At Bookaroo, Delhi
At the Aviva Young Scholar Bookaroo Festival in Delhi, there were many activities, talks and readings for children to choose from at any given time. So I wondered if children would choose to spend an hour and a half on something as serious as human rights. It turned out they would— ‘I Have a Right’, the workshop on human rights, was almost full.
The workshop was based on the book We Are All Born Free, first published by Frances Lincoln (UK) and published in India by Tara Books.
This is a marvellous picture book, which lists the Declaration of Human Rights in a simple and readable way, for children. Each article of the Declaration is accompanied by an illustration from different international illustrators which helps the child understand the right in question.
A little bit, first, about Bookaroo: Bookaroo is an organization started by a small group of people with an interest in children’s books and literature. With the idea of bringing books closer to children, Bookaroo began India’s first children’s literature festival in November 2008. Bookaroo 2009 was held at Sanskriti Anandgram on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road on Nov 28 and 29. There were more than sixty events, conducted by forty-eight authors, illustrators and editors. There were talks, discussions, poetry readings, workshops of various kinds and storytelling sessions, all targeted at children from four to fourteen years of age.
The workshop ‘I Have a Right’ was for ten-year-olds and above. There were over twenty children at the workshop. I started by asking the parents to go away, so that the children could be uninhibited when they talked about rights and freedoms. The children were then asked to think of occasions when they had thought to themselves ‘he/she had no right to do this’. The children came up with anecdotes involving teachers and monitors, which led nicely into the next segment.
We wrote down on a flipchart all the rights that we felt everyone should have. Predictably, most of them spoke about things like freedom of choice and right to education. There were some touching ones like the right to fulfil your dreams, and the right to choose your own future, which clearly came from deeply felt places. But it was interesting that no one came up with the right to food and shelter. These were middle-class children; they take these things as given.
Next the children had to ‘read’ the pictures, to get the most out of the book. There’s a notion that picture books are only for very small children. Watching these children, it struck me that children of all ages, and even adults, respond with excitement and enthusiasm to pictures.
Once they had understood the different processes by which a complex idea could be turned into a visual, I asked each child to choose a right from the ones we’d listed, and draw pictures. Many of them told stories, with speech and thought bubbles; some of the illustrations were more abstract.
Once they were done, it was evident that the children had basically understood the concept of rights.
They then wrote their own stories. One girl said that she did not want to write. They had just learnt that no one could force them to do what they did not want to do. ‘You have a right,’ I said, and let her be.
I noticed that a couple of the children were exercising their right to express themselves in the way they wanted, by drawing pictures again.
We had some stories read out at the end. The one that stays in my memory is a story about a black boy who was excluded from a football team because of his colour. He went on to make a team of ‘outsiders’ and they became the champions. The story ended with – ‘And the boy’s name was Pélé!’
There were many stories and pictures about deprived children and adults –of poverty and lack of access to education. This is what education should be about – making connections. Books like We are All Born Free, because of their unusual approach, help children think differently about issues that they don’t always see as relevant to their daily lives.
One never knows what and how much children take back from sessions such as these. But the sense I got was that the book and the exercises we did had got them thinking. That’s a good first step.
Anushka Ravishankar
Author, Tara Books
Snakes in the Museum
Indian Cults and Folklore at the Musée du quai Branly
Admittedly, our latest handmade book SSSS…Snake Art and Allegory is unexpected, even by our own standards. It combines a dense collection of Indian snake tales and legends with abstract – very spare – art by Ianna Andreadis, a Greek artist based in Paris. It’s co-published with the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, a museum that specializes in indigenous art and artefacts from Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The museum’s India collection evokes the myths and rituals that are part of everyday belief in India, and their publishing agenda is very select, generally connected to the artefacts in the museum.
The story of the book SSSS…is tied up with Manasa, a cult figure of a snake goddess that is part of the museum’s collection. The piece at the Musée du quai Branly is a fierce yet frail looking form made of wood, clay, paper and pith, from the Northeastern state of Assam. The cult of Manasa dominates the folk imagination of this region, especially Bengal. It is said to have evolved in its contemporary form from an ancient pre-Hindu myth, which traces the snake goddess’ fateful desire to be worshipped in place of the great god Shiva.
SSSS… finally turned out to be more than the story of Manasa, becoming in the end an excursion into the snake cult folklore of the subcontinent. But to begin at the beginning – it all started when Tara was approached by the artist Ianna Andréadis.
