Ita Mehrotra is a visual artist, arts researcher, and educator. To her, all of these stem from an “impetus to be with the world creatively.” Her work primarily engages with the history of socio-political shifts that she has seen and been a part of. Her works have been published and exhibited by thewire.in, popula.org, Zubaan Books, Goethe Institute, Yoda Press, AdAstra Comix, among others, and her graphic narrative, “Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection”, was brought out by Yoda Press in 2021. In this excerpt from an interview conducted in October 2022, Mehrotra chats with Ila Manish and Sonal Dugar about this recent publication.

Sonal Dugar and Ila Manish talk to Ita Mehrotra about what drew her to the graphic medium, her own process of storytelling, and the growing comics industry in India. Mehrotra discusses her recent work on the 2020 Shaheen Bagh protests and her experience crafting graphic narratives of events unfolding in the real world. The author also sheds light on how the graphic medium offers something unique to the art of storytelling.

SD: Comics as a medium has only recently garnered recognition in India. Growing up in the 90s, what was it that drew you towards this medium? What were among the first things you read and what sparked your foray into creating graphic narratives?

IM: While growing up, I was reading popular comics like Tintin, Asterix, and Amar Chitra Katha. I never really got into the action hero comics, those just didn’t hold my attention the same way as Tinkle comics or even the many well-illustrated stories for children in both Hindi and English did. I would come back to these and try to copy the drawings. I would sit with one comic for a long period and try to make copies of particular pages or characters that stood out for me. During my undergrad, I came across Orijit Sen's River of Stories, which had been released a lot earlier but was not available in print at all. It [has now been] republished in fact.

Though I had been doing freelance journalistic writing for various publications, I got more into non-fiction graphic narratives when I was doing my Master’s in Visual Art. I was part of a residential workshop organised by the Goethe Institute for women comic-makers led by two professional German illustrators. Staying together, living and breathing comics for over a week at an art organisation, it was quite an intensive training in comic-making. The works were subsequently published in the anthology Drawing the Line by Zubaan Books. This jump-started me into saying, “Oh, so this is something I can do. This is a way I can tell the stories that I want to.” I have always been interested in both drawing and writing. Those were the things that I always did, but this was a way of suddenly saying, “Oh, so when brought together, it's a whole new language.”

Being part of the book-making process made me think of the questions of editing and publication more as well. How do you kind of go back and forth with actually putting it into the format of that book? How do you bring a book to fruition, especially when it involves bringing together a set of very diverse stories and ways of telling and drawing?

Ila Manish: How have your methods of creative construction evolved from there? For instance, how do you go about crafting your narrative—do you first come up with the whole story or do you first start writing or drawing?

IM: My non-fiction comics are inspired by stories, deeply impactful stories that are unfolding in the world around us, and that in some way or the other really hit home for me, and to which I feel the need to respond or to engage with more. I’m therefore not always in a studio, drawing. I’m very engaged with non-governmental organisations, activist groups, and people’s movements. These are spaces that I’ve always spent more of my time in. So, working out what it is that I want to tell stems from experiencing socio-political shifts and concerns in the world around us. So, it's actually a reverse sort of trajectory. It’s not “I’m an artist and what do I do now?” It’s much more of “I’m here, these are things that I’m seeing and hearing and trying to understand, and how do I do that as a writer and an artist?”

With my book on Shaheen Bagh, I hadn’t begun with the idea of writing a book. I was meeting people there, going to the protests nearly every day, doing one-off drawings as posters and putting them up on social media. Only towards the end of the protests, the publisher at Yoda Press spoke with me about what it might mean to create a longer compilation of graphics and text around the protests. In that sense, it was organic and not a ‘project’.

I went there to stand in solidarity with the Muslim women who were leading the protest. I found myself having discussions, some occurring within the context of the protest itself, while others evolved into deeper friendships over time.

For me, the process of bringing notes for the book together begins with creating a rough storyboard and dividing it into sections or chapters. There's a whole parallel book filled with these notes along with links to articles—like a reference library of photographs of other research work and articles! From the storyboard, it works slowly page by page—drawing by hand, often digitally on my iPad, and then adding text via Photoshop.

