This article analyzes Russian fairy tales translated into Malayalam, exploring adult influences on children's narratives, suggesting a sociopolitical context.
Soviet children's literature had a considerable following in India between the late 1960s and early 1990s, when literary works from the Soviet Union were widely translated into Indian languages. The dissemination of these works was informed by the sociopolitical milieu of the period, especially the Cold War. This article analyzes Maaya-Lokam: Russian Ezhuthukaarudae Kutti-Kathakal ( The Faerie: Children's Tales by Russian Writers ) (1986), an anthology of translations of literary fairy tales from Russian to Malayalam, the official language of the south-Indian state of Keralam, and delineates the adult normative discourses that are present in the tales, which can be discerned in the manner in which the child is posited in relation to the adult. The article thus tries to engage with the dominant discourses that had informed the Russian conception of childhood during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
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Varghese et al. (2024) studied this question.
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