1. moral
   ˈmɒr(ə)l

adjective

concerned with the principles of right and wrong behaviour.

noun

a lesson that can be derived from a story or experience.

2. value

ˈvaljuː

noun

principles or standards of behaviour; one's judgement of what is important in life.

-Oxford English Dictionary

Once upon a time, there lived a fox. He saw a bunch of grapes swinging enticingly in a vineyard. He broke his way in, drooled a little before he realised they were higher up than he’d estimated. He jumped high to reach them, jaws wide. But his teeth snapped on air. He kept at it till he was tired. Then, he shook the pole supporting the vine, in the hope that a few grapes would fall. Nothing did; the disappointed fox slinked out, telling himself the grapes were probably sour anyway. Moral of the story: what you cannot get need not be bad.

Nyadosh the cow was ugly and untameable. She was bought by a large Bengali family from its milkman. She chewed up clothes, barged into the house, ate books and pushed policemen into the river. One day, she devoured the banana leaves that the family ate its meals on and developed an immediate craving for ilish fish. She became a non-vegetarian cow. Another time, she came home drunk on date palm wine after chasing away the workers harvesting it from the trees. When she finally fell sick, perhaps due to her eventful lifestyle, she wouldn’t let any vet near her, so she never fully recovered.

Two animal stories that couldn’t be less alike. The first from More Moral Stories from Panchatantra by Shree Book Centre, claiming “Easy Vocabulary, Large Print” right on cover. The second a summary of Our Incredible Cow by Mahasweta Devi, republished by Tulika Books from Seagull’s collection titled Our Non-Veg Cow and Other Stories. In this post, I intend to use them as examples to decode how Indian children’s books incorporate morals and values in their stories. The main question I’m trying to answer is this – which works better for children, morals or values?

To begin addressing that question, let’s first look at what morals and values are. Although the distinction isn’t watertight, I’d define morals as one-liner teaching aids, in which the author imparts a very particular instruction to the reader (in this case, the child). If we looked at the fox and grapes fable, there could’ve been several obvious takeaways from it: how greed is detrimental to all creatures, how thievery never does anyone good, how resentment never gets you what you want. Instead of leaving it open-ended, so the reader can figure out the message on her own, Vishnu Sharma - let’s assume, for the sake of this piece, that the tale is a reliable translation from the ‘original’ Panchatantra, with Sharma as the author - chose resentment and handed it to the reader in a platter.

Had he left it to the child to derive the meaning of the story, I would’ve said he was imparting values, not a moral. As stated in the definition above, a value also tries instilling certain behavioural codes. In fact, looked at strictly in terms of this definition, morals could even be viewed as a subset of values. Both kinds of stories take human error into account, using it as the basis for the plot; both hint at the idea that a behavioural change might be necessary to set things right. But if we made a table separating the two, the first point on the moral side would be that morals look for quick fixes, derived from hard lines between good and bad, right and wrong. If you looked closely at the fable format, the story is narrated in third person; in the last line, however, the author addresses the reader directly - “What you cannot get need not be bad,” he says, or, “Think before you act.” The conduct values are trying to ingrain, on the other hand, are less direct, more fluid with right-wrong boundaries. Unlike morals, they can’t be summarised in a sentence. They require more than one reading and some mulling over for understanding to set in, and even then, they inspire more of a feeling than a specific message.

If that’s too abstract or long-winded an explanation, let’s take an example. “The Fox and the Grapes” has a moral, but if we stripped it of this, it could still contain a message. How? Through values. It’s relatable – every child is tempted by some food or the other; every child pouts when the adult tells her it’s time for lunch, and she can have payasa later. This tale is also retold in More Moral Stories from Panchatantra with a great deal of sensitivity. Accompanying the text on every page is an illustration with a dialogue box or thought bubble, providing additional insight into the character’s mind. When he’s salivating, the fox’s expression is endearingly soppy. When he’s unable to make the grapes fall, his frustration is tangible. As he walks away from the vineyard, his disappointment is so human that the reader could feel sorry for him, despite his desire to steal what isn’t his by right. An easy value takeaway could be the sensibility with which the illustrator has treated an erring protagonist, which could, in turn, demonstrate to the child thoughtfulness in dealing with other people’s emotions. It’s still instructive, but the child can first laugh at the foolishness of the fox if she wants to, or empathise with his bad luck. If she likes the fable, she’ll ask to read/ for it to be read aloud/ narrated again the next day, during which time she’ll have the chance to tease the message out.

Be it with textbooks, mythology or moral stories anywhere, the hold that instruction has had over reading since after the Middle Ages hasn’t loosened. A few months ago, I sat in a circle with a group of 17-year-olds, fresh out of government school. Every one of them said they read to learn. When I asked if there were books they’d opened for enjoyment, they responded firmly that they could enjoy something only if they simultaneously learned from it.

