From her studio Minus 9 Design, Rathna Ramanathan has worked with Tara Books on projects over the last sixteen years. Here, she reflects on her experiences of collaborating with Tara Books in the context of sustainable modes of design and production, and alternative models of publishing.

Sustainable graphic design and print production

Jason McLennan in The Philosophy of Sustainable Design summarizes sustainable design as the redefining of how things – objects, buildings etc. – are designed, made and operated to be more responsible to the environment and responsive to people.

India is a country that has an excellent tradition in sustainable design and production. Just a glance at Aditi and M P Ranjan’s Handmade in India: A geographic encyclopedia of Indian handicrafts, gives one a sense of the wealth and range of local design and craft processes that are indigenous to our country.

In industrial production processes, sustainability is much harder to achieve as the focus is on achieving the best quality product at the lowest possible price and within the fastest production time. This isn’t always achievable in a local context. In publishing it has become common practice for publishers (particularly in Europe and North America) to send books to print in Asia – particularly China. This is problematic for a few reasons.

First, is the environmental impact of the lithographic offset process, which traditionally uses masses of chemicals and energy and utilises large amounts of water, paper, aluminium and plastic in the production process. Second, is the environmental impact of producing goods in faraway locations, requiring them to be shipped back to the countries in which they were designed to be sold. Third, is the paper often used in the printing of books. ‘Paper pulp production’, as noted by Caroline Clark of lovelyasatree.com, ‘is responsible for a rapid global expansion in intensively managed tree plantations, some of which are established by clearing natural forests or other precious habitats’. Just one ton of recycled paper saves approximately six mature trees and 89 cubic feet of landfill space.

Last but not least, because the designers of the books are invariably not based in the countries printing them there is a break in the production process. This means less time and opportunity for meaningful dialogue or interaction and more automation and impersonalisation. If we take a look at the inside of a book of fiction published by a European publisher or an American publisher, and you will notice that they tend to look almost identical rather than as individually designed objects. In contrast, independent publishers such as Tara Books have an opportunity to pursue more local, sustainable production options.

The Tara Story

I first came to know of Tara Books when they invited me to come by with my design portfolio. This was in 1996 and at the time, the publishing house was still very young and had only one title in print. I was astonished to hear from my classmate that this title – The Very Hungry Lion by Gita Wolf and illustrated by Indrapramit Roy – was printed in-house, by hand using the silkscreen process on locally made handmade paper.

It was the first time I had ever heard of a publisher producing books in such a different way. My first response to hearing that was to wonder whether anyone could sustain such an approach to the making of books. I have worked for Tara as a freelance book designer for close to 16 years now and have come to realise that Tara’s way of doing things is often innovative and path breaking.

The handmade titles published by Tara are produced in Tara’s in-house fairtrade printing shop called AMM Screens after its founder (and Tara’s Production Manager) Arumugam Chinnaswamy. The motto of Tara’s printing workshop – ‘nothing is impossible’ – is a genuine mission.

The AMM team

To date the printing shop has printed an incredible 2,41,600 individual books by hand. This is no joke in the silkscreen process where each colour has to be ‘pulled’ by hand individually. According to Arumugam, the average number of pulls per book is roughly 65, which brings the total number to 15.7 million pulls! This is incredible when one considers that this is no big scale industry but instead a small self-contained printing workshop of 16 young printers who hail from villages in Tamil Nadu and live and work together in Chennai as a community.

A pull in the screen printing process

The making of a handmade book

The book production process is built on fair-trade and sustainable values. The paper that the books are printed on is handmade from cotton rags and recycled waste paper. The paper, procured from nearby towns, is ordered exactly to the needs of the project, ensuring no waste. And in fact, any wastage in the process of printing books ends up being a cover for Tara’s stationery range of Flukebooks.

Handmade ‘flukebook’ notebooks

Film used to embed the image on screen is exposed using natural sunlight or single tube light. There are no huge machines being run or mass energy consumed in the process of printing the books. Instead the process from start to finish is by hand. Colours are mixed by hand in large vats, designs positioned on screens and pulled by hand, and dried naturally in the open air in large crated shelving. The individual sheets are then collated into order and stitched by hand.

Collating the handmade sheets

With publishing, design and production happening in one city, local solutions can be found to problems and unique approaches can be formed to each book. For example, Arumugam recounts how for the book Antigone which had a big print run; cricket bats were purchased to mix the colour in buckets. With The Night Life of Trees, the black handmade paper on which the book was printed on gave the word ‘Night’ to the title. And when the monsoon rains hit during the production of The Beasts of India the books were dried with hairdryers belonging to the Tara team.

Beasts of India

According to Arumugam, the workshop is run on village community values with all members working together and supporting each other. As he notes, ‘the important rule is that everyone must know how to cook! It is also important that everyone takes a turn and does equal work. There should not be a hierarchy, even for the boss’.

Looking to the future

As William McDonough put it, ‘design is the first signal of human intention’. As designers and producers of content, we have the obligation to first ask ourselves before we produce more things to put out into the world. What are our intentions? What values do we wish to propagate? What kind of world are we leaving as a legacy for future generations? The Tara Books model gives voice to the stories of a marginalised people, builds on local talent, materials and processes of production, and is the output not of an anonymous corporation but of a collective of individuals working together. That is a practice that is worth sustaining for present and future generations.

A slightly modified version of this piece was first published by POOL Magazine here.

Gita and her fellow judges discuss the criteria for their selection

“If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,
“That they could get it clear?”
“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

Lewis Carroll, The Walrus and The Carpenter

When I saw the sea of images waiting for us in a huge hall at the empty Bologna fair, I felt exactly like The Walrus gazing at the sand on the shore. We weren’t seven maids, but five jurors, and we had three days, not half a year, to work our way through the rows of tables laden with hopeful submissions. Could we do it?

Amazingly enough, we did.

We began slowly, by getting acquainted with the submissions, going up and down each row, individually marking the ones that called out for attention. Each of us had our own benchmarks of selection, and we would need to consciously articulate what these were, at a later point. But for now, it was the graphic quality of the image on view which decided on whether we would pick it up, and be interested in the story it had to tell. And so over the first day and a half, with aching backs and tired eyes, we sifted, sorted, arranged and organized the submissions, until we had what could be called a long list.

