Telling Gandhi’s Story
The story that I am going to tell is about the way we made the illustrated book ‘My Gandhi Story’, published by Tulika Publishers in 2014. By ‘we’, I mean Radhika Menon, Rajesh Vengad Chaity, Ankit Chadha, Sunaina Suneja and I. The story begins like this:
When Tulika publishers asked me to do an illustrated book on Gandhi for children in collaboration with the Warli artist Rajesh Vengad Chaity, I panicked. It was not because I had never collaborated with traditional artists before; on the contrary, I had worked with embroidery artists from Kutch and Kaavad makers from Rajasthan to make animated films and illustrated books for children but my approach had always been more ethnographic. I would interact with them and together we would arrive at the images and text. In this case, the artist ...