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Five years ago, one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded occurred off the coast of Indonesia’s Aceh Province. The quake triggered a tsunami in the Indian Ocean with waves up to a hundred feet tall. More than a quarter of a million people died, most of them in Indonesia. India was also hit. Now a publishing company based in the Southern city of Chennai is remembering what happened five years ago with a beautiful new handmade book.
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KATY CLARK: This past weekend marked the five-year anniversary of the Asian tsunami. 230,000 people were killed in the disaster; more than half of them were in Indonesia. But the tsunami also devastated parts of Thailand, Sri Lanka and India. Now an Indian publishing company in the city of Chennai is commemorating the event with an extraordinary publication. It’s called “Tsunami”. Gita Wolf is the founder and director of Tara Books. She says Tsunami is published as a scroll in the tradition of Indian Patuas or scroll painters.
GITA WOLF: The patuas are actually bards and singers as an artist and what they used to do is they would go from house to house singing and showing their scroll, it was like a picture book. So what they have done here is actually relate and narrated the events of the Tsunami. It’s a scroll that’s been taken over into the book form and they’ve gone on to make a dirge out of it. Make a ballad; make something that commemorates the dead.
KATY: I’m wondering is this an art form that is still practiced today? Do you still have people walking around wandering from village to village with these patua scrolls to tell stories?
GITA: Yes it is and it isn’t. I mean it’s also grown a lot and many of them are now artists who actually sell the scrolls. And they actually paint pictures so it’s like a word picture that’s painted.
KATY: And this beautiful book you sort of unfold it and if you kind of stand it on end it’s about five feet tall or so and the colors are just these vibrant yellows and reds and blues. Describe sort of how this book came to be.
GITA: Well we actually met these patua painters at an exhibition and they had this beautiful scroll. They are a husband and wife team called [PH] Moinanja Adib. And you know I asked them whether they’d like to turn this into a book for us. So you know they came down to our publishing house in Chenai and worked with us for a month. And then we came up with this scroll. It kind of folds up into a book but it retains the scroll form.
KATY: There is actually a song that goes along with this patua scroll book that you’ve made. But let’s play a little bit of it right now.
[INDIAN MUSIC]
KATY: And those again are the artists who created the book, singing the words to the story, which in the book that I have anyway the words are in English. Describe what we see when we open this up. I mean as I’m, I was talking about the colors, and we see this that “Tsunami” is sort of this demon with red bloodshot eyes and flaming black hair. Describe what else we see.
GITA: Yeah so we see, you know this demon and you see the lot of people being carried away by the waters. And along the banks you see reporters, you see people and helicopters trying to rescue people. And you see you know bodies of animals, children, men and women floating down and trees. And then you also see the viewers who are looking at this on television. And you’ll see people who are morning on the banks of the river. And they also talk about how people forgot to stick to their communities and the way they do and, how Hindus and Muslims were buried in each other’s burial grounds or cremated. And they also talk of help and friendship.
KATY: I’m curious whether the Tsunami still looms large in people’s minds there in Chenai in southern India.
GITA: I certainly think that people who have been directly affected by the Tsunami and it’s quite a traumatic feeling and I don’t think that people have lost their fear of the sea and the fear of what nature can do. Some of them still you know are in makeshift housing and you know there has been a lot of suffering. So yes I don’t think it’s forgotten so easily.
KATY: Well it’s a really the book is a really beautiful way of commemorating what happened. Thanks for sharing it with us.
GITA: Thank you, thank you very much.
KATY: Gita Wolf is with Tara Books. A video of the artist making the screen-prints for “Tsunami” and singing the Tsunami ballad depicted in the scroll is on our web site TheWorld.org. This is PRI.
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