The Gijjigadus and the Fireflies — Fantasy and Folklore in an Indian Picture Book
‘The Gijjigadus and the Fireflies’ is a sumptuous book, with beautiful detailed illustrations that keep you riveted on each page. This retelling of a Telugu folktale is a charming story about the coexistence ( symbiosis) between fireflies and Baya Weaver birds — written by Gopini Karunakar, illustrated by Atanu Roy and published by Katha Books.
Atanu Roy talks about what went into this book, about his life and his times, with an eventful career spanning decades — in illustration, design, cartooning, fine art , copy writing — you name it, he’s done it!
Over to Atanu dada — one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met, with a wicked sense of humor!
Me — Tell us about how this book came into being.
Atanu — It was somewhere around 2005–6 that Geeta Dharmarajan offered me Gijjigadu.
The story was about this old lady and her weaver birds. I had started doing preliminary sketches but it was during a seminar organized by NBT, when I began sketching on the notepad provided, that I got my character!!
I started work on it immediately and finished the book in a record time of less than six months.
Me — I am always amazed at how prolific you are dada.
Atanu — Working from home as a true freelancer had its own challenges of insecurities so I decided to create a safety shield by taking on extra work as a backup. I had a backlog of five years and a load of ever pleading clients to finish their work. Now it has been painfully reduced to about three years and it is all picture books.
Me — Tell us about how the illustrations were made.
Atanu — I used black fountain pen ink for the drawing and Winsor & Newton Concentrated Water Colors in bottles which were gifted to me by the legendary painter/ sculptor Mr. A Ramachandran himself.
Making a caricature of the weaver birds was not working so I decided on working in two layers and the birds were realistic in a surreal setting. The most challenging part was to control the smudging of the ink as one applied the water color.
And then there was the one where the moon is scratching his back. For this I devised the closed area to give him a surface to rub his back!
Me — What was the experience like, illustrating this big book — did the large scale format influence the illustration style.
Atanu — The original artworks were of a much smaller size for a regular sort of a book but Raju Dharmarajan, Geeta’s husband and equally involved, decided on the Big Book concept and radically changed the sequence and arrangement of the pages.
Thanks to extremely high quality scanning and control over the printing and high production values the book came out a winner. I really enjoyed doing this book and it is still in print and hopefully it’ll be there for years to come.
Me — Tell us about yourself. What were some experiences that shaped your work as an artist?
Atanu — Yours truly comes from a lower middle class family with five siblings and parents perpetually trying to make ends meet without us kids realizing which is why, I had a more or less happy childhood.
My dad was a NCO (Non Commissioned Officer) in the Air Force and my earliest recollections are still vivid when we were in the Air Force Station, Jodhpur.
In 1956 as a six year old I was going to have the time of life when Dad took us all to Noakhali, the native place for both my parents in Bangladesh for an extended holiday. I have very clear memories of the trip beginning with the ferry crossing the Padma River to the sprawling mud and jute thatched house, compound, the kitchen hut, the various ponds, paddy fields, coconut and supari groves and the variety of local fruits. It was a full house with all my five mamas and two mashis, my grand ma and two elderly aunts of my mom too.
The day would begin with my aunts pounding the dheki to flatten par boiled rice into chira or flattened rice. Fresh khejur gur and grated fresh coconut was just divine food that one really misses. After this hearty meal we would head for the digha or the big community pond to bathe and watch the hired group of professional fishermen encircle the fish with a high net and some of the fish would dramatically jump clear out of the net. Also we could easily catch Koi or the climbing carp holding on to the reeds along the bank.
I remember we left my mother’s place to go to my dad’s about 25 miles away and the only way to travel was by boat. I remember the boat ride on the canal with the boatman singing Bhatiyali songs through the night and the boat was just inches above the water.
From here we moved to Jammu for about two years in 1959. Probably the most wasted time in my life so far. We went the local Govt. High School and every morning after wet plastering the floor of our class under the Sheesham tree with cow dung, we swam in the Choti Nahar or the lesser canal during the lunch break and walked back home in the late afternoon. It was in Jammu that we got our pet Alexandrine Parrot Khoka.
In 1961 we came to Delhi and after a few months we moved into our residence in the Old Wellington Camp next to the race course. This was heaven compared to all that had passed before. A large house with sloping asbestos roof and a big front yard, a huge space on the left and a back side with an outhouse. There was a Sirholi mango tree and a banana tree cluster with hedges around, a huge babool tree in the front along with a neem tree. We had a Badminton court and had lights installed for endless games in the evening. The equipment was provided by the Air Force. We got our chicken and named each one of them and started school which changed my life for good.
