Ditta's Tree

by Jean Gordon Hughes

A sprite who lives in a tree in an Indian village is upset when the arrival of a red automobile makes the villagers forget to bring him the customary offerings of food and flowers.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

Reviews

[Adam Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ditta’s Tree is a novel set in India but clearly written by an English woman. There’s a slight Kipling feel to it, an element of Jean Gordon Hughes choosing a quaint setting. It’s not overtly racist, but there is a certain colonial inauthenticity in the book.

The main character is Ditta, a tree sprite, a very European folkloric character. There are also gnomes, which are very European and a European style witch - but they placed in a pseudo-Malgudi type environment. Ditta has some ‘ethnic’ style exclamations, “Hugrum Bugrum” and “Hinny-Honny” which mean nothing. He’s also coded as African, with curly hair and white teeth, he sounds more like a golly doll than anything else. Ditta lives in a tree and helps the villagers and animals with their problems. In the first story, he is insulted when the people forget him to look at a new car and causes chaos. In the other stories, he helps people who ask him and makes an enemy in Shusti The Laziest Man in the Village.

Hughes loves a bit of quirky capitalisation. All the villages have descriptive names like, Jainki The Prettiest Girl in the Village and Budhoo The Man with Lame Legs. None of these names are Indian names (though in checking that, I learnt that a budhoo is an Australian indigenous slang term for genitalia).

However, despite the story’s absolute inauthenticity as an Indian tale, there is charm in it. Ditta is fun, powerful but not all-powerful, kind but impulsive. He was a ‘bag of magics’ and at one point is involved in a battle of magic with a witch, which he can’t win. There was something very charming about how very vague the magic system in the book is. There was also the interesting element that the story was being told to a pair of children called Dick and Dinah. This wasn’t set up as a frame story, only that every so often the narrator explains part of the story to one of the children - it’s a cute affectation.

I picked the book up because I love the descriptions in older Puffin books. It says of this book that, “it is primarily a small children’s story, but has so unusual a flavour that many older people will turn to it with particular interest.”

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won this book in a school poetry contest in 1969 when I was ten. The poem was about me lying at the base of a tree looking up at a squirrel. I think I have the book still, but not the poem. Will have to give it a reread and see how it plays now.

[Sona Prendergast · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I first read it when I was a child. A lovely charming tale about a cheeky tree sprite called Ditta. He helps the villagers and the jungle animals. But sometimes can be mischievous.