Along the way, images and narratives that had started out as strangers became acquaintances, and then, as I lingered longer over interesting pieces, turned into something like friends. There were a few that l loved, but also a couple that l actively disliked. This was good, because I knew what l felt about them. My real difficulty was the opposite – it had to do with all the others, illustrations that I neither particularly liked nor disliked. I didn’t think they were terrible, but I wasn’t too excited about them either: I just couldn’t relate to them personally. And alarmingly, this turned out to be the largest chunk of work. So where did that leave me?

I choose art work all the time, as a publisher. The way I decide is probably the way most publishers do: it’s a mixture of instinct – which is very subjective – and some formal criteria we need to keep in mind. ln all cases though, the work we take up in the publishing house speaks to us emotionally in some way, and fits in with our vision. We wouldn’t pick it up otherwise. But now I had to decide in another way, for a very different purpose. It is like being asked to select clothing that you would never wear. How do you step out of the circle of your own taste?

One way is by engaging seriously with people you respect, who are not like you. And this is where my colleagues in the jury came in, a happy mix of professionals working in varied fields of childrens’ literature. Additionally, and just as valuably, we also happened to be from different countries… and visual cultures. So as individuals, we looked for and at different things, and each vision was very distinct. When we first looked at our long list as a group, we were dismayed at how wildly mixed and uneven it was. At various moments, each of us wondered aloud about how some pieces had found their way onto the selection table in the first place. To be honest, I myself was responsible for some of this, and had been guilty of more latitude and good faith than I would normally show.

I now found myself becoming increasingly unsure about how we could all possibly agree on the final list. In the end, I decided to wait it out, reserving judgment even on a couple of pieces that really strained my open mindedness. This was something new for me – to allow myself to actually consider a piece of work, however outlandish or unsuitable I might normally think it. I was curious: did someone else see something that I had missed?

The medley of illustrations we’d tagged did in fact have a positive side: it was an extremely varied selection. As we looked through this riotous assortment of styles and renderings, all from different countries, cultures and traditions, our first question came up naturally: did we want to make sure that at least one entry from every country was represented? Most of us said no. At worst, this could turn out to be a kind of tokenism, and if we weren’t convinced of the quality of what we were choosing, it would be patronizing. We would much rather judge every entry on merit. And so this brought up more questions: were there universal standards of judgment, regardless of where the work came from? What about imitations? Was it alright for an Italian artist to mimic a Japanese style? How did we see the matter of authenticity?

Many troubling questions, and we had no easy answers. We couldn’t uphold old certainties about universal norms, but neither could we afford to be endlessly relative. Fortunately, some of us in the jury were familiar with a few of the non-western traditions we were judging, and we brought in more nuanced frames of reference. It was a rich discussion, and in the end we all agreed that style is more than a way of rendering.  It’s part of a particular visual language, with its own grammar, syntax and context. An authentic piece of work brings this world alive, from within.

The illustrations in front of us contained many such worlds, some part of a lived reality, others created in the imagination. Our criteria for judging them were equally varied: sometimes we looked at the formal elements, at other times it was more contextual. Each of us had our own particular focus: was this drawing well executed? Did this one tell a good story? Did this push the boundaries of the form? Was there any emotion here? How about these colours and forms?

The process of talking through the work was a revelation. When someone spoke up for a piece I had dismissed in my mind, I learned to put their glasses on and look again, letting myself be convinced. . . or standing my ground. We took turns to persuade each other, and this articulation, of saying WHY we were for or against a piece of work, was the best part of the experience for me. It took the matter of taste and judgment beyond the subjective, allowing us to put together a selection of work that we all, more or less, endorse. Some more, and some less, it’s true. Not all the work presented here succeeds as completed projects, but they all have the seeds of potential. In the end, the one thing we unanimously agreed on was that our selection is a celebration of genuine plurality. And in a rapidly globalizing world of sameness, we wanted to give a voice to a multiplicity of approaches.

So the illustrators that we selected for the exhibition and annual are our tribute to difference.

You can find out more about the Bologna Illustrators’ Exhibition on the Bologna Book Fair website here.

A Bookseller on College Street, Kolkata

India is both exciting and confounding. It’s a country of glorious opportunity and crippling inefficiency, of rapid economic growth and terrible inequality. A place where contradictions sit, sometimes frustratingly and often happily, side-by-side. Any publisher who has worked in India over a period of time knows that this holds as true for publishing as it does for other industries and aspects of life. Universal solutions that have emerged from elsewhere can hardly ever be successfully applied here. Unique context-driven management approaches and innovative business models are essential in order to succeed in India. In this ancient, enormous and diverse country, the only real constant today is swift change.

To confuse matters, there are no completely authoritative figures on the size of the Indian publishing industry or its rate of growth. This is because no systematic studies or comprehensive statistics exist, for books published with or without ISBN numbers. It would be nearly impossible, or at least severely daunting, to attempt to quantify a large and disorganised sector that is composed mostly of privately-owned family-run enterprises. But the FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce) has tried, and their estimates peg the annual turnover of the Indian publishing industry in 2012 at 1000 billion Indian Rupees and the growth rate at 30 percent. This makes India the 3^rd largest English language publisher in the world and 7^th largest worldwide, when all languages are counted.

One thing is clear – Indian publishing is on the ascendency. It’s an industry that is evolving at blinding speeds, as a result of a growing population of young people who are increasingly educated and literate, as well as the rising income of an affluent urban market. So it’s a market of huge opportunity, but it’s also complex and in no way homogenous. Of the 90,000 or so titles that are brought out every year by approximately 19,000 publishers in India, only 50 percent are in Hindi and English. The remaining half are distributed across about 120 major languages (22 of which are officially recognised).

What this means is that several markets actually coexist, structured and differentiated not only by genre but also by language. Trade publishing is estimated by the FCCI to account for 20 percent of the industry. The largest sector is by far education, which is dominated by state-owned publishers. Although the abundant number of titles that private publishers put out makes them important players in the sector as well. But a lack of access to books and knowledge remains a key issue, for a large underprivileged section of society in urban and rural India.

