We Are Often Looking for Buffaloes in Children’s Books

We are a group of library educators and library facilitators at Bookworm, a library-based organisation in Goa, India. Our work involves facilitating and holding library experiences, library spaces, and library pop-ups across communities, institutions, and public-facing events in Goa, as well as in collaboration with educators across the country. Our seeking of buffaloes is an entry point into what we look for in children’s books for our readers.

It all began with a kerfuffle in a classroom in 2017. The classroom was located in the Immaculate Heart of Mary High School, Goa Velha, a school building bursting with students who come from various parts of the country due to their parents’ migration for labour. As a library that visits the school once a week and attempts acts of heroic proportion in terms of spreading book love, book joy, and book sharing, we get to know our children slowly but surely.

It was a Std VI classroom, and we were reading aloud Antonio’s Lucky Day, retold by Joe Hayes and illustrated by Oki S. Hans (Scholastic, 1993), a folk tale from Mexico about imagination and dreaming. We celebrate acts of dreaming, which are integral to reading and thinking, and so the class began with an exploration of dreams. Young Sanju K. said he wanted to be a pilot. Dreaming – imaginative, bold and ambitious are often the affordance of privilege,  most children who come from labouring and historically oppressed communities consistently translate dreaming into becoming, and we listen to what they want to be because it is the beginning of legitimising a break from oppressive, enclosed systems of being. It was not an unexpected response for us, but a burst of laughter and some unpleasant comments from one side of the classroom alerted us to low-level bullying that seemed, despite the adult presence, to feel legitimate to the group.

Sanju K. sat down and put his head upon the desk, like a soaring jet plane now crashed, all in under a minute. Further conversation revealed that Sanju K.’s family keeps a buffalo and that Sanju has the task of herding and caring for it. He had been spotted by someone, and that was enough for other struggling, growing children to find a chink that gave them power in shaming Sanju about dreaming beyond cattle herding.

As adults who choose to work with children, we are wired over the years to find every opportunity to use children’s books as artefacts for conversation, discussion, and questioning. This comes from our firm belief at Bookworm that the responsibility of literature is to enable us to become better versions of ourselves as we grow. A natural consequence, then, was to begin thinking about how to support Sanju K., while also recognising that the laughing students needed to deconstruct their ideas about themselves and about the enclosed caste-occupation dynamics they had internalised, in order to become better human beings. We went back to our mother library and began to browse and search, looking for books that could re-present Sanju K.’s world and enable us to question long-held notions about occupations and social place. We found books with cows, hens, sheep, even a camel – some reproducing the idea that caregivers of animals know their animals best and must therefore remain caregivers, others including animals as symbols of divinity or sacrifice, but we could not find a single book that could be a mirror to Sanju K.’s aspirations, to the breaking away that he dreamed of and deserved to find reflected in literature.

Sitting in our junior category was a book in Hindi, Chiknik Choon by Sushil Shukla, illustrated by Atanu Roy (Eklavya, 2016), with a water buffalo on the cover. As we looked at it, we realised that the water buffalo was a mere carrier for a storytelling louse and would never appeal to a twelve-year-old audience or allow for the perspective-building we were seeking. This was not a total surprise. We often find that books for children published by dominant publishers, written by people who are themselves entrenched in systems of social  reproduction, are not exactly written with the Sanju K.s of the country in mind. Chiknik Choon was soon set aside.

Melcom, our colleague, suggested The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, illustrated by Robert Lawson (Viking Press, 1936). It is a potentially powerful and tender story about a bull who will not fight — a telling that breaks a normative idea about bulls and bullfights but we did lament the gaps in our own collection and its representation. And so one strand of our seeking for buffaloes in books began in earnest.

Our colleague Anandita reminded us in a conversation of a gut-wrenching story by Bama, “Old Man and a Buffalo,” in Harum-Scarum Saar and Other Stories (Women Unlimited, 2016), translated by N. Ravi Shanker,a perspective-shifting moment for her. In reading about Malandi’s relationship with his own buffalo and the other cattle belonging to the landlord, she was enabled to see the many sides of Malandi’s oppression and to understand why he does what he does. Such fierce writing and perspective-shaping comes to us from very few authors, and we desire deeply to see more powerful content of this kind for children, because when children are told or read stories that present the lives of diverse people in diverse voices, we visibly sense a shift in how we move in the world.

