LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 25:5 May 2025
ISSN 1930-2940

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         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
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The Half-Inch Himalayas:
Topoanalysis and Belonging in The House that Spoke

Ms. Rama Sudakar, M.A., Ph.D. Research Scholar and
Dr. Mathangi V., M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Assistant Professor

Abstract

The contradiction of Kashmir's rustic charm to the cruelty inflicted upon its land and its people due to incessant political and territorial conflicts is hauntingly evocative. That the landscape of Kashmir has often provided poetic fodder to Indian English literature as evidenced in the works of Agha Shahid Ali and Mirza Waheed to name a few, then, is not surprising. However, representations of Kashmir in children's literature remain relatively vacuous. While middle-grade children's novels like No Guns at My Son's Funeral (2005) by Paro Anand, Queen of Ice (2014) by Devika Rangachari and The House that Spoke (2017) by Zuni Chopra all deal with the politics of Kashmir in varying degrees and in various historical timeframes, what makes The House that Spoke an integral contribution is the 15-year-old writer's highly personal treatment of Kashmir's landscape. Using Gaston Bachelard's spatial criticism from The Poetics of Space (1958), the article explores the intimate relationship between the young protagonist and Kashmir functioning here both as a setting in a fantasy novel and as a sanctuary topos. Through the novel, the article considers the notion of "home" as extending beyond the confines of a structure to include cityscapes and in this case, the state of Kashmir to arrive at a stable sense of place amidst vulnerability and precariousness.

Keywords: topoanalysis, home, Kashmir, spatiality, belonging

Home in Children's Literature

The notion of "home" is a much-contested space in children's literature and is often considered in a series of antitheses. Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer in The Pleasures of Children's Literature (2003) while identifying the home-away-home pattern, a prevalent trope in children's literature, also explore the constant pull between freedom/restraint, civilisation/nature and reality/fantasy that lie within and outside the home.

As for houses and its attendant home in children's literature, Badger's house in Wind in the Willows, the eponymous house from Anne of Green Gables, the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, Ariel's, or rather Titan's, sea house in The Little Mermaid have given the readers an extensive understanding of the remarkable differences in the qualities of places that children can call home. To Jane Suzanne Caroll, "[t]he home is sanctified because it reflects, on a microcosmic level, the world as a whole" (19). Home, then, becomes a microcosmic encapsulation of one's identity since it is through the home, which acts as a primary site of formation of the self, that the child understands the world.

Ajit Anand, in an article titled "Topoanalysis and the City Space in the Literary writings of Amitava Kumar", mentions Anjali Gerua Roy's argument regarding the Kharagpur diaspora to state that a home is not just brick and mortar but essentially "subsumes those spaces where one has grown up, thus one's locality or city becomes the 'home' for the individual" (68). The idea of home then has extended beyond the physical structure to include landscapes both literal and metaphorical which hold experiential or phenomenological resonance to the individual. As for children, the attachment to home is perceptibly more immediate and pressing, since in modern children's literature, home is an integral topoi, or locus, with particular emotional significance to the characters, "taken as an outward and visible embodiment of their personality" (Carroll 23). The novel The House that Spoke, the literary debut of the then fifteen-year-old writer, Zuni Chopra, deals precisely with such a cavernous attachment to not just the hometown, i.e., Srinagar, but to Kashmir as a whole.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Ms. Rama Sudakar, M.A.
Ph.D. Research Scholar
Department of English, PSGR Krishnammal College for Women, Coimbatore
mathangi@psgrkcw.ac.in
&
Dr. Mathangi V., M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English, PSGR Krishnammal College for Women, Coimbatore
mathangi@psgrkcw.ac.in
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