In short, it is an unsaturated market with immense possibility. But it is also riddled with its own peculiar challenges. A lack of professionalism (and availability of properly trained talent), inadequate or undeveloped distribution channels, patchy infrastructure and logistical gaps (the sheer size of the country is a problem) and rampant piracy (especially in educational publishing) are some of the difficulties that publishers in India are routinely forced to confront. No matter whether large multinationals or small independent publishers, local know-how is crucial. Indian conditions and consumers are quite unlike those in other parts of the world. They aren’t even the same across India.

Distribution: strategic mergers

Sensing the possibilities afforded by the market, all the major multinational publishing houses have already established operations in India with varying degrees of success. They have looked to make their mark in a market with a growing number of retail chains and a proliferation of e-commerce start-ups. The last few years have also seen an explosion in literary festivals, none better known than the Jaipur Literature Festival, which sees the big names in international publishing rub shoulders with their Indian counterparts. This has meant less room to manoeuvre for Indian publishers in a highly-competitive English language market, but has had little influence on a vibrant and multi-faceted Indian language publishing scene, or on educational publishing. The bulk of the annual sales for regional language publishers comes from less glamorous local consumer fairs, travelling individual book-sellers, and the State, which is a major buyer.

The merger of Penguin and Random House, which will bring together an unprecedented 250 imprints in the world’s biggest publishing house, represents an unparalleled trend towards concentration and internationalisation. It’s a strategic response by their holding companies, Britain’s Pearson and Germany’s Bertlesmann, to gain negotiating leverage with their largest sales platforms – Amazon, Apple and Google. “The consumer publishing industry is going through a period of tumultuous change, propelled by digital technologies and the giant companies that dominate them,” Pearson’s former CEO, Majorie Scardino, wrote in an email to her employees. “The book publishing industry today is remarkable for being composed of a few large, and a lot of relatively small companies, and there probably isn’t room for them all – they’re going to have to get together.”

The real financial clout lies in distribution and retail – both in the physical and digital realms. Penguin Random House, which will be responsible for publishing around one in every four books, is an attempt to address the challenges posed by the new booksellers. But even outside of global big-player mergers, similar trends towards convergence and symbiotic partnerships have surfaced in India. Industry consolidation and the increasing importance of e-books has forced Indian publishers to rethink their business models, and mergers have been one of the key responses.

In India the answer seems to lie in both fighting the tide and swimming with the current. While most large media houses are replicating a common pattern across the globe, Indian publishing houses have found ways of not being left behind. Large Indian companies like Rupa & Co hold exclusive distribution rights to international titles, and most multinationals survive on the strength of the Indian editions of globally famous titles. But even in an extremely competitive English-language market, there has actually been a rise in the number of successful independent publishers. By and large, smaller independent publishers have been better at identifying subject areas, themes, and constituencies. Perhaps because foreign publishers see Indian publishing more as a market of consumers than producers, much of the cutting edge content has come from independents. Some of these smaller houses are well established in the domestic market, and are increasingly looking to make their presence felt globally either through distribution arrangements or foreign rights sales.

The biggest challenge that stares small and innovative publishers in the face is distribution. Affordability and pricing are a problem, particularly for the working classes or in rural areas, but even stocking the big retail chains in the Indian mega cities is often a nightmare. Children’s book publishing, in particular, has for long suffered from a lack of visibility. “Even while fiction and non-fiction titles are given pride of place in Indian bookstores, it’s a different story when it comes to children’s books,” Sayoni Basu, director of the newly-launched Duckbill books, writes in their blog. “I visited four retail outlets today. Two were chain shops, two were independent bookshops. But in all of them the situation was the same. In one tiny corner, either at the far rear of the shop or somewhere else equally inconspicuous, is a tiny shelf or two, labelled Indian children’s books. Often nearby is a gleaming wall of shiny international children’s books. I found the corners only after specifically asking for them, in two cases I had walked by them searching but failed to locate them.”

 Duckbill was started by Anushka Ravishankar and Sayoni Basu, in partnership with Westland, which is owned by the Tata group. Westland includes EastWest Books and Tranquebar Press and possess one of the best distribution networks. Moving into a new market with Duckbill, by partnering with two of the best known names in children’s publishing, was an enticing proposition for them. It is another example of a coming together of commercial reach with creative content. Sayoni Basu sums the advantageous of the partnership succinctly, “We checked out bookshops when we were looking for a partner, and we noticed Westland seemed to be rather well represented. So we figured they were good partners because they seemed to be getting books into shops.”

For publishers looking to be creative and different with their children’s list, another major deterrent is the Indian market’s emphasis on narratives with explicit morals and academic content. “A lot of parents want books with only educational value. Some schools are extremely censorial about content. But we are ostrich-like in ignoring these things. We believe that good stories will eventually win readers. And since we are unconstrained by company revenue targets, we are being extremely selective about the books we publish so that we can truly stand by each of them. We think that this time and space helps to create wonderful books, and that in the long term this will work!” says Sayoni Basu.

Digital opportunities, not problems

The emergence of online retail has been a boon to both publishers and consumers in India. It has given publishers the ability to bypass dodgy supply chains and book buyers have easier access to books at lower prices. Although the Kindle India Store went live last August and Indian publishers sell their books overseas through Amazon, the company’s long-imminent full-scale entry into the Indian market hasn’t materialised just yet. FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) legislation that prevents foreign companies from being majority stakeholders in e-commerce retail in India has kept Amazon at bay so far.

But in the meantime, Indian start-ups like Flipkart have made merry. Flipkart was founded in 2007 and is, in all likelihood, the largest single bookseller in India today. On its rise to the top of the e-commerce pile, Flipkart has built an innovative delivery network based on decentralised nodes, couriers, and in-house delivery teams. Quick shipping coupled with offering cash-on-delivery models has made them the most popular choice in a country where a lack of trust in online transactions and unreliable shipping continue to persist. One of the biggest pushes for eBooks in India has comes from the growth of online shopping.

