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The prevalent mindset in India has been that children's books aren't
value for money. If one can buy a management book for Rs 50, the
rationale goes, why would one buy a 20-page picture book for the same
amount of money? Radhika Menon's Tulika Books, has been a pioneer in
the field of original children's publishing in India. Mindfields talks
to her about the journey.
ENTERING THE WORLD OF CHILDREN'S
PUBLISHING
After college, I taught at the J. Krishnamurti School (The School KFI)
in Chennai from
1978 to 1979. I did my B.Ed while teaching there, so in effect, I went
to teach with no background - just my curiosity, and an interest in
J.Krishnamurti 's philosophy. It was at the school that I got the
opportunity to see some really good children's books - mainly
American, British, and Russian books.
The lack of Indian children's books of that kind of quality was
glaring. It hit me even more when doing a class project on an
India-based topic - even something as basic as rivers
or mountains of India. Facts were easy to find as our whole approach
to teaching is so
fact-oriented but where were the stories, songs, poems?
There is a culture, a history, a people's lifestyle that is linked to
the geography of a place and that is the kind of understanding that
you want children to get from project-based learning. A
cross-curricular approach was possible when the topic was, say, the
Amazon forests - there were enough books and children could find
information themselves. But not if the topic was the river Ganga!
(Incidentally Tulika has published four books on the Ganga, Narmada,
Brahmaputra and Kaveri rivers in the Read and Colour River Stories
series with precisely this kind of approach.)
This realisation that how much, good children's books could enhance
the creative teaching /learning process is what sparked off my
interest in children's books. I certainly wasn't thinking of
publishing then but became aware of the
wealth of material there was and the creative possibilities of
children's books.
Then came the whole experience of discovering wonderful children's
books with my children - reading to them, looking at pictures. Around
that time we moved to Delhi and I taught briefly at Sardar Patel
Vidyalaya. There the medium of instruction was Hindi till class 5. I
found myself teaching English bilingually and realised
how naturally that worked. As my children were in the school too, I
was delighted that they were as comfortable in Hindi as they were in
English.
But there was great resistance when it came to reading books in Hindi
which to them seemed so drab visually and very often text-heavy
compared to the foreign books in English they read.
While teaching there I was given the responsibility of setting up the
primary school library which I did. So my engagement with children's
books became deeper. Now I was not thinking of Indian children's books
as just in English but that they had to be in the different languages
and even be bilingual.
Looking back, the exposure to teaching children in an Indian language
and listening to the songs, stories, plays, riddles and rhymes changed
the way I thought of children's books in a subtle way. Intrinsic to
Indian children's books was an Indian style of telling, visualizing
and illustrating. Indian children's books, even in English, had to
have an Indian sensibility in the use of language, contexts, visuals,
and even in the look and feel, if it had to be rooted in the culture
like the best of children's books are. The idea of children's books
combining the best of storytelling and art from both from here and the
west was very exciting.
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FOLK TALES AND BEYOND
Folk stories sell. The reason why parents pick
up folk stories is their familiarity level with this kind of book
- something tells them they won’t go wrong. That is changing. Our
earliest, best selling books were retellings of old folk stories –
the writers interpreted stories their own way, but the stories
were always contemporized
Many of our titles, like Pranav's
Picture and I'm so Sleepy (illustrated by NID students)
are idea-based. I am Different is a multilingual book illustrated
by noted author and
illustrator Manjula Padmanabhan.
What Shall I Make? is about a child imagining things to do
with the dough while his mother
is making chapattis - it's written by a mom whose child actually
did this.
While
working on My Mother's Sari, we could have followed a
certain formula to guarantee success - made the illustrations
exotic, pretty. We chose to go against that, and follow our own
vision. The child in the book is an average looking child, the
saris are of ordinary fabrics that you'd find in a household.
Our books go to villages, government
schools, tribal schools (not just urban bookstores)
and we believe that nothing in our content should alienate the
(non-urban) child. It would be undermining the very purpose of
doing books in so many languages. It is an editorial policy. That
My Mother's Sari went on to garner perceptive reviews and
awards was a big high
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THE
EARLY DAYS OF TULIKA
Around 1990 I left teaching to join hands with my sister-in-law Indira
Chandrashekhar and set up a pre-press unit with two Apple Macintoshes
which had just come into the market. We started by doing pre-press
work for many publishing houses like Penguin, Sahitya Akademi, Rupa,
etc and also turnkey printing work. That was how I discovered the joys
of producing printed material from start to finish! And I suppose that
was the beginning of my journey into publishing.
We called our unit Tulika Print Communications Services. The name
means 'quill' in Malayalam and Sanskrit, 'brush' in some languages.
The name stuck. As we gained experience both Indu and I started
thinking 'publishing'.
The goal now was to make enough money to start our own publishing -
which never happens we realized soon enough! So we just took the
plunge. Without giving it too much thought we both retained the name
Tulika for our respective publishing houses Tulika Publishers in
Chennai publishes children's books and Tulika Books in Delhi publishes
academic books.
Moving back to Chennai gave me the impetus to start Tulika Publishers
in 1996. An old friend and colleague Sandhya Rao (she was with us in
Tulika, Delhi) joined me and in the first year we brought out three
books, two of them bilingual (Line and Circle and Number
Birds) in English and Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam. The third one
was a Hindi alphabet book, Ka se Kapde Kaise.
