Though I did not read this book..yet my brief sting with pigeons pursued me to include it here.
Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon is a 1928 children's novel by Dhan Gopal Mukerji that won the Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature
in 1928. It deals with the life of Gay Neck, a prized Indian pigeon.
Mukerji wrote that "the message implicit in the book is that man and
winged animals are brothers."
He stated that much of the book is based on his boyhood experiences
with a flock of forty pigeons and their leader, as the boy in the book
is Mukerji himself.
He did have to draw from the experiences of others for some parts of
the book, such as those who trained messenger pigeons in the war.
The book offers an insight into the life of a boy of high caste during
the early nineteen hundreds and also into the training of pigeons.
Several chapters are told from Gay-Neck's perspective, with the pigeon
speaking in first person. Elizabeth Seeger writes in a biographical
note about Mukerji that, "Gay-Neck was written in Brittany, where every
afternoon he read to the children gathered about him on the beach the
chapter he had written in the morning."
In an article in the children’s literature journal
The Lion and the Unicorn, Meena G. Khorana calls the novel one of the few children’s novels from Western or Indian authors to explore the Himalayas
in a meaningful way (rather than simply using them as a setting), and
notes the way Mukerji recalls their “grandeur and spiritual power”.
A brief glance:-
Gay-Neck, or ‘’Chitra-Griva’’, is born to a young owner in India.
Gay-Neck’s parents teach him how to fly, but he soon loses his father
in a storm and his mother to a hawk. His master and Ghond the hunter
take him out into the wilderness, but he becomes so scared by the hawks
that he flees and ends up in a lamasery where the Buddhist monks are
able to cure him of his fear. When his young master returns home he
finds Gay-neck waiting for him. But Gay-Neck decides to go on other
long journeys, much to the boy’s consternation. Then, during World War
I, Gay-Neck and Ghond end up journeying to Europe where Gay-Neck serves
as a messenger pigeon. He is chased by German machine-eagles (planes)
and is severely traumatized when one of his fellow messenger pigeons is
shot down. Gay-neck and Ghond barely survive, and Gay-Neck is unable to
fly. Ghond, Gay-Neck, and his master return to the lamasery near
Singalila, where Ghond and Gay-Neck need to be cleansed of the hate and
fear of the war. After that, Ghond succeeds in hunting down a buffalo
that killed a villager, but feels remorse for having to kill the
buffalo. Gay-Neck disappears once more, but when the other two return
home, they find, to their joy, that Gay-Neck had already flown there
ahead of them.
not a leaf
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