E-publishing is both a great unknown and an enticing prospect for publishers in India. It means that content no longer has to traverse long distances to be stocked in shops or land in the laps of readers. While this is a great advantage, there is also much insecurity about the future role of printed material and confusion about the best path to take in a rapidly evolving digital arena. Acronyms like ePUB, mobi, XML, and DRM are still mysteries for many publishers who have little knowledge about formats and platforms. One of the main areas of concern in e-publishing is copyright protection and preventing piracy. Pricing and the appropriate models to adopt to monetise content also remain a grey-area.

Even if the market share of e-books is currently small, the potential is obvious to most. The pressure on publishers to adapt or be left behind, comes from the youthful demography of the country and the speed of technological adoption. The number of users who own devices with e-reading capabilities is growing fast. Most of these are smartphones and tablets in the hands of young English-speaking Indians, who are very active online. According to most studies India is Android country, with Android devices already cornering a market share above 55 percent and briskly gaining more ground. This is almost certainly going to lead to new developments in publishing, with the potential it brings for book apps and enhanced e-books.

But the digital divide still looms large. To balance the hype with a less luminous outlook – India might have the largest number of Facebook users in the world, but computers and the internet still remain out of reach for 90 percent of the population according to the IAMAI (Internet and Mobile Association of India). A recent World Bank report finds that India has 70 mobile subscriptions per 100 people and one of the highest average mobile data speeds. The number of smartphone and tablet users is much lower than in other less “mobile” countries, but the largest growth in new internet users comes from mobile devices. Recognising the opportunity, the Indian government commissioned the low-cost Aakash tablets to enhance the use of internet and computing in education. The Aakash 2 was released in November 2012, and will be sold to students at a subsidised price of 1,130 Rupees (about 20 USD).

The idea to equip 220 million young people with the Aakash tablet, indicates that low cost mobile devices could become viable platforms for widespread digital reading. The only hitch is that India doesn’t have a mass-scale reading tradition. Although sales figures for books are on the rise, an increasingly smaller proportion of a growing literate public is reading. A recent report by FICCI, finds that only one-fourth of the young population describe themselves as book readers. This makes the group of people who are techno-savy and literature-loving an even smaller proportion. But given that India’s population is around 1.2 billion, even this is a substantial number that provides tremendous opportunity.

Is it possible to bridge the digital divide and encourage a reading habit at the same time? Pratham Books, a not-for-profit publisher based in Bangalore (India’s IT hub), has taken big strides forward in learning how to make the most of digital opportunities to spread non-functional reading. “Our mission is to see a book in every child’s hand and democratise the joy of reading. While almost all children in India are now enrolled in school, very few of them have access to the simple joyful storybooks that children from middle and upper income segments take for granted. We strive for inclusiveness and to reach children that the market would otherwise not reach,” says Suzanne Singh, who has worked at Pratham Books since its inception in 2004.

Pratham Books has already made a name for itself by showing that slashing prices can lead to higher print runs and sales, without having to compromise on quality of content or production. Given the problems afflicting physical distribution, liberating content from the strictures of print and copyright was a natural transition to realise their goal of reaching as many children as possible in as many languages as possible. E-books are available at no cost on their website, under a Creative Commons license. Their authors and illustrators are happy because they gain recognition and a large audience for their work – 20,000 visitors a month on various platforms, and around 40 books have been viewed approximately 200,000 times.

“The Creative Commons model allows people to remix the content – translate it, change formats, develop new stories and so on. Our books have been translated into Assamese, Lojban, German, Spanish and other languages. People have also converted our books into Braille and DAISY formats, and iPad and Android apps have been developed. It has worked extremely well for us – our books are reaching newer audiences in newer ways,” says Suzanne Singh. The strategy to move from being content curators to collaborative content creation, wouldn’t have possible without effectively using social media to build a vibrant community. E-books and cloud-based tools have helped Pratham Books achieve scalability, whether it is through reaching out to readers on Twitter, sharing content on Scribd or holding reading sessions on Skype.

While such a model might seem unattractive to mainstream market-driven publishers, there is much to learn from the example of Pratham Books. On the one hand, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that giving away e-books for free actually increases sales. Paulo Coelho figured this out pretty soon, and set up a blog called Pirate Coelho back in 1999. Since then he has actively encouraged piracy and this has consistently boosted sales. Giving something away for free, even if you want to make a profit from it, seems to be pretty wise strategy.

One the other hand, there is a need for content creators to experiment and find innovative ways of framing content digitally. Fascinating possibilities would emerge in India, were a strong IT sector come together with the creative industries. Gita Wolf of Tarabooks, says, “Some of our books are handmade and very tactile. They are created with an artisanal approach and it’s not possible to replicate this on screens. So far we have concentrated on the book as a physical object and used digital spaces to add layers to the culture of the book. We aren’t against technology or exploring new mediums. But we believe that just turning physical books into identical e-books doesn’t make for a special reading experience. Digital forms require an exploration of their own intrinsic potential.”

For the foreseeable future, printed books and e-books are likely to flourish together. But that’s not unusual because many apparently contrary things coexist in India today – bullock carts share the road with hi-tech cars, a lack of good primary education persists alongside some of the best qualified doctors and engineers. With this unique mixture of old and new, of diffidence and aspiration, of strengths and difficulties – it’s hardly surprising that a truly interesting and diverse publishing scene continues to thrive. But then that’s what India is all about.

Arun Wolf

“For me, Tara Books is a publisher which has a strong identity. And this identity lies on the border between not only what is local and what is universal, but also what is traditional and what is contemporary. Their approach to the book is something between the view of the publisher and that of the artist/artisan, so an ordinary reader can have an artistic book without paying a high cost.”

Some of our titles published in Korean

 So read an email that popped into our inbox recently, from G Colon – a design magazine based in Korea. While the email made for pleasant reading, it wasn’t as surprising as you might imagine. From visits to rights sales, media coverage to awards – the last twelve months has been something of a Korean themed year for us here at Tara Books. It began with our founder Gita Wolf being invited to Seoul by the Korean Publishers’ Society, and has culminated with an even more significant milestone: our first handmade title being published in Korean.