Me — You transported me with your description. And what vivid memories! Lovely! You spent the larger part of your childhood in Delhi, isn’t it? Was it the time you discovered your inclination towards art?
Atanu — I went to The Air Force Central School aka AFCS which was across the house and over the nullah for us. I started school in the sixth standard and, the new books, dress and the School Assembly in the morning are still so fresh in my mind. The classes were divided into basic subjects and hobbies and games. This is when my inclination for art took off although it was something that I did not want to pursue as it was considered quite a sissy profession then.
Even then I was regularly packed off to art competitions and always came back with the prize. I remember the Shankar’s on the spot painting competition which was held in the Modern School grounds and me winning the first time and receiving the prize from the then Railway Minister Lal Bahadur Shashtri — eating all the pastries and picking books from this huge pile was thrilling to say the least. Thereafter I had won another couple of times besides a horde of other competitions.
Me — Was Art a subject in school?
Atanu — Art was not taught in school nor was it a subject per se but was there as an extracurricular activity along with carpentry, leatherwork and music.
Our art class was a huge hall with low sitting and a big soft board at an incline where we would tack on this beautiful imported cartridge paper and with basic Japanese powder color mixed in water on enamel plates we would paint directly without any pencil or eraser. The brushes were all flat long handled ones and detailing was minimal. Then there was carpentry and each of us had our own station with all the tools and a vice. Leatherwork was also something I enjoyed with all the hot glue and the color and finally glazing and punching to strap up the creation…
Me — You were also the captain of the athletics team representing the state in the National Games.
Atanu — I was an average student but did surprisingly well in the initial years. NCC was a robust program in which the school had to train the boys for the NDA. I tried really hard but flunked the marching test and was hit by depression for a while when the miracle of my life happened. We got a new coach whom we called lambu but his real name was Jaswant Rai. On being taunted by our principal he decided to form a winning team out of the odd lot of students. And I was selected as the first Captain of the athletic team.
Wearing the pink colored spikes for the first time and stepping on the cinder track of the National Stadium at the India Gate was an experience that still sends a thrill down my spine. In the first Delhi State School Games I participated I created a national record in the hundred meter dash in the under sixteen category. This record remained for the next several years. Besides this I was also into the two hundred meter and the relay team.
It had become my first love and we trained really hard and also had a special diet which was mostly a lot of milk, eggs, butter and salted nimboo pani! After the State games I was chosen for the National Games in Madras where I was at sea with the burly athletes who simply walked all over us!
Me — You also told me that cartooning is your first love. Tell us more about that.
Atanu — My dad got posted to the new Hindon air force station near Ghaziabad in UP and me and my brother joined the hostel in the school. This was the place which would shape me and make me ready to take life head on!
What I developed the most here was my sense of humor. Since most of us were from an Air Force background, speaking English was a given and we boys were all the time exchanging stories and sharing jokes. I was introduced to Mad magazine and promptly fell in love with its total craziness. I could see humor in almost all things and situations and slowly started making cartoons which became my first love…
Me — Is that when you decided to get into an Art College?
Atanu — After school I faced the dilemma of my life as to what I should pursue as a career. My coach gave me a letter of recommendation for a sports scholarship and I went to the Delhi University for the first time to the Shri Ram College. What I saw there, left me so depressed, that I just came back home.
Then we went to Dadu, who was a mystic living opposite the Kali Bari in Delhi. Dadu saw me through his thick glasses and mumbled that I should pursue what I am good at, thereby sealing my fate.
Me — Then, on to Delhi College of Art?
Atanu — With a lot of confidence I landed at the Delhi College of Art premises and was surprised to see such a crowd of students coming for the entrance test. And they were all talking in an alien lingo of sable hair brushes, handmade paper, watercolor, still life and mixed media. Also the majority of them came from schools with art as a subject.
Anyway once I entered I felt confident and we seated in a circular pattern with a brick and a jug with some drapery placed in the centre on a stool. I noticed everyone holding their pencils and holding it at eye level and winking!! I thought the guys were making a serious pass at the girls already!!
I drew the still life really small in the middle of the page with the HB pencil I had and then there was a paper on composition which I painted a street scene with gusto and finally my greatest hope was the paper on GK. I really sailed through it and left for home.