“When I saw Tara’s The Night Life of Trees in 2006,” says Ianna. “l was bowled over by the book. The artwork and the screen-printing were amazing. I wanted to know more about the publishing house, so l visited their website. Then I wanted to meet the publishers, and see whether we could work on a project together. We met the same year – in London where they had an exhibition of The Night Life of Trees – and hit it off instantly. During the course of conversation the topic turned to snakes – and I was really taken with the graphic possibilities of the idea…”
The topic of snakes just came up?
“It was like this,” continues Ianna. “At that time l had started a project with the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. The idea was to make a series of books on the subject of the four continents, each showing an artefact or a series of art pieces from the museum, as a starting point for an idea, and then linking it up to the country of its origin. I would then travel to the country in question to absorb the atmosphere, feed my inspiration and also look for the ideal publisher to co-publish the book with the museum. At the time I was working on an Aztec Bestiary, drawing Aztec pieces featuring animals at the museum in Paris, and in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico. It was later published by Petra Ediciones, my publisher in Mexico.”
“So when it came to thinking about an Asian project, I began researching the Indian pieces in the museum with the idea of a project with Tara. Manasa, the snake goddess – as well as two scrolls from Patua artists in Bengal on the Manasa legend – caught my interest. That’s how our snake project evolved and everything fell into place when Gita Wolf agreed to write the text.”
The Musée du quai Branly was happy with the proposal, and Ianna began her research.
“Although I have always been close to nature, working with legends and myths was new to me. I had never been to India, so I wasn’t very familiar with Indian culture. I started by researching the iconography about snakes in Indian art, and about snakes native to India, the cobra in particular. I was very taken with the snakestones that are found near temples, specially a photograph which had been taken by friend of mine, Richard Cohen, near a temple in Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu.”
“I wasn’t aware until then that snakes were actually worshipped. I loved the evocative simplicity of the snake stones – and the dots of red and yellow put on the stones by worshippers. This is the photo that I chose for my dialogue with Manasa. When Gita sent me her text, I was struck by the relationship of snakes to the elements – to the sea and other water bodies, to trees, to fire – and it became clear to me that I should work in that direction, to evoke these elements. Sometimes I was on the border of abstraction, but my reference point was always the elements, and the association of snakes to them.”
Of all the images, Ianna’s favourite is this one, of Vrtra the ancient serpent, lying on the tallest mountain.
“This image appears very simple, but it was the hardest to achieve! I worked on it for more than two weeks, and I still wasn’t satisfied. The story, in which the earliest snakes become the guardians of the four directions was full of the power of the elements – rain, lightning, thunder, the high mountains – at first I wanted to draw everything, and the results were complicated and anecdotal. Finally, when I came up with just the line of the mountains and the snakes, I was satisfied.”
The way the book was put together finally involved working together with several people across continents and despite differing time zones. It was a mixture of technologies.
“We worked closely, communicating via the internet. I sent in the scans of the images from Paris. The layout was done by Jonanthan Yamakami, Tara’s Brazilian designer in Chennai; and then Arumugam, the production manager, separated the colours on Photoshop, before taking it off to his silk-screening workshop to make the films. The book was finally hand printed and bound. It was an amazing collaboration. My favourite part was visiting Tara while the book was being printed, meeting everybody who was involved, and hunting for snakestones during the monsoon…”
How did the Musée du quai Branly view this first ever collaboration with an Indian publisher? We asked Muriel Rausch and Clair Morizet, in charge of the publishing program of the museum.
“Ianna Andréadis, with whom we had collaborated earlier on a project, came up with the proposal. This is the second of our set of four titles from the different continents, co-published with foreign publishers. We were very excited when Ianna brought Tara into the project – we’d heard of you before, and we’ve always loved your books. This is the first time that we’re experimenting with handmade books, and you are the perfect partner for that. This collaboration is very much within our philosophy – as a museum devoted to non-European ethnology and folklore – of dialogue between cultures. We also wanted to combine this publication with a major 2010 exhibition called “Other Masters of India”, which will present Indian popular and folk art to French audiences. We hope this gorgeous book – with its brilliant editorial concept and handsome handmade production – as well as the exhibition will offer an unknown face of contemporary India.”
Gita Wolf
Publisher