Gita Wolf at the Youhlwadang Book Shop in Paju Book City

It’s always a special day when finished books first come into our offices from our Book Craft Workshop, but seeing Borim’s edition of our quintessential title The Night Life of Trees was particularly poignant. A fusion of Indian craftsmanship and art, a sensitive translation into Korean script, and the collaboration of two publishers venturing into the unknown; it acts as a tangible symbol of all that has been achieved in partnership with Korea over the years.

Borim's edition of 'The Night Life of Trees'

So how did it all begin? The first Tara title in the Korean market was brought out by the publisher Dongin over ten years ago, after an encounter at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Since then, Korean publishers have bought the rights to several of our books, until now always producing the books themselves by the conventional offset method.

'To Market! To Market!' published by Woongjin thinkbig Co. Ltd.

It’s been interesting to see the kind of books that Korean publishers have selected from our list. They all have a strong sense of place, and evoke the specific context of India:  whether through conjuring up Pondicherry’s bazaar in To Market! To Market, giving a glimpse of Indian village life in Tiger on a Tree or addressing the issue of child labour in Chennai in Trash! This as a phenomenon is exciting, reflecting the willingness of Korean publishers to explore different cultures in a meaningful way.

'Tiger on a Tree' published by Daekyo Publishing Co. Ltd.

For us, this sums up and reinforces many of Tara’s fundamental beliefs and principles:  the ability of the visual to transcend the boundaries created by language, the importance of collaboration in order to push the boundaries of how we work and ultimately the fact of our shared common humanity, which supersedes while not neglecting the role of disparate cultures.

Going forward, we hope that our links to Korea will grow even stronger:  through collaborating with the InKo (Indo-Korean) centre in here in Chennai  for exhibitions and events, hosting visiting Korean artists and writers at our new space – Book Building – and of course through seeing more of our books available in Korean. Our latest collaboration is with Jogye, who will be releasing four of our titles next year. Their representative Prof. Choi Dong il said that they were attracted by the special philosophy of our books. Long may this special relationship continue.

‘The Night Life of Trees’ will be published by Borim later this year. This blogpost  first appeared in the Inko Centre Focus magazine, and is reproduced and adapted here with their kind permission.

On the fifteenth anniversary of the publication of her first book, India’s acclaimed nonsense poet Anushka Ravishankar talks to the team at Tara Books about the collaborative process behind making picture books for children.

Tiger on a Tree was your first book. How did the project begin and evolve?

The point at which I came in was when Tara had already held an illustrators’ workshop, which Pulak Biswas had attended. At the workshop, Pulak told Gita Wolf (Tara’s founder) a partly true story about a tiger that strayed into a village, and then Gita asked him to illustrate it.

As the story was already told in pictures, the question I had to grapple with was what I could add in the text that was not already there visually. That’s when I thought – since I had always liked nonsense – that I would try writing that.

Of course, Tiger on a Tree is not completely nonsensical, but the words are slightly tangential to the pictures. So that was a nice first book to do because I had the story already. But at the same time, I had to think of ways in which the text could do more than the illustrations were already doing.

'Tiger on a Tree' in English, Tamil, Japanese, French & Spanish

How is the process different for you as an author between writing a text that is then illustrated compared to writing a text when the pictures are already done?

It’s hugely different. What I enjoy about picture books is the tension between the text and the illustrations, and the way they play off each other.  If I write the text and then give it to an illustrator, then the job of creating that tension falls to the illustrator. On the other hand, if I have the illustrations with me and then write the text, then that job is mine.

I do like it when I write something and then see what an illustrator has done with it, for example as was the case with Today is My Day. For this book, Rathna Ramanathan (Tara’s designer) and I came up with the idea of the child who wants to do everything her way on one day.  I wrote the text & gave it to the illustrator, Piet Grobler, who did a fabulous job with it. So even though I wasn’t involved once the text was given to him,  it’s one of my favourite books because it came back with a whole new dimension that I hadn’t thought of myself.

A spread from 'Today is my Day'

So do you prefer one way of working over the other?

It’s actually nice both ways. The good thing about working with illustrations that are already there but which are not already telling a story, like in the case of Excuse me is this India?, is that you have to create the story yourself using the illustrations.

You find that when you’re looking at the illustrations there are little things that strike you, which then feed into the narrative. I’ll give you an example. In Excuse Me there is a page in which there is a girl who is making the floor design, the kolam, outside her house. So the verse on that page took off from the design – it is all about a map without a place and things like that. So that’s a very fun thing to do: to look for little things and then spring off that and make up verse.

There are also other ways aside from these two ways of working with illustrators, too. After Tiger on a Tree the next book that I did with Pulak Biswas was Catch that Crocodile. In this case the whole story was given to Pulak, he then did the illustrations and then I wrote the verse.

What’s the most unusual way in which you have worked on a book?

I think that Wish you Were Here is probably the most oddly evolved book that I’ve worked on. We had these little characters created by Trotsky Marudu, and we decided that we needed to use them in a book. I remember that we were just talking about it in the Tara office – Tara’s designer, me, and Gita. We kept throwing ideas around, so in the end we didn’t know who came up with the idea first and how it happened.

In the end, we decided to do a book about a family traveling, and we placed the characters in these different contexts: the Eiffel Tower, Tower Bridge in London, the Egyptian Pyramids and so on. It was such a complicated process!

Funnily, the book that came out of it is one of my favourites, Perhaps it was a little too off-centre for most people, but that again is one of the best things about working with Tara. You can do off-centre things that you can’t do with other publishers, and there is no strait-jacket.

I’ve been really lucky, because I’ve worked with so many different kinds of illustrators, styles and different ways of making a book. And that I think is the fun thing – you don’t just write in a vacuum. The nice thing about picture books is that there are so many things involved, and they all have to come together just right to work.

At the Eiffel Tower in 'Wish You Were Here'

And then there is an extra step, isn’t there? When both the text and the illustrations are finished, the book is then handed over to a designer. How have you found that process?

That’s true. With Tiger on a Tree the designer Rathna Ramanathan brought a completely new aspect to the book. The illustrations were black and white to begin with and the touch of orange was added by her.

