Art in children's books comes of age

Mint

02-05-2025

Sasha was blue all of December—her best friend, Naisha, who had been with her since nursery, had shifted from Gurugram to Mumbai. 'We tried distracting her with dance and theatre workshops and playdates but she couldn't get over Naisha not being at school with her every day," says the seven-year-old's mother Radhika Chopra, a Gurugram-based freelance human resource consultant. A month later, Sasha chanced upon the book
Afo and I
on Pratham Books' Storyweaver website by author-illustrator Canato Jimo. The story shows a young boy racing home from school to catch his sister, Afo, just before she leaves the village for the city. Jimo's illustrations create a metaphor between the changing fabric of the child's life and the changing landscape of his village—dense forests giving way to stumps of trees, bulldozers rendering lush hillscapes barren.
What appealed to Sasha was the way the illustrator captured the sense of loss of a companion. 'It's like he understood me," she says over the phone. 'The boy in the story realises that no matter how much he will miss his sibling, he can continue sharing moments with her through letters. I am also doing that with Naisha." Chopra was impressed with how Sasha created her own version of the story by seeing in the illustrations both a coping mechanism and a way of maintaining a connection with her friend. While Jimo created the visuals in the context of the changing topography of his home state, Nagaland, Sasha based the visuals in her school. Chopra shared the book with Naisha too. 'She is now working on her own version," she says.
Books capture such big-small moments in children's lives. Stories about anxiety, coping with change, loneliness, the feeling of being one-of-a-kind in a crowd, and more, can help children explore emotions and topics they don't have the vocabulary to discuss with adults. And visuals go a big way in making these complex topics accessible to children of all ages, from pre-nursery to teenagers grappling with a web of emotions. A survey of the changing landscape of illustrations in children's books is fascinating, and somewhat riddled with envy for a person like me, who grew up in the 1990s on a very Western aesthetic of kids with blond-brown hair living in honeysuckle-covered cottages.
Illustrations in books such as
Famous Five
and
Hardy Boys
showed term breaks spent camping on cliffs and moors, while I was at the gharial sanctuary in Lucknow during the annual visit to my grandmother's house or visiting echo point after echo point during a family vacation in Mahabaleshwar. Or there would be a gaggle of girls playing lacrosse in Malory Towers. With no Google around, we couldn't even search for what the game was.
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One could only imagine what festive tables laden with roasts and pies would taste like while reluctantly eating
roti-sabzi
on returning home from school. Of course, these visuals from books imported from the UK or the US, or the exquisite oil works in Russian books, opened up windows to faraway worlds and cultures, but it was hard trying to find ourselves in them. Where were we—the kids living in Delhi, Mumbai, Mysuru, Dibrugarh, Madurai, Surat, Indore—in these books, which were for children like us but didn't reflect our context? For an 'Indian" visual aesthetic, we had only comic books such as Target, Tinkle, Amar Chitra Katha, Chandamama or books by the National Book Trust.
Things began changing at the end of the 1990s when Tulika Publishers, set up in Chennai in 1996, started publishing picture books for 3-8-year-olds in nine languages, including English, Hindi, Tamil and Marathi. Around the same time, Tara Books, an independent publishing house in Chennai, too started experimenting with visual storytelling in terms of form, design and production techniques.
When I came across Tara Books'
Catch that Crocodile
, authored by Anushka Ravishankar and illustrated by Pulak Biswas, in 1999, I was much older than its intended audience but I was captivated by its visual design. A handful of words—Snap! What! How! Why! Which!—looped around images in black, white and green to tell the story. It was a whimsical book with a 'subtle message on conservation'. It went against the cliche that images in children's books had to be elaborate and rendered in vibrant pop colours, or that they needed to be a literal take on the text.
From a handful of books with nuanced illustrations, the number has steadily grown in the last 15 years, be it picture books, illustrated publications or wordless books. Within the pages of children's books, there is now space for diversity of communities, geographies, body types, regions, ideas and concepts. Illustrators bring their creativity to build layers into a story, perhaps through abstraction, use of inverse images, telling a story simply through shadows or employing anthropomorphic characters to show transformation.
