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Apr 08
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Writing, Criticism, and Some Philosophical Musings: An Interview with Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih | Jobeth Ann Warjri

By Interview, North East Indian Writing in English No Comments

Jobeth Warjri: Thank you very much for being part of this interview. I want to start by commenting on
the vast repertoire of books you have written—six books of poetry, a large collection of fiction, and critical readings. What makes you so prolific?

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih: I would like to hold my restless energy responsible for making me attempt so many things. But I know it is not as simple as that. The truth is, I have found peace and a sense of
fulfilment only in my creative and literary endeavours. And that is not only about the
cathartic nature of literature. My firm conviction is that I can be most serviceable to society,
contribute the most to it, only by doing what I can do best. Perhaps, here is the real reason
why I have done so many things—because I can. Without talent or knowledge, no one can
write anything.
But, at times, I also think, what if I had focused only on a genre or two? Would I have
accomplished much more? I certainly regret not writing my novels sooner. Working in two
different languages and on too many forms can take away so much of your free time. And I
regret, too, that I cannot be a full-time writer.

 

JW: After all these years, do you think there is more to to be said, and, if so, why?

KSN: It will be a sad day when a writer has nothing more to say. Fortunately, I still have a
few stories and ideas to share that have already developed into clear outlines. As for poetry,
as long as my heart feels strongly about something, it will always come knocking. If a writer
writes about what he knows best, he will always have things, and new things, at that, to say.
Writers, with their vast knowledge gathered from life’s varied experiences, have a duty to
share their wisdom, to speak out and voice their conscience. My worry is time, ‘flashing
through / our lives like a shooting star across the sky.’

 

JW: I think readers of English know you as a creative writer, but you have also written quite
extensively in criticism. Do you perceive a connection between the two seemingly distinct
fields? If so, what is it?

KSN: The creative and the critical are not as distinct as they may seem. The first known
critic, for instance, was a poet—Aristophanes, the famous Greek comedian. The two faculties
are inextricably intertwined. Horace beautifully brought out the connection between them:
‘I’ll serve as a whetstone which, though it cannot cut of itself, can sharpen iron. Though I
write nothing, I’ll teach the business and duty of a writer’. A good critic is a whetstone that
can sharpen the iron of a creative writer. I don’t consider myself a critic, but I do believe that
the better the critic you are of your creative work, the better your work will be.

 

JW: Funeral Nights is a tome of a book in which material from your research is quoted quite
frequently as part of the narrative. What made you think of integrating research material as
part of the book?

KSN: Initially, I conceived Funeral Nights as a form of writing back. I wanted to counter the
misrepresentations and the slander spread by outsiders about the Khasis. But that was not all.
Even more appalling to me is the ignorance of my own people. I remembered what Achebe

said about the novelist as a teacher: I wanted to teach and educate them. And when a writer
sets out to educate, and Hamlet-like to tell the story of his people, to clear their ‘wounded
name’, he must first become as near a master of the subject as possible. How does one
achieve such mastery? The experiences of life are not enough. He must search and explore far
and wide, dig deep into the past and scrutinise the present intensely like someone sifting rice
in a winnowing basket, separating it from the husks. That is why I have braided into the
novel’s narrative materials from my research and reading.

 

JW: You are also an editor of anthologies. The first poetry anthology from the Northeast,
Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the Northeast, was co-edited by you. How has being
engaged with the craft aided (or impeded) your profession as an editor?

KSN: You are right; I have edited a few poetry and prose anthologies in Khasi and English.
Among the latest are Late-Blooming Cherries: Haiku Poetry from India, to be brought by
Harper Collins later this year, and Lapbah: Stories from the Northeast. I’m co-editing them
with my colleague, the poet and writer Rimi Nath.
The craft, as you put it, has only assisted me in many ways. It has acquainted me with some
of the best literary works written in the country and thus affording me the opportunity to learn
from them. And editing them has also helped me edit my own work much more efficiently.
As you know, no creative piece can shine in its splendour without some rigorous and
competent polishing.

 

JW: You have often said that the purpose of storytelling is ‘to teach with delight’
(particularly, in the Prelude to Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends). If we understand the
classroom as one of the places where critical reasoning is taught, how do you see this statement
play out both within and outside the classroom?

KSN: I have always believed in teaching through illustrative examples and amusing
anecdotes relevant to a point I happen to be making. I practise this technique not only in
teaching but also in my writing. I find it to be quite rewarding. Students enjoy the little stories
I tell them, and outside the classroom, whenever I read or talk about poetry, people have
come to me and have said, ‘We never knew that poetry or criticism could be so entertaining.’

 

JW: You are one of the very few writers who treat Khasi philosophy as equal to any other
philosophy around the world (canonical literature in English usually adores the Greeks or, in
the case of India, Sanskrit philosophy). How is your celebration of Khasi philosophy
significant to your understanding of literature and the craft of writing?