One of the very striking things about Tiger, of course, is the typography. You have no idea the number of people who have seen the book and then said, “We’re going to try this in our books now!” It really does change the way you read the book when the text expresses the word in a different way. After Tiger Rathna and I worked together on Anything but a Grabooberry which takes this a step further and uses the text as illustration.

I like the way Rathna uses white space as well – the way she frees up the text and makes the page such a beautiful thing to look at.

A spread from 'Anything but a Grabooberry'

Your use of rhyme and rhythm is very distinctive. Is that something conscious, and how do you think it fits in with other children’s and nonsense verse?

See, I don’t see that one starts writing with an idea of whether something is like or unlike something else. Every narrative has its own rhythm. As I said, Tiger on a Tree was my first project, and I just went with the pictures and did what they suggested.

If you read Tiger, there is a kind of structure to the verse, but at the same time it’s not very regular rhyme & I think you’ll find that with most of my books. I don’t like to stick to too regular a rhyme pattern because I find that it gets boring. So I deliberately break it: there are halts and then it takes on a different rhythm.

Those are things that I do because I just like doing them – I don’t know if it’s right or wrong or whether it’s like anything else or if it’s different from anything else. You just let the story decide the rhythm. If you look at To Market To Market!, the rhyme patterns are fairly standard, but because the picture are so rich and what the words are saying is so different, then in that case that works.

Some of the verse from 'To Market! To Market!'

Is there anything that has defined and unified the process of working with Tara, even though each individual project has been so different?

With Tara it is always collaborative. And the nice thing also is that I think there is a certain matching of wave lengths, so that when we are saying something one doesn’t have to explain oneself, the other person just takes it off from there. A certain resonance happens and that’s something that I really treasure.

Anushka's latest book with Tara 'Excuses, Excuses!'

Interview conducted by Nia Murphy & Maegan Dobson

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.

There was one thing that always struck me during my time as the resident designer with Tara Books. The number of projects which were waiting in line for someone (in this case a graphic designer) to claim them – no doubt the result of the creative energy of an office constantly brimming with new ideas. I don’t remember the exact day when Tara publishers, Gita Wolf and V. Geetha, showed me the artwork for the poem I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail, but I definitely remember how they approached me: “There’s also this project, which we think you might be interested in. Do you know this 17th century poem?”

Looking back now, I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail – a project that took almost two years to complete – was emblematic of my stay with Tara. It taught me a lot about book design and how essential time is in order for a project to mature. It also illustrated for me the importance of collaboration – something that I could always find at Tara – and, at the same time, showed me that a designer must find their own voice in the midst of different opinions.

Gita and V. Geetha might have been nonchalant, but I was more than excited when I saw Gond artist Ramsingh Urveti’s work. Around the same period, I had been involved in designing another book – Sita’s Ramayana, a graphic novel with illustrations by Patua artist Moyna Chitrakar. Moyna’s beautiful panels were so vivid and colourful that Ramsingh’s black and white work felt to me like a quiet respite. It was silent and concise and, in lack of a less obvious word, poetic.

As for the poem, it turned out that I was not familiar with it. It goes like this:

As I soon discovered, the poem contains a game with punctuation and the meanings it hides/reveals. Read as it is, each line describes a fantastic scenario. But if you break up the lines in the middle, an alternative image is born – which someone with a more realistic vision might say makes more sense. ‘With a fiery tail I saw a blazing comet’, ‘Drop down hail I saw a cloud’, ‘With ivy circled around I saw a sturdy oak’ and so on.

From the very beginning the main challenge to me was: how do we create a book that presents both readings without actually printing the poem twice? A lot of different solutions were considered. I think Gita Wolf was the one who hinted at the direction of die-cutting although was still open to other possibilities. Using transparent paper and printing with two colours was another suggestion, but there was an issue of cost and, more importantly, it just seemed too complex for a poem that was in itself so simple. After all, once you crack the puzzle that it holds, you can’t help but wonder how you could have missed it to begin with.

We decided to pursue die-cutting as a solution and here I have to mention Katsumi Komagata, even though I never had the opportunity to meet him in person. I’d been a fan of his books for a few years and I was pretty excited when I found out that everybody at Tara shared the same admiration for his work. I remember seeing one of his books, Namida, for the first time when I was in Japan in 2007.

Now this is interesting because Tara had a good collection of Katsumi’s books in the office, but Namida was not one of them. After I came back to Brazil (in May of last year) I saw this book on my shelf. I didn’t remember what the cover looked like, but I was so surprised when I saw it! It shows how much influence Katsumi had on I Saw a Peacock. It sounds silly to say this about someone you’ve never met before, but often while working on this project, I wondered what Katsumi would think of this book and how we solved the challenges of the poem.

A page from Jonathan's 1st dummy

The corresponding spread from the finished book

Realising the potential to use die cuts was only the beginning. I didn’t know it then, but the book was to evolve many times before reaching maturity. This was the first ‘dummy’ that I made up, and as you can see, the cuts are all rectangular and quite functional: they existed so that the text on the following spread could be read. It’s a bit hard to explain why I felt that the die-cutting shouldn’t ‘interfere’ too much, but I was still attached to certain ideas of what a designer should or shouldn’t do, and how I was supposed to ‘lead’ the reader throughout this book. At that point, I thought that die-cutting should act much more as a magnifying glass, rather than add another layer of meaning.

The opening page of the 1st dummy

After producing this first dummy, I showed it to Gita, V.Geetha and Arumugam, and received a positive response. Some time later, our London-based designer Rathna Ramanathan was in the office and I asked for her opinion as well. She pointed out that the die-cutting should be reconsidered. Not in terms of shape, but in terms of their position on the page and their relationship with the illustrations. She was the first one to mention that the cuts were also telling a story and that I should be aware of that.

As I was about to restart work on the book, Tara received two other visitors: artist Gabrielle Manglou, from Réunion, who was doing a residence with us, and designer Marion Bataille, who was in Chennai to launch her famous pop-up book, ABC3D. Once more the first dummy was shown. Gabrielle’s impression was that the illustrations were not flowing throughout the book as lightly as the poem did. Part of it, she believed, was because I had decided to have fixed positions for the text.

