New publisher Chellamey Books is all about making Tamil fun to learn for kids

Try to sit your three-year-old kid down with a wordy book and chances are that you’ll lose their interest five minutes in. The beauty of interactive books though, is that it grabs their attention with engaging visuals and fun elements they can touch and feel – keeping kids interested in the story and enhancing language learning.

While English interactive books for children flood the market, the ones in Tamil are few and far between. For young Tamil parents who are eager to enrich their kids’ education at home, this lack is a source of frustration and anxiety.

Enter Chellamey Books. This newly launched publisher bridges the gap with Tamil-language interactive books for children. Co-founded by childhood friends and young mothers Usha and Razmiah, here you’ll find books with all the cool bells and whistles – tabs to pull, flaps to lift, textures to explore, and even QR codes that lead you to digital translations and transliterations.

We catch up with Usha and Razmiah to find out how Chellamey Books hopes to foster an appreciation for Tamil language, culture, and issues from a young age.

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Hi Usha and Razmiah, thanks for joining us today! First up, tell us more about your long friendship.

Razmiah: Usha and I have known each other since secondary school where we were in the same Higher Tamil class. We were always the worst two students, so as the worst two, we united to copy homework and share resources and knowledge. That’s how it started out.

We were in the same form class in Secondary Three, then we went to the same junior college and university. We got married around the same time and pregnant around the same time – so lots of similar experiences. We’re basically stalking each other.

Before Chellamey Books, what did you read to your children?

Razmiah: We mostly read English books. My kids love interactive books, the ones where you can pull the tabs, lift the flaps and explore different textures. I couldn’t find this level of interactive elements in Tamil books, so we had those softcover books that are very wordy and have bad illustrations.

Usha: My daughter isn’t as much of a reader as Razmiah’s son, but she liked playing with books. We might think that books are just about reading to your children but at such an early age, it’s more about keeping their brains engaged because the whole world is so overly stimulating for them. With English books, I couldn’t read normal picture books – I needed some sort of interactive element in order to stand a chance of my daughter sitting through it.

What drove the decision to launch Chellamey Books?

Usha: There is a big fear of losing touch with Tamil. Razmiah and I are both good at writing Tamil, but you would never catch us speaking it. It’s later on that we realised how beautiful the language is, and how much of our culture and tradition is tied to the language. There are so many things you say in Tamil that can never be captured in English, so just the fact that we could lose all that if our children don’t appreciate the language really drove me.

Razmiah: Same – it took me 18 years of my life to love the Mother Tongue that I had. It was only when I took Tamil literature that I started really enjoying Tamil plays and poetry and appreciating its beauty. I don’t want my children to wait 18 years to learn to love their own Mother Tongue – I want to give them opportunities at a young age to realise that damn, this language is really beautiful.

It took me 18 years of my life to love the Mother Tongue that I had. I don’t want my children to wait 18 years to learn to love it too.

Do your peers and other Tamil friends have the same concerns?

Usha: Yes, I think a lot of people realised how much we’ve let Tamil slip through our fingers after becoming parents. Just the consumption of Tamil movies and songs isn’t enough if we want it to get through to our children, and we owe it to them. If they are going to know the culture then it’s going to be through us, they’re not going to learn it anywhere else. That’s our responsibility.

Razmiah: Some of the parents that we reached out to are also in mixed families. Some do not know how to read Tamil anymore, so that’s something we’ve taken into consideration. Our books provide translation and transliteration in a virtual space that can be accessed via a QR code so that even if they don’t know how to read Tamil, they can still do so for their kids. 

Tell us more about the collections available at Chellamey Books and how they address these concerns.

Razmiah: We have two collections. The Classics Collection is based on traditional Tamil nursery rhymes that most of us grew up learning, and that’s great because poetry and rhymes are a wonderful way for children to learn languages and improve on their pronunciation.

Our second collection is the Originals – a passion project of ours that reflects our Tamil community and the problems we face, so that parents can use these books to have important conversations with their kids.

Usha: These topics are very close to my heart. I’m a dark-skinned Tamil girl working in an extremely male-dominated environment. Growing up, a lot of the discrimination didn’t necessarily come from outside the community, and it didn’t necessarily come across as nasty discrimination.

How do we respond to those who give us backhanded compliments? How do we feel truly proud of who we are? We’re trying to bring across these topics about gender, race and discrimination in a way that’s friendly and approachable so that Tamil parents can start having these conversations with their kids and not just brush it off as something that happens.

And where do you see Chellamey Books in five years?

Razmiah: We’ve got so many aspirations that we’re tempted to get rid of our full-time jobs to work on this fully. We are hoping to work with many different Tamil illustrators and writers and help give them exposure through our books. We are also hoping to expand beyond books, perhaps to play items that kids can use in their language learning or even delve into other non-Tamil Indian languages.

Usha: Like Razmiah said, we’re a couple of very imaginative friends. We know there’s huge potential, but it’s scary when you’re just two young moms with full-time jobs. So, we’re taking it one baby step at a time. One day, we hope to partner with others to bring more interactive activities, subscription boxes – all the things that parents see everywhere but is now all in English.