KSN: I’m not much of a believer in any organised religion, but I do admire some aspects of
Khasi religious philosophy, in particular, three. One of the three Commandments in Khasi
religious philosophy says, ‘Tip briew, tip Blei’ (‘Know man, know God’), meaning, ‘Live in
the knowledge of man, in the knowledge of God’. It would take pages for me to elucidate on
the significance of this Commandment. But very briefly, as I wrote in Funeral Nights, in its
deepest connotation, the knowledge of man forms the basis of all human actions. It teaches
man to be prudent and urges him to ponder his every move carefully. He thinks things
through—both the task and its outcome—and only then takes a decision on whether to
proceed.

In this manner, a person guided by the knowledge of man is also guided by his conscience,
which, by its very essence, weighs all things on the scales of virtue and truth. Therefore, a
person blessed with conscience, or the knowledge of man, is also blessed with the knowledge
of God because God stands for virtue and truth. By placing, in the Commandment, the
knowledge of man before the knowledge of God, the Khasi faith indicates two things. One,
that man must serve God through service to his fellow man. In other words, service to man is
service to God. Two, man must always be guided by his conscience.
I also admire the Khasi philosophy’s anti-anthropocentric attitude. This attitude is crucial.
The Jews, for instance, believe that God made man so that he might populate the earth with
his countless hordes. ‘Go forth and multiply,’ he said. This assertion places man at the
pinnacle of all creation. This kind of anthropocentrism encourages man to indulge in all sorts
of earth-wrecking activities in the name of progress and development. He tears down trees in
the forest, he quarries the earth, destroys hills and rivers, land and sea, earth and sky, and thus
places all species of living things (himself included) and the entire planet in terrible danger.
But the old ones who formulated Khasi thought, in their compassionate wisdom, stressed the
fact that man was sent to earth by God, not to multiply himself, but to be the honourable carer
that Ramew, earth’s guardian spirit, pleaded for. They did not believe that man was the crown
of creation. To them, everything that breathes, and even those without life, like sand and
stones, are equal creations of God. Because of this, the old Khasis held nature in great
esteem. They never indulged in acts of wanton destruction. For instance, when they went to
the forest for tree-cutting or hunting, they bowed low and explained themselves, they prayed
and appealed, they asked and pleaded before God.
These principles have shaped my attitude to life and, thus, my writing. And I rue the fact that
we have become so different: truly a generation kaba bam duh, one that eats till extinction.

Apr 03
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The Oral in Literature: An Interview with Esther Syiem | Jobeth Ann Warjri

By Interview, North East Indian Writing in English No Comments

Jobeth Warjri: Thank you so much for agreeing to take part in this interview. I want to start at the beginning—with Oral Scriptings. What made you think of oral narratives and oral storytelling as sources for your creative work?

Esther Syiem: Memory has played an important role in my life. Maybe because I was always told stories by my grandmother, my mother, my father and the innumerable visitors who were never part and parcel of the city of Shillong, but who came from the suburbs, who belonged to far away villages and told us things they saw that we never did.

I was always conscious of my oral antecedents and when I was young, I mined my stories from anyone I met and looked for books everywhere but found that books in Khasi were very few. There was always a sense of something that had to be done for the community in terms of retrieval, recordings, anything that would make these stories come alive. I was unnecessarily burdened with the thought that there were no books in Khasi on Khasi subjects that ‘mattered’ (the situation is different now).

I suppose my first collection of poems was an attempt to bridge the past; I found that these memories were, to my surprise, meaningful and that they had a significantly contemporary relevance. It was my first attempt and I was still feeling my way around but realising more and more that so much had to be retold, reinvented, re-made, updated and understood. I was not looking to write about the daffodil, as I told Professor Temsula Ao in one of my innumerable conversations with her. I was looking to the bamboo and the scuttling rodents who were generating stories of other worlds and other modes of being.

  

JW: How does the oral shape your style and your understanding of the literary?

ES: My world view has always been oral: by that I mean my consistent affirmation of the world in which words had the power to shape, to rule, to be sourced for their wealth of knowledge and ability to empower a community. In the course of my journey, anything to do with words and word-making seemed to reach out to me in a very essential way. And I responded by listening or reading or immersing myself in these world-views that constituted a very important part of my identity. This was reinforced by constant meetings that I had with those who lived far away from the city. Strangely, I still meet such people on a regular basis and my perceptions and understanding have become stronger – not that I idealise them – but that I find strength in their words and philosophy; where life and death are concurrent to each other and there is acceptance of the pace that life must take – no hurry there, nothing forced, nothing smart or clever about it.