In
Nani's Walk To the Park
(2019), author-illustrator Deepa Balsavar moves beyond the cliches of Mumbai as a bustling metropolis with its skyline, beaches, Art Deco buildings and cinemas. She creates detailed storyboards of neighbourhoods that Nani and her grandson Venki walk through. Each lane has a quirky name, Lane of Dreams, Lane of Magic, Lane of Friendship, so on and so forth, featuring a vibrant carpet of flowers on the road, the school library, homes of dear friends, to reflect elements that make those areas special to the duo. 'At first, I had imagined a giant jigsaw with each frame being a piece of the puzzle. When the story is over, the pieces are placed to form a map of the neighbourhood," writes Balsavar in an article on the Pratham Books website.
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The ecosystem of publishers, authors and illustrators is no longer afraid of showing things that many still believe kids should be shielded from. 'Life is unfolding around them in all its complexity and they are observing everything. If they don't find a reflection of that in books, there will be a huge dissonance," says Richa Jha, author and founder, Pickle Yolk Books.
There is a lot of information online that is inaccurate and unsafe. Books are a safe way to make sense of issues children might not be comfortable asking adults about. 'There is a growing consensus among creators that everything that touches a child's life at all stages should be shown in books. We still have a long road ahead, but there is now an honest intent among creators—including illustrators—to address matters that kids feel strongly about. And they are not doing it out of tokenism," says Jha.
In recent years, illustrators are being recognised for their role in the storytelling process. In 2022, the estate of abstract artist Mehlli Gobhai, who illustrated children's books such as
Lakshmi the Water Buffalo Who Wouldn't
, instituted the Mehlli Gobhai Award for Best Work in Children's Book Illustration. Bengaluru-based visual storyteller Rajiv Eipe was the first recipient of the award for
Chitty: A Dog and Her Forest Farm
, written by Serow and published by Kalpavriksh. Then there is the Big Little Book Award from the Parag Initiative of Tata Trusts to recognise significant contributions of authors and illustrators to children's literature in Indian languages. The award was first presented in 2016, and has since honoured artists like Atanu Roy, Proiti Roy, Nina Sabnani, Priya Kuriyan, Rajiv Eipe and Deepa Balsavar.
Jha is one of the organisers of an ongoing exhibition at the India International Centre in Delhi, which looks at the evolution of art in children's books in India over the last 130 years. On view till 6 May, Becoming features 100 illustrations by artists such as Atanu Roy, Canato Jimo, Bhajju Shyam, K.G. Subramanyan, Lavanya Karthik, Priya Kuriyan and Satwik Gade. The work of these 75 artists and illustrators has been published over the years by 25 publishers, including Art1st, Children's Book Trust, Eklavya, Jugnu Prakashan, Kalpavriksh, Karadi Tales, Little Dipper, Zubaan and Room to Read.
To walk through the show is to be reminded of India's history of art for children and the changing contours of the sensibilities and styles of illustrations in children's books from pre-independence to contemporary times. It takes one back to Abanindranath Tagore's
Khirer Putul
(1886) in Bengali, one of the first printed children's books in India for leisure reading, or the illustrations from
Sandesh
, a children's magazine started by Upendrakishore Raychowdhury.
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The show is a reminder of the fact that children's books are no longer meant to force-feed moral lessons or add merely to character building. Rather, the stories and the visuals are focused on children's lived experiences. One of the highlights of the show is art from the book,
Laali
(2024), written by Mamta Nainy, published by Room to Read India and illustrated by Suvidha Mistry. It shows a young girl peeking over her shoulder to see her white kurta stained with menstrual blood. Even today, advertisements for sanitary napkins shy away from showing the colour red. But the image by Mistry normalises the staining of clothes during menstrual cycles and takes away the shame associated with it.
