Passing Our Stories To Kids Abroad

By Sailaja Joshi

From Swarajya

A new series of books seeks to make Indian myths popular and accessible to children growing up abroad

Sometime in 2013, Sailaja Joshi started looking around for books that would introduce Indian mythology to young children. An Indian American living in the Boston area, she was expecting her first child, and wanted her kid to grow up with the mythological stories that she had heard at bedtime from her mother and grandmother.

The situation that Joshi, an anthropologist by training, was facing was one that any parent raising a child in an adopted country was likely to face. Even as you had to allow the child to be able to figure out her own identity within the milieu, you also had to introduce her to the cultural and religious diversity of the country her parents, or increasingly in many cases, her grandparents came from, without making it sound unreal or fantastic.

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