Tara’s outgoing resident designer Jonathan Yamakami reflects upon the creative journey he embarked upon when working on ‘I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail’. A 17th century English ‘trick’ poem, Tara’s version is illustrated by artist Ramsingh Urveti from India’s Gond tribe.
I was invited to the Guadalajara book fair, recently, on a publisher’s fellowship. Afterwards, my travels around Mexico took me to the state of Chiapas, to visit an extraordinary book making cooperative of Mayan women called Taller Lenateros, The Woodlanders’ Workshop.
Impossible to sum up otherwise, I decided to turn my experience into a small visual trail around the world of the book, populated by readers, publishers, book fairs, writers, libraries, artists, book stores, book makers and books in all forms.
In the aftermath of Delhi University’s decision to ban A K Ramanujan’s essay discussing disparate versions of The Ramayana, Tara publisher V.Geetha reflects upon the many lives of the text, and in particular our recently published retelling of the great epic from the female point of view, Sita’s Ramayana.
'Sita's Ramayana'
Ganesh Jogi
Ganesh Jogi, musician and artist from Rajasthan-Gujarat, is no more. We met him and his wife Teju Behn in February 2010, and invited them to sing and draw for us.
Last month, Tara’s Maegan Dobson attended Publishing Next – India’s first conference on the future of publishing. There she spoke about social networking from the perspective of an independent publishing house, joining a conversation that touched upon subjects as diverse as technology, dissemination, class and language. Here Maegan discusses the experience, reflecting on some of the issues raised by Jennifer Abel in her ongoing series of posts on the social economics of both digital and printed publishing.
‘Social Publishing’ just about captures the nature of the Publishing Next conference held in Goa earlier this month. Chosen by Maya Hemant (of Pratham Books) as the title of the workshop we conducted together on social media marketing, I couldn’t help but feel that it had it wider application in summing up the conference as a whole.
Informal discussions between sessions (photo courtesy of Frederick Noronha)
In the first in a short series of posts, Tara’s North American representative Jennifer Abel takes on the fiery debate about the future of the printed book, addressing the issues of class and economics in the context of a reading community.
It’s a fiery conversation, the one about ebooks, digital publishing and the future of the printed book. It’s certainly an omnipresent topic; recent articles appear in The Guardian and The Washington Post , and The Millions has a featured section dedicated to the issue.
A Workshop Exploring Indian Floor Patterns
All over India, there are enduring traditions of women decorating the threshold of their homes with decorative patterns. Known by different names in various communities, they are called kolam in Tamil Nadu. Women create them every day with rice paste or powder, and by nightfall, they are usually gone. Once, while talking to the Gond artist Bhajju Shyam about the tradition of floor patterns in his community – known as Digna – we were astonished by his reverence for this ephemeral art. Bhajju felt that Gond art evolved from these patterns on the floors and walls – that they were, so to speak, the basic alphabet of folk art. Struck by this, we wanted to explore further, and decided to invite women from four different regions for a workshop on floor patterns.
Kolams from Tamil Nadu were represented by Selvi and Jayashree from Chennai. They were joined by Sunita from Rajasthan’s Meena tribe who created Mandanas. Sarla Devi from Madhubani in Bihar was an expert on Aripanas, while the Gond group from Madhya Pradesh – Deepa, Rupa, Sunita and Shakuntala – came up with Dignas.
Here Chennai-based performer, writer and activist Aniruddhan Vasudevan – who was part of workshop – shares his thoughts about this creative process:
The artists gathered together for the workshop
Recently, we were asked to write an article about our experience of gender in children’s books in the Indian context. It’s certainly a topical issue at the moment: a recent study in the US looking at almost 6,000 books published between 1990 and 2000 found that males are central characters in 57% of children’s books published each year, with just 31% having female central characters.
We were more than happy to oblige, and the resulting ‘Postcard from India’ was published on the Guardian children’s book website last week. Aside from our obvious pleasure in the interest shown in an issue that we hold dear, we were intrigued by how the request had come about: via social networking – twitter, to be more specific.
We have been consistently – and pleasantly – surprised by the opportunities afforded to a small press by social media, and feel that this article is an example of how new technologies often dismissed as trivial can be utilized to further aims and ideologies that are anything but.
Written by Tara’s Maegan Chadwick-Dobson, here is the article in full:
Neya & Maya reading about the Indian herione Jaya.
Why is it that conflict-torn lands often produce fiction that delves into deep human recesses? Does this writing have the power to influence the conflict itself?
Here writer and critic Miguel Fernandes Ceia, from the Asia House Festival of Literature, interviews author Daisy Hasan. Daisy’s debut novel ‘The To-Let House’ explores the often forgotten conflict in Shillong, North East India, and its impact on the lives of children growing up within it.
How do you live a whole life within a conflict? Do you think that people who have lived their whole lives within the same conflict are able to understand what it is like not being in one?
Waterlife: a Fluid Tradition
Earlier this year Mithila art expert and enthusiast Peter Zirnis visited India’s Madhubani region. There he met with a range of artists working in what can broadly be defined as the Mithila style of folk art. He was guided by the artist Rambharos Jha, the talented author behind our latest handmade title Waterlife
Since Peter discussed the book with Rambharos last month, it has been at the receiving end of international acclaim – being singled out for special mention by the jury of the BolognaRagazzi Award in the New Horizons category.