And no matter how hard I try to deny it, they’re right. Every story has something we can learn from; every storyteller is a human being; every human believes she knows better than the next person. In explaining that stories and morals needn’t go hand-in-hand, am I not doing the same? Am I not trying to convince you that values tell superior stories, by illustrating this through examples? An author is more efficient. She could demonstrate that value-based stories are instructive as well as entertaining by deliberately omitting morals from her book, as Mahasweta Devi does with Our Incredible Cow.

As with the stories in the Panchatantra, this one regales its reader with the antics of an animal. But Nyadosh the cow is no Gomata. If personified, she’d be exactly what the Panchatantra-proponent would keep away from her child. Children, however, love immorality. Authors of moral stories know and use this fact too: the fox’s greed is what makes the Panchatantra story worth telling in the first place. But while Sharma lays it out as a problem to which a solution must be sought, explaining to children how not to be in the process, Devi draws no such parallels. The cow’s boisterousness is exactly what children’s secret lives, away from adult eyes, are all about. Nyadosh breaks her way out of the cowshed everyday; which child doesn’t dream of sneaking out of her house without parental permission and embarking on an adventure? She eats up books; which child doesn’t wish her books disappeared so she wouldn’t have to study anymore? She pushes policemen back into the river when they’re getting out after their morning dip; which child hasn’t been told that policemen are out to get her, inciting the wish for a little revenge? She gets drunk and comes home; for which child is drunkenness not forbidden adult knowledge that she’d press her ear against closed doors for? Even when the narrator suggests that Nyadosh fell ill because of these activities, she doesn’t pause to lecture the reader. She allows her her own time in coming to the conclusion that an eventful lifestyle isn’t good in excess, and goes on instead to a light-hearted description of Nyadosh’s treatment of the vets who come to see her.

Furthermore, if our children’s preferences aren’t incentive enough to give them this book, we could bore straight through the story’s foundation for what we wish them to imbibe. To begin with, the story is rich in detail. Written first in Bengali and translated later by the author herself, the English version retains key Bengali words: Nyadosh (clumsy), Monimashi and Monididima (aunt and great-aunt), ilish (a kind of fish). It mentions the Ganga, the field in front of the court, the earthen bowl in which hay, husk and oil-cakes are stored for Nyadosh, the tradition of presenting the cow-seller with new clothes. In its crudest form, these details shape the value of Indianness. More subtly, they localise culture, hinting to the reader that she’s surrounded by people and places that are dissimilar to yet like her own (let’s get past unity in diversity). A chain could be strung from here, with cultural/linguistic/religious tolerance as the last link.

Next comes art. The pictures on each page don’t replicate the words – they illustrate them. When the narrator describes Nyadosh’s taste for books, Shah paints a cow made up of books. Similarly, descriptions of the animal’s fish cravings are accompanied by a seafood-onion cow. Tastefully coloured, perfectly proportioned and placed, the reader’s education in art appreciation could begin right here.

This list could go on to the understanding of human-animal relationships (which adult does Nyadosh like or dislike and why?), glimpses into adult personalities (whom does Nyadosh listen to, whom is she afraid of and why does she avoid chewing on anything that belongs to Baba?), even messages for us parents and teachers on how to balance enjoyment and censorship for our children. We are, after all, the author’s first targets; we surround children; we believe we know more about them than they do themselves and hence give ourselves the power to decide what stories they read or don’t. If the author can’t get past us, she can’t reach them at all.

So when we walk into a bookstore to pick up something for them, how do we know which book’s the book? How can we decide whether it’s extolling a moral or propagating a value? Sometimes, authors don’t go all out in stating, “So the moral of the story is – “ at the end of the narrative; a direct moral could be present in some lines in the middle, when a wiser character preaches to an erring one, obviously intended for the child reader, as happens very often in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. So, we need to create filters and pass each book we pick up through these. To do this efficiently, I’d suggest these three steps:

a) If it’s small, read the book cover to cover; if long, read the blurb and the first two pages at least – does it seem like our child will enjoy what we see?

b) Glance through the illustrations – do they add meaning to, not just describe, the words? Could they be good examples of art the reader could learn to appreciate?

c) Scan for morals and values – which seem more dominant? If it’s morals, is the story worth the preaching? If it’s values, are they ones we agree with? Do they seem to arise naturally from the narrative, or have they been squeezed in just so that some learning can exist in the tale, making them as obvious as morals?

Children’s author and theorist Emily Neville says, in her essay titled “Social Values in Children’s Literature” - “The problem in dealing with the social or moral issue in fiction for children or adults is that the author must not preach, must not make the reader's decision for him, must not indulge in the fallacy that all nice people do good things and that all evil things are done by bad people. The author's job is to throw sharp light on how some real people act in a particular time and place.” We’ve always thought of children’s stories as fantastical, simplistic tales, of children as imaginative young humans. It’s time for us to press the clutch down, shift gear, to think of our young as intelligent beings capable of understanding complex, real stories. It’s time to tell ourselves – “They can. Yes. They can.”