So, stories in one way or another always struck a chord within me. As I said earlier, I swallowed them whole for they provided much food for my thoughts. Inevitably this formed the basis for my entry, if you could call it that, into the “literary” world of attempting to write. Of course, my education was in English Literature and I learnt a good deal about other cultures, but not about my own. This has always made me feel disadvantaged. Besides, there was always within me this sense of belonging to a community that had this uncanny ability to use the spoken word in a way that could move the universe. This has guided my attempts to put it down on paper, and it has always been my attempt to replicate its spirit, incurably candid and independent.  

 

JW: I think, in The Oral Discourse in Khasi Folk Narrative, you also speak of the oral as a way of interrogating the literary, a hermeneutic that unravels what it means to belong to a particular community. What does this mean for you—to have your cultural identity also be part of the way you interpret the world?

ES: Yes, the oral tales needed to be unravelled and unpacked to find out why they had not disappeared from the face of the earth, given the amount of discussion that went on about how the Khasi community had begun to lose its intangible heritage. Even though I always felt disadvantaged, I saw the oral as an asset that needed new ways to disseminate it productively in the present; to show the oral for what it really is, within Khasi society – not as a set of traditions or practices or sayings to be learnt by rote, but as a philosophy that feeds a particular way of life. One example is the practitioner of herbal medicine. There are no notebooks to be followed, only gut instinct and knowledge handed down (sometimes, not always) and an almost mystical sense of healing. When we talk about the oral it also implies this communion with the universe; the reason why, time and again, I have referred to our indigenous world as the “speaking universe.” It is within this context that the tales speak louder than anything else.

 

JW: The oral seems to resist a single interpretation. This is especially noticeable in Many Sides of Many Stories where a single poem is open to multiple points of view. How did you achieve this development in your craft?

ES: By listening intently to the same story being retold multiple times and to the hidden nuances and inflexions in the voices of those telling me stories. However, I am not aware of this kind of development in my poems. If there is one, then I’m very happy about it.

The oral goes through multiple retellings. These are like multiple edits. Each edit reinforces the other. All of them are equally important. For example, there is the story of Manik Raitong: some sources speak about an affair that he had had with the king’s wife. Some speak about the liaison after her marriage to the king. Tales from each region are embellished differently, but the implicit story line remains the same. And we pick them up one by one without disputing which one is the right one.

 

JW: I want to dwell a little on the translatability of the oral into print. How do you strike a balance between the forms of the oral (which are largely in Khasi) with English in which most of your books are written?

ES: I suppose this has not been difficult for me because I move in out of both languages quite easily. When there are words that are difficult to translate, that I think would add to the meaning or texture of the poem, I usually rely upon the original Khasi words. I use them in the midst of a thought process in a poem or to make the Khasi-ness of what I am writing about, stand out etc. In this way I feel assured that I am communicating my own world-view to the rest of the world in an authentic way; and I provide a glossary at the end.  

 

JW: I think gender, as a way of understanding the literary, has been a recurring theme in your work—several of your poems and Memoir in Water: Speaks the Wah Umkhrah come to mind. What, do you think, are the ways in which stories told from the perspectives of women in Northeast India (yours, Temsüla Ao’s and Easterine Kire’s, to name a few) transformative in the way that the literature is understood?

ES: The stories coming from these women writers are different. In Easterine Kire’s novel, When the River Sleeps, the forest is identified as a protagonist; a protagonist that has been sidelined so often that we’ve failed to hear her voice. The narratives that we hear from these women writers come from a place never seen or heard of before. Another example is Temsüla Ao’s These Hills Called Home, which has brought a human face to the Naga struggle. So, women do have a transformative role in wielding their words and stories to a readership and an audience that is still untaught in the resources of a female imagination rich with associative memories and perceptions that have never really been sounded out to the rest of the world.

The river Umkhrah for instance, is the protagonist that has given my book its name. This body of water had often been described to me by those of the older generation who were closely linked to it. Then it had beauty and power and the ability to make itself heard through its raging waters or clear translucence in autumn or winter. It forms the backdrop to my consciousness; I hate it because it’s filthy but I love it too. And I’ve come to understand it almost as woman to woman: the stories that it has carried through the ages, the effluents that plague it now, its ability to clean itself in the monsoon, its faithfulness to all of us by simply flowing onwards, its ability to nurture life, its insistent presence in my consciousness. If this isn’t a woman telling her story then what is? The narrating voice of the woman has many layers . . . to be teased out with each new reading. And the woman’s voice has never been trained to speak in certain way. It is the voice of impulse, imagination, emotional certitudes that have never been discussed, never brought to life . . .     

 

JW: How are the notions of the “oral” and the “literary” affected with the telling of stories that have gendered perspectives?

ES: For me the oral fashions the narrative; in that, I am always conscious of a certain way of story-telling, a certain way of looking at life, that particular inflexion that always brings out the oral strain. By “literary” I understand it to mean the qualifying mark for acceptance in academia. Under the sway of the oral, any thought of the “literary” seems to fall away (for me at least); for when I write I only have one thing in mind: and that is to emulate what comes to me by way of memory, through the stories that close around me all the time. The women in my stories and poems have a keen sense of the oral, never of the literary, and I find that once they take over, their stories take on a life of their own, following their own path of grass-root telling.      

