Supriya Kelkar sits cross-legged on the floor of her studio and lays out old saris from her mother, studying their colors and textures. She likes to mix rough and sheer fabrics to emphasize endurance and gentleness—qualities that are also a part of the stories she writes. She layers tissue to complement the wrinkles in ancient silk or homespun cotton.
Then she begins adorning handmade paper from old Indian wedding invitations, cutting shapes and painting a peacock and a flower onto the paper. She adds jewels and sequins with tweezers. Later, the embellished paper will be collaged with the fabric.
As Kelkar works in her studio—actually her family room at her home in Metro Detroit, during the hours her three kids are at school—she’s remembering family stories, the labors of skilled artisans in the country where her parents were born, the animals from folk tales she heard as a child. Throughout, she pauses, steps away from her work, and examines the big picture she is creating.
“I want there to be a sense of three dimensions here in a flat illustration because I’m writing about a vibrant place, one that was alive before colonization.”
Kelkar (A.B. 2002) is an author whose latest book, And Yet You Shine: The Kohinoor Diamond, Colonization, and Resistance, is the first that she has both written and fully illustrated. It tells the story of a stolen diamond that illuminates a larger history: the British colonization of South Asia.
For the book’s illustrations, Kelkar improvised her own modern versions of South Asian metal work, block printing, textiles, and folk art, to honor the survival of these art forms against painful odds. The materials and artistic practices survived colonization and the British East India Company, which taxed and suppressed the work of South Asian artisans for centuries.
Kelkar graduated with a double major in film, television, and media (FTVM) and psychology. She also took nearly enough courses to qualify for a history minor as well—and Kelkar says that her love of history is infused in all of the books she writes.
And Yet You Shine tells the story of how the British came to possess the Kohinoor diamond, which at the time was the largest in the world. Kelkar’s telling focuses on a real-life story of a 10-year-old child king who was separated from his mother and tricked into handing the diamond over to the British East India Company, which took it as a trophy of conquest. Over centuries, the diamond was cut down in order to match British standards of brilliance. Today the Kohinoor diamond sits in the museum of the Tower of London when it’s not being worn by British royalty.
Symbolically, the diamond holds tremendous power for Kelkar and others. “For so many people in the South Asian diaspora, this stolen diamond represents so much more than a gemstone. It symbolizes the brutality of colonization and its lasting effects today.” And for Kelkar, the story of British colonization in India is not a distant history, but a family story; her father was born in British-colonized India in 1946.
Kelkar’s creative road to And Yet You Shine took several turns. A screenwriter by training, Kelkar studied with Professor Jim Burnstein in FTVM. She credits him with helping her develop a strong foundation in storytelling. After graduating from LSA in 2002, Kelkar began working as a screenwriter in Bollywood, attending to a rigorous production schedule between Michigan, Los Angeles, and Mumbai.
The Bollywood screenwriting job kept her busy but was not where she gravitated creatively, she says. Knowing she had other stories to tell, she began writing her first book, Ahimsa, in 2003, and over the next decade she wrote more than a dozen other titles. Kelkar also started a family during this busy time.
“I was pregnant with my third child, a week before giving birth actually, in 2016, when I sold Ahimsa, and I was just about ready to give up on that dream of publication,” she says. Ahimsa was finally published in 2017.
Today, Kelkar’s list of published books includes bestsellers and award-winning middle-grade novels such as American as Paneer Pie; Strong as Fire, Fierce as Flame; The Cobra’s Song; and The Many Colors of Harpeet Singh, which was the Michigan Center for the Book’s honoree in the Library of Congress’s “Great Reads from Great Places” in 2021.
In 2023, Kelkar was honored by the Michigan Legislature on the House of Representatives floor for her contribution to children’s literature as a “distinguished author and Michigan treasure who has touched the lives of countless children, adults, and families.”
Kelkar may be known for her lush, layered illustrations, but when it comes to the creative process, she puts her “writer hat” on first. “When I’m drafting, I’m not thinking about the visuals,” she says. She writes first, going directly to the storytelling tenets she learned from Burnstein in FTVM.
In the case of And Yet You Shine, she had noticed that in the retelling of stories from this time period, South Asian people were often excluded from the narrative. Kelkar shares that she and many of her BIPOC peers had been shut out of children’s books for decades, and that creating diverse books for all children felt especially urgent in an age of book banning.
This urgency inspired Kelkar to turn her storytelling skills to the hidden history of the Kohinoor diamond. The story came out in second-person, with the diamond presented as the protagonist and addressed as “you” throughout.
“The story of the Kohinoor diamond is the story of a people,” she says.
Kelkar finds support among her creative colleagues and peers in children’s literature. They inspire each other in the creative process, and they are there for each other, whether their books are getting taught or banned.
“While I was excluded from previous eras of publishing, we’re creating a new era of diverse kid-lit,” she says, mentioning other authors and illustrators like Karina Yan Glaser, Christina Soontornvat, John Schu, and others. “We’re working together to make sure kids of all backgrounds see each other in a book.”
Kelkar’s readers inspire her sense of hope in this work. Every school visit, every enthusiastic letter she receives from readers, reminds her that good storytelling matters. Kelkar’s next project, Thank You, Teacher!, is a picture book for early elementary-aged readers. The book, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2025, honors the work of educators.
And Yet You Shine is as ornately illustrated as a picture book, but it’s a middle grade book, geared toward third- through seventh-grade readers. “That’s a great age for having these discussions,” Kelkar says. “Kids at this age are starting to become critical thinkers. I was experiencing the effects of racism in preschool, so middle grade readers can definitely handle these stories, and they have the critical thinking skills to make connections.”
As a writer, she feels a responsibility to tell these stories well. Kelkar describes a mutual respect between the author and the reader, a relationship she takes very seriously.
“Kids know that these stories matter. And that gives me a lot of hope.”
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| Tags: | LSA; Department of Film, Television, and Media; LSA Magazine; Humanities; Gina Balibrera |
