The silent type: Take a peek inside the world of wordless books
They let children write the story, and rewrite it with each visit. Adults are entranced too. (It’s a step up from re-reading tales about teddies and unicorns.)
What’s the best way into the world of words? It turns out the answer may be: a book that contains none.
Wordless books are being published around the world, targeted mainly at children, aimed as a sort of gateway drug to the world of reading. As so happens with things targeted at children, parents and other adults are ending up entranced too.
Take a look at the images alongside. The fact that they tell a story is undeniable. Often, it’s a slow, Studio Ghibli-like tale of quiet afternoons and the ephemeral magic of the everyday.
The plot is designed to be open to interpretation. Is the child crying in the playground, on the first day of school, a bully, a victim, or just nervous?
One can imagine children spending hours telling and retelling their own versions — a happy alternative to the (let’s just say it) drudgery of reading and re-reading the same stories about dinosaurs, unicorns, teddy bears on bicycles, or the blasted moon.
“Doing away with language opens up a much wider world for the reader,” says Priya Krishnan, senior editor at Tulika Books, whose wordless titles include Ammachi’s Glasses (2017) and Ammama’s Sari (2019).
The books are also meant to encourage children to express themselves more effectively in art, and see more worth in the wordless tales they create in school and at home.
The wordless book as a genre can be dated to 1932, when Ruth Carroll released What Whiskers Did, the story of a Scottish terrier who befriends a family of rabbits.
What Whiskers Did stood largely on its own for decades. The current rush of titles can be traced to Flotsam (2006), a wordless tale by the exceptional children’s storyteller David Wiesner, about a boy who finds a loaded camera on the beach. Also released that year was The Arrival (2006), a wordless work by Australian artist and writer Shaun Tan, about a man who must leave his wife and troubled homeland to seek a better future in a new land.
“To do away with text entirely allows for a special kind of freedom,” says Canato Jimo, art director at Pratham Books, whose wordless titles include the vibrant Ikru’s First Day of School (2021) and This is Where We Live (2021). “It’s a special opportunity for an artist because they are free of the limitations that words can bring,” Jimo adds. Take a look.
* Ikru’s First Day of School (2021)
Sunaina Coelho brings her experiences as a mother and an artist together to tell a story of excitement, fear, and a boy’s first day at school. We see Ikru walk in; sense the overwhelming effect of the many people, colours and new rooms. We see him approach other children, and explore the playground. He learns to climb a tree, panics, and is helped down by a new friend. Speech bubbles contain more images. It’s the perfect medium for a tale of confusion, joy and new adventure.
* This is Where We Live (2021)
Manjari Chakravarti takes readers through a single day at Santiniketan, as seen through the eyes of two cats. Chakravarti, who lives and works at Rabindranath Tagore’s art and cultural settlement in West Bengal, draws its towering trees, seasonal storms and quiet afternoons in vivid detail. The black-and-white ink drawings linger at a gate, zoom in on a cosy drawing room or seem to sit, endlessly, by a window. Dream-like and engaging, it seeks to encourage the viewer to appreciate the simple magic of the everyday.
* Seed (2021)
Swetha G Nambiar’s book, published by Yellara Pustaka, is about the dreams of a young girl who plants a seed and lets her imagination leap forward to imagine the plant it will grow into. The minimalist work is meant to encourage children to make art of their own. “We want them to feel inspired to create something,” says founder of Yellara Pustaka, Vanitha Yaji.
* Ammama’s Sari (2019)
Drawn by Niveditha Subramaniam, this is the tale of a girl and her grandmother who find a hole in the Ammama’s sari and then set about imagining all the things it can now be. Can it be a screen with a peephole? A baby’s sling?
* Ammachi’s Glasses (2017)
Priya Kuriyan didn’t know there was such a thing as a wordless book, when she started work on her story about a grandmother who can never find what she’s looking for. “I put a lot of words in, which was not going very well,” she says, laughing.
The art, and the tale, were so engaging and full of humour by themselves that her publisher recommended she delete the words. “I was initially surprised but it did work out much better,” Kuriyan says. “In a way the child is the writer of the book. The narrative is mine but the words are the child’s.”
* Bonus title: Journey (2023)
Keerthana Srinivasan’s innovative project is a wordless book for adults.
Published by Paper Lantern, it is the autobiographical tale of a woman who goes from having a full house, with a husband and two children, to living alone as her husband explores a new job in another city and her children leave for college. This story is poignantly told through hand-torn paper-collage art. Evocatively, the characters are represented by symbols: a red kite, a blue boat.
