My Name is Amrita. . . born to be an artist

Barefoot Husain

The Veena Player

A Trail of Paint
As a lover and promoter of children’s books from all over the world, I have lately been thinking about how so many parents love to buy “self help” books for their children. How to draw, how to play a musical instrument, how to write cursive etc. etc. At the same time, the traditional “biographies” of great men and women continue to be dull, boring and not at all written with young, independent readers in mind, especially in our country. Perhaps that was why the comic style became a great hit three decades ago with the Indian audience for tackling subjects of religion, mythology and prominent figures from history too.

With the “looking at art series”, Tulika has pioneered a new genre if you will. Artistes and their work is dealt with in a unique way in each title, with art appreciation, being the common theme. The pain felt by young Amrita Shergil as her childhood diary entries are translated from Hungarian, the colours used by Jamini Roy, M F Husain’s range of themes and Raja Ravi Varma’s realistic style – are bound to lead to several exciting conversations between the young readers and their parents and/or art teachers. While everyone agrees that children should be exposed to work by “great masters”, we in India do not have so many museums or travelling exhibitions by museums or collectors for children to “see” those works. The coffee table books with fancy photographs are expensive! What Tulika succeeds in doing via this series is debunk “exclusive” attitudes that art cannot be appreciated and seen by all!

Hats off to the author and illustrator team for dealing with each artist in a different way, with sensitivity. Keep up the work- cannot wait for regular additions to this series!
- Rachna Maneesh Dhir

A Tree in my Village
Going through the pictures in A Tree in my Village is not at all leafing idly as through a magazine, rather it is gaining entry into a conception of the world. Is it a book for children? Yes, if you consider children the most exacting readers for whom a book is not just another book, but a condensed world held close to the heart and which surges up in the memory at various stages of life. Fortunate are those who are constantly imprinting in their mind the butterflies flying from one hyacinth to another rather than the world offering a multitude of possibilities. Each one can find his insect, his bird, his monkey, his snake, his fish, in different sizes seen from different angles, making each page a feast for the eyes (un delice pour les yeux, as we say in French).
– Eric Auzoux (Director, Alliance Francaise, Chennai)

The Arjuna tree in the author's village is an ordinary tree. But the author gives it personality. He gives it life. With illustrations and a text that is as graphic. His observations about something as passe as a tree are so striking that you can't but agree with him that a tree is like a 'high-rise building', with its many classes of birds, bees and reptiles ... The language is unpretentious and makes for fast reading, mainly because of the pictures that will keep making you turn the pages. Written and illustrated by the author himself, the book makes for good 'visual' reading.
– India Today

It is heartening to see a new entrant – Tulika Publishers (1996) – setting high goals and matching them with taste and imagination. Its fiction and non-fiction for different age groups are well laid out, the illustrations highlight the content, the colours vivid without a synthetic gaudiness.
    A Tree in my Village, released by Tulika this year, is a work of a special kind ... Sen's words can turn into brush strokes ... text and pictures often have an auditory component. Nature is not forms and colours alone, it orchestrates harmonies ... No doubt the illustrations make the book. What a variety in perspective, framing, focus and angle of vision. There is nothing static here, each visual has its particular shade of meaning. The viewer is infected by their energy. There is a rich, detailed narrative in the images which is out of reach for the pen.
– August 1998, The Hindu

Paritosh Sen's A Tree in my Village, glows on account of the author-artist's exuberant pen-and-ink sketches, washed with water colour. He tells us about the variety of bird, animal and insect (and spirit!) life in and around a giant Arjuna tree in his village in Bangaldesh ...There are some intimidating words and references (for example, 'de rigueur', Mark Rothko), but very sensibly, the publishers have not 'simplified' these, but explained what they mean. Too often, children's writers and publishers think that kids have a fixed vocabulary of about twenty-five words and are not in the least interested in finding out about things.
     Both content and production wise, these two books (A Tree in my Village and Suresh and the Sea) give one a lot to be optimistic about with regard to the future of children's literature in the country. Let's hope there's plenty more of such stuff in the pipeline.
– February-March 1999, Indian Review of Books