Children’s literature

Beyond the grid

Contours of a character: Katrin Engelking’s illustration for the Pippi Longstocking book.

When the Delhi-based German Book Office — a joint venture between the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Foreign Office, Berlin — co-sponsored the children’s literature festival Bookaroo in the capital last winter, it was only the beginnin g of a series of initiatives for the fastest-growing segment of the Indian publishing industry. “We want to look at various avenues of publishing and find ways of developing them,” says Akshay Pathak, director, GBO, “and children’s books are our primary focus this year.” Accordingly, the office has now launched a programme called Jumpstart specifically for children’s publishing in India.

One of the initial concerns for Pathak’s office was that Indian children’s publishers don’t get enough opportunities to form contacts with their international counterparts and to explore how things are done in other markets. It was with this in mind that the GBO organised a publishers’ and editors’ trip to Germany last month, which enabled editors from seven publishing houses — Scholastic, Young Zubaan, DC Books, Ratna Sagar, TERI Press, Sterling and BPI — to meet representatives of leading German children’s publishers such as Oetinger, Carlsen and Beltz & Gelberg. Presentations and discussions over the course of the trip provided a sense of how mature and varied the German children’s publishing market is. At a prize-winning children’s bookshop, the Indian publishers saw how supplementary activities — such as sleep-ins where audio-books are played to groups of children — can help keep young readers interested. At the Kinderbuchhaus (Children’s Book House) in Hamburg, they learnt about workshops where children are shown how to bind books, to help them appreciate the book-making process. And a “speed-dating” session in Berlin facilitated personal interaction and the discussion of buying and selling of rights between the Indian and German publishers.

The experience also provided a forum for the participating editors to discuss the challenges facing children’s publishing in India. The issues addressed range from the lack of adequate marketing of children’s books to the regressive nature of school textbooks that provide children with their introduction to the world of reading. “There are still so many gender biases and stereotypes in children’s textbooks in India,” says Atiya Zaidi, publisher, Ratna Sagar. “In Mathematics problems a husband will always draw a higher salary than his wife, girls will always get fewer marks than boys. You don’t find a north-eastern name or an Oriya name in a textbook — imagine how all this conditions children’s minds over the years.”

Another problem is the conservatism — or timidity — of many Indian parents, and the belief that fun for its own sake is to be frowned upon. As Madhu Singh Sirohi, head, TERI Press, says, “The major demand in India is for books that are connected to the syllabus somehow, or to the knowledge greed of the parent — so innovation is not really required, and content remains fairly standardised.” The result: a lack of imagination and irreverence in children’s literature.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the attitude towards illustrations, which are so central to the children’s publishing industry everywhere except in India. At the Kinderbuchhaus, exhibitions of framed, original versions of children’s book illustrations help visitors to see these drawing as works of art in their own right. There’s a lesson here for the many Indian parents who instinctively judge a book’s worth purely by the amount of text it contains (preferably placed in the service of a pedantic moral lesson) and who fail to realise the role that a series of beautiful drawings can play in developing a child’s imagination. (As Zaidi pricelessly puts it, “You want value for your word-count? Buy a newspaper.”)

“Though the Indian art scene is lively and brilliant,” says Anita Roy, editor, Young Zubaan, “there’s a lack of understanding of how children’s picture-books work. Publishers rarely involve illustrators in the creative aspect of putting a book together. We don’t even realise how vitally important a layout is — we simply get artists to work separately on their drawings and then somehow insert them in between the text.”

Making children’s books look good is an important concern for the GBO and its associates. Among its forthcoming programmes under the Jumpstart banner are a series of intensive workshops for professionals involved in children’s books: writers and editors, illustrators, librarians and teachers, and marketing personnel — the idea being that if the hard work done by talented artists and writers is backed by good marketing, there’s no reason why readers won’t follow. “There are very few writers’ residencies and groups in India,” says Roy, “and such measures are badly needed.”

The first of these workshops will be held in July, at Delhi’s Max Mueller Bhawan, and other initiatives will follow: going by last year’s attendance, the Bookaroo festival can be expected to grow bigger, and the publishers who travelled to Germany are now planning a special catalogue about the best children’s books in India, to be distributed to bookshops and libraries. A vibrant, vital segment of the Indian publishing industry is set to get the attention it deserves.

Katrin Engelking: Subtle variations of colour and texture.

Katrin Engelking is a leading German illustrator who has worked on more than 40 children’s books for publishers like Oetinger and Ravensburger. She has illustrated the new editions of Astrid Lindgren’s famous Pippi Longstocking books. Excerpts from a conversation…

Normally I work on one big project at a time, but one has to adjust. Publishers typically want you to send a book cover in advance — for the catalogue and other promotional material — so there are times when I’m doing the inside illustrations for a particular book but also simultaneously working on the cover illustration of my next project. And if the two books require different styles, it can be tricky! Once I made a cover and they printed it for the catalogue but later I ordered it back and added a few elements, because by that time I had a clearer idea of what the rest of the book would be like.

It varies. Once I told an author, whom I knew very well, that I had looked at the moon one day and saw a rabbit shape on it. So she developed that idea into a story and I illustrated it! But we worked separately: she wrote the story first and then I took over. When I’m doing both the text and the drawings for a book, I write the story first and then work out how much space there is for the illustrations.

Quite scary! I was reading these books when I was growing up, like nearly everyone else. Pippi is such a famous character in Germany, everybody loves her, so it was daunting to do these new drawings of her. I’ve done one Pippi picture-book but I’m doing others now and there are 50 colour illustrations in each.

There are no contractual problems, except that you can’t draw the same characters for different publishers. But you have to manage your time and your deadlines. In my case I’ve developed a good relationship with Oetinger and we fit together very well, so I mostly work for them now.

I don’t think so. It depends on how good you are — if you come out of nowhere but your pictures are good enough to impress a publisher, that should be enough. On the other hand, when you’re doing a professional course, there are many talented people working together and competing, which is a useful environment to be in.

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