Bookscapes in the City

When it comes to the Popsicle Test, most cities in India would probably fail miserably. A phenomenon of the 1990s, the test has been increasingly used by town planners to rate a city as child-friendly. The premise for this test is quite simple: if a child can walk safely to a neighbourhood store, buy a popsicle and come back home before it melts, the neighbourhood is a child-friendly one. And, by extension, many neighbourhoods like this make for a child-friendly city.

If one extends the Popsicle Test to include an answer to this question: can a child walk safely to a neighbourhood library and find a book of his choice, most Indian cities would fail even more miserably. Try looking for one in your neighbourhood. This, however, is not a story about what’s missing in cities.

This is a story about a children’s literature festival that has travelled to nine cities and discovered spaces that have played host to happy children who, in turn, spent the weekend in those spaces basking in the unadulterated joy of books and reading. Along the way, it also won a global award for Literary Festival of the Year at the London Book Fair in March this year.

Bookaroo is not about just storytelling, it has illustration workshops, crafts workshops, dramatised reading and more

Spaced out

Talking of spaces, the idea of Bookaroo, India’s first children’s literature festival, was born in a 190-sq. ft. children’s-only bookstore in a corner of south east Delhi. Back in the mid-2000s, book reading sessions or author-illustrator workshops in bookstores were not the rage they are today. However, there was a limit to how many children could fit into a place where nearly 100 out of the 190-sq. ft. was given over to bookshelves, the cash counter and a makeshift office area.

In August 2008, the three co-founders of Bookaroo – Jo Williams, Swati Roy and Venkatesh – met with like-minded friends in the book world. It was a snap decision to launch the festival in November, just three months down the line. With no money to back the venture, the search for a venue that could take in at least 500 kids started in earnest.

Bookaroo’s first venue – Sanskriti Anandgram on Delhi’s Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road – came about by accident. It was Williams who stumbled upon the beautiful artists’ residency on a September morning when she walked in through the gates of Sanskriti and encountered the enormous banyan tree on the front lawn. “The Storytelling Tree,” she exclaimed excitedly. A mix of museums, studios, open air theatres and green spaces, Sanskriti, was an ideal launch platform.

The beginning

Bookaroo is not just about storytelling, it has illustration workshops, crafts workshops, dramatised reading and more. Much to everyone’s surprise, 3,000 children and parents arrived on the last weekend of November 2008. The children were happy, the parents happier and the authors, storytellers and illustrators the happiest. That amazing weekend set the tone for 21 editions to follow.

After two years in Sanskriti, the festival had to relocate as the numbers and parking (the absence of a good public transport system didn’t help) became a problem. In 2010, Bookaroo moved to the lawns of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) located in the heart of Lutyens, Delhi.

For a first-time visitor, IGNCA comes as a surprise. The 32-year-old sanctuary in the middle of a bustling metropolis was set up as a meeting point of cultures and civilisations. In 1989, in a letter to the then member secretary of the IGNCA, Kapila Vatsayan, the Curator Emeritus of Indian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Stella Kramrisch, said: “No dimension, no region of artistic form has been left standing by itself. Each in its own place holds the key to an unlocking of the entire structure of creative experience and its form.” As home for a children’s literature festival every November, IGNCA had everything a child could dream of.

In the last nine years (the festival celebrates its 10th birthday in Delhi this November), Bookaroo has had the good fortune of visiting some picturesque cities as one edition of the festival led to another.

An exciting part of organising the festival is scouting for a venue

Going places

During the 2010 event in Delhi, the owners of DPS Srinagar, came visiting. “Would you,” they asked, “be interested in coming to Srinagar with the festival?” In 2011, Srinagar became Bookaroo’s first station outside Delhi. Srinagar is the only city in which, for various reasons, Bookaroo is held in a school. DPS, that nestles at the foot of a large hill, has big spaces and nooks and crannies that make for interesting discoveries.

The urge to explore more cities grew stronger till, in 2013, it was decided that Pune would be an interesting venue because of its profile as the ‘cultural capital’ of Maharashtra. An exciting part of organising the festival is scouting for a venue. In Pune, the recce comprised trips to Empress Garden, Pu La Deshpande Park and Bund Garden before Sambhaji Park was selected. Kuching (in Malaysia), Goa, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Kolkata and Bengaluru followed.