When we showed the books to friends in the publishing world they were
all most discouraging saying the books were far too expensive because
they were so well produced! They were also sceptical about the
bilingual concept. But both Sandhya and I were so convinced about what
we were doing that there was no stopping us.
We started by doing books in English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and
Malayalam as we could handle these languages between us. In 2000,
Pratham launched their Read India programme and wanted ten of our
titles in four languages, three of them new. They wanted the ten
titles in Hindi, Kannada, Marathi and Gujarati in three months! We
jumped at the opportunity to add new languages.
A year later we added Telugu and two years later, Bangla. So now we do
books in 9 languages - English, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu,
Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati and Bangla.
It was not an easy decision and, from a business point of view then,
perhaps foolish. It meant creating nine different markets for our
books.
It would have been far easier financially, editorially and for
production if we had stuck to just English and may be Hindi which had
a good market. It has been a struggle but looking back I think we
have, by going against accepted trends, overturned notions of what
makes good publishing sense. And we have gone on to become
trendsetters in children's publishing in many ways!
We are now at a stage when the business is driven by the books in the
different languages and our multilingual books our strongest asset.
Though we are still struggling to find the market for a couple of the
languages we are keeping them alive by printing as few as 200 to 250 –
print runs unheard of in publishing. But we are confident that books
in these languages too will find a market soon.
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We get a lot of inquiries from young people who have liked our
books. Many of them have high pressure jobs in design or
animation, or are students - but would like to do a children's
book. They are doing this on the side, or have jobs already - it's
not all about the money. We are always making these connections.
They do not have ego problems that established artists can have,
the work is fresh and unjaded.
Going after them is hard work, but our alternative distribution
channels have proven to be a blessing - the NGOs, government
programs. All children's literacy programs require books, but
there is great paucity. We have tied up with several regional
publishers like the Kerala Government's Kerala Balasahitya
Institute. The print runs are big here, we get royalty on sales -
and volumes make all the difference.
We have been trying ways to make work affordable and easily
distributable to NGOs. Sometimes we do large prints on newsprint.
Some work has been done with grants and sponsorship from corporate
companies -like the four-part animals with photographs series
supported by HSBC. (Riddle of the Ridley, addresses the
threat to the survival of the Olive Ridley turtles that come to
nest on the eastern coastline of India).
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MULTILINGUAL PUBLISHING AND
DISTRIBUTION
Publishing in so many languages has been a huge learning curve for us
in every aspect. For children to be comfortable with reading in their
own language they have to see it as equal in status to English books.
They have to feel the same pride of ownership, find the same enjoyment
from reading the books. The look and feel of the book draws children
to books as much as the content. It's their right to get the best
books in whatever language they read.
Distribution is the biggest challenge primarily because of the price
factor. We have resisted doing cheaper language editions and have kept
to the same quality of production as English and kept the same prices.
We were clear from the beginning that if we privileged the English
books with a higher quality of production we would be
undermining the very purpose of doing books in so many languages.
It was always thrown at us that by pricing our books high we were
making the books inaccessible to the majority of children. But we were
not targeting those sections who could not afford to buy books to
begin with. Our primary target was the English book-buying segment who
visited bookstores and we saw no reason to subsidise costs for them.
Books are not cheap products anywhere in the world and the buyer has
to pay the price for a good book just as she/he pays for a good meal.
This of course brings up the unfairness of making good books
inaccessible to a majority. The solution to that was finding
alternative distribution channels, not under pricing books. Over the
years we have built a network of alternative channels through NGOs,
government agencies and regional co-publishing.
Our books are regularly bought in bulk for reading literacy programmes
and the volumes enable us to offer substantial discounts. Today there
are probably more Tulika titles in government school libraries than in
private school ones.
THE MATTER OF PRICING
The strategy of the same pricing for all languages is paying off as
bookstores are increasingly looking for books in other languages - the
same bookstores that refused to keep them a few years ago. We are also
selling more and more through our website which caters to the more
informed and aware buyers who don't hesitate to pay the price for good
books whatever the language. And many of them come to our site looking
for good books in Indian languages.
ON WHAT COMES NEXT
Twelve years after we started, our books are seen as the best
children's books in India and from India. Publishing in nine Indian
languages has given us a unique understanding of the plural culture of
the country, and this in turn is reflected in our books.
What has been most rewarding is that the same books that find their
way to government school libraries in different languages have also
won international acclaim and have been published in other countries.
In short, the reach of the books is across the local, national and
international, and cuts across linguistic, cultural and economic
divides. And now they are crossing over into other media too. We will
soon see the Aditi series of twelve books in animation - a first for
Indian animation and Indian publishing. This year we have brought out
audio versions of some of our Hindi books for the US market.
Apart from the core team of ten in Chennai we have a team of committed
associates helping in the marketing and distribution of books in
different parts of the country and abroad. Then there is our expanding
network of authors, illustrators and translators from all over the
world - from well-known names to talented young first-timers.
As for our publishing we will continue to explore and discover ways of
creating a richly diverse range of books - contemporary, democratic
and rooted in a multilingual, plural culture.
FOR MORE
INFORMATION ANO TO BUY TULIKA TITLES ONLINE VISIT WWW.TULIKABOOKS.COM
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