Illustrations start conversations about complex topics such as identity, neurodivergence, queerness and mental health. And parents are actively seeking out such books, more so after the covid-19 pandemic. 'Fifteen years ago when I started AA's Book Nerds book club for children in the National Capital Region (NCR), I struggled to find titles featuring substantial work by Indian illustrators, barring seven to eight names. Today, there are so many more doing great work. It has become a project of discovery," says Noida-based Archana Atri, who has closely followed this change.
Shailaja Menon, consultant with the education theme of Tata Trusts, described an earlier era when illustrators were called in after a story was written to help visualise it. They often ended up drawing a faithful sequence of events as depicted in the text. For example, if the text read, 'She fell in the mud", the image would likely show a child flat on the ground and splashed with brown. In contrast, over the past few decades, picture books from the West have started influencing Indian children's publishing. 'The intent is that the text and picture together tell the story. Take the book,
Rosie's Walk
by Pat Hutchins, first published in 1967, in which a hen goes for a walk around the barnyard, mill and pond and comes home. She is unaware that a fox is following her. Nowhere in the text is the word 'fox' mentioned, but the reader can see it in the images. The pictures add another level of meaning to the text," says Menon.
Illustrators add details that expand the child's imagination, such as bringing to life the vibrant sensory experiences of being at a mela by adding details that might not be described by the text.
Often children notice these details in images that adults miss. Menon references a piece written by Goa-based educator Sujata Noronha in the book,
Children's Books: An Indian Story
. Noronha, who runs the library Bookworm, says children described a title as 'a rich man's book", pointing to the tiled floor in the visual, which they associated with affluence. So, the group went around the library, finding class markers in illustrations in children's books. 'Illustrations always carry a lot of meaning, both intended and unintended to readers, who interpret pictures based on their own prior experiences and connections," says Menon. 'As children's books have become more illustration rich, this carries both higher potential and deeper dangers—if a given issue is not tackled with enough sensitivity and awareness."
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Both readers and publishers are looking for stories about inclusivity and authentic lived experiences. For Bijal Vachharajani, author and editor, Pratham Books, the inspiration comes from conversations with educators and children during visits to schools and literature festivals.
An example is the book
Reva and Prisha
(Scholastic India, 2001) authored and illustrated by Shals Mahajan, who brings their context of being a queer feminist, with both humour and practicality, to this story about an alternate family with two mothers and twins,
Reva and Prisha
.
Caste is addressed in a new perspective in certain books. The illustrations by Nidhin Shobhana for Yogesh Maitreya's
B.R. Ambedkar: A Life in Books
(Pratham Books, 2022), for instance, sets the legendary leader's early life against a background of the stacks of books he loved to read, making the point that the foundation of his education became his tool to fight discrimination. 'When the steering wheel is in the hands of someone who understands a particular emotion or experience, you get imagery that is far more real," says Vachharajani, who is based out of Bengaluru.
In
When Adil Speaks, Words Dance
written-illustrated by Lavanya Karthik (Puffin India, 2020), a child who is hearing impaired is shown making friends in the classroom. Then there is
Vibhuti Cat
(Duckbill, 2020), written by Shikhandin and illustrated by Shubham Lakhera about Magesh, who speaks in one or two words and twitches when he gets upset. It is cats that make him happy—he loves to draw them. The book has illustrations of cats in all shapes, hues and sizes to bring depth to this story about a boy who often feels misunderstood. Though he may not verbalise his emotions, through the artwork, you gain insight into the workings of his mind.
A vibrant book, which addresses issues of human-generated garbage and its impact on the ecosystem, is
Go Go Flamingo
. Published in April by Tulika, the title has been authored by Devashish Makhija and illustrated by Priya Kuriyan. The layout is quirky with delightful images that loom larger than the text, drawing in kids of all age groups. Yet the theme underlying
Go Go Flamingo
is about debris and garbage clogging the environment and adversely impacting biodiversity.
