How this platform aims to help Indian children abroad learn about India's languages, culture

A young reader with a copy of An Illustration of the Hindi Alphabet

On her way to school, this writer would pass an abandoned building where her granduncle used to live. Too young to remember much about the inside of the apartment, her imagination would take off from the peeling paint and sounds of the road leading to the house, to build a life from the stories she heard about him. Without the sight of that building and the experience of walking past it every day, would the stories about him be comprehensible to a young mind? If stories have to travel long distances and time, visual aids, sounds and common experiences help lend structure to world-building. Recognising this need, North America-based platform Golguppa, a women-led small business, uses storytelling and illustrations to help Indian children living across the world learn Indian languages and culture.

Artwork from Feeling Junglee

Founded by New Delhi-born Akshata Malhotra, a design manager in Secaucus, and Samira Jain, a UX researcher in Montreal, Golguppa offers two books - An Illustration of the Hindi Alphabet, which reflects what it looks like to grow up in India, to evoke nostalgia or inspire one to share childhood stories like watching cricket matches, eating jalebis, and getting a champi-maalish. "As immigrants, and having grown up in close-knit families, we want kids to learn the languages their grandparents speak, share childhood stories with them, and experience the richness of our cultural backgrounds," they express. Their second recently-launched title, Feeling Junglee, details the A to Z of emotions in Hindi and English in playful animal illustrations with phonetic spelling. The book aims to help children over two years of age build their vocabulary to express emotions in both languages. Malhotra and Jain add, "The core idea we want kids to take away is to identify their feelings without any judgment so that they can become self-aware, which is the first step towards empathy." Their next release will be a book of rhyming opposites in Hindi, called UltaPulta. They also plan to pen books in other Indian languages.

Akshata Malhotra and Samira Jain

As Indian kids living outside the country might often lose touch with their mother language, it can be helpful to engage with it at an early age to develop not just fluency but also a love for the language. The founders note that books should be mirrors and windows for children. "When books are mirrors, kids can see themselves reflected in the stories and pictures. And as windows, books can provide a glimpse into something outside of what they know." With this, Golguppa strikes a balance of familiarity and newness.

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