An Indian prince features in a new adaptation of the French classic, The Little Prince, thereby opening the classic to regional readers
The Little Prince in conversation with the animals on Earth. Illustrations Courtesy/Priya Kuriyan, Pratham Books
A small mention of the boa constrictor devouring an elephant can remind you of a stranded aircraft pilot on the Sahara Desert and his little friend, a young prince, visiting the Earth. Antoine De Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince has been adapted into an abridged children’s book (Pratham Books) by Anushka Ravishankar, with illustrations by Priya Kuriyan. Apart from English, the book will be available in Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, and Tamil.
“I don’t remember many books from 40 years ago, but this is not a book one easily forgets,” says Ravishankar. She asserts that it has been part of the reading culture of the world. “The story has so many layers and messages that almost everyone can find a mirror in it. The thought that children are able to imagine and see things that adults cannot see has embedded itself into my world view,” she tells us.
The book cover
The author and the illustrator worked in collaboration with the French Institute in India — Embassy of France. “The first thing I did was decide which parts were important and could not be left out. Once I did that, then it was a process of paring the words down to the essentials. One does lose a bit of colour in the process but those are choices one has to make,” Ravishankar recalls.
Kuriyan’s vibrant illustrations add an Indian touch for an Indian audience. After working through a few initial iterations, which involved imagining the prince similar to the original one or taking inspiration from Indian cinema, she decided to tap into visual references of Indian royalty from history and arrived at the current re-imagination. “Our princes were quite pop-ish in their own way. The costume became a culmination of many princes’ costumes. The green costume and the yellow muffler connect well enough [to the original].”
Anushka Ravishankar and Priya Kuriyan
For the other illustrations in the book, she used Indian colours, such as rani pink, which children can see around them. “It was a conscious choice to lift the colours up.” Since most of the narrative is set in the desert, she decided to play with the colours of the sunset and sunrise. “I thought I’d lean in to the highly saturated ones to make it look different from the original. I didn’t want to use the pale European palettes,” Kuriyan reveals.
Ravishankar’s engaging style of storytelling, which conveys the emotional depth of the original in fewer words, and Kuriyan’s ability to completely immerse the reader in the little prince’s world complement each other. Ravishankar remembers the task of re-working on the much-loved classic as a daunting one.
“It’s still a little wordier than a picture book needs to be, but that was a choice the editors and I made together.” They had seen other versions with lesser text which felt flat to them. Even though she had to drastically prune the story, she concludes, “I’ve tried not to lose the essence of the book in the process. Hopefully, I have thrown out the bath water and not the baby!”
LOG ON TO: prathambooks.org (for print copies)
NOTE: The picture book can also be accessed on Pratham Books’ open digital repository, StoryWeaver
Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest news!" Click here!