Now comes the most dramatic moment of my life so far… On the day the results were declared I was stunned to see my name at the bottom of the waiting list!! I was on the verge of tears when the two girls who were also on the waiting list decided to quit and go to Jaipur.
As I was walking away there was a shout and I looked back to see this fair and plump man with tousled curly hair, Mr. Maharaj Kishore, calling me over and saying that there is a seat available if I could deposit Rs.150 right away before the banks closed. I was totally out of my depth as it was impossible to go home and come back in time. Then, in a flash, I remembered Banerjee Kaku (Uncle) with whose help my entrance to the college was done.
I entered the class with the resolve that now I’m here I’ll try and do my best in this new learning from here on. My class had started when I entered and I was able to grasp things very slowly. But soon I had made friends with most of them and showed off my drawing skills by rapidly drawing some action scenes which seemed to have impressed my teacher, Mr. Sarkar who said loudly to the class that this boy will be a great success in the years to come. I didn’t believe him then but will proudly say that it is mostly true for me.
Me — Did you like your time at college?
Atanu — College was indeed the best time of my life where we would go sketching in the densely crowded Jama Masjid area and eat a huge mutton kofta with naan at the now shut Meerutwale kawab shop. I made friends with some of the tongawalas and sketched their skinny horses. Besides this I would furiously sketch every day and enjoy it too!
There was the college tour where we went to the south. It was a totally fabulous experience for me and my sketches of the temples with a shaven nib pen were really popular. Sadly my locker was robbed and most of my favorite artworks were thus lost.
In the annual exams I got first place and was also given the Merit Scholarship of Rs.75/- every month. I remained a merit scholar all through except for a year.
I did pick up a lot of new things but was still at sea about art per se. In the third year there was a strike, so college was in limbo and things just drifted.
Me — How did you manage then?
Atanu — I joined an advertising agency called Mac in the nearby Bengali Market. It was a small group of us where I was the Art Director. I worked here for more than a year and this would be a valuable experience for me in shaping my attitude. Soon after, college reopened…
Me — And did your time at Mac lead to new work experiences?
Atanu — One day, there were some people at the college gate wanting to talk to me. They had come from a two star hotel recently opened in Karol Bagh called Sobti Hotel and wanted me to do some publicity folders for them. I agreed and together with a girl from Mac and a photographer from the college did the job and got it printed and delivered.
This was also the time when my teacher Shri Pranab Chakravarty introduced me to the publishing world by asking me to go to Rajpal & Sons, a very prominent publishing house in the Kashmeri Gate area of old Delhi. Well I made a few imaginary covers and left them at the desk of the editor Shri Mahendra Kulshreshta.
Mr. Kulshreshta became one of my best friends and guide. I was given my first book cover to do which was liked and I got my first payment of Rs. 75!! Thereafter I did a lot of covers and had the chance to meet some famous authors as well which was a huge learning experience. This was also my springboard of being a freelancer henceforth. And, as my coach had taught me that an athlete is all alone and to be on the lookout forever looking and assessing the competition and keeping aware of everything around.
Me — This was part –time work while you were continuing your education. What were some things in college that shaped your attitude towards art?
Atanu — With the degree came new subjects and one of them was aesthetics. It finally opened my eyes to the meanings I had been looking for and I sort of felt liberated from thereon. Finally I passed out in 1974 coming first with a distinction in aesthetics, as one of the first Degree holders from college. I had applied and had been offered the prestigious National Scholarship which I rejected, as I was asked to go to the NID in Ahmedabad instead of Delhi.
Me — What were the initial years like, after you graduated?
Atanu — After finishing my BFA I worked for a film magazine called Dreamstar located in the Fleet Street of India called Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg near my college and this gave me an opportunity to design a full magazine and meet with famous people like Conrad Rooks and a trip to Bombay (now Mumbai) to interview a whole lot of the filmi folks including an offer to stay back and make a new career there. Then in 1975 came my big break when I had taken a few cartoons for a new magazine that was supposed to come out soon. It was supposed to be ‘The’ magazine!!
This was a politically charged time when I went to meet Vijay Shankar, the blue eyed boy of the press who was now working for the new magazine called Surya. I had taken a few cartoons of mine to show to Vijay when I came to know about the magazine.
In the time of the infamous ‘Emergency’ it was the place to be for everyone. From Gerson da Cunha of Lintas, Mumbai, Srikant Binge the famous Art Director in the Ad world, Harmeet Singh (National Geographic photographer), Raghu Rai to Khushwant Singh all jumped onto the bandwagon!
