The People of Indus by Nikhil Gulati, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer
I just put down The People of Indus by Nikhil Gulati, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer and ran to my laptop to write a short review of it. A full-time job fuels my graphic novel reading habit and this book has been on my to-read list for a while but it never blew up in my social networks so I put off reading it. Until I borrowed the book from a local library in Hyderabad and absolutely inhaled it around dinner time.
There aren't a lot of graphic novels coming out of India. At least that's how it looks to me. I should have read the book sooner. I'll have to spend time looking at criticisms of the book but i'm happy after the initial read - it prompted a bunch of interesting questions about archeology, language, history, and more. I loved it enough to want to buy his first book - Shepherd's Hill - The Rise and Fall of Golconda - on the rise and fall of the Golconda fort, which is ten minutes from where I live on Hyderabad, India! But sadly, there seems to be some problem with his website and I'm not able to buy the book. Alas.
I loved showing the book to Luffy yesterday and he was only interested in seeing the river in the panels. He has spent a good chunk of his life around the Sutlej river so his interest in seeing rivers is understandable. It's in stark contrast to my own life, having spent much of it near the Bay of Bengal ocean. He will hopefully read and understand it sometime soon. He needs to deal with four languages in the far future (Kinnauri, Hindi, Telugu, English) so the questions about spoken and written language posed in the book should be interesting to him!
P.S. Huge shout out to The Bookshelf lending library for children in Hyderabad, India. I've been following them for close to an year but only after Luffy and Preeti came back did we go to visit the library. I walked away an hour later with a library card and 3 books in hand. I've already swapped the first round of 3 books with another round last Sunday, one of which is "The People of Indus". I've already read through all three books so i'm eagerly waiting for Sunday again. I think i'm more excited about borrowing the books than Luffy is. Checkout their page on Facebook and Instagram, and a story about them from 2020 by The Scroll. Consider supporting them - pay for a library card.
Comments
Post a Comment