It’s a Book,Silly

To all of us who refuse to believe that a bunch of pixels and a backlit screen can replace the tactile presence of a book,the picture books brought out by Chennai-based publisher Tara Books,many of which are handmade,make that argument in the best possible way. They are beautiful things,exemplifying what illustrator and author Martin Salisbury believes a picture book ought to be: a child’s first “personal,private art gallery,held in the hand,to be revisited over and over again”.

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Don’t just hold I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail,peer through it — a melancholy peacock stares back through an eye-shaped hole in its brilliant blue cover. Flip it open,and a game begins,leading you through many layers of optical illusion and a wily trick verse.

Tara Books editor Gita Wolf chose 42-year-old Gond artist Ramsingh Urveti to illustrate the 17th century English poem “I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail”. She saw,not a curious creative combination,but “a poem about meanings,and how we make them” told through a highly conceptual and sophisticated art. Urveti is related by marriage to the great Gond artist Jangarh Singh Shyam,and is an acclaimed artist himself. He once worked as a labourer in Bhopal,when he was encouraged by Shyam to draw the stories of their community,from their animistic creation myth to tales of trees and gods and goddesses. “Those stories are not in books,but in our songs and stories. I remember coming back from a day spent in hard,manual labour and getting down to paint,” he says,over the phone from Bhopal.

Urveti,who had read a translation of the poem in Hindi when he set out to work,chose two colour combinations to illustrate the poem’s many levels of meaning. “I saw a peacock 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 creep on the ground.” Read this way,it is a fantastic poem,about blazing comets that shower hail,ants that swallow up whales and a well full of men’s eyes that weep. But when read with the lines broken in the middle,(“With a fiery tail/I saw a blazing comet”),they seem descriptions of a more rational world. The more surreal descriptions are black illustrations on a white background,while the more literal ones are in white,on a black background. “The two possible readings are distinct by the use of colour,which set up two different atmospheres,” says book designer Jonathan Yamakami. While the intricately detailed drawings speak of a thoughtful,contemplative restraint,the book’s design is what makes it playful,a thing of whimsy. Yamakami spent two years structuring the book,experimenting with die cuts till he found an organic flow: a flame-shaped die cut on one page morphs into a tear on the other,a peacock feather turns into a comet tail. “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? 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,” he writes in a blog post. The exquisite book made it to the prestigious USBBY (United States Board on Books for Young People) Honor list,2013,along with The Great Race,another Tara Book illustrated by Mata di Pachedi artist Jagdish Chitara.

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Children as well as adults will dip into Waterlife again and again for the marine life of Mithila artist Rambharos Jha’s imagination. It teems with giant lobsters and baby fishes,sea horses and octopuses,drawn in a joyful burst of bright colours and forms. Maria Popova,who curates Brainpickings.org,a search engine of “interestingness” of all things creative,called it “ the most beautiful book she has laid her eyes on”.

Jha,who lives in Hariharpur village in Bihar’s Mithila region,tapped into the memories of an unbridled childhood when he was commissioned to do this book. “My childhood was about endless play and wandering,as well as hours spent lost in storybooks. I would go deep into the pond in my village to look for a jadui chhadi,a magic wand. When I would read stories about fairies,I would look for them in forests or thickets. That world of imagination and fantasy began to return to me when I became an artist. Waterlife for me is a reincarnation of that fantasy,” he says.

Mithila art,which originated in the Madhubani region with women who would draw on walls and floors,began to be made on paper in the 1970s. Jha’s father was an officer in a SEWA organisation which trained and supported women in art,including the great Mithila artists Ganga Devi,Sita Devi and Jagdamba Devi. As a child,Jha would slip in and out of their houses,watching them at work,while gnawing on a guava stolen from the neighbourhood tree. But he is among the new generation of artists who are travelling on new roads with an old toolkit. Though the line drawing of traditional Mithila art gives it a flat,two-dimensional effect,the ponds and oceans in Waterlife eddy and ripple out,billowing into restless waves or suggesting quiet movement. “My art is an extension of tradition,an attempt to take it forward,” he says. Each of the splendid drawings is accompanied by a small note by Jha,and illustrates how he turns personal experiences into symbols. The story of a crocodile once told to him becomes inspiration for the fearsome creature he draws. His sea horses,carrying eggs,are drawn with tenderness,swimming in the amniotic sac of reeds and ocean,and he draws not just the lobster,but “its inner being,and its secret core”

In the inevitable e-age,would such books turn into artisanal oddities of a less efficient time? Wolf suggests otherwise,as “there will always be a human yearning for the material and the tactile.” And who knows,says Yamakami,their quirky individuality might survive in newer ways. “What would happen if I Saw a Peacock was made into an e-book? What do we lose and gain from that? It would be an interesting challenge,” he says.