I joined the staff as the Art Director plus all the sundry jobs like interacting with the paper suppliers, advertisements for the magazine and of course looking after the printing and distribution. It was an awfully important learning experience for me. With our photographer Bhawan Singh I had some great times and learnt the basics of photography from him besides becoming a lifelong friend.
One day I got an offer from India Today to do a cover for them which was much liked and soon on a whim I quit and started doing cartoons for them including a column called Cartoonscope. It was a fortnightly and I had enough time to do my column. I realized that it was a fairly easy job being a political cartoonist as most of the work was done by the politician himself!!
Soon after I left for Tokyo and stayed there for about two years working with ad agencies and actually survived by copywriting!! Most of the copy was as headlines for ads for Citizen Watches in the Middle East.
When I came back I immediately called Aroon Poorie, owner and editor of India Today and Thomson Press. He called me over and offered me the Design Unit, a specialized design team for the clients of the press. I joined that very day and was also handling the designing of sister magazines like Destination India and Bombay besides doing my cartoon page called Ha!Ha! for Target the children’s magazine which later got me a place in the Limca Book of Records.
I quit this place too and decided to open my own design setup called Profile. The office was situated on the fifth floor in the busy and prestigious market of C block, Vasant Vihar. My colleague from Design Unit, Desraj, quit as well and joined me as an equal partner. We ran this place successfully for seventeen years and closed it down once my house got ready in Gurgaon and Desraj had also moved far in the opposite direction, it was simply not feasible to commute the distance any more.
Me — You have often spoken about visual literacy. Tell us more about that.
Atanu — Sometime in the early nineties I was asked to speak about visual literacy at a conference of Education Ministers from all the states of the country as well as writers and authors of children’s literature and picture books.
It was a chance I had been waiting for - to talk about the idea that the first expression of any communication was art rather than language, which came much, much later.
There was pandemonium in the hall when I said this with the crowd refusing to accept the dominance of the visual over the written word! Then I gave them the example of imagining something that they have not seen and then write about it. If one has never seen an elephant for example, how will you write about it? We can only imagine about things which we have seen and even if one has to fantasize it can only be within these limits.
The crowd was flummoxed and there was a lot of mumbling and finally a trickle, and then there was a long applause. I was really thrilled to bits about my performance in front of such a vast crowd. This was the time when I was asked if I would like to come to Trivandrum and work on the DPEP (District Primary Education Project).
Me — Tell us about your work with the District Primary Education Project.
Atanu — This was a World Bank funded program running in seven states of the country. It was meant to improve the learning capacities of children and that meant creating new text books. I saw there were a lot of teachers there working furiously over the content. I then started on my theory of the percentages of visual versus the text. My idea is that the smaller the child the more the visuals, as the child does not as yet have the understanding of the concept of the word or the writing. So on my suggestion we went looking for illustrators and the first stop was at Art College next door.
My main job was that of Capacity Building by training the artists the nuances of book illustration, typography, layout, design and printing. There was nothing much to teach these guys as Kerala has a rich tradition of visual arts and the phenomenal number of magazines and they are all vividly illustrated. Once these boys came in, work started in right earnest and pages were done at record speed.
For the processing of the pages we dispatched our chief typesetter Vilip, to Madras and once he came back with the positives we started printing the books. The front and the back cover had games on them and were in color while the inside pages were in black… once I finished here I went to Chandigarh to finish their books but there was hardly any talent available so I had to do it myself.
Thereafter I went to Andhra Pradesh with similar lack of talent, Assam and Uttar Pradesh. My association with Kerala has continued with the Malayalam Mission program to develop books for the Malayali speaking population overseas.
Atanu Roy’s capacity building initiatives have trained many talented artists to be illustrators. Learn more about Riyaaz Academy for Illustrators here, a joint initiative by Atanu Roy, Eklavya and Parag initiative of Tata Trusts when it first started in 2015.
‘The Gijjigadus and the Fireflies’ is available here and here.
The idea behind this series of interviews is to give readers a glimpse into the world of children’s publishing and picture book illustration in India — what illustrators actually do and how they work their magic. Stay tuned!
Read the interviews with children’s book illustrators Ishita Biswas , Sunita , Deepa Balsavar, Bhargav Kulkarni, Ruchi Mhasane, Ashok Rajagopalan, Priya Sebastian, Karen Haydock, Archana Sreenivasan