'Their beaks now STUCK and their feathers WRAPPED," is accompanied by visuals of flamingos stuck in plastic water jars, and with surgical masks, mops and cutlery adorning their heads. '(It is) a thought provoking and timely tale about the hazardous reality that awaits these birds once they make their long journey southward," states the publisher's note. 'The drawings are inventively interspersed with photographs of real objects, creating a powerful three-dimensional effect."
Atri says it is a positive trend to see themes of disability, difference and queerness being addressed visually in children's books.
Guthli Has Wings
or
Guthli Pari Hai
(2019) by Kanak Shashi visits gender identity with a child protagonist, who would rather wear a frock than 'boy's clothes". '(The) reality echoed in the flatness of the vibrant cut-out illustrations—Guthli's sparkle and sadness, her family's confusion, the big question mark that hangs over them all," reads a note about the book. The Hindi story was published by Muskaan, and its English version by Tulika.
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According to Atri, even with such books as aids, it is still difficult sometimes to get schools and parents to discuss such issues. She points to the book
Ritu Weds Chandni
, written-illustrated by Ameya Narvankar (Puffin India, 2022) about same-sex relationships and meant for children aged 5 and above. 'A parent said she didn't want her child to read it as she didn't know how to answer questions about same-sex relationships. I asked her why she presumed the book is about physical intimacy when it is about love," says Atri.
On the other hand, she says, a nine-year-old who has been part of the book club from the age of 5, remarked, 'Ma'am, even if Ritu and Chandni's wedding is stopped, the love in their heart will remain. Can anyone stop that?" Atri points out that children are ready for such books and themes, at the right age. 'When children see two women standing side by side, hugging each other or raising kids together (in a book), it gets normalised, which wasn't the case earlier," she says. 'A child who belongs to such a family structure does not feel singled out."
A lot of effort goes on behind the scenes to make sure representation of regions and communities from across India is accurate while going beyond the cliches. 'At Pratham Books, it has been crucial for us to create books that underscore the many Indias that exist. When I was a journalist, Zubaan, Duckbill or Tulika Publishers were opening up doors to many creators. Today, I can't put a number to it, but we are seeing so many more visual creators from different parts of the country— perhaps because of a lot more design and visual arts courses being offered," says Vachharajani.
According to Sayoni Basu, editor, Hook Books, early readers from Duckbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House, a lot of conversations are taking place between publishers, authors and illustrators about inclusivity and representation. Sometimes, the author and the illustrator may have different visions. 'A lot of authors have a definite vision of how they see their books, which might not give enough scope to the illustrator's visual imagination. So we often act as intermediaries between authors and illustrators. We give as many visual references, facts and research material as possible to the illustrator to make sure they are equipped to add textural and visual layers to the story," she says.
Some illustrators make every effort to get the representation right. They don't need to be from that region but should be familiar with it. 'For example,
Zooni's Alarm Clock
was set in Kashmir and illustrated by Pankaj Saikia, who hails from Assam. But I had seen his work, his familiarity with Kashmir was apparent and it comes through in the detailing," says Basu, who is based in Gurugram.
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In the world of children's storytelling, there are many meaningful and repeated collaborations between illustrators and authors who have created a comfortable working relationship. Artist Rajiv Eipe and author C.G. Salamander have worked together since 2015 and their books include the ongoing
Maithili and the Minotaur
series (Penguin Random House India, 2021-) and the recent
Song of the Asunam
(HarperCollins). Both Eipe and Salamander are fascinated with mythological creatures that transcend the mainstream religious realm. Song of the Asunam features creatures lost to public imagination, such as a music-loving beast with rainbow scales and sharp talons, which inhabits a prehistoric world in southern India. 'Working with fantasy allows both of us to have a connection with the idiosyncrasies of the contemporary world. Salamander puts in a lot of references from Tamil movies and pop culture. So you will see a strange fantastical creature carrying a tiffin box, which is straight out of our school days. As an illustrator, I find it interesting to create monsters dancing to Tamil film lyrics. The result is weird, funny and endearing," says Eipe.