Mar 25
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The Diasporic Sensibility: An Interview with Janice Pariat

By Interview, North East Indian Writing in English No Comments

Jobeth Warjri: Thank you, Janice Pariat, for being a part of this interview. I would like to talk to you about an important element in your writing—the diasporic sensibility. How has calling multiple places “home” shaped your sense of aesthetics and, also, the affective components related to your craft?

Janice Pariat: Calling multiple places “home” has indeed contributed to my “diasporic sensibility”, but I think even more than that my exceedingly mixed ethnic heritage—of Khasi, Jaintia, Portuguese, British. I grew up in pockets of Assam, where my father was transferred from one tea estate to another, but I always had Shillong to call “home”. Except, I grew up in a mixed maternal household—my grandmother was Jaintia, my grandfather Portuguese, so even if I had a place to call home, I was never quite an “insider”. And then, of course I left, to study in Delhi, in London, I lived “outside” here and there for a long while, and I think because of this, along with my mixed heritage, I have felt unmoored, unanchored. At first, in a not entirely positive way—after all, who doesn’t wish to fit in? But I’d ask myself these questions: Who am I? Where do I belong? Where is home? And be quite disquieted by not having a clear answer. Only recently have I learned to embrace this—to acknowledge that I am a child of vast historical processes, of vast movements and migrations across the globe, that my story, as all our biographies, began a long time ago. That I carry the stories of my ancestors. And this has opened me up to the world in a way that I didn’t think possible. I appreciate the abundance of “homes”, I appreciate the complicated, entangled stories that have created my ancestral history—and I think this has permeated into my fiction now. My novel, Everything the Light Touches, intertwined a quartet of stories set across geographies and across centuries. Somehow, I cannot really bring myself to only consider the miniscule anymore. All is open. All is complicated. The past very much alive in our present.

 

JW: I think that you, along with Anjum Hasan and Jahnavi Barua, were among the first writers from the Northeast to express a fully developed idea of the diasporic in your writings. Formalistically, such as is the case with Seahorse: A Novel and The Nine Chambered Heart, it has resulted in a style that draws from an ephemeral sense of place and the people associated with these places. Was this intentional?

JP: Perhaps it wasn’t quite intentional at the time—we also are able to draw these observations in retrospect. Seahorse, my first novel, very much followed a geographical trajectory that echoed my own—Nem moves from an unnamed small-town to Delhi University’s North Campus, and then is in London/the UK for a year or so on a fellowship. Looking back now I think this allowed, for me, some safety in the intimidating exercise of writing a first novel. These were familiar places—in fact I was living in London at the time of writing the book, and while all else felt unfamiliar, the process of working on a much vaster canvas than the stories in Boats on Land, at least there was the familiarity of these locations and settings to fall back on. In The Nine-Chambered Heart, the unnamed protagonist also follows a geographical trajectory similar to mine, but this was more so I could explore love, desire, relationships, in a variety of settings. To see how we leave stories of ourselves wherever we go—and in a book like this we are able to gather them and place them together.

 

JW: Contrary to popular understanding of the diasporic as something associated with drifting and wandering, the term also touches upon a sense of a symbolic belonging to place. I think we see this in The Nine Chambered Heart where objects, such as paintings and sculptures, mark the character’s belonging to a certain place in time. What is your understanding of place as a symbolic feature in your writing?

JP: I think we carry home with us wherever we go—be it in the form of a coffee press, a dried flower, a pine cone, food stuff, a pendant, a photo. No matter how nomadic we might be, I suppose we are also only able to appreciate that movement, that journeying, if we are able to recognise some fixities, some anchors. And those anchors can themselves be movable—but they carry meaning within them—a particular place, a particular room or home—that becomes embedded in that object. It’s in the nature of the social lives of things to carry meaning in this way…

 

JW: In relation to the question above, in Everything the Light Touches, you ground the nomadic experience with the idea of the Nongïaïd. What made you think of connecting the travel and the diasporic experience to one of the cultures you’ve inherited?

JP: Travel in Everything the Light Touches is used as a vehicle to explore the tussle between worldviews—those that hold on to fixity and those that call for fluidity. My characters are travellers caught in movement, just as the novel leans strongly towards supporting a worldview that acknowledges the constant motion of life and the universe. Travel also serves as a useful tool to “unlock” characters—they are placed in unfamiliar settings, dealing with unexpected occurrences, and we see the decisions they make in those situations. Just as in life—I think how people travel is very revealing of their characters. The Nongïaïd as you know are a fictional community—but they play an incredibly important part in the novel as a whole. They symbolise everything that the nation-building project, or any project that seeks to fix and calcify, cannot control. The inclusion of the Nongiaid speaks very directly to the tussle between fixity and fluidity. They are the unsettled, wayward, wild, unruly and untamed that the Linnaean way of seeing is constantly trying to suppress, isolate, manipulate, tame, and eliminate.

