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Literary Review
The little star
TARA BOOKS is a small Chennai-based publisher with international tentacles. With one of these it has just looped in the Outstanding Book of the Year award in the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2002. This is a US-based prize for small publishers that demonstrate "innovation and excellence". The Tara-produced book received it for "Best Book Arts Craftsmanship".
I've seen some of Tara's books, which are mainly for children. They are unusual and playful. Several of them are written by Anushka Ravishankar, who sounds like the maestro's daughter but is not. A typical section in one of these, Excuse me, Is this India?, goes "I hopped into a three-wheeled car/ And called out `Take me there!'/ The driver started off at once, / He never asked me `Where?'" Correctly fearing that children would have too much fun with them, few of our schools use them for teaching.
The book that's won the award is for grown-ups. Published with the Paul Getty Museum, this is the story of Sophocles' "Antigone" retold by Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao. It is illustrated by the Baroda artist Indrapramit Roy in a style based on classical Greek pottery — the museum wanted a book that would showcase its Greek collection.
It was then hand-printed on hand-made paper by a Chennai company called AMM Screens. They produced 8500 copies of the book, using nothing more sophisticated, according to the Getty publishing director, than "an old-fashioned guillotine to trim the paper."
ANURADHA ROY
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