An Exercise in Restraint

 

This illustration for the latest issue of The Indian Quarterly was done by layering my drawings with Photoshop, the first time I have used digital assistance this extensively to create an image.

I had a rough idea of what I wanted my illustration to say, but apart from that, as I do with charcoal and pastel, I explored and found my way through while creating the illustration until I reached something satisfactory. I came away with the opinion that while making a digital collage such as this, it is so easy to get carried away by stuffing your composition with as many elements as possible and overcrowding your image. It seems to me that creating an effective illustration using Photoshop is ultimately an exercise in self-restraint – Does the image really need this? No? Then just remove it because the lesser the elements the better the image.

Initially I admit I got overexcited with all the different things I wanted to use – gold leaf, pressed flowers, dried leaves, Punjabi lettering, drawings, strokes of pastel, butterfly wings etc etc. I stuffed it all into the composition like I would a suitcase for a long journey and then seeing the weight and the sheer clutter, I was compelled to eliminate  the layers one by one by one.

Finally what makes this illustration effective apart from the symbolism of the elements is the way the eye moves around the composition, from the darkness towards the right bottom led by the black lettering  towards the stroke of red pastel on the left and upwards by the white lettering to the top of the rock and the house and then the birds and the inland letter onwards in the sky in the shape of an arc. All this ultimately reflects the words of the poignant essay about migration which I was given to illustrate, written by Anvita Budhraja, titled No Home but Memory. The essay was  based largely on a poem by Amrita Pritam called Mera Pata or My Address.

Here is the poem by Amrita Pritam

My Address

Today I effaced the number of my house and

The name of the street at the top of the street;

I removed the signposts of all the roads;

Even so if you must find where I am

You must knock at the door

Of every house in every street, city and country.

This is both a curse and benediction

Wherever you come across a liberated soul

You can take it to be my home.

Prejudices

An illustration I did towards the end of last year for The Indian Quarterly was for a story called The Circle, featuring the last of the Anglo Indians, the prejudices inherent in them and how it ultimately destroys them.
The print has turned out a bit darker than the original, so I am adding the complete original below along with a detail of the illustration.

The haunting story which makes us cringe at the extent of prejudice and perceived superiority that one community has for another reminds me of the remark made by a friend of mine after she had broken up with her Anglo-Indian fiancee. She said, "How long are these Anglo-Indians going to prefix "Anglo" to define themselves? They are Indians!" This is true of course, but try telling that to Anglo-Indians, you'd probably make them writhe in agony.

Once, some years ago, during coffee an Anglo Indian acquaintance of mine remarked that the father of her niece was a Malayalee. When I expressed surprise, my acquaintance hastily added, "But she (the niece) is not Malayalee! She is one of us! She is one of us!" I was perplexed at the absurdity of that remark and at the determination of my Anglo-Indian acquaintance to completely erase the Indian aspect from her family.

Some explanation for these mindsets can be found in William Dalrymple's The White Mughals and more briefly in City of Djinns.

Here are a couple of memorable quotes from City of Djinns -

'And they're a fascinating people, the Indians. I'll say that for them.'

I've always had friendly relations with them, mind. It's their country. That's what my father always used to say.'

'That's right. The Indians are a nice people. Provided you treat them as human beings.'

'You see we're not Britishers', said Mr Smith. 'We're something different.'

*

Partition

The illustration above is one of three I was commissioned to do by the Commonwealth Writer’s website, Adda, to remember 70 years of violent, bloody Partition of the sub-continent. While I was given complete freedom to conceptualize the illustrations, it was suggested that I make all three with some kind of connecting thread to them. For this I used similar colors, red, black and white and a certain similarity to the landscape.

The illustration above is for a powerful story called ‘Regional Division’ by Sidra Zia. In the image, to depict division and violence I’ve used dramatic colors – red and black and torn paper; to show migration, I've poured the mayhem of million birds in the air, I've splattered red for bloodshed; I want the dramatic illustration to draw out all the emotions in the story.

The second illustration is for the non-fiction section, Speaking of Partition is a complex piece about communication; language and words in relation to Partition - whether what comprises a language is adequate enough to describe what happened during the Partition, the author is on a train journey, she talks about how the moment you board a train you can sometimes arrive at your destination.

The third piece shown below, is for a poem called That Part of Us.

More and more when I read such stories, when I hear Urvashi Butalia talk about her book, The Other Side of Silence, when I read Shashi Tharoor dismantling false constructions that we were (and still are taught in schools), I thank heavens for the power of stories that hold up the truth before our eyes.

Brought to Book

The Caravan, an excellent magazine of politics and culture invited me to do three editorial illustrations for them, super-fast, for an extraordinary essay about an author who had to face litigation for some of the contents in his book. He was hauled to the courts by people who hadn’t even read his book or deliberately chose to misunderstand what he had written. I had very little time to deliver something substantially complex for a story such as this. In the time I need to conceptualize and complete one illustration, I had to do three. But one does one’s best, takes a few by lanes and is thankful when such a project is completed and delivered.

In the illustrations I did for this essay, rather than creating standard visuals with courtroom scenes, I chose instead to depict the overwhelming emotions of paranoia, bewilderment and frustration that the author was consumed by; how small and vulnerable one can feel while battling strange and terrifying forces in an unfamiliar world.