The format for the festival essentially consists of dividing a venue into various sub venues. Sessions at Bookaroo are programmed for two-year age bands beginning with the age group 4-6. In Delhi, the upper age band is 14-16 while in other cities it is 10-12.

The Kahani Tree, as the name suggests, is used mainly for telling stories to children who are under eight. This is the only sub-venue that has two 30-minute back-to-back sessions – younger children do have shorter attention spans – followed by a 30-minute break and so on till evening. Every other session in Bookaroo is 60-minutes long with a 30-minute break. 

The big-audience events (300 or more children in a session) are reserved for the Stage. The Doodle Wall is a 20-foot paper wall that is used for illustration workshops. Illustrators encourage participating children to try their hand at doodling.

For children interested in craft, there is the Crafty Corner. These are smaller sessions and children work on creating various things. Every session in Bookaroo is based on a book that has been published. Dramatised readings take place in the Amphitheatre while sessions that require projection are organised in a sub venue called the Studio.

Using spaces

The festival’s charm lies in the fact that the sessions are held in a mix of outdoor and indoor spaces. Pune’s Sambhaji Park, for instance, is also a public walking space. On Bookaroo Day, morning walkers were pleasantly surprised to see its transformation into a child-friendly space that did not interfere with their activities.

IGNCA in Delhi has wide spaces, grassy mounds, an amphitheatre, trees, an exhibition centre, a media centre with a fully equipped studio (which hosts regular film shows) and a 200-seater auditorium spread over 27 acres. It makes for an interesting visit any time of the year. Bookaroo too creates its own spaces while in residence. Run around, play, pick up a book or meet an author, a child can find so much to do.

Pustaka Negeri, the Sarawak State Library, is a research and information complex in Malayasia with rolling parkland and a lake. The climate forced the festival to stay indoors, but the architecture of the building compensated. It had the added advantage of being disabled-friendly.

In 2015 we travelled to Goa first and then to Ahmedabad. In Panaji, Campal Gardens – a grassy expanse on the banks of the River Mandovi with trees as far as the eye could see and a small beach to boot – blended well with the Bookaroo spirit. Soundproof tents were erected to house the indoor sessions. In Ahmedabad, the festival’s location was a modern architectural marvel: the Mill Owners’ Building. Designed by the great Le Corbusier in 1954, it had ‘atmosphere’.

A ceremonial ramp marks the approach to the main hall. The east and west facades are in the form of sun breakers (brises-solei), a Corbusier invention. With no windows, this design avoids the harsh sun but permits free movement of air. Along with their tryst with literature, children learnt a thing or two about architecture.

In 2016, Bookaroo made its debut in the beautiful Jawahar Kala Kendra (a.k.a JKK). JKK is a place where some cultural event or the other keeps happening. The multi-arts centre, designed by Charles Correa, is inspired by the original city plan of Jaipur, consisting of nine squares with the central square left open. Having stayed all day, the children who came for Bookaroo wouldn’t leave when it was time to go home.

In Kolkata, the venue was none other than the historic Indian Museum. Known fondly by the locals as Jaadu Ghar, this museum with its imposing vaulted corridors and green quadrangles, was the perfect oasis for a children’s literature festival. For two days, it became a magical melting pot of books, children, archaeology and history.

Further afield

Having been to the rest of the country, we could not have left out the south. Infotech city Bengaluru played host to Bookaroo in early September. As always, we dug up an interesting venue: Freedom Park.

A jail-turned-public space, which is also used for rallies, Freedom Park has a jogging track, a children’s play area, the jail museum, an information corridor gallery, a children’s interactive museum in the old cells yard, a tree museum and an outdoor exhibition park.

The beauty of the experience is that such spaces also fulfilled Bookaroo’s quest for destinations that encouraged the breaking down of classroom walls while still being with books. The voices of children accentuated the natural ambience of each venue. “All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts or stimulates the people in that space,” said America’s Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning postmodern architect, Philip Johnson. Bookaroo’s choice of venues, by accident or by design, underlines that sentiment.

All PHOTOS: BOOKAROO