Marion’s opinion was a bit harder to digest. In her very sweet way, she said that the die-cutting wasn’t working at all, which took me aback. As a designer you constantly have to present your ideas and receive feedback, that’s only natural. But I confess that it is hard when someone points out that whatever you have done is NOT working at all – you can’t help feeling a bit lost. As far as I remember, Marion was also the first person to use the word ‘play’. The book had to be playful and, if there were so many possibilities lying there, why were the die-cuts so austere? Why was the text fixed in such a strong grid?

Once I realized that die-cutting had to be organic and add to the illustrations, the second part of designing this book started. It was an exciting moment because I didn’t feel lost anymore – the question became how to do something rather than what to do. Trying to find out which shapes I could use for the die-cuts on a spread was an interesting puzzle because the same shapes still had to make sense once the page was turned. So I was looking for common imagery that I could use. The peacock feather could become a comet’s tail. The shape of a tear could also be the one of a flame. And again, when you’re working on a poetry book, there is a lot of freedom as well. As time passed, I became more and more bold with the shapes. The book starts with circles and simpler forms that grow in complexity.

One of the more complex pages in the finished book

So we reached the production stage, and here a new challenge arose. Up until that point I had done several different dummies by hand. But it is one thing to make one dummy yourself, another story is to print 3000 copies of a book.

Madly working on dummies ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair

We were lucky to be working with a very attentive and careful printer in China, but there were a lot of trials and tribulations to work through. The fact that we were so far from the printer made us extra cautious as well. Because the book doesn’t open entirely flat, some of the cuts moved, even only millimeters, and had to be repositioned. I remember some emails in which we asked the printer to move a circle one millimeter to the left. They reassured us and mentioned that part of the binding would be done by hand, and I guess it shows. When we finally got the advance copies from China there were no bad surprises. The book was just beautifully done and we have to thank the printers for all their care.

A spread from the finished book

My only regret about this project is the fact that I haven’t seen Ramsingh’s reaction to the final book – I was about to leave India when the copies were sent to him. I met him in Bhopal for a workshop in February 2010 and I found him to be extremely focused, extremely introspective and (as many Gond artists) very good at translating complex ideas into visuals. I hope we meet again and we’re able to talk about his impressions.

I’m writing these lines from my new house (it feels to early to call it home) in the US. I came here to pursue my masters in Graphic Design at the Rhode Island School of Design and I’ve been living in Providence for less than a month. It’s ironic to be working on this text right now as I’ve recently realized that going back to school will be more stressful than I had foreseen – there are so many deadlines already and here I am talking about a book that took almost two years to complete!

I don’t want to get nostalgic (if I start mentioning all the things and people that I miss in India, it might take a while) but I do miss the pace at Tara. I do miss contemplation and working and re-working on projects. Obviously we always do and redo things, but there’s something about time and the processes it triggers. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet some of these people if it were not for the extended period in which I worked on this book. RISD has been a very exciting place and I hope that I’ll be able to write future posts about new projects with Tara – even if long-distance ones.

Jonathan Yamakami

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.

Gita Wolf, Publisher, Tara Books

'Sita's Ramayana'

A K Ramanujan, polyglot, poet, literary scholar and folklorist has been very much in the news in India recently. His essay Three Hundred Ramayanas, which discusses the many versions of the epic, has been proscribed by the Department of History at the University of Delhi, ostensibly for its potential to cause distress to believing Hindus. The Hindu Right is seen as being behind this proscription. Predictably, this has led to an intense and critical debate about censorship, freedom and dissident thought.

Ramanujan would have been immensely amused by this turn of events. For he has taught us that texts live on, not because they are canonized and remain untouched by time, but by the spread of memory – by the many lives a text acquires in the course of time. The Ramayana has survived precisely because it has had its imitators, detractors, translators and traducers. Each of them, he suggests, has done their own Ramayana, drawing as they do from a ‘pool of signifiers’, particular to a cultural area and which includes names, geography, kin relationships and incidents.

The Ramayana lives on in other ways as well – it is narrated as an oral tale, recited in ritual contexts, performed as song, dance and theatre, and drawn and painted. At Tara Books, we discovered a new Ramayana – a version sung and drawn by the Patuas of Medinipur, scroll-painters from West Bengal. This Ramayana has since become the basis for the worldwide acclaimed Sita’s Ramayana. The story of how we came to make this book, and the details of that doing merit a narrative of their own.

Patua artists are familiar figures in India’s art and craft landscape. In the 1970s, an artists’ cooperative was set up in Bengal to rejuvenate their art, which had suffered an interim eclipse after a period of middle class interest during the late colonial period. They were once itinerant tellers of tales, who carried their scrolls of stories, and sang songs while unrolling each of them. Muslims by faith, their stories were wide-ranging. Tales from the Ramayana and Mahabarata feature prominently in their repertoire, which today has expanded to include news, political allegories and much else.

Patua artist Moyna talks to guests at the launch of 'Sita's Ramayana'

Traditionally women sang and men painted, but it is not so anymore. Both genders paint, and some of them sing and paint. There have been other changes to the art. The picture – the painted scroll art – has become primary and is viewed as integral in itself. It is not that artists do not sing, but the song is no longer a necessary part of the patua form. That is, it is not essential for the work of art to realize its meaning. Yet, when Tara Books came to work with Patua art, the song was reclaimed for the form of the book. It now became the basis for the text, the core creative element around which narratives were made.

And so it was with the Ramayana: Moyna Chitrakar whose art is featured in Sita’s Ramayana not only drew the book but sang its content, as if it were a narrative fable. Her song in fact guided her choice of event and incident, as she drew picture after picture to complete the long drawn out epic.

Moyna had come to Chennai – to the Tara office – to take part in a workshop on graphic narratives. The workshop sought to develop a grammar of the comic form, using the constituent elements of Patua scroll art. It seemed a logical enough thing to do – convert the vertical panels that make up a scroll into horizontal pictures that could move a story through the pages of a book. Moyna and the other Patua artists were excited by the prospect of their scroll becoming a comic book and participated eagerly in the experiments that unfolded in the workshop. Orijit Sen, comic artist and a Tara illustrator, guided them through the drawing and framing of panels and more importantly in conceiving of a tale as a series of panels that could depict action in a variety of ways: showing, splices of action, working on close-ups, calling attention to detail, extracting and reworking from a larger image, compressing a series of multiple actions on a single page were some of the elements that the artists came to deploy in the course of the workshop.