 

JW: Do you see yourself continuing with exploring the diasporic theme in your writing? What’s next for Janice Pariat?

JP: To be honest, I’ve never quite imagined it as the “diasporic theme” until you mentioned so! I am looking to tell more stories that acknowledge these vast timelines and storylines we all belong to—the immense sweeps of history that go into me, my characters experiencing certain things and seeing life, the world in a certain way. I cannot undo this “long perspective”; it will continue to inform my writing from now on.

Aug 18
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On the Conservation Trail with Rohan Chakravarty: An Interview

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Indian writing has often allowed its readers to discover the world of animals: the violence, the calm, their habitats with and without us, their encounters with humans, and their vulnerabilities, both because of and distinct from these encounters. The joy of inhabiting these worlds: through ACK’s Panchantantra, Kipling’s Bagheera and Baloo, Orwell’s elephant or Narayan’s tiger of Malgudi, or more recently though Perumal Murugan’s tale of Poonachi, the goat or Rajiv Eipe’s sleuth act following Dugga, the dog around town, lies also in the recognition that these are stories of Indian animals and stories that while traipsing along animal trails also follow humans whose lives are entangled with those of animals.

Rohan Chakravarty’s cartoons place us smack in the middle of a wild world that is aware and wary of the human species prowling alongside and all around it and whose predatory behaviour manifests itself through hunting or killing animals, harmful policy, inaction or ignorance. A dentist from Nagpur, India, who discovered his interests lay not in the decaying molars of homo sapiens but in drawing bats casually hanging with each other or the courting habits of the praying mantis, Rohan Chakravarty’s cartoons are sui generis, in that he is possibly India’s first environmental cartoonist. His cartoons appear as the column, Green Humour, a name that embodies the form he is most comfortable with: satire. Over the last decade, the Green Humour cartoon strips have been a regular feature in several newspapers, ‘cartoonifying’ government policies that impact the environment, research that impacts wildlife or the discovery of a new species, and playfully picturing various species being flummoxed by Zoom calls.  Rohan is also author of five books – The Great Indian Nature Trail (WWF), Bird Business (BNHS), Making Friends with Snakes (Pratham), Green Humour for a Greying Planet (Penguin) and Naturalist Ruddy (Penguin) that tread the line between conservation and wildlife education and has worked closely with organizations and state governments to create wildlife and urban biodiversity maps.

In this interview, we take a close look at some of Rohan’s work and aspects of his style.

***

MS: There are very few dedicated environmental comics artists in the country today – as opposed to comics artists for whom environmental comics form one theme in their larger oeuvre. Do you place yourself in a lineage? Do you see yourself as India’s first (only?) environmental cartoonist? Which artists do you draw inspiration from for your comics?

RC: I personally simply view myself as a cartoonist. My primary goal has always been to make some mischief with my art, firstly for my own creative satisfaction and secondarily to connect my readers with my subject. I don’t think art of any kind that pertains to the environment constitutes any distinct category as such, so I’d say that my series is simply a series of cartoons, comics and illustrations, that happens to speak about conservation and the environment.

When I had started out back in 2010, I was the only cartoonist in India in my knowledge, using cartoons to communicate environmental issues. I am sure there are many others now doing the same with their art.

One of my peers I really look up to has been the Canadian biologist and cartoonist Rosemary Mosco (Bird and Moon Comics). Cartoonists whose work has inspired my journey, humour and art style include Bill Watterson, Gary Larson, Mark Parisi and Nina Paley. The one artist who has singularly been responsible for inspiring me to take up art as a profession in the first place, is the animator Genndy Tartakovsky.

 

MS: One difference between your column Green Humour and some of your recent books, such as Naturalist Ruddy or Making Friends with Snakes is the intended audience – and the presence of political commentary/advocacy. Your work also appears regularly in the children’s magazine Chakmak and has appeared in Tinkle in the past. How do you approach drawing cartoons for these differing audiences, in terms of both drawing style and content?

RC: I usually don’t let the platform affect the art. I believe that it is the art that should be given the power to affect the platform. Cartoons in my Green Humour column have appeared in newspapers for the last 9 years (The Hindu Blink, Sunday Mid-Day, Pune Mirror, The Hindu Sunday) and have consistently spoken about politics each time there has been a significant intersection with environmental issues. In the years between 2020 and 2021 when some of the most disastrous environmental decisions were made by the ruling government, the intensity and the frequency of political intersections in my cartoons too, accelerated. It was then that I decided that I needed to take my mind off the column and start an entirely new project which would not be political in nature at all, and would simply explore the delight of exploring the natural world. That project was Naturalist Ruddy. In a way, Ruddy saved me from the dreariness of politics!

