An author, a poet and a graphic novelist, who are participating in the Singapore Writers Festival this month, discuss the power of prose, poetry and picture. In the last of a three-part series, picture book illustrator Debasmita Dasgupta shares how before the words, the visuals come to her first
For nearly a year now, every time Debasmita Dasgupta looks at her phone, there is a girl staring back. On the wallpaper is a character that the graphic novelist has created for a book, but she has yet to tell the story.
“I know her story. I know her name. She keeps staring back at me, asking, ‘When are you going to tell my story?’” says the Singapore-based internationally published author-illustrator. “I call myself a visual storyteller because before the words, the visuals come to me first. I see my characters and I must draw them—and then they start talking to me. Sometimes I have them on my mobile-phone wallpaper as a reminder that I have to tell their stories.”
Growing up, Dasgupta was exposed to all kinds of books, including picture books and comics, and cinema, thanks to her theatre actor-director father and writer mother. She attended the Patha Bhavan school in her native India. In its formative years, the institution had the influence of many illustrious figures, including film maestro Satyajit Ray.
“My childhood was filled with these creative beings around me, and they were a big influence on my life. I knew somewhere, somehow that these early experiences were going to express themselves. Of course, I didn’t know it then,” she shares.
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It was in 2009, when she was working as a communications specialist who would draw after work, at night and over the weekends, that she met the founder of a Delhi‑based independent publisher, Katha Books. “We were having a conversation that was not related to books, and she said, ‘We’re doing this series on Tagore for his 150th birth anniversary, why don’t you illustrate one of the books?’ I had never done anything like that before, but she saw something in me.”
With no formal art training, she started participating in workshops and residencies and, by 2010, had moved to Singapore. She came across a Ted talk by Shabana Basij-Rasikh, an Afghan women’s rights champion who shared about her life during the Taliban regime, and how her father would dress her as a boy to go to school.
The speaker revealed that her father had told her the Taliban could take away everything, except one’s knowledge. Basij-Rasikh went on to study in the US and later returned to Kabul to start an all-girls boarding school. (With the return of the Taliban, it was reported that the students and staff of the school were evacuated to Rwanda in August.)
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