MANTO ON A POSTER, TAGORE ON A LAMP, A GODAAN MUG...
Almost every time someone brought them a gift based on art or literature from abroad (such as a Shakespeare mug or a Gone With The Wind fridge magnet), Delhi-based academic Saba Bashir and her husband Amir would think about the dearth of such products in India. Then in 2016, Amir left his job with a paper manufacturing company to launch Booksetc to make available ‘literary gifts’ to bibliophiles. They started with Shakespeare mugs and tote bags and currently offer merchandise carrying illusthan trations of and poems by more 20 international and Indian authors in English and Urdu.
“Both of us are avid readers. There came a time when we could visualise poems and couplets on utility items,” said Saba who manages the enterprise with her husband from their south Delhi apartment. Theirs is one of the many enterprises using visual art to popularise Indian literature and literary figures. The merchandise gives a ‘face’ to popular couplets; makes conventional products attractive; and makes popular literature part of our daily lives.
There is a couplet or poem for every occasion, mood and phase of life, only if you have the patience to pick the right product, said the Bashirs.
Being the son of an Urdu teacher, Shiraz Husain grew up in a home in south Delhi’s Okhla where everyone was interested in reading. Images of rose petals, dry leaves, burning candles with poetry superimposed on them, was all he could find when he ran a Google image search for Urdu poetry. While exploring literature offline, he came across abstract interpretations of popular poems. “I was pained to see that thousands of people who love shayari didn’t know their favourite poets by face,” said Husain, a Masters in Fine Arts, who started the Facebook page Khwaab Tanha Collective on which he regularly posts images of T-shirts, posters and pocket notebooks conceptualised by him.
Husain shares his artwork with people interested in buying it. Some of the Collective’s creations are available on its FB page, apart from the People Tree store in Connaught Place, Delhi, and the Pagdandi Café in Pune. “This is my response to the clichéd imagery of Urdu literature. Monetary