November 17, 2002

IN keeping with its mission of promoting excellence in research and scholarship, the Oxford University Press has been publishing worldwide. OUP Pakistan has been producing not only a wide range of books for adults, it also has to its credit a whole stock of publications for children.

According to Faryal Tajik Husain, director education division OUP, the publishing house publishes a variety of children’s books annually. A number of books are also imported from abroad, such as the The Oxford bookworm series and the Domino series.

Faryal speaks with pride of the books which have been locally produced, especially the very colourful series in history titled The historical readers and the The Mughal diaries. They are full of illustrations and are designed to capture the young reader’s interest in the subject.

OUP is also publishing books in Urdu, the most popular of which are Nazmein and the Urdu Silsila, a comprehensive and structured Urdu reading and language programme.

With a change in government policy, the private sector has been allowed to enter the field of textbook production. “To bring about this change wasn’t easy,” Faryal says, “but now that the government has accepted us, our readers and textbooks are being used in the government schools all over Sindh. This is extremely encouraging for us.”

The greatest challenge for a big publishing house in Pakistan which produces titles for children is the versatility that is demanded of it to cater to the diverse linguistic needs of a multilingual population. OUP has responded to this challenge by publishing in the regional languages, such as Pushto and Sindhi as well apart from Urdu. Of the story books which have been published in Sindhi and Pushto, the most acclaimed have been Ejadan joon kahanioon, Samandar and Sij aien chand in Sindhi and Hercules and Phool in Pushto.

A new venture undertaken in recent years has been the history and current affairs books the OUP has published. The idea is to acquaint children with their past and the events taking place around them. A recent publication is Fahmida Riaz’s The beautiful pearl which is a tale about an Afghan girl. Thus the young readers would gain a perspective on Afghanistan, which has had a profound impact on life in Pakistan. Another book on Moenjodaro by Zubeida Dossal takes the reader back into time to life in the days of the Indus Valley civilization. According to Faryal, the children’s books have been made accessible by keeping the prices low. “At times we even run a loss due to our pricing policy. if our costs are high, it is because we look for originality and quality in our work. We employ our own editors, illustrators and designers. If we take any passage or picture from another book we pay for the copyrights. All this boosts our expenditures, thus increasing the price.”

Faryal Husain says that the high demand of OUP books notwithstanding, they are in constant search of writers and illustrators. “It’s a never ending process,” she says. The OUP has seven bookshops in Pakistan, two of which are in Karachi. To promote the reading habit in children, the OUP organizes story telling sessions at these bookshops. Nation wide book fairs are held each year in September. These exhibitions target children as well as their parents, who actually control the purse strings.

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