V Jayashree

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will examine the role and impact of illustrations in various kinds of Tamil magazines in the second half of the 20th century. It will seek to understand how the ascription of supplementary nature of illustrations to fictional narratives was understood and negotiated in the public sphere. V Jayashree is the Coordinator for this project. 

V Jayashree is an artist, art historian, poet and short story writer based in Coimbatore. She has a PhD in Art History and a Master’s degree in Mass Communication and Journalism from Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, Tamil Nadu. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Visual Communication, Avinashilingam Institute for Home Science and Higher Education for Women, Coimbatore. Given her experience, Jayashree is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA. 

During the second half of the 20th century, a wide range of magazines, weeklies, and monthlies brought informative essays, political ideas, travelogues, and most importantly, prose fiction in the form of novels and short stories to the public in Tamil Nadu. Of these, the serialised novels garnered special attraction. As a result, it became a common practice to have illustrations accompanying fictional writing, both for serialised novels and short stories. They were meant to enhance the readers’ imagination by providing them with a visual supplement to the textual narratives. The illustrations accompanying popular novels in mainstream Tamil magazines were widely cherished, commented upon, collected, and preserved by enthusiastic connoisseurs. It became common practice to save the illustrated pages and bind them together later as collector’s items. 

Through this project, Jayashree will examine the advent, evolution and importance of illustrations for fictional narratives in Tamil magazines. In addition, she will study the aesthetic choices that informed artistic representation of specific moments in the stories, whether these illustrations are part of the gaze produced by the ecology of film and studio photography, and how they differed from the West in the 19th century.

Two sets of people will be interviewed for this project. One set will comprise artists, their families and the editors of the magazines. The second will include members of the reading public who have fond recollections of their savouring of the illustrations. Printed interviews and memoirs of artists and editors will be studied as part of secondary research. The project will attempt to explore the sociological impulses displayed in illustrations. Along with figurative illustration, the project also aims to analyse the use of abstract and semiabstract art that accompanied poems and fictional work. Studied together, the practice of illustrations provides a unique opportunity to think of the supplementary aspect of figural imagination to prose, poetic imagination, and expression. 

The outcomes of this project will be an open-source digital repository and a monograph. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA, along with reports, will be a link to and a sample from the digital repository and the monograph. 

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Research programme as it attempts to study the unexplored history, aesthetics and evolution of an aspect of visual culture within the ecology of the publishing industry that is often ignored in discourse. 

IFA will ensure that the project is implemented on time and that the funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is complete and deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with the Trustees.