Forests of Imagination: Ideas of the Environment in Indian Children’s Literature

A personal reflection on the evolving idea of what makes a children’s book ‘environmental’

‘Once upon a time, a hare and a tortoise were having an argument…’

Thus begins a famous Aesop’s fable and one of my earliest encounters with wildlife in literature. I must have been four or five years old.

The story has a sense of the natural world—the hare is nimble-footed while the tortoise, weighed down by the house it carries on its back, lumbers along slowly. Yet what stayed with me wasn’t nature, but the delight of discovering how a slow and steady tortoise defeated a swift hare in a race! 

It was only later that I came across non-fiction that explained how fascinating these creatures are and how unlikely it is for a tortoise to beat a hare in a race! In the ordinary course of things, such non-fiction would fall neatly into prevailing ideas of environmental literature as grounded in ecological reality. 

But what about the fable belonging to a thriving storytelling tradition that stretches back thousands of years and perhaps gave children’s literature one of its greatest fixtures—talking animals?

The question opens a larger one—where do we draw the boundaries of imagination in environmental literature for children? When does literature trespass these boundaries such that it can no longer be considered ‘environmental’ and who decides these limits?

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Nature is an abiding theme in children’s literature worldwide, but for the longest time it essentially served as a moral guide to goodness. This isn’t surprising, given how children’s publishing emerged in Enlightenment Europe as a tool for moral instruction. 

The talking animals of Aesop’s Fables, Panchatantra, Jataka Tales and other such storytelling traditions—dispensing wisdom on the ways of the world—fell perfectly into this framework. In fact, the English philosopher John Locke specifically recommended Aesop’s Fables as an ideal book to place in the hands of a young reader, “wherein the entertainment that he finds might draw him on … and yet not such as should fill his head with perfectly useless trumpery.”

Soon, nature became a stage upon which societies projected their anxieties, aspirations and lessons for children. Written in the decades following the 1857 Indian uprising against British rule, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) emphasised obedience and authority. Its protagonist Mowgli lands in all kinds of trouble when he disobeys the laws of the jungle and the riotous bandar-log (monkeys) are outcasts who meet an unfortunate end. On the other hand, in colonial Bengal Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury’s Tuntunir Boi (1911) introduced children to Tuntuni, a tailor bird who outwits all her oppressors, making for a striking image in the aftermath of the Partition of Bengal and the emergence of the Swadeshi Movement.  

At the same time, with the spread of scientific education, literature was also beginning to encourage observation, curiosity and a more rational understanding of the natural world. Chowdhury’s Sekaler Katha (Tales from the Past), published in 1903, is a beautiful volume on prehistoric animals of the subcontinent. Similarly, Jagadananda Roy not only wrote some of the earliest science fiction in Bengali, but also produced literature on insects, birds and various botanical subjects. 

What had not yet emerged, though, was a categorisation we now call ‘environmental literature’. It’s hard to pin down exactly when this idea first took root. Many believe it to be a corollary of the post-industrial world of the twentieth century when environmental devastation became so pronounced in daily life that publishing inevitably mirrored it, giving rise to a distinct environmental consciousness in literature. 

In India, where wildlife conservation was having a moment in the 1970s, books like Mulk Raj Anand and Ruprecht Haller’s Mora (1972) and Arup Kumar Dutta’s young adult novel The Kaziranga Trail drew attention to poaching. Meanwhile, in the industrialised West, Dr Suess’s The Lorax (1971) directly confronted industrial exploitation of nature.  

What united these books was an impulse to protect nature—an impulse that was fortified by the rise of environmental education during the 1970s. 

Yet, in emphasising the costs of environmental destruction, children’s literature often drifted toward a transactional understanding of nature—we should not cut down trees because trees give us the oxygen we breathe, not because they deserve to exist as much as us, or that they are the keepers of deep time and of wonders that go beyond human need.  

It is true that there are many indigenous communities that continue to depend intimately on nature for their survival and who need to save it because they may not be able to survive without it. Environmental literature has room for these stories, but it is far more expansive than this. 

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My foray into environmental literature for children began with my book Unearthed: An Environmental History of Independent India (Puffin, 2020). Researching and writing the book played a significant role in shaping my understanding of this theme. For me, environmental literature is writing that makes its readers ponder their relationship with the more-than-human world. 

I’ve found that people often hesitate with this approach. Many times, I’ve been handed books with the tentative question—is this really environmental literature? One recent example that comes to mind is CG Salamander and Rajiv Eipe’s Song of the Asunam (HarperCollins, 2025), a stunningly illustrated graphic narrative that spotlights an imagined creature from Sangam literature.

Can a book about a fantastical creature be considered ‘environmental’? To answer this question, one needs to look closely at the imaginative pulse of the story—where is it leading? In Song of the Asunam it leads the reader into the life of a wild and weird child steeped in the wonder of the natural world around him. Eager to interact, to battle and to befriend it. To me, this is unequivocally environmental.

Now, let me contrast this with the story of the hare and the tortoise. Even though the latter features familiar animals, its imaginative pulse moves primarily towards a moral lesson: slow and steady wins the race. Nature, here, is largely a convenient prop. 

Sometimes, though, the distinction is harder to make. Let me take the example of my picture book A Home of Our Own (Tulika, 2018) which follows a group of street children in a city, reimagining scraps of waste—from empty chips packets to discarded cardboard boxes—as ordinary items in a make-believe home. Most readers quickly grasp the themes of friendship and poverty in the story. But sometime in 2020, it was picked up as a recommended read by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Book Club. 

At first, the environmental connection feels tenuous. There is hardly any nature in the book. But looked another way, the story is shaped deeply by the relationship street children have with a city and its culture of overconsumption, where one person’s waste becomes another’s plaything.   

Environmental literature doesn’t always announce itself through familiar leitmotifs: forests, rivers and wildlife. Sometimes it reveals itself unexpectedly in stories that capture the ways in which humans inhabit the worlds they have built. 

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Since the release of Unearthed, I’ve had the privilege of being associated with two very public platforms for the promotion of environmental literature for young readers in India. From 2021 to 2023, I headed the Young People’s Programme at the Greenlitfest and since 2022, I’ve been curating the Nature Writing for Children programme at Azim Premji University with Shashwat DC and Dr Harini Nagendra. I also co-edit a monthly newsletter published under the latter, with the independent children’s bookseller Vidya Mani. 

Although I do a lot of other work that lies outside this public profile, I’ve apparently been branded ‘that Greenlit person’. It made me chuckle when someone first mentioned this. Our desire to label is clearly all-pervasive! But, perhaps, this is a subversive way of looking at categorisation. As a friend reminded me, categorising is also a way of remembering. Sharp memories are usually specific, not vague. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea, then, to be slotted!

It struck me that this can also be applied to the practise of branding books as ‘environmental literature’. It’s a way of reminding readers what a certain book may be about. The trouble, I realise, is not with the branding. It’s with the limits we place on our own literary imagination and exploration. 

Children don’t usually ask for ‘environmental literature’. They ask for books with adventure, with mystery, with love, about friendship… and all these can be found within the umbrella of ‘the environment’, just as much as a book with fun facts about jellyfish that a friend’s five-year-old is currently devouring!