ILLUSTRATING INDIA: WHEN ART MEETS HERITAGE AND ECOLOGY

With words and drawings, Anumeha Yadav and Ita Mehrotra speak about narrating India's ecological and cultural inheritance for future generation

- Words Adit Ganguly

Graphic narratives have long been associated with fantasy, superheroes, or counterculture movements. But two recent works — Our Rice Tastes of Spring by journalist and researcher Anumeha Yadav (with illustrations by Sandhya Visvanathan and Anirudh Menon of the Spitting Image collective) and Uprooted by comic-maker and educator Ita Mehrotra — bring this form into dialogue with India’s heritage, environment, and communities at the margins.

Together, these books transform reportage into art, blending image and word to document struggles for cultural and ecological survival. Where Yadav traces heirloom rice and traditional farming in Jharkhand’s Chhota Nagpur plateau, Mehrotra documents the lives of Van Gujjars and Taungyas, forest-dwelling communities negotiating displacement, rights, and identity. Both ask a deeper question: How do visuals make visible what prose alone may fail to capture?

WHAT FIRST DREW THEM IN

For Mehrotra, Uprooted began in the pandemic years. “It was during lockdown and after where reading made me realise the huge amount of forest extractivism and deforestation drives that are ongoing. It began with me wanting to know more for myself and be in association with organizations that are rights-based and see what I can do in solidarity. It's between being an on-ground activist and an artist.”

She spent four years working with the All India Union for Forest Working People and the Van Gujjar Tribal Yuva Sangathan, making posters, doing education work, and taking notes that later became the book.

Yadav’s project also began with a search for form: “The roots of this book attempt were in mainly one question - how do we translate the interviews and a news investigation into a format that we can take back to the village? How will we distribute the story, so to say?”