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August 4, 2002
CHILDREN'S BOOK REVIEW: A visit to the past
HISTORY, a discipline seeking to understand past lives is often turned into the very antithesis of life, warmth and individual existence. Worse still, many students perceive history as a dull routine of memorizing dates, names and events. J.G. Herder, the first philosopher to appeal to the principle of empathy, in his work Ideas for the philosophy of the history of mankind emphasized the importance of imaginative understanding and argued that true understanding of history required ‘Einf|hlung’ i.e. ‘feeling into’ the individual significance of actions, characters and periods.
Zubeida Dossal does exactly that in her book for young children Mohenjodaro the living city. An eminent educationist who retired as the principal of the Habib Girls School, Dossal understands the mind of the child.
This book imaginatively reconstructs the lives of people living in Moenjodaro, and allows a young child to step back in time to experience the thoughts, feelings, dilemmas and actions of people from history. This integrated approach makes history more meaningful to students and helps them retain historical details and facts by immersing them in stories surrounding historical events.
Each of the six stories is an exploration of the city, seen through the eyes of children. Some youngsters visit the Great Bath, others climb the watch tower, and yet others go to the granary. Active and alert, they observe their surrounding with interest. For instance, they describe the dress and head dress of the priest or how large the bath is, how many pillars are in the place, what the street looks like and how organized the civilization was.
In this way information about Moenjodaro is disseminated by bringing the city to life and without the present day reader feeling bored. Moreover, children reading this book would be able to empathize with the children of that time. Additional interest is generated through the illustrations by Sadaf Siddique.
Overall, this book is a good way of introducing young children to their heritage. They learn about Moenjodaro, ‘the mound of dead’ (one wonders how the Sindhi word ‘moen’ meaning the dead, was replaced with ‘Mohen’ which is a noun personifying an individual and therefore gives an entirely different meaning and connotation) when the city was alive. Once the imagination is whetted, the child might later be interested in exploring further this city that thrived with the other great civilizations of the time.
What we need are more books which deal with history in the same manner. Thus our children will grow up understanding their heritage, and realizing that their history does not begin in the twentieth century, but that civilizations have come and gone since thousands of years and that we all should be proud of belonging to one of the oldest civilizations of the world.
Writer’s email: ambernagori@yahoo.com
Mohenjodaro: the living city
By Zubeida Dossal
Oxford University Press, 5 Bangalore Town, Sharae Faisal, Karachi-75350 Tel: 021-4529025
Email: ouppak@theoffice.net
ISBN 0-19-577824-3
40pp. Rs105
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