CHENNAI: From fables at bedtime, and English lessons in school to novels, traditional children’s literature is penned with the overwhelming urge to instill morality. Take, for example, the story of Ekalavya rendered through time as the pinnacle of gurudakshina; an indigenous boy who cut off his thumb for his teacher Drona. In the 1990s, for then-10-year-old Samhita Arni, the story of Ekalavya was unjust. In her rewritten version, she noted, “He cut off his thumb and gave it to Drona. Drona was satisfied that Ekalavya would not be able to wield a bow anymore. He returned to the camp without even saying a word of thanks to Ekalavya.” These lines eventually entered The Mahabharata: A Child’s View, published by city-based Tara Books in 1996.
Looking back on this story, the now-40-year-old notes, “For me, it was an injustice, an upper-caste person asking a lower-caste person for their thumb, their skill. The story was constantly being told to me as a way of ‘we must honour our teachers and give them their fee’ and obedience, but justice is not embodied in the form of the guru, the teacher, or the system.” If anything, the Mahabharata endlessly fascinated her, as “it is so evil and complex.”
Between Karachi, Delhi, and Chennai, Samhita began penning her version, in her journals, alongside her illustrated images of Karna, Arjuna, and Draupadi’s saris with a black ball pen. As a child who grew up in Pakistan and returned to India amid the Babri Masjid riots, “it was something to occupy me. I was a dreadfully lonely, bullied child and in many ways, writing was a cathartic, therapeutic process for me,” she explains. Her version questioned the idea of war, took a look at the shades of grey, and peeled the layers off complex characters.
“When we talk about morality for children, we are trying to indoctrinate them or push them into adhering to these social norms. Instead of projecting moral values onto them, it is far more powerful to tell them these stories and let them discover that for themselves; that is what children’s literature should do,” says Samhita, who has continued her pursuit of re-telling myths over the years.
What if our stories were fun, engaging, empathetic, and allowed children to discern the world by themselves, and independently build their view? Why are our narratives solely moralistic?, asks Tara Books. In a quiet residential area with a proclivity for cats, Tara Books’ office has been silently pursuing this quest and pushing the boundaries of children’s literature for three decades.
In this sunlit spot on Kuppam Beach Road, the ground floor houses a wide range of their books which open out as scrolls, into large pages and experiments with style, colours, and design. For instance, Between Memory and Museum – A Dialogue with Folk and Tribal Artists questions the idea of museums; Sultana’s Dream examines a feminist utopia, and Begum Rokheya’s words from the 1900s are accompanied by indigenous artist Durga Bai’s images; The Women I Could Be is a peppy pastel book by Sangita Jogi with pictures of women leaping out of the pages.
Alphabets of wisdom
Like most magical literature, Tara Books grew out of multiple conversations, searching for books, and craving for more interesting stories. Editorial director Gita Wolf and author and co-founder V Geetha were part of a feminist women’s group in the city and would meet to discuss books and ideas. “I don’t know exactly how this conversation came out but Gita’s son was little and we were looking for things for our children to read and enjoy,” recalls Geetha. They resorted to Western books, Chandamama, Gokulam, and later, books from the Soviet Union sold in vans.
In the late 70s, Gita pitched the idea of crafting books for children, and soon their first book emerged — Mala. Based on a Kannada folktale, it follows a little girl who travels to bring back the rain seed from a demon. By 1994, Tara Books was an up-and-running publishing house, engaging deeply with social issues, art, the act of writing and bookmaking, and course the question of children’s literature. “In the West, you have the young adult genre which is all problem-oriented, constantly addressing problems faced, but that same thing can be done through superior literary writing as well, which can stay for a longer time,” says Geetha. Over the decades, Tara Books has translated their works across languages including German and Japanese.
Of folktales and indigenous art
Often, reading as a child in India can be an act of grasping at loose images, far removed from local contexts and folktales. However, Tara Books was among the first to publish tales from India like Speaking to an Elephant, a book penned from Kadar folktales and living in the forest.
Tara Books’ endeavour to publish folktales ran parallel with investigating how children learn languages, how they speak in classrooms, and the stories employed to teach them. Textbooks are littered with formal language that alienates a child, notes Geetha. Undertaking a survey, they looked at how children from UKG to class 2 learned languages and their results ended in multitudes of Pillai Tamizh. “Pillai Tamizh showed us the rich world of folktales and how problematic they were, replete with caste references, discrimination, and misogyny. We had to sift through them,” she says. The stories that gained them a larger audience and put them in the spotlight were The Very Hungry Lion, about Singam, a lazy lion who would rather trick other animals than hunt for his food, and Hen Sparrow Turned Purple, about a bird whose plume is accidentally dyed the feminist-colour of purple.
In the 2000s, while navigating stalls at government-run melas, haats, and exhibitions, Gita had the idea of roping in indigenous artists in their work. On bed sheets, saris, and fabric, they noticed colourful, intricate tribal traditions featuring regional setting, landscape, and stories. “Gita had a publisher’s intuition where you see a book where no book exists, and she said why don’t we acquire art from these artists, and do a book featuring animals of India.” These ideas resulted in Beasts of India, dotted with the art of animals rendered by a variety of folk and tribal artists; it also set off their long-standing tradition of working with (not merely employing) 25-odd indigenous artists and printing their books with art including Warli, Gond, and Mithila.
From Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ to Renaissance sculptures, our understanding of art, as our worldviews seem to instruct, is rooted in the West. Refuting this idea, Geetha says, “(Roping in indigenous artists) was interesting because some artists never thought of their art being in a book. It was also poignant because some artists don’t read and write but they value their books as one of them put it, ‘after they are gone, the book, our art, and tradition will remain’.”
Art of bookmaking
In Tara Books’ unit in Perungudi, around 12 workers toil with screen printers, handmade paper, and curious hues of dyes to produce these unique children’s books. Arumugan Chinnasamy heads publishing here, and as Geetha describes him, “Anything he doesn’t know about publishing is not worth knowing.” Here, the printing process is central to the meaning-making of this world shaping up within the pages. The motto of Tara’s printing workshop is ‘nothing is impossible’ and Arumugam adds, “We need to bring back book sense to people and every project is interesting to us, and each is a challenge.”
In the 1990s, as digital publishing emerged, Geetha recalls the literary world being struck by panic. “Would books outlast this? At that time, we had serious discussions about this book and felt one way to retain and return sense to the book is through this process and the use of a kind of paper. The way material, process, and ink interact is interesting, handmade paper absorbs and it gives a certain texture and is very tactile,” she says.
As Rathna Ramanathan writes on the Tara Books’ blog, apart from using sustainable paper, silkscreen printing is used, and “film used to embed the image on the 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...”
From ideating books to disseminating them, Tara Books sees publishing as co-creation. “We refuse to have hierarchy of editorial on top; from dispatch to the person sitting at the front desk, a book is what it is because each one brings something to the book,” signs off Geetha.