Making Friends with Snakes had a completely different aim altogether: to simplify communication around snake biology and prepare readers to be better equipped with the base knowledge of Indian snakes. When renowned herpetologist Romulus Whitaker approached me with the idea of the book, he was very clear that he wanted the target audience to be kids who reside around cultivation and are most likely to encounter snakes. The language had to be simple enough for the book to be translated to regional languages and distributed across the country. So far, Pratham Books has translated MFWS into 14 regional languages.

 

MS: What kind of research went into ‘Making Friends with Snakes’? 

RC: Romulus had already made a film on snakebite awareness on just the Big Four which feature in the book: the Spectacled Cobra, the Saw-scaled Viper, the Common Krait and the Russell’s Viper. These are the snakes that cause most of the snakebite accidents and deaths in India. He felt it was awareness about these four snakes that needed to be disseminated among a younger audience – his film was meant for an older audience. I already had some experience with snakes. Not that I handle snakes! I am from Nagpur where there are many cultivation areas and issues with snakebites and farmers are common. I was aware of the problems that arose, I had seen these snakes in wildlife and was familiar with their characteristics. I went through the film several times and thought about how to adapt a film script for adults into a very simple story with three or four characters. The story is very conversational, especially because it had to be translated into as many regional languages as possible.

 

MS: What is feedback like for such work? Do you get feedback often about how your comics are making an actual impact?

RC: I attended a literary festival with school students as participants and came to know from them that Making Friends with Snakes was received well, and that the children had relayed the information they gained to the adults in their families. That was one unexpected outcome of the book.

A lot of readers write to my editors or to me directly with feedback. I have noticed tangible impact several times. For example, some readers who traveled to South East Asia wrote to me saying they refrained from buying civet coffee – highly hyped and responsible for the illegal capture and often, even killing, of civets – after they read my comics. I have a comic about why sea shells should not be collected, and a lot of people stopped doing so once they read it!

 

MS: You have spoken of this before – our animal friends in your comics/cartoons speak like humans do, and anthropomorphism is a definite element in them. This isn’t new; Tinkle popularized characters like Kalia the Crow, the rabbits Keechu and Meechu etc (ironically another famous character from Tinkle is Shikari Shambu, though no animals are ever harmed by him in the comics). Does anthropomorphism complicate or help you define the relationship between humans and non-humans in your comics?

RC: I am quite dependent on anthropomorphism to build a connection between my subject and my readers. Having grown up watching 2-d animated cartoons that used anthropomorphism extensively, it was natural for me to take that course. While there are critics who think of anthropomorphism as a weakness in a storyteller’s inventory, I personally have no such qualms. I don’t think I would be a storyteller in the first place if I was not exposed to anthropomorphic cartoons.

MS: Alongside your cartoon strips for newspapers and the books, you have also drawn several maps of forests, nature parks and urban biodiversity from around the world. These are often detailed, and provide a bird’s eye view (of course!) of the space. There is a certain similarity between comics and maps, of panels and grids helping the reader navigate time and space. In Naturalist Ruddy, you show us micro habitats: the outside of a porcupine’s cave, potter wasp’s nest or the endemic universe in a bamboo. There are tiny maps worked into The Great Indian Nature Trail. These are undoubtedly different ecosystems. What kind of research and process goes behind representing different ecosystems and comics cartography?

RC: Maps have been my gateway to understanding Indian wildlife and the communities that interact with it better. The first map project I worked on was Pakke Tiger Reserve for the Arunachal Forest Department in 2013. Since then I have drawn several such maps for national parks, tiger reserves, cities, countries and organisations both governmental and non-governmental. The field trips I conduct for researching the biogeography and terrain of my maps have been the most exciting aspect of my journey as an artist, as these trips entail firsthand exploration. Eventually, all I have learned on these trips have influenced my cartoon column, my books including Naturalist Ruddy, and my own outlook as an artist, an Indian citizen, and a human being.

 

MS: It is difficult to talk of animal habitats and habits without referring to some iota of violence (admittedly, not very unlike the human world!). Consider the chapter “Egad, the impaler!” about the shrike from Naturalist Ruddy where you mention murder, cannibalism and suicide. What goes into the decision process about the degree of graphic description you include in a comic meant for children such as this?

RC: I must first thank you for reading and analysing chapters from Naturalist Ruddy. The quirky animals that are introduced as killers and miscreants in these stories have been some of the most enjoyable experiences of cartooning for me, as the book gave me a chance to present these creatures in a way they had not been before. Documentaries quite often romanticise the role a particular animal plays in nature, and I wanted to reverse that. It is a general misconception that Naturalist Ruddy was meant for children. In fact, I rarely approach any book or story with a specific age group in mind, unless it is specified by the publisher or the commissioning organisation. Naturalist Ruddy being a personal project, played by my rules. Which is why you see a mix of blood, gore, sex, sensation and mystery in Ruddy’s adventures. And trust me it has more to do with the way things actually are in nature, rather than reflect on my own character!