After initial visual play with panels and frames, artists at the workshop decided to try their hands at doing a short visual text. They chose their own stories, and Moyna chose the Ramayana. She began to draw scenes from the middle of the epic, when the heroine Sita is abducted by the demon King Ravana.

One of Moyna's Initial Sketches

Another of Moyna's initial sketches

These sketches were already a move away from the vertical panel art of the patua, especially the ones that compressed action on a single page. But clearly it was not yet a graphic narrative – for the compressed action had to be shown as happening on the page, as an unfolding. At this point, it was decided that perhaps it would help to actually rework these images into a comic narrative form, so that the artists had an idea of how their images would actually look, when strung together in this fashion. And this is what was done with Moyna’s pictures.

Text is added to Moyna's sketches

Moyna was excited by what she was shown, and set about to finish the Ramayana. She succeeded in doing over half a dozen panels at the workshop. A couple of months later, she was done with the Ramayana – and she sent us around 85 panels. Remarkably the scenes she had begun to draw in the workshop, based on her initial pencil sketches were now transformed into vivid dynamic panels.

One of Moyna's painted panels

Another of Moyna's painted panels

On the back of each panel, Moyna had penciled in Bangla her description of the scene, clearly a paraphrase of the song she would have sung had this been a scroll. Once we had this first lot of panels, we set about to find an author who could write, keeping in mind Moyna’s visual narration. Samhita Arni, who had authored Tara’s very successful The Mahabharata: A Child’s View, seemed an obvious choice. Samhita was fascinated by the richness and originality of Moyna’s art, and her choice of incident and event from the Ramayana. She saw at once that what we had was a unique female perspective on the Ramayana, and one that was clearly influenced by local versions. Samhita decided to follow up on Moyna’s suggestive visual reading of the Ramayana and after a series of fascinating discussions with the Tara editorial team a script evolved that took on board Moyna’s notes on the backs of the pictures, and of course the story that the art narrated.

Once text and art seemed in place, Jonathan Yamakami, resident Tara designer at the time, got to work on integrating text and picture into the form of a full length graphic narrative. He familiarized himself with the Ramayana, looked at other visual representations, and worked carefully and meticulously on the visuals, taking care to edit and frame them in ways that retained their original grammar and power. He also suggested that perhaps Moyna may want to supply a few more pictures, especially of the heroine Sita and the other main female character of the epic, Trijatha. This, Moyna was happy to do, and so the work progressed, initially in fits and starts, but finally it got into a rhythm that eventually produced the book, as it exists now. In Yamakami’s hands, the pages that had taken shape initially as pencil sketches acquired a character of their own.

A spread from the finished book

This Ramayana, then, takes its place amongst the three hundred and more versions, and as with the others, it adds its own to a remarkable tale of war and valour, fortitude and endurance. This essentially visual version allows the epic to live on, not only as argument and moral, but as a series of dramatic events, beautifully drawn characters and objects that tell their own story.

V.Geetha, Publisher, Tara Books

Ganesh Jogi

Ganesh Jogi, musician and artist from Rajasthan-Gujarat, is no more. We met him and his wife Teju Behan in February 2010, and invited them to sing and draw for us.

Ganesh died at the age of 72, while singing at a temple. Born in Rajasthan and to music, Ganesh was from a community that wandered the streets from early in the morning, singing devotional songs to the neighbourhood. In return the singers were given grain, clothes and some money. Like many old caste based practices, this one too has lingered on, but is not a viable occupation.  Ganesh Jogi, like others in his community, had to make other livelihood choices. For a while, he did whatever work came his way, but some years proved harsher than others. During one such period, when his home town was plagued by severe drought, Ganesh left home to go to Mount Abu, a major pilgrimage centre. He worked there for a while and then moved to the city of Ahmedabad, where he tried to make a living by singing.

Ganesh & Teju in Chennai

As fate would have it, he met the artist Haku Shah, who was keenly interested in folk and people’s music and art. Haku Shah invited Ganesh into this home, and eventually found him a job as a singer in a hotel. But he did more – he offered him a pencil and asked him to draw. Ganesh was bewildered, but at Haku Shah’s insistence, began to try his hand. He came to visit Shah’s house every day, and in time came to develop a style all his own – naive, yet fresh and extraordinarily complex images made up of dots and lines.

Ganesh Jogi's Art

Ganesh then encouraged his wife Teju Behn, a singer in her own right – who had even sung a number for an offbeat Hindi film – to take up paper and pen. Eventually their children came to paint as well, and art became a means of survival for the entire family. Ganesh and Teju Behn found themselves invited to craft and art fairs across the country.

In February 2010. Ganesh Jogi and Teju Behn visited Tara Books. This was not their first time in Chennai. They had come a year ago, to participate in the crafts fair held in the Kalakshetra ground (Kalakshetra is home to a prestigious dance school). We heard them singing, surrounded by their marvelous paintings. We wanted to create a book with them, and so they returned, at our behest the next year, and worked on two book projects with us. We also organised an evening of music for book and music lovers at Spaces – an atmospheric venue near the beach in Chennai. It turned out to be a magical  evening of Kabir songs from their repertoire.

Ganesh & Teju performing together

This year, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, we presented Teju Behn’s stunning visual story of their moving to the city to become artists. As we begin to print, news of Ganesh’s passing came in. We are shocked and heavy hearted, but also curiously fulfilled by the thought of Teju’s book going out into the world. Called Drawing from the City, it is at once a celebration and a  tribute to his memory, to the art that this gentle and loving couple practised together.

Drawing from the City

We can only hope that Drawing from the City will stay with Teju, as a reminder of what she may yet do, though neither this nor anything else can compensate for the immense loss she has to endure.

Gita Wolf & V.Geetha, Publishers, Tara Books

A more extensive selection of images can be found on our facebook page here.