This article is in the Publishing Profiles Category
Tara Books – 30 years of creativity
Pam Dix interviews Gita Wolf, founder of Tara Books.
2024 is the 30th anniversary of Tara Books, a remarkable achievement for an independent publisher and for Gita Wolf and her team, a collective of writers, designers and bookmakers. Gita shared her story in this interview and with IBBY UK during a recent visit to London from India. Most of us could remember the first time we saw a Tara publication, innovative and exciting and so different to anything we had seen before. That quality and freshness has not diminished over the years, opening a Tara book is a sensory, emotional and intellectual experience.
Tara Books started at a time when most books published in India were moralistic and educational and there was a feeling, as Gita says, that adventure happened elsewhere in books, something which they have successfully overturned. As a team, they had a passionate commitment to quality publishing, to the visual and to Indian traditions. And of course, they were very much rooted in their non-hierarchical feminist inclusive approach
Gita sees these 30 years as a period of organic growth, very much based within the Indian context, rooted in the land and the ideas and resources that come from the local environment. She is very pleased that nowadays 75-80% of their sales and selling rights are within India, with Japan remaining their major export destination.
The visual was important to Tara from the beginning, partly because of the number of indigenous art styles which they wanted to draw into book format. As Gita says, the artists know about their work, their artistic styles and the stories they can tell, but it is the publishers and designers at Tara who know how to make this into book format. The result is that they have been able to work with new unknown creators. We discussed the ever-present debate about art versus craft, the individual artist versus the tradition of an art form, an issue explored in two wonderful Tara publications Origins of Art: the Gond Village of Patangarh (Kodai Matsouka and Bhajju Shyam) and Between Memory and Museum: a Dialogue with Folk and Tribal Artists (Arun and Gita Wolf). Many Tara books use these traditional art forms as a visual starting point, as in Waterlife (Rambharos Jha), a Mithila artist exploring childhood memories of growing up by the river.
Waterlife is in oversize landscape format, silkscreen printed by hand on handmade paper, which has a rich textural effect..
Tara also publish practical activity books for children to learn and explore, as in 8 ways to draw … an elephant (Paola Ferrarotti), one of a series of three including fish and deer, which explore eight different Indian art traditions through tracing, patterns and having fun.
The visual is also important because of the number of languages spoken in India. Tara publishes in English and in Tamil, and rights are sold for other Indian languages. A very visual output helps transcend any barriers of language.
India and Asia have many varieties of book formats (scrolls, unfolding pages), of paper quality, including handmade, and of printing including block printing and different presses. These have been celebrated by Tara and are represented in their catalogue. Graphic and typography are also explored in a variety of ways. The result is that Tara employs a wide range of skilled craftspeople to produce the handmade books, plus original art works related to the books, and to work on a variety of printing techniques. The company is in itself a whole creative industry. Their printing is now done in India.
These are some examples of the publishing styles and techniques pioneered by Tara Books
A Village is a Busy Place (Rohima Chitrikar, 2007) is in a scroll format, the artwork based on the Bengal Patua style of scroll painting, with image on the front and the story on the back.
The scroll opens page by page and the text (on the reverse) guides the reader to look closely and interrogate the images. This image from a German translation.
Knock! Knock! (Kaori Takahashi) is an absolutely magical unfolding, an interactive pop-up, showing a young girl searching for her bear on the many floors of an apartment building. This work is by a Japanese artist.
Starting with the book in a box, each page opens horizontally and then vertically as the child moves through the floors of the building.
Many Tara books create pairings of artists and illustrators from around the world, encouraging cultural exchange and creativity. Joelle Jolivet, the French illustrator has worked with Tara on several books including An Indian Beach: By Day and Night, a never-ending circular (because of the opening) book with a palette of blue, black and grey which can be coloured in and explored.
This shows the fully opened book with the under the sea inside and the beach scenes on the outside of the pages. For the reader the inside view is a surprise as it is only apparent after the book has been read through.
Graphic layout, text styles and typography vary according to the subject and style. I want to be (Anushka Ravishankar, illustrated by Rathna Ramanathan) is an exciting exploration of typography.
Many Tara books have a performative quality and a good example of this is Seed (Gita Wolf). This book came out of lockdown and Gita’s new life as a farmer in Pondicherry. Each foldout is appropriate to the stages of the seed, the different openings, a fold out to the side page, a fold up page and an envelope fold. As Gita reads this to the IBBY audience you could hear the intake of breath, of awe, from the listeners.
This is a complex fold out perfectly suited to the story of the seed’s development.
The Deep (Mayar and Tashar Vayeda) is another outcome of cross-cultural experience, showing the journey the two indigenous Warli artists made to Japan, in which they bring their technique and visual grammar to interpret things that are outside their normal experiences. At the same time, this approach demonstrates how water is a connecting feature of life.
An exploration of the underwater world and all its magic and life forms on the bluest of blue backgrounds. This image shows how the pages are layered in size to encourage the reader to the next page. Handbound and silk screen printed by hand on recycled cotton paper.
Tara Books have an excellent online shop (tarabooks.com) and they have good shipping arrangements from India. Some of their books are sold by Newham Bookshop and they have a UK distributor. Their bookshop is in Chennai. It would be wonderful to arrange an exhibition of their books in the UK, especially as they have won over 80 international awards and deserve to more widely known outside the specialised book world.
Gita Wolf spoke at the IBBY AGM in July and was subsequently interviewed by PD during her recent visit to the UK to receive an Honorary Professorship by Norwich University of the Arts.
Pam Dix is Chair of IBBY UK.
