IN 2015, ADIVAANI, an independent press dedicated to creating “a database of Adivasi writing for and by Adivasis,” published a revolutionary children’s book titled Disaibon Hul. Ruby Hembrom, its author and also Adivaani’s founder and editor, wrote in its preface, “It is our duty to keep our stories of injustice, persecution and hope alive in public spaces. ... Dear gidra, don’t let the Sido and Kanhu in all of us die.”
For the first time in Indian English children’s literature, the words “our” and “us” were used by a Santhal, presupposing and centring an audience of Santhal readers who knew that “gidra” meant them—the “children” for whom references to Sido and Kanhu as freedom fighters were as familiar as references to Bhagat Singh or Mangal Pandey.
Hembrom’s exhortation is echoed in the book’s illustrations, by Saheb Ram Tudu, who is also Santhal. The first double spread, in sepia, with rib-baring cattle and bare-breasted women, sets the scene for the 1855 Santhal rebellion against zamindars and the British in what is now Jharkhand. Tudu alternates watercolour paintings with stark black-and-white line drawings that give the narrative a live-report kind of immediacy. The switching of artistic medium mirrors the way that traditional storytellers share and process intergenerational trauma—in narratives that cyclically smoothen and jolt. Hembrom writes with similar echoes to oral history styles, transitioning from the third person on one page—“Unable to tolerate the unjustified arrests, they attacked the police”—to the first person on the next—“We were at war.” The complementary choices of text and illustration continue when the text bluntly summarises history: where the book reads “Sido and Kanhu were captured and killed,” a double-spread illustration depicts them in action—one running away from a horse-riding pursuer, while the other is being led away in ropes.
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