Illustrators of children’s books talk about the challenges of bringing to life new narratives to grab young minds

A quick walk down the aisle of children’s illustrated literature in India opens up a fascinating world. As a nation, we’ve slowly walked away from ‘rosy-cheeks and dimpled-chin’ toddlers toward distinctly Indian characters with stories drawn from our mythology and folklore, and, increasingly, from our everyday rural and urban lives. As much as writers, editors and publishers have helmed this trend, a motley crew of illustrators have helped visualise these new terrains, and breathe artistic life into these new narratives.

With Chennai being headquarters to several South Indian stalwarts in children’s publishing, the city is now also home to growing numbers of full-time children’s illustrators, who, through politically and culturally conscious images and through interesting media and style choices, are continually pushing the boundaries of what pictures can do.

Children are drawn into a book first by its visual language, says Srivi Kalyan, writer-illustrator of over 50 books and founder of art collective Fooniferse. “There’s an assumption that illustrators simply transliterate into pictures the writer’s words, but I see it otherwise. Illustrators evoke the ethos of a story, build curiosity and adventure into it, and pique the child’s interest in the story’s context.” This goes past the literal word, and into playing with picture compositions, often gently revealing the story’s subject from multiple directions and in different dimensions, until the completed story unveils the full picture in the child’s mind. In Srivi’s recently-illustrated book for Katha, on rhinoceros conservation, Run Ranga Run, she uses this tactic to see the rhino afresh in a new light, frame after frame.

“I see text and illustrations in a beautiful dance that complement each other,” says Ashok Rajagopalan, illustrator of over 500 works, and author, most-recently, of Tulika’s Gajapati Kulapati books. “I love illustrating for children because they live in the picture, climb inside the houses and over the trees and ask unpredictable questions of everything.” It’s in illustrating these answers that Ashok finds most joy, for intricate details that set a story’s subtext are his forte. In Shamim Padamsee’s story of a cook who accidentally discovers bondas ( A Silly Story of Bondapalli, Tulika) Ashok wove in the recurring characters of a cat and a dog that weren’t overtly in the story, but fleshed its world out better. “I tripped on details as a child, and children’s illustration, for me, is about going back to that slowness in pace, of dwelling deep on things and filling in the image gaps in the story’s world,” says Malavika P.C., illustrator for eight years now, most recently in Karadi Tales’ four-book Mouse series.

It is the subtle spirit of these story worlds that inform illustrators’ artistic styles and media of work, as well, adds Malvika. Her Mouse illustrations, for instance, feature sparse backgrounds with richly dimensional creatures whose body textures are taken from scans of the carpets, door-mats and curtains in her home. “This mix of collage, drawing and rendering helped me create images that popped out from the page,” she says. For Srivi’s illustrations in Mamang Dai’s story Sky Queen set in the North East, the textures of native jewellery, fabric and instruments are recreated in raw oil pastels to give the story its “dream-like, yet force-of-the-Earth” quality.

Niveditha Subramaniam, illustrator and editor at Tulika, adds that their recent books My Gandhi Story and Nabiya now blend folk art, watercolour paintings and photographs to recreate Gandhi’s Gujarat days, and life in a Bombay chawl respectively. The last few years have also seen the mushrooming of digital art work demanded for apps, e-books and video editions of childrens’ stories, observes Senthil Kumar, founder of artists collective Sporg Studio.

“The publishing industry today is certainly looking towards stories from different regions, using diverse art forms, and our visual culture needs to evolve too without falling into easy stereotyping and generalisation,” says Srivi. There is a conscious effort to use the power of the image to break stereotypes, and this comes with increased respect for the child reader, says Niveditha.

In her recent work The Pleasant Rakshasa, Niveditha says the very point of the book was to subvert unilateral notions of beauty by depicting the usually demonised rakshaka as beautiful, bright and colourful with bright red eyes, purple skin and yellow teeth. “These efforts go beyond political correctness,” she adds, “They’re about freeing a child’s mind, and often the parents’ too, to think about issues and come to conclusions themselves.” As adults, we underestimate the range of complexity children can grasp by feeding them a diet of cute images, believes Srivi. “At one level, children’s literature is about giving kids gender, societal and visual literacy, by translating the complexities of our lives into accessible images that spark conversation.”

In these new narratives about conflict, war and violence too, Malavika cautions of the danger of being merely symptomatic in our descriptions and prescriptive in our solutions. “Children will keep questioning till they come to an understanding of things for themselves. It’s important that our stories don’t come from a position of help, but of taking responsibility, and of mutual wonder.”