LEAVING THE FOREST

In Uprooted, Delhi comic maker Ita Mehrotra listens to the forests and the people being driven out of them, turning the spotlight on Uttarakhand's Van Gujjars, yet another community paying the price of 'development'

- ADITHI REENA AJITH

FOR Delhi-based comic maker and artistactivist Ita Mehrotra, Uprooted (Westland/ Context), her latest graphic novel that follows the Van Gujjars, a pastoral community in Uttarakhand, didn't begin as a "book project". It began as a question of belonging, displacement, and what it really means to live with the forest.

As the title suggests, Uprooted explores the literal and metaphorical displacement of a community from their ancestral forests, as they face eviction and forced resettlement on agricultural land.

"The landscape is being uprooted, and so are entire communities," says Mehrotra.

"When they are moved from forest to resettlement sites, it doesn't just shift their location, but changes their entire way of living. The Van Gujjars have historically lived with the forest, consuming its produce and migrating with their buffalo. All of that disappears when they are confined to small plots of farmland." The book took shape during the Covid-19 lockdown, when Mehrotra began learning about communities facing forest rights issues, extractivism, and displacement. Her research led her to work with organisations such as the Van Gujjar Tribal Yuva Sanghatan and the All India Union of Forest Working People (AIUFWP) in Uttarakhand, where she met activists and lawyers fighting for forest rights.

Her work with them brought her to the Van Gujjar community near Dehradun, where she began documenting what she was seeing and hearing.