Two years after the school incident, in 2018, Speaking Tiger published Lakshmi the Water Buffalo Who Wouldn’t, written and illustrated by the remarkable Mehlli Gobhai. All of us at Bookworm wanted to go back in time and read this book with that Std VI class, but we did the next best thing, we ensured that this story, rich in image and text, is available in abundance in all our school pop-ups and standalone libraries. We are yet to meet a reader who does not smile or feel warmed by the relationship between Lakshmi and Hansa, or who does not understand the lengths to which Gokul’s family go to settle Lakshmi during Hansa’s absence. Mehlli Gobhai’s paintings transport us into the landscape and the home of a buffalo-caring family and allow us to immediately understand our capacity to be human in relationships of love and reciprocal care. What this book disrupts for many readers is the assumption about what working-class families are like. It allows us to enter a home like Sanju K.’s and see them first as a family who love and support one another and the animals that constitute their everyday. The book resists the narrative of always showing us a herding family out in the fields, far from life as we know it, diligently performing a duty. It allows us to laugh, to affirm, and to feel pride in being human, irrespective of our social or caste location. The book portends immense hope, and we long for more such representations on our shelves.

Library practice and our buffalo-vigilante work at Bookworm led us to welcome Beauty is Missing by illustrator Priya Kuriyan(Pratham Books, 2022). The title and cover illustration of a beautiful water buffalo called Beauty, were sufficient to draw readers’ interest from the shelf, and subsequent conversations around the plot, the representation, and the relationship between Tessamma and Beauty gave us months of reflective practice and new ways of thinking about books. Once again, it was children who allowed us to understand the narrative in more nuanced ways. When Tessamma’s buffalo goes missing and she turns to the police, a reader was shocked: Why? We would never go to the police — they come after us! In honour of Sanju K., now well out of school and beyond our orbit in the post-COVID-19 world, we continue to insist on close conversations with this text, probing the questions that children have left us with from previous experiences, with the intent of moving towards justice-thinking through reading. Would Sanju K. and his classmates have arrived at this on their own, without the library educator? We are not fully sure — it was only in conversation with children that we learnt how differently, based on context and lived experience, readers respond to the roles of Jessy the Police Inspector, Tessamma, the truck driver, and of course Beauty. In conversation, children can disrupt any reproduction of caste and class that may come through, even unexamined, from a well-meaning creator provided the space and the openness exists and this puts a load on us as educators working in the library as well as a responsibility upon book creators.

In 2025, the outstanding critical social theorist Kancha Ilaiah — author of Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land: Dignity of Labour in Our Times (Navyana, 2007) and Mother (DC Mango, 2009) — published a poem in a web journal that caught our attention. The poem is titled “Black, But Beautiful,” and it demonstrates precisely what we are seeking for our shelves and for perspective-building.

We quote a short extract here:

When we built our Harappan civilization, 

You became our source of health and wealth. 

You built our nation on the back of your body. 

Alas, the forces that hate you treat you as a devil, 

Never realized your beauty, love, and labour. 

I do not want you to fight another animal, 

Since they worship her as their goddess. 

But you must fight for your rightful place in history. 

Cows and bulls exist in all nations. 

You exist as a household animal only in India, 

Yet you do not exist in their books.

As we arrive into 2026, our following of the Hans Christian Andersen Award, given by the International Board on Books for Young People, led us to learn that Michael Rosen (UK), a favourite among young and old in our library, had been declared the winner of the year. It left us with a quiet, happy feeling as we curated a display of his work in celebration. In preparing to share this with children, we were compelled to look into whether India featured anywhere on the IBBY award list. In previous years, the children have asked, and we know that winning a prize closer to home makes all of us feel prouder to belong. It was therefore a tender but sceptical moment to note that the jury had curated a list of twenty-one outstanding books from the nominations received, and there at number fifteen was Chiknik Choon by Sushil Shukla, illustrated by Atanu Roy (Eklavya Publications, 2016). We were not surprised, given how networks of awards and visibility operate among the dominant in India, but we hold onto hope that ours can become an industry that makes space rather than takes it. In our list of books that feature buffaloes, almost none are written from within the communities that care for and nurture this animal within the Indian social system and when represented none are disrupting the idea of who cares for these animals. Further, almost ten years after its publication, was Chiknik Choon truly the best that this remarkably rich land of subaltern storytellers, visual story creators, and diverse publishers could offer as a nomination? When the water buffalo appeared as a character in that text — from whose point of view was it presented, and for whom? Would readers like Sanju K. find themselves in that representation, or is the buffalo merely a powerful symbol for some to ride upon, while others tend, care for, and nourish it forever more?

As we think about literature being produced for children, we ask for more. Not more celebrations, awards, festivals, and lists alone, but more by way of ensuring that critical and diverse voices get to publish their stories, disrupt long-held ideas about who has freedom and who has responsibilities in society, and most of all who gets to dream, and about what, and how. Literature has the potential to do all of this, and in doing so, library collections can take flight, and children can grow wings and fly, dreaming of being and /or becoming pilots.