Author-illustrator Niveditha Subramaniam shares interesting experiences from her journey with Tulika in this delightfully-written guest post.
Children often ask for the same book to be read again and
again, but their reading itself is never quite the same. I’ve often wondered if
this is really any different for adults. And as a reader of pictures and a
visual thinker, I have certainly come to think of a cyclical reading process as
being intuitive and essential to enjoying, unravelling and creating
narrative.
Thinking Round: Jalebi Curls
I did my first book
with Tulika as an intern. The seed for the idea had been planted many moons before
I wrote it. One night, I had gone for a walk with a friend who had pointed to
orange swirls on the moon. “Doesn’t it look like a jalebi?” she said. The
moment and the description lingered in my memory. But I didn’t have a story.
When I finally wrote the first draft, it was based on a series of images that
tumbled into my head. And it was having the time and space to read and pore
over pictures during the course of my internship that finally led me to find
the right words to coax them out and connect them.
Jalebi Curls |
For me, there are a few simple measures that are useful in evaluating this.
1.
Do the words allow pictures
to take the lead?
2.
Can I ‘hear’ the story?
3.
Does the removal or addition
of a word say something that the pictures do not or complement it in a way that
enriches the reading experience as a whole?
Working with Dilemmas: The Musical Donkey
In 2010, I was commissioned by Tulika to retell a
Panchantantra story. I chose the fable of The Musical Donkey. In the original
(or perhaps it’s more accurate to call it the most popular version), a donkey
who likes to sing does so against the advice of his friend, the fox. He ends up
being badly beaten up by a sleepy farmer whose cucumber field he wanders into
at night. The moral is that there is a time and place for every action.
The juxtaposition between the humanised animal and the
inhuman treatment meted out to him had always bothered me. Even if the animal
did not stand in for the child, how could the violence be justified? The
discrepancy between an adult’s understanding of this transposition and the
assumptions about a child’s ability to somehow infer all this bothered me.
These questions filled my head as I wondered how to rework it to suit the
contemporary reader.
In my retelling, the farmer does not stir from his sleep
because he’s dreaming that he has a thousand cucumbers in his field. I
anthropomorphised the cucumbers who flee the scene unable to bear the donkey’s
cacophony. At the end, the farmer wakes up to find bleary-eyed cucumbers all
around him. Meanwhile, the donkey is fast asleep in the field.
Each of the books in the collection feature folk art
styles from different parts of India and the bilingual collection was
particularly sought after in schools. An educator at an international school,
who also reviewed the book, was grateful that I had done away with a violent
ending (illustrations accompanying the text often featured a very bloody
donkey). But there were some parents and teachers who were sceptical about the
twist. What was point I was trying to make?
When I was working on the retelling, a picture of the
cucumbers dashing out of the field appeared in my head. The image that followed
was that of the farmer lying in bed, surrounded by cucumbers. When I reflect on
my own writing process, it strikes me how images always precede words. My
approach to character and plot rely on visual integrity. But this does not
answer the question.
The Musical Donkey |
A storyteller, who used the book in a workshop, told me
that children identified both with the donkey who slept peacefully in the field
and the cucumbers running to the farmer for help. Although, I hadn’t been
conscious of this while writing the story, this response has always stayed with
me as a reminder that young readers are far more at ease with multiple points
of view than they are given credit for.
Thought Clouds: The Sky Monkey’s Beard
The first picture book I wrote
for older children, The Sky Monkey’s Beard, was inspired by the levitations of
a hairy seed – in Tamil, Thathapoochi. For a long time, the spiralling
movements of the seed played out in my head like an animated sequence. One day
I ‘saw’ bubble eyed sky monkeys flocking together. And then, a silver monkey
from whose long beard the seed drifted away. The third image was that of a
little monkey who spied through the clouds and saw a river which looked like a
shiny tail.
The Sky Monkey's Beard |
In its final shape, the book
imagines how the first monkey on earth came to be. A little sky monkey grows
weary of being a creature of the clouds. Her family is alarmed at this
demonstration of ‘unskymonkeyness’ but her grandfather understands that her
place is on earth. Because the story evolved from the triptych I saw in my
head, these remain the strongest images; the roots from which the narrative
grew. As a writer and illustrator, I have now come to believe that the theme of
a book can be made legible entirely through pictures – my love for and exploration
of wordless picture books comes from this conviction.
But what makes a picture book truly
compelling?
1. Is it the
way in which pictures and words take cues from each other and fill each other’s
gaps?
2. Can pictures
and text also leave space for readers to work out ways of meaning-making that doesn’t
depend on a single definition of ‘the whole’?
3. Can details
in pictures and words become trampolines that give us room to step outside the
story and think creatively about the world we live in?
These are questions I constantly
ask, in relation to my own work and otherwise.
