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Shortly we will be moving on to a new update on the main PaperTigers website – but, of course, there’s still time to explore Children’s Literature from India and the Indian diaspora, if you haven’t already, and the features will remain readily available via the permalink to the October/November homepage.

And just to remind you of the wealth of resources and sheer joyful reading out there, here’s a glimpse at some recent blog posts from that rich and varied Indian diaspora, as well as India itself:

Find reviews of Signature: Patterns in Gond Art, edited by Gita Wolf, Bhajju Shyam and Jonathan Yamakami (Tara Books, 2010) and The Yellow Bird by Lila Majumdar, illustrated by Ajanta Guhathakurta and translated by Kamala Chatterjee over at Saffron Tree. Both books sound and look wonderful…

Read this post from author Uma Krishnaswami, in which she muses on cultural perspectives, and on making unfamiliar words clear through their context in a story…

Mitali Perkins is (sort of) on her winter break from her blog (her back-posts are still worth perusing, though) BUT you can read a new interview with her over at Color on Line, conducted by Tarie of Asia in the Heart, World on the Mind…

A recent post on Pratham Books’ blog, Revamping Mythological and Traditional Indian Stories, will be of particular interest to graphic novel fans; and they also have lots of news and photos from the recent Bookaroo in the City festival in New Delhi…

Gita Wolf, publisher and director at Tara Books,  has posted a wonderful entry on the Tara Books Blog entitled The Politics of Voice: Folk and Tribal Art in Children’s Literature in which she talks about her presentation at the recent IBBY Congress:

“It may seem, at first glance, that the majority is the dominant force in every society, but those who dramatically change their world, now and throughout history, always belong to the minority.”  With this motto, the International Board on Books for Young People – IBBY – organized their Congress this year in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The theme was The Strength of Minorities. Given Tara’s work with folk and tribal art communities, I was invited to contribute, to talk about how these ‘outsider’ artists could change the course of children’s literature.

The fundamental question for me had to do with how we can re-imagine children’s literature. What possibilities are there in a publishing world that is increasingly dominated by big business, bestsellers, and a certain sameness in what we think is suitable for children?

When we started publishing in 1995, there were very few picture books for children in India. Ours has been a largely oral tradition, and the notion of children’s literature came from abroad. So Indian children’s books tended to be derivative. To create something that was original, we looked around for Indian illustrators, and what excited us most was the potential we saw in traditional artists.

To read the rest of the article (which contains some lovely illustrations and images!) click here .

Note: The image above is by Gond artist Bhajju Shyam and is from the book The Flight of the Mermaid, text by Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao (Tara Books, 2009).  Bhajju is currently featured in our PaperTigers Illustrator Gallery.

I had heard of the book The Night Life of Trees, by Chennai-based Tara Publishing, and the fact that it had won the Bologna Ragazzi “New Horizons” Award (the first title from India to do so) before going to the Bologna Book Fair. The award spotlights the cultural heritage and innovative drive coming from children’s book publishing in the Arab world, Latin America, Asia and Africa, so I knew the book was bound to be a treat. But nothing could have prepared me for the jolt I experienced when I finally saw it.

When you flip through the book’s pages you understand why it has won a prestigious children’s book award even though it was originally created as an art book. The book rekindles one’s sense of wonder. Everything about it invites closer inspection: the wonderful ink smell; the texture of the handmade paper; the intricacy of the majestic trees inhabited by creatures; the myths and folktales accompanying them…

Tara Publishing’s website states that their books are “largely visual in nature – and radical, witty and informed in spirit.” The Night Life of Trees is, no doubt, one such book. Silk-screened and hand-bound, with its luminous trees jumping out of the pages’ black backdrop, this book offers a glimpse into the world views of three of the finest artists from the Gond tribe of Madhya Pradesh, in Central India, namely, Ram Singh Urveti, Durga Bai and Bhajju Shyam.

The idea for the book, we learned from a presentation given by Tara founder Gita Wolf and editor Sirish Rao on the first day of the book fair, came out of one of Tara’s illustrators’ workshops. Participants from the Gond tribe kept including trees on every single one of their drawings. “When asked to draw a bird, they would draw a bird on a tree; when asked to draw a person, they would draw a person next to a tree; when asked to draw clouds, they would draw clouds over a tree, and so on,” (more…)

Dana's Sister,Brandy,had her tenth birthday and she always gets her way so this year she had a egg hunt and at first everyone was just looking for eggs but when they heard they weren't hard boiled that's when a egg fight started.It was very messy and Brandy got in trouble and then Dana found this huge egg that had veins and a heart beat.He took it in his room and put it in his sock drawer.The next morning he heard a loud cracking noise and when he opened his drawer he found this huge gross blob of eggs with two black beady eyes.

What I like about the book is it is like the book "How I Got My Shrunken Head" because in this book the boy figures out how to use the shrunken head and figures out how it has cool powers,and the egg monsters have powers if you touch one.How I got my shrunken head is cool,too.