 

MS: In The Great Indian Nature Trail, each chapter is followed by activities and trivia. This sometimes includes an invocation of literary animals and spaces who have certain characteristics attributed to them, such as loveable bears and mysterious islands. What are your favourite fictional wildlife characters/ spaces and do you have any pet peeves about fictional-environmental representations?

RC: The Great Indian Nature Trail was a rather simple series, and it was done in a very straightforward way, as WWF India (the publisher) was clear that it would have to be targeted at school kids spanning a broad age group, and that the stories had to have human characters (WWF has a policy against the anthropomorphising of animals). It was meant to be a very generalist introduction for a young, pan-Indian readership, into wild India. I personally enjoy my work a lot more as a storyteller when my protagonists are animals, and not humans. So even though The Great Indian Nature Trail is a very special book being my first comic book, it isn’t among the projects I have thoroughly enjoyed executing.

I certainly have a lot of pet peeves about fictional environmental representations. A certain degree of ecological accuracy matters to me, and it is something I look at as the responsibility of any creative communicator telling stories about science. So each time I see a penguin and a polar bear together in a cartoon, I do shrug in disapproval. Each time a bald eagle squeals in an Indian film, I cannot help but cringe!

 

MS: How have you explored the interconnectedness of human and planetary health in your comics? Your comics on bats and the Corona/Nipah virus come to mind.

RC: A lot of my cartoons have explored this interconnectedness. There have been cartoons about mangroves protecting coastlines against tsunamis, dams exposing fragile foothills to seismic mishaps, deforestation leading to the rise of viral diseases and so on.

MS: Several of your works must have involved traveling to forests and sanctuaries; what have some of the most exciting trips for work been? Do you take along a photographer, like Chunmun, to document what you see? Do you sketch on the field?

RC: I prefer working alone and I have been my own photographer on all field trips (which is why I take such terrible pictures!) Some of my most exciting travel experiences have been in North-East India, exploring rainforests with the members of the Bugun and Shertukpen communities. I remember seeing a Bugun Liocichla, one of India’s rarest birds (named after the Bugun tribe) in my very first morning at Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary! Naturally, experiences like these fuel an innate passion for the project itself (which in this case was a map of Eaglenest for the Arunachal Forest Department).

 

MS: These trips must be as much about engaging with people as they are about encountering wildlife, especially those people that cohabit these biodiversity-rich spaces. Comments?

RC: My own perspective of what wildlife conservation means to human beings has changed after interacting with indigenous people. Their knowledge and their oral history passed down from generation to generation is far more vibrant, diverse, and most importantly, inclusive when compared to what urban residents like you and me have learnt. What we have learnt comes from a very colonial understanding of wildlife conservation, whereas what they have learnt comes from actual interaction. I spent time with a hunter’s family when bushmeat was being cooked. Despite being in that space where the head of the family, the hunter, had just killed and cooked Barking Deer meat for his family, I gained a lot of respect for the community for being conservationists. You know, the way they hunt, all of it is done in such a meticulous manner. All factors are considered before a particular piece of land is involved or a particular animal is killed, whether it is bleeding, what month is best to kill it, what gender the animal is . . . it is beyond the understanding of an urban resident how a sense of balance already exists in these communities. I went to Arunachal thinking I would disagree with the views of a certain community but I ended up increasing my knowledge.

MS: Your cartoons balance drawing about wildlife and urban biodiversity. Is it easy to switch between the two?

RC: I don’t see a difference . . . even urban wildlife is wildlife. The spider in my bathroom or the lizard on my wall, I look at them as wild animals. There are some things that make an animal wild . . .whether a spider in my house or a polar bear in the Arctic, I would approach them the same way.

 

MS: A lot of research must go into your art, especially since your cartoons give us much species-specific information.

RC: A lot of these are based on observing these species in the wild. There are also instances where I have not seen a particular animal, but then I read extensively about it. For example, if a new species is discovered, I like to shed some light on the science around it and that involves reading research papers and speaking to the scientist if I know them to understand the discovery better. A lot of the clues and stories in Naturalist Ruddy are based around scientific papers. The mysteries are designed in the manner of decoding scientific papers, converting them into mystery and suspense that Detective Ruddy then solves.

 

MS: What medium do you draw your comics in? Has this changed over the years?

RC: The ideation and drafting always happens on paper with a pencil. The finished art that you see published, is executed digitally on Adobe Photoshop using a Wacom graphics tablet. I have dabbled with a few software like Illustrator and Flash before realising that Photoshop suits my needs best.

 

MS: What would you say is the difference between a comic, a cartoon and an illustration? Does it matter at all, and if it does, have you worked across all of these?