Purple like Karimuga: The Pleasant Rakshasa
While belonging and identity
surfaced at the end of writing The Sky Monkey’s Beard, identity was a strong
underlying theme in the first picture book I illustrated, The Pleasant
Rakshasa. Through depicting a rakshasa who likes his pot belly, hairy legs and
dark skin, Sowmya Rajendran gently inverts notions of beauty and happiness.
The Pleasant Rakshasa |
I had grown up with friends, some
of whose grandparents or parents told them not to play in the sun for too long
for fear that they would become dark. As a baby, I was much darker-skinned than
my brother. When my skin tone lightened as I grew up, our neighbour assumed
that my grandmother, who then lived with us, had worked some “magic” on my skin
and wanted to know what it was!
Sowmya once met a parent whose
daughter loved the book and whose anecdote moved us both very much. Her
four-year-old came back home after playing in the park and told her that her
friends were constantly saying she was dark. The mother was perturbed but her
daughter didn’t seem very upset. The mother held a hand mirror to her face and asked
her what she thought she looked like. The girl thought for a minute, giggled,
and said, “I think I am purple like Karimuga in The Pleasant Rakshasa!”
This exchange really brought home
that picture books help
readers grapple with difficult situations on independent terms. It also made me
revisit the familiar notion of why ‘less is more’ with fresh eyes.
Drawing as thinking: Soda and Bonda
Soda and Bonda was first developed for my Diploma project
– the penultimate module in the Masters Programme in Children’s Book
Illustration I did in Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. The book is about a
cat who looks like a cat, but feels like a dog. The dog is unable to
understand this but eventually accepts the cat for who she is. The idea was
inspired by the dog-like behaviour exhibited by a relative’s cat, something
that I had witnessed a long time ago but never quite forgotten. It was
initially called Bad Cat – a phrase used in the text.
The process of observational drawing was crucial to the
development of the book. I spent a lot of time drawing a specific dog and then
transferring this body language and range of gestures to the cat in my book. Two
developments took place: as I sketched and ‘thought’ with my pencil. First, I
actively began to question the boundaries between seeing and feeling. Second, I
began to mull over animal-human encounters themselves.
Along the way, the title changed from being Bad Cat to
Soda and Bonda. In the way the characters have shaped, both human and animal
traits are explored through the characters (I hope). Soda and Bonda was also
one of the books I went on to further develop in my Masters Project. However,
because the title didn’t work for the UK audience, I had to change it to Mudpie
and Mooncake.
When Tulika decided to publish it, I was relieved to go
back to Soda and Bonda – titles which were really expressive of these
characters – a dog who thought he was too cool and a lump of a cat with
boundless energy. I also did the pictures all over again – I wanted to really
nail the gestures and body language and I had only achieved this partially
earlier.
Soda and Bonda |
I was excited about how the story would take shape in
other languages. However, the concerns that cropped up in translation was
something I didn’t anticipate at all.
1. In more than one language, a line that read
so easily in English – ‘Soda looks like a cat but feels like a dog’ became
complicated and messy in translation. In Tamil, for instance, ‘unarvu’ (the
word for feeling) was too high-flown and didn’t have the lightness that the
context demanded. The next best option was to go with ‘thinks’ like a dog which
altered the meaning.
2. At a point in the book, Soda gets annoyed
with Bonda and says, “Go away, you bad cat!” In Hindi, for instance, the translation
for this – ‘gundhibilli’ – took on a very negative tone and connotation.
3. Soda the dog is male and Bonda the cat is
female. While the animality of the characters was something I as the
writer-illustrator had been clear about, one of the translators saw it from an
entirely human-centric perspective and read it as a story where ‘a man was
telling a woman what to do’. While this seemed far-fetched to me, I couldn’t be
dismissive of the implications in a story that was about self-perception,
acceptance and friendship.
My own editorial experience in Tulika has sensitised me
to what it means to ‘think in different languages’. And I have never ceased to
be fascinated by the wonderful crossing-over that happens from one language
into the other (the writer and activist Rinchin’s work is filled with the most
evocative examples of this). But Soda and Bonda was an eye-opener in drawing my
attention to how the links between gender, language, cultural codes and usage
can make the simplest of texts a minefield.
Speaking without Words: Flutterfly and Ammama’s Sari
Those who work closely with picture books in any capacity
can easily imagine that the incubation periods can be long and the challenges
unprecedented. Last year, I wrote about finding my visual voice in this guest post on the Tulika blog.
It feels counter-intuitive to write or speak about
wordless picture books. Theirs is a rich and varied silence in them and the
suspension of verbal language alters the nature of the exchange between readers
and books. I have seen wordless picture books like Manjula Padmanabhan’s A
Visit to the Market and Suzy Lee’s Wave countless times and marvelled at the
way in which the genre trains the eye in reading visuals in multiple ways but
also disrupts the tendency to assign a set of fixed meanings.
