Amazingly off-beat, feisty, fashionable, fun-loving and self-assured in every possible situation… meet the women in young artist Sangita Jogi’s mind.
“My women are modern,” she says. “A modern woman thinks differently. She’s not just going to do housework, she won’t get married until she’s pursued her own desires. She’s fashionable, she enjoys going to parties, and she likes to look beautiful. But it’s not easy to be modern.”
The images she conjures up are astonishing, in the light of the limited sphere of her own life. Sangita, with little formal schooling, was married into a labouring family when she was very young. She lives in Rajasthan, in a very traditional patriarchal set-up, where her role as a young daughter-in-law is strict and restrained. And yet she snatches time to draw whenever she can, her confident lines dreaming up endless possibilities—where desire, play and exploration make up enchanted alternative worlds that are as alive to her as her own.
This amazing project has been several years in the making and is especially close to our feminist hearts. Read a blog post by Gita Wolf – The Making of The Women I Could Be – to learn more about Sangita’s journey, and how we collaborated with her to come up with a book that speaks to every woman who reads it.
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Handmade Books through the years
Reading for Pleasure
All of us in the publishing house who became readers in childhood did so because we enjoyed it, not because we were made to do it. In fact, we grew up in an era – say around fifty years ago – when parents discouraged ‘story books’ and urged us to concentrate on school work instead. It was perhaps easier then to discover the pleasure of reading as a way to wander imaginatively into another world – there were not many other options vying for our attention. So why is reading still – or even more – important? Because it is surprisingly active and creative, in what it asks of us – the words tell us a story, but the details of the world they conjure up is always filled in by the reader’s own imagination. The act of reading for pleasure is a form of play. No two people read the same book in the same way. A child reader is a reader for life – and it is this insight which gave us the impetus to start publishing books which would interest a child, without an obvious moral thrust on them. We would still stand by our early convictions today, maybe just add something for our current times, which is that reading slows us down. When we are absorbed in a book, it makes us focus for long periods of time – particularly vital in an era which is determined to capture our attention at all costs, and in the process, distract us continually.
Handmade Books through the years
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