Little Brown Sanjay and Little Black Sambo : Childhood Reading, Adult Rereading; Colonial Text and Postcolonial Reception

Cultures are neither static nor hermetically sealed off from each other. Sircar presents the responses of an ethnic, South Asian reader, now living in Australia, to Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899). Sircar responded positively as a child to the inaccurate South Asian-izing of Sambo by a U.S. publisher, and responds similarly, though more informedly, to it as an adult. Sircar has an emotional, aesthetic, and cultural/political investment in Sambo, claiming it for India. He considers problems of interpreting the alleged racism, and undertakes a literary analysis of this controversial text.