Dotting the Paper,the Town

Original Tamil text: Salai Selvam

English text: V. Geetha and Gita Wolf

Publisher: Tara Books

Price: Rs 750

Drawing from the City the subtle word play in the title of this charming book points to an insight in the role of the city in the rebirth of folk art in post-Independence India. The city is not only the subject that many folk artists draw upon to stress the contemporaneity of their art,but it is also the site of novelty and experimentation. It was Ganesh Jogi and Tejubehans shift to the city Ahmedabad and then Mumbai that led to the encounter with the famous painter Haku Shah and the birth of what is now known as the Jogi style of folk painting.

They belong to a community of bards,one of the many singer-storytellers who have entertained rural audiences for centuries. Haku Shah was impressed by the depth of Ganeshs imagination and encouraged him to turn his storytelling skills to another medium. Ganeshs wife Teju,the artist whose drawings are the focus of this book,his children and their spouses followed in his footsteps,first imitating his distinctive dot-patterned style and then evolving styles of their own,which were nevertheless close enough to each other to become a recognisable tradition. By telling her stories through a book where pictures and words combine to form a multimedia mode of storytelling,Teju has perhaps taken another step in the development of this new folk art tradition.

Tara Books is known for its experimentation with different folk art forms and the high quality of its productions. Along with some other publishers,it may well be in the process of evolving a new genre of storytelling where pictures do not merely serve as illustrations of the text. Instead,words and pictures seem to communicate on separate registers and it is the creative friction between the two that generates a sense of excitement in the reader.

In this book,the text is minimal,acting as a frame to foreground the picture that occupies most of the page. The story as such is simple it charts Tejus life and her movement,along with that of others of her community,from the village to the city. But the pictures and the motifs that are woven into the story give it a fairy-tale quality that is very appealing. By no means a book for children,though some children may enjoy it,it is a fairy tale in the traditional sense of a story that can speak across generations and region.

It describes village life,not quite idyllic because of the poverty that we sense lurking in the background,and gives enchanting glimpses of modern technology and the wider world like the train carrying exotic passengers who are not like the people in the village,they are like faces you see on calendars,or on photos.

Tejus own journey to the city by train,being forced to seek work as migrant labourer,scenes of the slums they have lived in,her marriage,the meeting with the artist Haku Shah,the opportunity to move to new and exciting occupations these are the strands that make up the story. As urban viewers of the folk arts,we are quite used to seeing motifs such as trains and airplanes incorporated in folk paintings,as indexes of the modern world. What saves this story from becoming clichéd is the way in which the artist,Teju,and the writers,who have adapted her story to the text,have juxtaposed images and words in a way that seems entirely novel. Scenes of the forest,dwellings made of old plastic sheets and gunny bags in the slum,and the tall buildings in Mumbai,are depicted in a style that is clearly folk with its ornamental design of dots and half circles that cover the surface of the page. At first glance it reminds one of the Gond style,another new folk art tradition,but a closer look reveals significant differences in the way that dots,lines,crosses and half circles are combined or juxtaposed to create different kinds of texture on the surface of the page. Apart from the use of decorative patterns,Teju has a distinctive way of using the face and eyes to enliven a blank surface the outer wall of a building,a window or even the doorway of a shack. We see a face,but more often eyes or even a single eye filling up the space that is supposed to be a windowscreen of a car or an airplane. It is as if the artist is present in scene after scene,a witness to a city always on the move.

Roma Chatterji,a professor of sociology at Delhi School of Economics,is the author of Speaking with Pictures