Author Sowmya Rajendran and author-illustrator Niveditha Subramaniam have been friends from their college days in Chennai in the mid-2000s, studying English literature. They co-authored the well-loved
Mayil
series (Tulika, 2011-2018) which explores the dilemmas and questions of a curious pre-teen who grows into a young adult across the books. 'At the time, there weren't Indian children's books that discussed gender issues in a conversational, accessible way," says Subramaniam, who now lives in Rotterdam, Netherlands. 'We wanted to write for a young audience, whose gender constructs weren't fully formed, so they could start engaging with these issues earlier than we did."
The characters and milieus in the books are informed by the writers' growing up experiences and middle-class Chennai upbringing. Originally, they pitched a fiction + nonfiction resource book that could be used in classrooms to discuss genderrelated issues. 'Radhika Menon of Tulika suggested that we rework it in the form of a diary," says Subramaniam. 'The intimate first person narrative meant that readers could connect to the character much more easily. We didn't want to be preachy; we wanted to open up conversations and are happy to have done that with this series."
Rajendran has collaborated with other illustrators too. For the Hindi/English book
Aana and Chena
(Tulika Publishers, 2009), she worked with artist Renuka Rajiv on a story about an elephant who does not like the way he looks. He complains that his nose is too long or ears too small. 'The story came from the Malayalam word,
aanachandam
, or the 'beauty of' an elephant, which is of great cultural significance in Kerala. Also, each person's idea of beauty is extremely subjective. Renuka interpreted it by making his trunk several metres longer than what it ought to be. It is a beautiful way of showing that our flaws get exaggerated in our minds," says Pune-based Rajendran.
Inspiration can come from anywhere. For
The Weightlifting Princess
(Pratham Books, 2018), it came from Rajendran's daughter who asked why all princesses in books and films, including the progressive
Frozen
, were thin. So Rajendran came up with the idea of Princess Nila, who is eager to win the Surya Championship, a weightlifting contest in her kingdom. The visuals by Debasmita Dasgupta are stylised, drawing elements from traditional art and using the eyes to convey emotions. Multiple subnarratives take place on a single page, adding depth to the storytelling.
Eipe, whose art has tackled themes as wide-ranging as manual scavenging in a short 10-panel comic
Scavenger Hunt
, and life of an urban garbage collector in
Anand
to climate change and fantasy, says adding details keeps the reader's gaze on the story. With limited attention spans, texture and detail are ways of arresting the reader's eye. Often, a character from a previous book appears in a scene in another book. 'The sanitation worker, Anand, for instance, appears in a book about a street dog in
Dugga
. You don't see his face, but if you have gone through my books, you will find these cues," he says.
Karthik, author and illustrator of the
Ninja Nani
and
Dreamer
series apart from
When Adil Speaks, Words Dance
, finds inspiration in the sights and sounds of Mumbai. She turned to writing and illustrating art while growing up on books by Manjula Padmanabhan and Pulak Biswas. 'For me, art and text work very closely together. I look for a style that is related to the subject and use elements from it to keep it engaging for the kids," she says. For instance, for
The Boy who Loved Birds: Salim Ali
, from the
Dreamer
series, Karthik turned to Mughal miniature painting, which Dr Ali himself was very fond of. 'The detailed borders were really interesting. I would add details in the foreground, and let them interact with one another. The colours were inspired from Mughal miniatures as well. The book is set in Mumbai, with a lot of humorous details, actual landmarks, the beach finding their way into the visuals. In one image, you can see Salim Ali flying, which is taken from the miniature style of showing a person transforming," she explains. One of the highlights of my reading list last year was
Ogin Nayam's
When the Sun Sets
(Pratham Books). This wordless book invites readers of all ages to embark on a journey with the sun once she sets and goes home. In most mythologies, the sun is shown as masculine, but in this book, Nayam turns the representation on its head by portraying her as a hardworking woman, who casts aside the day mask of the solar deity and takes on the duties of a householder later. The elements are borrowed from the rich legends of Arunachal Pradesh and everyday sights from the state. Nayam's journey into the world of children's book illustration happened when Pratham Books chanced upon his Instagram page. His first book with them was
Tine and the Faraway Mountain
(2018), written by Shikha Tripathi, about a girl from Arunachal Pradesh, who became the first woman from the Northeast to climb Mount Everest.