Here, Peter finds Rambharos in a reflective frame of mind, as he muses upon the nature of tradition, the story behind Waterlife, and his own artistic journey.
Rambharos Jha
Tell me about Waterlife. How did that come about?
That was an exciting time in my life. Tara Books sent a researcher up to Madhubani to speak to a number of artists. He came to my house and we spent quite some time together talking about art, looking at my work. Afterwards some of us were invited down to Chennai to discuss possible projects. Because of my interest in painting water, and painting water animals, the concept of Waterlife was born. Tara showed me various aquatic animals on the computer, animals I had never seen in nature such as whales and lobsters. They asked me how I would draw them. I said I would draw them as I draw everything else: by making it part of my imagination. They were satisfied with my answer and I returned to Madhubani. Two weeks later I had finished all the paintings for the book and afterwards traveled down to Chennai to personally present them to Tara.
The finished book
How did you find working on the book?
It was a bit intimidating at first. The Tara staff were mostly young and very enthusiastic. I had never been around so many people who cared so passionately about art, about the details of line and colour. I was not sure how I would perform in that atmosphere. Also I had never done a book before. In fact such a project had never occurred to me. There was the size first of all and I also kept thinking of the audience. How would they receive the work? Until now, the audience for my work had been small, a number of group exhibitions arranged by the Ethnic Arts Foundation, a few paintings sold. Here I would be seen by large numbers of people around the whole world. What would they think of my non-traditional Mithila style? Nevertheless I just kept on working.
A spread from the finished book
What was the first painting you did for the book?
The one with the fish and their babies. It gave me great pleasure to imagine the fish as this, as human, perhaps because I had just become a parent myself with the birth of my son. I began using blue, green and orange colours in my work to express this deeply felt joy.
Fish & Babies from Waterlife (detail)
The crocodile was the second painting. I was trying to remember everything from my childhood for these paintings and I remembered a conversation I had overheard on a train when I was eight years old. It was someone talking about a crocodile and the great commotion it caused. How children would throw stones at it and it would submerge but then surface again making great ripples in the water. The story stayed with me all these years perhaps because it was so descriptive. That crocodile is now in my book.
Crocodile Smile from Waterlife (detail)
How was it that you became an artist?
I became an artist because I failed my Matric level English exam in high school.
You failed your English exam and became an artist?
Yes, I got a zero on the exam. Not just a low grade but a zero. I was very upset. This is an important set of exams here in India and pretty much decides your future. I came home crying. My father looked at me and told me to stop crying. What did you expect, he asked. You spent all your time running around with your friends, going to the movies, never did any studying. But instead of crying you should learn from this and take charge of your life. And I did. I became serious and eventually an artist. Later on I realized that I needed English as part of my art. I wanted to talk to foreigners about my art, about art in general and didn’t want to be hampered by a translator. So I bought a book and began learning English.
Your father was important to you becoming an artist in another way also, wasn’t he?
Yes. He was a quality control officer of paintings with the SEWA organization here in the Madhubani area. This was a government women’s self-help organization that gave art training to women so that they could support themselves. These were often widows and wives abandoned by their husbands or families. When I was young, I would come to my father’s office every day after school asking for money for a snack. This was how I met the artists, saw their work and how I began to paint. My father would encourage me. He would tell me to go visit the artists, learn from them. I imitated the color work of Sita Devi and after Jyotindra Jain’s book on Ganga Devi came out I began making black and white paintings like hers with a fine black line. When we moved to Madhubani I became friendly with Dulari Devi. I learned a lot from her. She was always mixing colors on the palm of her hand and then checking the result on a piece of newspaper. So now I never use a color straight out of the bottle, I always mix it with other colors – either to lighten it, change a shade, or just to see what it will do.
Ganga Devi's work
Do you consider yourself a Mithila artist? I ask this because if one looks at a painting from Waterlife it does not look at all like a traditional Mithila painting?
Of course I’m a Mithila artist. Tradition is like flowing water. It must flow to stay clean. If it stops flowing it gets dirty, becomes stagnant.
Sita Devi's Krishna
What is traditional Mithila painting? It comes from a time when things were so different, from an agricultural society, a society where time moved slowly and according to rituals that were carefully kept. The art was a ritual art painted on the walls and on the floor to celebrate and commemorate important life occasions. If you were marrying off a daughter, you might ask a neighbor in your village who was skilled at painting to do a ritual khobar painting on the marriage room wall, a tradition in upper caste families. But she was a friend or neighbour first, not an artist as such. This was part of village life. You would feed her, give her some sweets, perhaps a shawl or a cap, and that would be that. The community coming together.
When painting moved from wall and floor to paper everything changed. With paper professional artists emerged. Sita Devi and Ganga Devi, for example, but even they worked very differently. Their work is not similar at all. Ganga worked with a fine line and mainly in black and white whereas Sita Devi was a great colourist and used colours to great effect in her work. Which one represents the true Mithila tradition? They both do and so do I.
We’re pleased to share the news that Waterlife was mentioned in the BolognaRagazzi Award this year, in the New Horizons category. Our congratulations go to out to Rambahros, and the official award ceremony in Italy will be later this month.
More information about Mithila art can be found in Peter Zirnis’s own Mithila Painting blog.