, thus limiting their exposure to diverse perspectives. If I wanted to help students achieve a greater understanding of cultural hybridity, I needed to diversify my own reading list. Further complicating my choices is the fact that students’ only exposure to adolescent literature occurs in this course. Consequently, my efforts to include greater ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity were also shaped by other curricular demands such as providing a sense of the history and the generic variety in adolescent literature of the US as well as improving the analytical and writing skills of my students. The Serpent’s Secret features an appealing story for a younger YA readership, a strong female protagonist, a non-Western mythology (unfamiliar to me and my students), and comic fantasy elements and techniques that contrast to the high fantasy with which most of my students have some familiarity.
In my first reading of the novel, I enjoyed the comedy of Kiran’s kick-butt attitude and of the comically inept rakkhoshi. At the same time, I appreciated DasGupta’s parodies of US airport procedures, the cloying and embarrassing behaviors of parents and grandmothers (especially), in addition to Kiran’s pointed comments on environmental degradation and her references to US pop culture. However, as I considered how I might teach this novel, I was faced with a dilemma: What was I missing by not knowing the stories of Thakurmar Jhuli and the other Bengali folktales on which the novel was based? In DasGupta’s adaptation of these stories, what details, concepts, incidents, or characters cross the cultural divide? Did DasGupta modify the traditional representations of the rakkhoshi to make them comic? Is Kiran’s dislike of all things pink a Bengali cultural reference? Are flying horses just a convenient pan-mythological trope to move the characters from one dimension to another? DasGupta’s Author’s Note at the end of The Serpent’s Secret explains to her middle-grade readers the many Bengali sources for the novel and their widespread cultural presence in Bengal but offered little to me as a teacher who wanted to show her college-aged students how such cultural adaptations work, particularly how DasGupta represents the hybridity of the immigrant experience. If all I could point out to my students was what I myself knew, we could laugh at the parodies, puns, and jokes because we shared that knowledge with Kiran, but we would miss much of the way the novel illustrates its central theme--Kiran’s integration of her Indian cultural heritage with her identity as a young American teen.
How to quickly get my hands on such cultural information posed the greatest problems. I don’t read Bengali, so access to Thakurmar Jhuli wouldn’t help me—an English translation is not readily available. DasGupta’s website offered some information, but primarily about her desire to write books for readers in the US that featured kids of color, particularly Indian immigrants. Scholarly sources were non-existent. I could turn to YouTube to watch cartoon versions of the folk tales that air on Indian TV, but they, too, are in a language I do not know. As the start of the semester drew closer, I turned to my colleague from the state of West Bengal, India, Poushali Bhadury, for answers to specific questions: Does the color pink have significant connotations in Bengali culture? It turns out that pink does not have significant connotations in Bengali culture. DasGupta uses Kiran’s aversion to pink to establish her tomboy identity, which serves as a partial rejection of her parents’ insistence that she is an Indian princess. Are rakkhoshi made inept for comic effect in the novel, or are they similarly ineffective figures in the folktales? In the Bengali folktales, rakkhoshi are dangerous and violent but their evil efforts are rarely successful.
Only after I taught the novel for the first time did I have the time to find and read The Demon Slayers and Other Stories, the collection of Bengali folktales that DasGupta and her mother translated. Though the collection is suitable for young readers, it is designed for a multi-generational readership. Reading the tales provided me with a stronger sense of Bengali culture and allowed me to see patterns that I did not recognize just by reading the novel: e.g., the trope of packing an infant into a clay pot and sending it down the river, how rhymes work in the tales, or the role of grandmothers. For example, in The Serpent’s Secret Neel’s rakkhoshi grandmother greets him with endearments based on sweets: “Oh my sugar plum yum-yum, my lollipop dum-dum, my molasses-sweet grandbaby, oh me, oh my, o, come and give your old Ai-Ma a kiss!” (251). In the tale “The Demon Slayers” the rakkhoshi grandmother greets Neel in a similar way: “Oh my little Neelu babu! Oh, my shriveled bean-pole! Oh, my scrawny crow grandbaby!” she crooned, while clutching Neelkamal to her breast” (143). Later in the conversation in The Serpent’s Secret, the grandmother uses the same metaphors—scrawny crow and shrivelled bean pole. In both cases, the grandmother threatens to eat the human accompanying Neel (Kiranmala in The Serpent’s Secret and his fully human half-brother Lal in the folktale), but Neel is able to distract the grandmother’s attention and avoid the disaster. In another tale from the collection, “The Demon Queen,” a rakkhoshi crone has adopted a human maiden and treats her as her grandchild. When the crone returns from hunting, the maiden spends the night “plucking gray hairs from the crone’s greasy head” (159). A similar incident occurs in The Serpent’s Secret, exaggerated to heighten the comic tone: “The prince [Neel] took a big bottle of mustard oil and began rubbing the crone’s warty feet, while I sat by her head, massaging her greasy scalp and pulling out long gray hairs one by one. They were hard, the texture of steel guitar strings, plus they were slippery, so it wasn’t easy. A few times, I had to use both hands, with my foot on her head for leverage. Ai-Ma didn’t seem to notice, but smiled blissfully and kept her eyes shut, like we were giving her some kind of five-star spa treatment” (255). The two versions illustrate a cultural practice (plucking gray hairs) likely unfamiliar to US readers, but they also represent the doting grandmother as well as the reciprocal tasks that grandchildren may be asked to fulfill for their beloved grandmother. While most US readers may not be asked to pluck gray hairs from their grandmothers’ scalps, they may have been asked to rub sore feet, to fetch a glass of water, or to make a cup of tea. My white, suburban, college-age students were confronted with both the similarity they recognized in the doting grandmother, and the less familiar tasks that some grandmothers request. More importantly, the students experienced a narrative that features a protagonist whose adventures cross into unfamiliar (to them) cultural territory and celebrates unfamiliar cultural practices. The cultural hybridity that Kiranmala achieves by the end of her story fits well into the common thematic identity arc at the basis of all adolescent literature in the US, but seeing that arc in this mutation helps students to diversify their own assumptions about the ways in which identity is negotiated and achieved.
Though there are hurdles to incorporating texts that draw upon other cultures into an adolescent literature course, they are not insurmountable. And the benefit of doing so is significant: exposing students to a wide variety of perspectives, cultures, and ways of storytelling, which, I hope, will lead them to make their future classrooms more inclusive and interesting.
Ellen Butler Donovan
Middle Tennessee State University
Ellen Donovan teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in children’s and YA lit. Though her research focuses on American children’s literature, she’s always hoping to broaden her students’ horizons with diverse literature.