RC: I don’t think Manna De would like it if you called him a rapper! So it does matter to me that my readers use the correct terminology when consuming art of any kind. As far as definitions in the publishing world are concerned, a cartoon usually refers to a humorous visual with or without words or captions, presented in a single panel. When the panels are multiplied into a sequence of such images, it is called a comic strip. An illustration refers to the visual interpretation of textual information. And I certainly have been fortunate to have worked on all three!

As interviewed by Meenakshi Srihari
Art by Guru G for IWE Online
Apr 25
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Ammachi's Machines

Rajiv Eipe, interviewed by Shalini Srinivasan

By Comics, Interview No Comments
Cite this Essay

MLA:
Eipe, Rajiv. Interview with Shalini Srinivasan. Indian Writing In English Online, 25 Apr 2022, www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/rajiv-eipe-interviewed-by-shalini-srinivasan/.

Chicago:
Eipe, Rajiv. Interview with Shalini Srinivasan. Indian Writing In English Online. April 25, 2022. www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/rajiv-eipe-interviewed-by-shalini-srinivasan/ .

General

S: What are the different media you work in? And has this changed over the years?

R: I like working with paper and pencils, crayons, ink, charcoal. In my experience, working digitally saves a lot of time and can be a bit more forgiving of errors and things. Since I’m very often late on projects, I usually end up making exploratory sketches, rough thumbnails and final pencils on paper, and then adding colour on a computer. If I’m honest, I don’t think I’ve explored too many different media and illustration styles over the years, but it’s something I’d like to do more of in future.

S: Who are some of the major influences in your work?

R: It’s hard to answer this very concisely and specifically, inspiration comes from so many places. Growing up, I fell in love with the detailed illustrations and paintings of Norman Rockwell — we had a large book of his work at home. Around the time I went to art school, I remember being inspired by the work of Toulouse Lautrec, Schiele, Degas, Matisse, and trying to draw like them. Herge’s Tintin and Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix have been influences right from childhood, and more recently, the comic work of Guy Deslisle and Gipi.

From the world of children’s books, we had a few of the Mr. Men series by Roger Hargreaves when I was a boy, and I loved the characters. There were the cartoons and comics of Ajit Ninan and Jayanto in Target magazine. I love the books of Emily Hughes and Carson Ellis. And among my contemporaries, I admire and am inspired by the work of Aindri C, Priya Kuriyan, Prabha Mallya, Manasi Parikh, Rohan Chakravarty and Archana Sreenivasan, to name a few. I think there’s been a bit of an explosion of amazingly talented illustrators in India in the recent past, and I find inspiration flying at me almost everywhere I look.

Books

S: What medium did you make Hush in? And the cover? Could you talk a little bit about why and how these were chosen?

R: I think I used a combination of black ink drawn with a crow quill nib and a brush wash for texture and shading. The flashback sequences in the book needed to look noticeably different for the story to make sense, and so after some experiments and deliberation, we decided to use panels of pencil drawings against a black background. The cover was also a combination of ink and wash, with some digital tweaking. I believe we chose black and white ink drawings and wash to reflect the grim story. I should mention that a lot of the credit for the visualisation, pacing and design of the book goes to Pratheek Thomas, the writer. He had a very clear idea of the book in his head, and all I had to do was fill in the gaps with drawings.

S: What medium did you make Ammachi’s Amazing Machines in? Could you talk a little bit about why and how this was chosen? This was also (I think?) the first book you wrote for. How was it different to illustrate and write together?

R: Ammachi’s Amazing Machines was drawn with pencil on paper and coloured on a computer. Drawing on paper is the most natural and comfortable way for me to put thoughts and ideas down, and in my experience preserves a little of the imperfection and charm of using real materials. Though many art softwares recreate brushes and other media amazingly well, I personally find it a bit hard to achieve a comfortable balance when I’m drawing.

It was nice to write and illustrate together. Whereas you’d otherwise get a finished manuscript and then start imagining the pictures, this allows you to go back and forth between writing and drawing during the ideation process. The brief for the book was to introduce a science concept, in this case simple machines, to the reader in a fun way. I don’t feel very confident at all as a writer, and so it helped that I could draw out some ideas on paper and see if they worked for the story and the brief. After many many attempts and with lots of help and guidance from the editor and art director Vinayak Varma, the final book just sort of fell into place.

S: What medium did you make Anand in? Could you talk a little bit about why and how this was chosen? Is Anand based on a real person?

R: Anand was also drawn on paper and coloured digitally. In terms of style, I wanted to try and put the main character and his interactions with the people he meets squarely in the spotlight. The loud colours and patterns for the characters and limited palette and detail for the background was an attempt towards this. Anand is loosely based on the very lively person who drives the municipality waste collection auto in our neighbourhood — if not his physical characteristics, his zest, cheerful confidence and love for loud music.

 

Shalini Srinivasan, by email, 8th June, 2021
Published on April 25, 2022.
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