There is pure delight in the oral tradition of storytelling. Children gather around a parent, grandparent, aunt or teacher, eager and attentive, hanging onto every word until the main characters 'lived happily ever after'. In the Subcontinent, though the oral tradition has long been a staple as in many other places around the world, children's literature in the book form has developed only recently.
Since before Partition, the famous Urdu weekly magazine Phool has been published from Lahore, marking a significant and long-lasting contribution to children's literature. Other Lahore publications, and Khilona from Delhi, likewise offered critical platforms for a nascent Southasian children's fiction in those early years. After the birth of Pakistan in 1947, Hakeem Saeed of Hamdard Laboratories started to publish, for children, the famous monthly magazine Hamdard Naunehal, the first issue coming out in 1953. The Paramount Publishing Enterprise, founded in 1948, is worth mentioning as one of the largest wholesale and retail distributors-cum-publishers. But undoubtedly one of the grand old publishing houses in this regard is Ferozsons, founded by Maulvi Feroz-ud-Din in Lahore in 1894 not only as a business venture but also to spread literacy among the masses. Given this aim, one of the publisher's first projects was the publishing of children's books, with the idea of educating the Muslim children of India. Like Hamdard Naunehal, Ferozsons's monthly Taleem-O-Tarbiat became a staple source of entertainment for many children, both before and after Partition. Beyond periodicals, however, books specifically for children have come of age in Pakistan only in the past three decades.
It took almost a century for the logical extension of the Ferozsons initiative, with the 1978 introduction of Pakistan's first lending library for children. The Book Bus, a brightly coloured double-decker bus specially converted for the purpose, was the brainchild of an American psychologist named Nita Baker, who used inheritance money to purchase the bus library's first books. From there, an educationist named Basarat Kazim took over, setting up the formal Alif Laila Book Bus Society (ALBBS) in Lahore, which was aimed at providing meaningful education to children, especially girls from disadvantaged backgrounds. Within the first few years of its existence, the ALBBS had persuaded the Punjab government to construct a reference library next to the bus, and to convert the park where it was stationed into a space solely for children. The reference library now contains magazines, games, puzzles and photocopying facilities, as well as a television set on which educational films are shown regularly.
Next came the ALBBS mobile library, called Dastango (Storyteller), which visits schools in towns surrounding Lahore. Alif Laila has also set up libraries funded by other organisations in Muzaffarabad and in schools in 59 districts of Punjab province, as well as resource centres-cum-libraries in Bagh, Abbottabad and Mansehra. Even after more than three decades of the Book Bus initiative, however, the government has neither replicated nor helped to ply the ALBBS's buses in all of the towns and cities of Pakistan. Nonetheless, this project's decades of experience have since inspired some similar initiatives. Today, one hears of donkey libraries, book boats, 'single cupboard' libraries, libraries on bicycles – any number of modest means to bring books to children.