Backing up a bit, though, first, who are Tara? Based in Chennai, South India, they’re a “fiercely independent” publishing house showcasing illustration and writing from various regions and communities. They value “adventurous people around the world”. The feminist principles of dialogue and creating opportunities at the heart of their work are outlined pretty well in this piece over on For Books’ Sake. They want to open your heart and your mind, balancing “the pleasures of a beautiful book with wit and political rigour. Our titles are often unclassifiable, straddling accepted genres. We have pioneered the art of the book made entirely by hand, making artists’ books affordable for the average book lover.”

From the point of view of my illustrating I get particular enjoyment from their picture books, which always teach me new things – when we spoke to Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao about their work with artist Bhajju Shyam on The Flight of the Mermaid a few months ago, I found I was learning about Gond tribal art in the process.

Moving on now to the book in question, which is artist Dulari Devi‘s first book. She paints in the Mahdhubani style popular in the Mithila region of Bihar, eastern India, which you can read more about for starters on Wikipedia here.

I am an artist, but I wasn’t always one. This is the story of how it happened.

– Dulari Devi

This is a gentle, inspiring, true story about the urge to create – and running mildly but persistently through it, Dulari’s struggle to work that process out in a context where art isn’t a career she can economically support, and where education in artistic technique is not easily come by. She learns, in her own words, by doing, and keeping doing. One day after a long day working as a domestic help, she finds herself fashioning a bird from clay, and a journey begins. And for her, the discovery of her own creative power, and through it a new sense of self, is a momentous change. It would be really facile and silly to compare my own life to hers, so I won’t, except to say that I struggle with neurotic “creative block” a lot in my own way – and this reminded me to pull my finger out and get down with the muse again. There’s something very essential and beautiful about the way she describes having the ‘get excited and make things’-epiphany, and I love the cyclical way the text, which is all transcribed from Dulari’s oral account of her life, begins and ends with the affirmation “I am an artist”.

The art is serenely beautiful, full of detail that jumps out at you on a second look. Art Nerd moment: Mithila folk art really appeals to my love of strong line-work. Dulari’s work is high on decorative geometric borders and patterns, and double-lined and crosshatched outlines lifting the figures off the page. If I had kids, I’d read them this. As it is, I was super happy reading it to myself, with lots of pauses to notice all the birds hiding in the trees (I made a mental note to make Markgraf, our resident bird-art enthusiast, look at the birds).

So there’s a pile of reasons why you should keep an eye on Tara (plus the fact their latest graphic novel, Sita’s Ramayana, hits these shores in 2012, but it’s already made the NYT bestsellers). Christmas is coming, after all! Buy your family some beautiful readables.

• Tarabooks.com
• Tara blog
• Tara twitter
• Postcard from India: Maegan from Tara, writing for the Guardian, talks about their work

But I was in for a shock one day at school, when I settled myself down in the Book Corner with the Ladybird Well-Loved Tales version of Hans Christian Anderson‘s text. The Mermaid died at the end? She didn’t marry the prince? And then was turned into a “Daughter of the Air”, and wasn’t allowed a Christian soul unless a zillion children did good deeds and something-something-virtue? What a letdown. Expecting a straightforward happy ending, I was utterly bewildered. Prince or no prince, I hadn’t been prepared for quite so much all-out morbidity, and if you asked me, this Daughters of the Air business just sounded a bit suspicious.

It’s one hell of a leap from the all-out romance of Disney’s riff on the story to Anderson. Disney takes Anderson’s curious young mermaid princess and gives her a bit of sass, focusing the story on themes of adolescence and coming of age and adding a saleable happy ending into the mix. It’s a common refrain on feminist blogs to say that Disney “sanitised the originals” (whatever “original” means). Here, though, Disney at least allows Ariel her desires, even if they are chastely presented, and allows their fulfilment at the end. By contrast, Anderson focuses on the dangers of curiosity and makes the story arc a recognisably tragic one – and later, it seems, tacked on the stuff about the Daughters of the Air to add in a moral imperative for the reader: children, be good, else the mermaid will never earn her Christian soul!

