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Author: Express News Services
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: April 14, 2007
URL: http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=231495
Introduction: Pune based art teacher uses traditional writing instrument boru, with large font size to enable the elderly to read with ease
IN a unique tribute to the Dnyaneshwari, Pune-based 22-year-old Swati Pethkar will complete her feat of writing the entire text in calligraphy in Nevase on Friday.
The 13th Century sant-poet Dnyaneshwar rendered more than 9,000 stanzas of commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, that came to be known as the Dnyaneshwari. It is at the very temple that Sant Dnyaneshwar composed his work, that Pethkar will conclude her task with a traditional writing instrument, boru. This is perhaps the first time that the Dnyaneshwari is being written in the calligraphy font, a tedious task that demanded three years of painstaking work.
It all began on April 8, 2004, when Pethkar, a BA external student and art teacher at the St Anne's Girls' School, was studying the art of calligraphy. "Back then I used to practise calligraphy by copying individual letters in the Marathi alphabet from the Swar-Vyanjan. But this never gave me an idea of how much space should be left between letters while writing a full word. So I decided to take up some text and I chose the Dnyaneshwari because it is such an important scripture," she said.
There was another inspiration for Pethkar: Her grandmother. "Most of the times, the Dnyaneshwari is written in small print, which is difficult for my grandmother to read. The main objective behind writing this is to do it in such a way that everyone, including old people, would be able to read it with ease," she said.
As a writing instrument, Pethkar used the boru, which is an ancient writing instrument traditionally carved from wood using branches of trees or bamboo shoots. "I used a makeshift boru that I carved from the inverted end of an ordinary paintbrush. The end had to be sharpened to a point and cut across at an angle of 45 degrees to give the font its specific curved style," she explained. Pethkar used over 100 such borus, which had to be dipped into paint every time a word was written.
For three years, Pethkar burned the midnight oil to write the text. Her text has run into a whopping 1,300 pages because of the larger font size. "I used to spend anything between half an hour to six hours a day writing, whenever I had time off from teaching at school," Pethkar said.
Pethkar has completed 17 of the total 18 adhyays or chapters. On Friday, she will visit the temple at Nevase, where she will pay homage and complete the remaining part of the text.
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