Kancil by Dina Indrasafitri
Tiger Stone (my first novel) will be published in Australia and New Zealand in two weeks (August 1) so I guess I should get used to talking about it. It’s all making me feel a bit like the rabbit in the spotlight so let’s talk about Dina’s drawing instead.
Dina is a Melbourne-based artist and journalist. She read a draft of Tiger Stone last year and a couple of weeks ago she sent me this drawing. I really like this image. Kancil looks wise but feisty and maybe just a teeny bit fed up. I’m guessing she’s reacting to something irritating that Kitchen Boy just said or did. You’ll have to read the book to put that in context.
Tiger Stone is historical fiction if you want to give it a label. It’s also children’s fiction, not YA fiction, if you want to get further into labelling. I like to think of it as a mystery adventure for all ages that happens to be set in the past.
Dina drew the image to illustrate the clothing that Kancil probably wore. I say ‘probably’ because Tiger Stone is set in fourteenth century Java. The climate in Java isn’t great for preserving cloth so historians mostly rely on carved stone temple friezes and statues to figure out what people looked like and what they wore seven centuries ago.
The problem with that evidence is that stone is quite hard to carve so nobody was going to waste time carving an accurate portrayal of the everyday life of a village girl. Dina has drawn Kancil wearing a kain and kemben. This matches what the temple friezes and statues tell us for ladies considered worthy of having their image recorded so let’s assume ordinary folk wore much the same style of clothing but of rougher cloth and with less jewellery.
You can have a sneak peek at a few chapters of Tiger Stone here. And if you want to see more of Dina’s artwork, visit dinainds.deviantart.com
