Satire's Reality CHECK

In her debut book Touching Grass, political cartoonist Rachita Taneja reflects on doom scrolling, censorship, and satire, and chooses humour and hope to confront the absurdities of contemporary India. A conversation.

- ADITHI REENA AJITH

IN a week when India’s internet and social media rallied around the Cockroach Janata Party — a satirical response to controversial remarks by the Chief Justice of India about the country’s youth — it feels fitting to return to the political power of humour.

From George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Art Spiegelman’s Maus to political memes and what seems to be a parody party, satire has emerged most sharply when reality itself begins to feel absurd. Few contemporary artists understand that better than Rachita Taneja, better known online through her comic platform Sanitary Panels.

Known for her deceptively simple stick-figure comics critiquing political and internet culture, Rachita has spent the last decade documenting the emotional climate of contemporary India. Now, with her debut book Touching Grass (Bloomsbury), she brings together years of political satire into a collection that asks what endless doom scrolling and political uncertainty are doing to us emotionally. The title itself comes from internet slang — “go touch grass” — usually used online as a dismissal, a sarcastic instruction to log off and reconnect with reality.

“When I was figuring out the narrative and the format of the book, I was thinking how do we move past this feeling of consistent doom and gloom,” she says. “The thing that I kept coming back to was reconnecting with the offline world in terms of building connections with people, tapping into community and reminding ourselves that we're not isolated.”