Widely regarded as one of India’s finest independent publishing houses, Tara is run by a collective of writers based in Chennai, India. We work with a range of adventurous writers and artists from around the world, as well as create books in house. We’re unafraid of conventional marketing logic – the work we put out is guided by our vision of publishing, balancing the pleasures of a beautiful book with wit and political rigour. Our titles are often unclassifiable, straddling accepted genres. We have pioneered the art of the book made entirely by hand, making artists’ books affordable for the average book lover.

We look in unusual places for talent – tribal artists and oral storytellers, for instance, or street and billboard painters – and then transform this rich material into fine contemporary bookmaking. Creative collaboration is at the heart of our enterprise, and we prize dialogue across class, language and social register. Through all this, we hope to bring radically new visions into publishing.

Design is vital to our agenda, and we enjoy experimenting with the form of the book. Our only caveat is that cutting edge design also needs to communicate.

Social justice is another essential, and our political agenda takes several forms: books which actually deal with social themes, our work in guiding folk and tribal artists through the maze of intellectual property rights, or in restoring a sense of context to Indian street art. All our books are underlined by political rigour – but we would like this conviction to come through in a light and accessible fashion. We think that justice issues ought not to be restricted to alternative niches, and deserve an active place in the mainstream of society.

So the book is a complex cultural object for us: it can be the material manifestation of ideas, a source of pleasure, and the actual site of cultural production. In the case of our books made entirely by hand, for instance: a handmade book does not just document a particular art tradition – it is the actual art object. It democratises the access to art for the general reader, and elevates the form of the book into a site for art. At the same time, the process of making each book is a fair trade community enterprise.

It’s hard to build a market in a country like India, and this forces us to be inventive in the face of our constraints. With the resources we have, we’re proud to say that we continue to build a committed constituency of book lovers who appreciate our work.