Sugriva's Atlas: The Book Cover
The cover for Sugriva's Atlas — on the Ramayana passages where a monkey king describes the globe in startling detail.
- Client
- Nilesh Oak & Mitra Desai
- Services
- Cover Design, Typography
- Channel
- Green channel
The cover
A poetic invocation of the four quarters would not need this level of detail — and would not order it geographically.
The subject
In the Kishkindha Kanda, Sugriva sends vanara search parties out in the four directions to find Sita. What is peculiar is what he says as he sends them: mountain ranges, rivers, islands, seas, peoples and their customs, the lands beyond the lands — named in sequence as though reading from something. The specificity is the puzzle, and the question the book asks: how much of the globe was actually known, and to whom, at the time the passage was composed?
The design
The cover was designed to carry that mystery — an itinerary hiding inside an epic, and the antiquity of the knowledge it implies.