In my first wordless picture book, Flutterfly, a little
butterfly flies out of a child’s pillow and flits from page to page, from one
room and person in the house to another. Each character has his or her own
response but are united in the wonder they all feel as they watch it move. The
palette uses two colours – the butterfly is orange and the characters and the
environment are rendered in black and white. While this had been a considered
decision, I was thrilled when a parent told me that in addition to following
the butterfly her 18-month-old also enjoyed looking at the characters and what
they were doing.
Flutterfly |
Ammama’s Sari, my latest wordless book, is inspired by
vivid memories of my grandmother. Repurposing and reusing things were natural to her; she took
pride in creating something new but found more fulfilment in extending its
lifespan; in giving it a second and a third and a fourth life. Bits and bobs
and scraps were carefully saved and eventually made their way into some
endeavour or the other.
I made the first draft of this book in 2015 but wasn’t happy
with the outcome – it didn’t have the tactility, the sense of touch that was at
the core of the memory or the childhood experiences of watching her work. It
took me awhile to get back to it and in 2019, I started work again. This time, I
decided to work with fabric and paper. While the sari itself was made using a
single piece of fabric, I used leftover scraps to make lots of small elements
in the book (to keep to the spirit of repurposing my grandmother believed in) and
combined that with illustration. Collage is something that I have never taken
to naturally or used in work but I discovered that thinking about what the
project called for made me work through blocks and issues that surfaced.
Ammama's Sari |
At Tulika, the
editorial team works closely with both pictures and text and their approach integrates
an understanding of writing and art. During the course of working on my own
books, editorial intervention has strengthened my understanding in many ways:
1)
Identifying conceptual
weakness.
The
first thumbprint book I worked on featured animals piling on top of each other.
While visually, this idea was fun, I couldn’t really develop this into a story.
I
was given freedom to try and work it out in terms of pictures before getting to
this understanding.
2)
Defining the main focus of
the story.
The
first draft of The Sky Monkey’s Beard had a sub plot of sorts, inspired by
frame stories I had loved listening to while growing up. However, it was taking
away rather than adding to the story. This was one of the first instances where
I learnt that story had to be adapted to suit the format as well.
3)
Paying attention to the flow
of narrative and details keeping in mind the audience.
I
was one of the contributors to an anthology called Water Stories. In the story
I worked on, The Dragon’s Pearl, a young child turns into a dragon. Among the
many suggestions I received, an important one was to include the mother’s
response to this transformation at the end of the story, something I hadn’t
originally done. The inclusion of this moment made it substantially better.
With respect to
visuals, the guidance received at every stage is something that has ushered in
clarity about how to look at pictures
in picture books.
1)
What is clear to me but not
obvious to the reader.
One’s
intimacy with a story one writes or characters one invents sometimes comes in
the way of being able to see the larger picture or think about what cues there
are in the pictures that will enable readers to make connections.
2)
The lack of flow between one
image to another.
At
the rough sketch stage, feedback has often helped me take a step back and not
just look at a particular page but think over its connection to the next. Over
time, this back and forth has become more intuitive.
3)
To keep a balance between
the literal and the imaginative.
There
are different kinds of relationships between text and images and no way one way
is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. However, editorial intervention makes one aware of this
balancing act and helps illustrators ask a number of questions: Where do I need
to show something in an obvious way? Which detail or part of illustration can I
be more subtle? Does the scope of the project allow for more or less of the
literal or the fantastical? Is there a match between the tone of the text and
the tone of the visuals?
Endnote
Dr. Seuss was at a cocktail party where he met a brain
surgeon.
"Oh, you're that man who writes those children's books," the doctor said. "Some Saturday, when I have a little extra time, I am going to write one of those."
Dr. Seuss replied, "Ah, yes. And someday when I have a little free time, I'll do brain surgery."
"Oh, you're that man who writes those children's books," the doctor said. "Some Saturday, when I have a little extra time, I am going to write one of those."
Dr. Seuss replied, "Ah, yes. And someday when I have a little free time, I'll do brain surgery."
There are many misconceptions about children’s books and
writing for children. Children’s books are playgrounds where every child has
the right to imagine happiness. But well-crafted
children’s books can also be shelters to young readers grappling with complex
concerns. Picture books, in particular, are their first windows to exploring
the world. And every
children’s book that I look at, fall in love with or create always reminds of
the unique responsibility that rests on the shoulders of
children’s book makers: to nurture, cherish and defend the creative freedom of
children.
***
***
Niveditha Subramaniam
cherishes every opportunity to celebrate her abiding love for visuals, which
almost always inspires her work — particularly picture books, and wordless and
graphic narratives. Her books with Tulika display her enormous versatility as
writer and illustrator, ranging from the wordless Flutterfly, to the
whimsical Soda and Bonda and Tsomo and the Momo, and the
bestselling Mayil diaries.
Click here to get your copies of her books!
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