Thulir

Overview

Thulir is a monthly children's science magazine published in the Tamil language from Chennai by the Tamil Nadu Science Forum, a people's science movement. It has been published without a break since 1987 — a continuity few children's magazines anywhere can match — and its purpose, stated simply, is to bring science to school children, especially in rural areas. Thulir is sustained by the support of children and teachers, and it is produced not by a commercial publishing company but by the activists, volunteers, science professors and scientists of the movement that founded it.

The magazine's name is a Tamil word evoking a young shoot or sprout, an apt title for a publication meant to help young minds grow towards science. Over nearly four decades, Thulir has become one of the defining institutions of science popularisation in Tamil Nadu: a magazine that is read in classrooms and village science clubs, discussed by children together, and used by teachers as a resource for making science enjoyable rather than a subject merely to be memorised.

The Tamil Nadu Science Forum

Thulir's publisher, the Tamil Nadu Science Forum (TNSF), is a people's movement — a registered society — committed to science popularisation and education. It was started in 1980 by a group of research scholars of Madras University; other accounts describe a founding group drawn from scientists at IIT Madras, research scholars from the universities and school teachers. During the 1980s the Forum functioned mainly as an organiser of popular science lectures, taking telescopes and slide shows to villages, where, as one account of its early years recalls, even poor and roofless villagers wanted to hear about the stars.

In 1987 the Forum's work changed scale. That year it took part in the Bharat Jan Vigyan Jatha, a massive national science popularisation programme that carried the message of science for the people across the country, and in the same year it started Thulir, moving the Forum into science communication among children. A magazine gave the movement something a lecture tour could not: a permanent, monthly presence in children's lives.

Founding in 1987 and Unbroken Publication

Thulir began publication in 1987 and has appeared monthly without a break since. That continuity is the magazine's proudest claim, and it is remarkable given how it is produced. There is no large commercial apparatus behind Thulir; the Tamil Nadu Science Forum's activists and volunteers contribute to bringing out and selling the magazine every month, and science professors and scientists contribute to its editorial content. A volunteer-sustained monthly that has not missed its rhythm since the late 1980s testifies to the depth of the movement behind it.

Between 1987 and 1991, the years of Thulir's establishment, the Forum mobilised school science teachers on a large scale and began teacher re-orientation work aimed at making science education more enjoyable. The magazine and the teacher movement grew together: teachers were the channel through which Thulir reached children, and the magazine gave teachers material with which to teach science differently — through curiosity, activity and discussion rather than chalk and talk alone. When the Total Literacy Campaigns began in Tamil Nadu in 1991, transforming the Forum into a mass people's movement through its leading role in the Arivoli Iyakkam literacy campaigns, Thulir was already established as its children's publication.

Language, Purpose and Readers

Thulir is published in Tamil, and that choice is its founding principle. Science reached most Tamil Nadu children in the 1980s, if it reached them at all beyond the textbook, in English — a language barrier that fell hardest on rural children. A children's science magazine in Tamil put astronomy, nature, experiments and the scientific way of thinking into the language children spoke at home. Its declared purpose is to bring science to school children, especially in rural areas, and its distribution reflects that priority: at its silver jubilee, a major part of its circulation went to rural areas in Tamil Nadu.

The magazine treats science not as a collection of facts or a parade of gadgets, in the Forum's philosophy, but as a worldview — a way of asking questions about the world. Its readers are school children, and around them the teachers who subscribe, distribute and discuss it. Thulir is sustained by the support of children and teachers, a formula that describes both its finances and its method: the magazine exists because its readers and their teachers keep it alive, month after month.

Thulir Illams: The Magazine's Science Clubs

Thulir's most distinctive feature is that it does not stop at the printed page. Around the magazine's readership, the Forum encouraged the formation of science clubs called Thulir Illams — illam being the Tamil word for a home — where children gather outside school hours. The least that happens in a Thulir Illam, as accounts of the movement describe, is that children read and discuss the month's Thulir together; from there, children take up the do-it-yourself activities the magazine suggests, trying out experiments for themselves. Children's Science Festivals have been conducted at many places, with teachers trained in the Forum's workshops serving as resource persons.

