GROWING UP in urban India in the late '50s and '60s meant growing up with books. Television did not exist in the Bombay of my boyhood, and Nintendo was not even a gleam in an inventor's eye. If your siblings were, as in my case, four and six years younger (and worse, female), there was only one thing to do when you weren't with your friends. Read.
I read copiously, rapidly and indiscriminately. Chronic asthma often confined me to bed, but I found so much pleasure in the books piled up by my bedside that I stopped resenting my illness. Soon reading became the central focus of my existence; there was not a day in my childhood that did not feature a book, or several. One year I kept a list of the volumes I'd finished (comics didn't count), hoping to reach 365 before the calendar did. I made it before Christmas.
An abiding memory is of my mother coming into my room around 11 every night and switching off the light. I wasn't smart enough to think of holding a flashlight under the covers, but sometimes I would wait for my parents to fall asleep in their room, then surreptitiously switch my light on again to finish the book they'd interrupted.
It was, of course, my mother who'd started me off on the bad habit to begin with. When I was still in diapers she would read to me from the Noddy books of Enid Blyton, stories about a nodding wooden doll and his friends in Toyland. My mother jokes that she read them so badly I couldn't wait to grab the books from her myself; by the time I was 3, I was reading Noddy, and soon moving on to other stories by Blyton, easily the world's most prolific children's author, whose prodigious output (more than 200 books) could take you through an entire childhood. When I outgrew Noddy there were Enid Blyton fairy tales, nursery fantasies and retold legends; by 7 I started on her thrilling mysteries of The Five-Find-Outers (and Dog); by 8 I discovered her tales of British boarding-school life, midnight feasts and all; by 9 I was launched on the adventures of the "Famous Five" and of four intrepid British teenagers in another series which always had the word "adventure" in its titles (The Ship of Adventure, The Castle of Adventure and so on).
Today, Enid Blyton has become the target of well-intentioned but over-earnest revisionists, her stories assailed for racism, sexism and overall political incorrectness. But generations of post-colonial Indians have read (and still read) her books, entranced by her extraordinary storytelling skills and quite indulgent of her stereotypes. After 200 years of the Raj, Indian children knew instinctively how to filter the foreign -- to appreciate the best in things British, and not to take the rest seriously.
For colonialism had given us a literature that did not spring from our own environment, and whose characters, concerns and situations bore no relation to our own lives. This didn't bother us in the slightest: a Bombay child read Blyton the same way a Calcutta kindergartner sang "Jingle Bells" without us having seen snow or sleigh.
Indeed, the most popular British children's books other than Enid Blyton's were the ones that didn't take themselves too seriously. My own favorities were the "William" books of Richmal involving the escapades of an irrepressible schoolboy (all tousled hair, grubby face and cheeks bulging with Licorice All-Sorts) who was forever tumbling into ditches, pulling off outrageous schemes and messing up his elder sister's love-life. A close second came the Billy Bunter series by Frank Richards, whose stories under half-a-dozen pseudonymns earned him attention in George Orwell's famous essay on schoolboy fiction. Richards created an uproarious world of British public-school characters, from the eponymous Bunter ("a fat, frabjous frump") to his doughty Yorkshire classmate John Bull. There was even a dusky Indian princeling, improbably named Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, who played cricket magnificently, mixed his metaphors in a series of sage howlers, and answered to the name "Inky." I suppose that, reading the books in independent India half a century after they were written, I ought to have been offended; but I was merely amused, for Frank Richards never wrote a dull word in his long and productive career.
Another hardy perennial was Capt. W.E. Johns, whose hero "Biggles" made his literacy debut as a World War I flying ace and agelessly fought through the Second World War and the Cold War before his creator finally -- in the RAF jargon he made so familiar to us -- "went West." (Biggles' adventures inspired my own first work of published fiction at age 10 -- a credulity-stretching saga of a figher pilot -- but that is another story.) BLYTON, Bunter, Biggles: that insidious imperialist Macualay had done his work too well, his policies spawning a breed of Indians the language of whose education made them a captive market for the British imagination. What about Indian books? Sad
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1991/12/01/a-childs-reading-in-india/2e5d