Essay: The mystery of Enid Blyton’s enduring appeal in India

When I’m in the mood for comfort reading, only one author will do: Enid Blyton. “Long before JK Rowling’s Harry Potter cast a spell over generations of children, Enid Mary Blyton had made reading magical” The English author wrote more than 700 books and 4,500 short stories, with her work being translated into 90 languages and selling over 600 million copies. Thomas Abraham, managing director of Hachette, India, which distributes Blyton’s books in the subcontinent, told the BBC that Blyton was “one of the few author brands whose work remains unshakable”. It’s old-fashioned,” Bessie had this to say: “Well, we must be jolly old-fashioned then, because we not only believe in the Faraway Tree and love our funny friends there, but we go to see them too -- and we visit the lands at the top of the Tree as well!” “Author Sandip Roy believes that Blyton colonised the subcontinent with ‘crumpets and make-believe’” Perhaps what I liked best is that while the stories featured characters around my age, they were in settings vastly different from my own and doing things that I possibly couldn’t: Sneaking off for midnight feasts, planning secret club meetings, rowing boats out to an island to catch criminals, solving mysteries before the silly cop could, or running away from home. “Blyton’s descriptions single-handedly made generations of children crave food that they had neither seen nor heard of.” And then there was the food, great big “lashings” of it.