In both stories, identity and self-knowledge is a key theme – and both mermaids are willing to give up their voices and identities for love and to gain access to the exciting, adult, otherworld of the land. There’s something problematic about both of them – with Anderson’s version, as Marina Warner puts it in From The Beast To The Blonde: On Fairy Tales And Their Tellers, “the story’s chilling message is that cutting out your tongue is still not enough. To be saved, more is required: self-obliteration , dissolution.” With Disney, Warner ruminates that “the issue of female desire dominates the film… the verb ‘want’ falls from the lips of Ariel more often than any other – until her tongue is cut out”, concluding that – however much we want to cry “sanitised!” – it is more that in the film “romance constitutes the ultimate redemption, and romantic love, personified by the prince, the justification of desire”. So it’s a kind of sanitising, but it’s also a secularising.

All of which brings me to The Flight of the Mermaid, Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao‘s adaptation of the tale, a wonderful picture book, now recently reprinted by India-based publishing house Tara Books. This version re-energises Anderson’s original storyline and tells it in such a way that it becomes, devoid of its Victorian moralising, a genuinely life-affirming, feminist story. The real achievement, though, is that it keeps the Daughters of the Air stuff, and Anderson’s story structure, but tells the story in such a way that a happy ending is forged. And it’s an ending that retains the sense for wanderlust Disney gives its heroine, but doesn’t end in the mermaid trading selfhood or identity for marriage – at the same time neatly avoiding Anderson’s preachy, morbid shutdown of female desire or personal autonomy.

But let’s start with basic facts: the book is gorgeous. Check it out!

Flight of the Mermaid – skipping out the diminuitive little from the title for a start – is a treat for the senses from start to finish. Beautifully letter-pressed on tactile, thick-grain paper, the cover has a press-out fish shape which doubles as a bookmark and reveals the mermaid herself underneath. The book is fully illustrated with acclaimed artist Bhajju Shyam‘s distinctive artwork in the Gond tribal style, and the results are a wonderful, fresh contrast to the European visualisations of this story I’ve become so used to. Look how colourful it is!

The title of the book also describes the ending (skip to after the grey blockquotes if you don’t want the detail spoilered!) – the mermaid comes to the realisation that the prince, though he is fond of her, does not love her romantically. She is saddened, but will not kill him – the only way she can save her own life – and chooses to sacrifice herself instead: yes, familiar Anderson territory. And yet:

Slowly, the truth came over her – her plight had nothing to do with the prince at all… he knew nothing of her, and could not carry the weight of her dreams.

And at the point where, in Anderson, her tragic end is mitigated only by the Daughters of the Air announcing “welcome to the airy feminine purgatory party!”, Wolf, Rao and Shyam show the mermaid’s transition into the air as a change, not an ending:

“Who are you?” she asked, and found that her voice had returned.

“We are the daughters of the air, they answered. “And now you are one of us.”

The mermaid was delighted. “I was born into water,” she said to them. “And I know the world on the shore too. Only the air is left to explore, and it seems to hold more freedom than sea or land.”

The air is, logically, her next destination on a continuous journey. Always on the move, the mermaid’s real aim is constant self-discovery and adventure. Visually, in each of her phases on land, sea, and air, she retains her flowing hair and colourful attributes, whether they are feathers or scales. Her identity is always hers, and is never relinquished.

It’s a wonderfully executed blend of the positive points of both Anderson’s text and the optimism the Disney generation have come to expect from the story, and for parents, schools and people who love beautifully made books, I just can’t recommend Tara Books highly enough.

We managed to grab five minutes of co-author Gita Wolf’s time, via email, to ask her a little about the book – why this story?

“We felt that the story had universal resonance,” says Gita. “It was both a coming-of-age tale as well as the story of a journey (both literal and spiritual). When we first told the story to Bhajju Shyam, he related to it right away. ‘That’s exactly it!’ he said, ‘That’s what it feels like to come into a completely new element – like when I traveled to another country for the first time. I lost my language, and it felt like I was [as Anderson’s mermaid experiences when she loses her voice] walking on knives.'”

How about the ending? “We wanted to give the tale a feminist twist, and not focus on the loss of the prince as an absolute tragic end of everything – nor did we want the Disney ending. In keeping with Anderson’s basic narrative, the Mermaid in a sense does go up in the air, but the air is here a new element to explore, and her journey will continue.”

All hail the flying mermaid!

Order your copy from Tara’s UK distributors or on Amazon.

Find out more

• See more of the interior of the book at Drawn.ca here
• Check out the Tara Books blog here, and read about their work in their recent article on For Books’ Sake. Be sure to check out their catalogue (available on their homepage as a PDF file – I’m especially excited for Sita’s Ramayana!

Warm thanks to Maegan Chadwick-Dobson, Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao at Tara Books for taking the time to talk to us, sending us parcels and being generally lovely.