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In 2024, he worked on his own book,
When the Sun Sets
. The underlying idea was about being alone but not lonely—something that stems from his own experience. Nayam was sitting in a cafe and daydreaming when the idea of a two-dimensional universe came to him. 'I started populating that universe with clouds in cosy sweaters. You know, how some people, like my sister, are always cold even in summer. So, I showed the clouds, which start crying when the sweaters go missing, and that's how rain happens. As an illustrator, I am not trying to offer tokenistic representation. I am just telling a story and all these elements are fitting into it," says the Itanagar-based artist. For the house that the sun lives in, he imagined an architect coming to Arunachal Pradesh from abroad and studying the houses in the state. He envisioned the man going back and making a house for himself that had elements from the East and the West.
'I am forever in love with watercolour. I sketched for a long time till 2012, but realised I was not evolving as an artist. I went to a bookstore, found watercolours and started experimenting with them," says the 35-year-old, who studied biotechnology in Bengaluru, followed it with a master's degree in mass communication, and then headed home.
There are challenges to getting representation right, especially under deadlines. 'When you work within a specific time frame to represent a place that you are not from, and if you are not given enough research material, you can not do a region or community justice," says Rishita Loitongbam, 23, who studied communication design at National Institute of Design, Andhra Pradesh, and lives in Imphal, Manipur. She started illustrating children's books in 2023—Loitongbam's first book was
The Child Who Played with Spirits
published by Niyogi Books in the same year while she was in college, followed by a book for Pratham Books as part of her graduation project.
Earlier this year she worked on Hook Book's
Wrestling Day
, written by T. Keditsu, a modern tale of a traditional sport from Nagaland. 'In 2021, I was going through some of my old school books and I found a chapter, Who will be Ningthou? It was riddled with inaccuracies about Manipuri attire and way of living. It must have been funny as a child, but when I grew up I realised just how misrepresented the state was. That really bothered me," she says. Loitongbam was clear that if she ever took up illustration, she would try to be better at representation. It is after she started working on projects that she realised how big a responsibility it really was.
These illustrators are just as vibrant as the imagery they create, hailing from the worlds of technology, medicine, advertising, some are self-taught, others trained, but all of them are united in their vision to tell a meaningful and engaging visual story. Chitwan Mittal, founder, AdiDev Press and author of the book, Are Your Emotions Like Mine, worked with Shruti Hemani, an architect, for the illustrations. 'I liked her way of using traditional line art in a contemporary style. She did not use typically bright colours but subtle hues. The idea is to show a child, who goes through different emotions through the day, and allow moments of pause and reflection. She has achieved that with great skill," elaborates Mittal. Today, with social media becoming a platform for showcasing talent, she is able to connect with Indian illustrators from Ireland, Canada and the Caribbean, who are bringing different lived experiences to their art. They are adding nuance to ideas of home and belonging in the storytelling.
Ultimately, stories need to speak to everyone—from that gregarious kid in class to the quiet one who fears being judged by peers. The text and the visuals go a long way in normalising differences and empowering children.
Take Wings to Fly
, based on the story of paralympian Malathi Holla, in which a little girl in a wheelchair dreams of plucking ripe mangoes off trees and chasing hens and chicks. The whimsical rendering of visuals by Arun Kaushik don't make disability a subject to be pitied but give the protagonist agency. Or
The Boy Who Wore Bangles
illustrated by Shruti Hemani, which takes the young reader through the sweet-sad emotions of Bhargav, who has been forbidden by his father from wearing bangles. The visuals—the contrast of the vibrant Navratri festivities and the swirling vortex of emotions that Bhargav is feeling—add depth to the conversation between the young child and his grandmother about gender norms. 'This kind of storytelling will not just impact kids' lives right away but will shape a lot of their views for the future," says Jha.