‘The Ramayana’ as a typeface
The Hindu · Gautami Reddy ·
A designer teams with Madhubani artists to turn Ramayana into a decorative, typographic alphabet that narrates the epic in English letters.
How do you fit the Ramayana, an epic of gods, demons, warring kingdoms and human frailty, into 26 letters? For Ishan Khosla, a Dehradun-based designer and educator with a fascination for the history of typography, the question was not entirely absurd. He had spent years thinking about the strange relationship between pictures and words: how Egyptian hieroglyphs represented objects and sounds, and how medieval European manuscripts turned their opening letters into elaborate miniature worlds, populated by saints, animals and sword-wielding men. Letters are things we read, but what if they could become pictures again?
Khosla had been exploring this possibility through The Typecraft Initiative, founded in 2011, born of a frustration with how little of India’s own visual culture he saw in contemporary design. “I also wanted to get out of the confines of the urban, air-conditioned studio,” he recalls, “and typography became a means of dialogue, through words as much as images.”
Working with practitioners of Gond art and Baiga tattoos, kolam and other visual traditions, he has sought to bring artistic knowledge passed down through generations into digital typography. Having previously collaborated with Madhubani artists Pradyumna Kumar and Pushpa Kumari on a Devanagari typeface, he wondered whether they might help him turn the Ramayana into an alphabet.
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