The Thulir Illam idea reflects the Forum's conviction that, while formal schooling matters, the informal, out-of-school arena is where a lasting scientific temper is built. The magazine is the thread that ties those spaces together: each month's issue gives hundreds of small clubs a common text to read, argue over and act on. Few magazines anywhere in the world have a organised club movement of readers built around them; for Thulir, the clubs are not a marketing device but the very mechanism by which the magazine does its work in villages and small towns.

Circulation and the Silver Jubilee

On 24 November 2012, Thulir celebrated its silver jubilee — twenty-five years of reaching children — in Chennai. Reporting on the celebration recorded the magazine's circulation at 35,000 copies, with a major part of that circulation going to rural areas of Tamil Nadu. For a Tamil-language children's science magazine produced by a voluntary movement, a circulation of that size represents a substantial achievement, built through schools, teachers and Forum activists rather than through newsstand marketing.

The jubilee was marked in ways that underline the magazine's place in the state's public life: a special postal cover was released to commemorate it, and a CD containing the digital formats of all the issues of Thulir was released alongside — an archive of twenty-five years of Tamil science writing for children, preserved at the moment the magazine completed its first quarter-century. Coverage in The Hindu and The Times of India marked the anniversary as news, with the latter reporting, twenty-five years on, a children's magazine still going strong.

Content and Editorial Character

Thulir brings science to children through articles and activities designed to be read, discussed and tried. Its editorial content is contributed by science professors and scientists, which gives a children's magazine an unusual directness of sourcing: the people writing for its young readers include working scientists and teachers of science. The Forum's wider publishing programme, of which Thulir is the best known part, has included other science magazines, but Thulir — monthly, in Tamil, for children — is the flagship that has defined the movement's public identity since 1987.

The magazine's approach grows from the Forum's educational philosophy. In its teacher work of the late 1980s, the Forum debated what science education should be, against a prevailing tradition of chalk-and-talk instruction, and developed training in low-cost and no-cost teaching methods. Thulir carries that philosophy into print: science presented so that children, including those in schools with few resources, can engage with it through reading, questioning and simple activities, rather than receiving it as distant, expensive expertise.

Digital Presence and the Forum Today

The Tamil Nadu Science Forum maintains its official presence online at tnsf.co.in, where Thulir has its own section and where the Forum publishes material connected with the magazine, including Thulir talent test model question papers — a sign of how the magazine's world extends into organised activity for its readers, with tests and events built around it. The Forum's working areas, as it defines them, extend well beyond the magazine: science communication, universal education, universal health care, women's self-reliance, and environment education and sustainable development. Thulir sits within that wider movement as its longest-running publication and its direct line to children.

The digital archive released at the silver jubilee, containing all issues of the magazine in digital format, also marks the point at which Thulir's back run became a preserved record. A complete run of a children's science magazine in Tamil from 1987 onwards is a resource for teachers, researchers and historians of Indian science communication, as well as a working library for the Forum itself.

Role in Indian Science Popularisation

Thulir's significance is best seen in the history of the people's science movement in India. The Tamil Nadu Science Forum is part of the wider network of people's science organisations that, from the 1980s onwards, argued that science belonged to ordinary people and should be communicated in their own languages. Thulir was one of that movement's most durable creations: a monthly magazine in an Indian language, for children, sustained by volunteers and teachers, published without a break since 1987, and deliberately directed at the rural children whom commercial publishing least serves.

Its combination of print and organisation — the magazine plus the Thulir Illam clubs, children's science festivals and teacher networks around it — made Thulir a model of science communication as a social practice rather than a product. Generations of Tamil Nadu schoolchildren have now grown up reading it; some of the scientists and teachers who contribute to it today first encountered science as its young readers. That cycle, renewed monthly in Tamil since 1987, is the magazine's real circulation figure.

How to Read and Subscribe

Thulir is published monthly in Tamil by the Tamil Nadu Science Forum from Chennai. Subscriptions are handled through the Forum: its website, tnsf.co.in, carries the magazine's section, where readers can find current information on the magazine and related activities such as the Thulir talent test. Schools and teachers, who form the backbone of the magazine's distribution, typically subscribe through the Forum's network. Individual readers wishing to subscribe should contact the Tamil Nadu Science Forum through its official website, where Thulir is listed under its publications.