For a graphic narrative, you need to carefully consider how the pages are coming together, including their sizes and font sizes, as well as the book design. This process can take many months after the body of the book is done – so, it can be tedious but is essential! Fortunately, a skilled designer joined in during the process of producing Shaheen Bagh, which is crucial unless you're capable of handling everything on your own. Overall, this book took about two years, which is fast for a book!

That said, it’s not entirely non-fictional experiences: any non-fiction graphic artist will often find themselves oscillating between fiction and non-fiction because when you're drawing, you are actively leaving out bits from the scene ‘as it would have been’. You also have to imagine because sometimes you don't have a photograph. I think there's always some fiction involved in non-fiction.

SD: That’s great. ‘Between fiction and nonfiction’ is an accurate way of describing your recent book Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection . It is, interestingly, also a journalistic and ethnographic work. What do you think it is that the comic s medium adds to the fields of journalism and academic research that might currently be lacking?

IM: That’s a great question. I think in academia and reportage, you take the authorial perspective for granted. Take a news agency or a reporter or a social science researcher, there is this opaque credibility, right? But when you’re doing comics, you are foregrounding who you are. That doesn’t make it righter, but it puts the conversations in front. It demands that you look at the person telling the story and the perspectives that inform them. Also, the grammar of comics can hold multiple, often contradictory perspectives of looking at the same thing. They come together without the risk of losing the strength of the narrative. This is harder to do in an academic or news report. What also comes up is the question of listening to people as who they are instead of fitting them to the demands of an anti-CAA protest. They are people too and they have lives outside protesting. That sort of attentive listening and the slow unfolding of the narrative is something the comics medium certainly offers.

Ila Manish: In past interviews, you’ve touched on the purposeful choice of representation. Could you walk us through your process of capturing and stitching multiple voices together into one coherent narrative and the challenges that accompanied this? How did you decide what to include and what to leave out, given that you were working with facts and non-fiction?

IM: Honestly, it’s difficult to verbalise the process, but there were numerous reports on Shaheen Bagh and people knew about this protest. The questions that drove me forward were: What is it that I don’t know? What is the sense of the protest that I’m not getting from these media reports and posters? What are the things I would want to know when I’m talking to people? These are the urges that pushed my conversations in a meaningful direction.

It was really important for me to be physically present in Shaheen Bagh. It needs to be slow because I cannot expect people to give their time and stories. Even after the protest, for example, I have been engaged with my organisation in several workshops with the children there. It’s not just about multiple perspectives but also about multiple ways of knowing. It requires patience to build a long-term relationship with the place. What made a real difference was having a publisher who supported the book and a solid framework in place because it’s a long and intense period.

Deciding what to leave out is always a bit tricky. Firstly, if there are things that are being repeated, I wouldn’t include them because there’s an economy of words within a graphic novel. And for me, the graphic recollection of Shaheen Bagh, in particular, was a lot about what Muslim women were saying and standing up for. I didn’t want it to be 125 pages against the government. That’s of course what polarisation in mainstream media or social media algorithms will want you to do. There’s a lot of anti-Modi content artists are making, and that has to happen. I decided to listen to voices that spoke about what it means to think of democracy and the future of this country and citizenship and human rights: concerning not just the CAA, but demonetisation, education, employment, and these broader things that opened out as discussions during the protests. Beyond that, the way the book grew was looking at the multiplicity of what happened in the movement: not just limiting it to one aspect, but the library on the footpath, the men and women from Punjab coming and cooking—just a proliferation and diversity. I also wanted to move between the larger to the smaller: go from the bigger picture of thousands of people—these double-spread pages—to micro-conversations.

SD: How do you think your experience as an art educator for children with Artreach India has informed your art? And in turn, how do you think your experience with the use of art in political movements has influenced your experience as an educator?

IM: That’s an interesting question because while these are two different worlds, they’re similar in that they’re both trying to do something creative with the world. Even when I am leading the organisation, in that administrative position, I can be very creative in thinking of what programmes to conduct, how to design them, and which artists work where. I’ve always enjoyed collaborative working processes, even while leading the team, and responding to particular situations – first listening in, asking questions, knowing the space, and then figuring out how we could work with it. Part of the process is very on-ground and involves a lot of other people, but the other part involves retreating and working by myself, recognising that what I was doing would go back into the world and have its own journey. I feel like these are two ways of production and as an artist, they sort of fit together for me. That initial phase, that impetus to be with the world creatively, and think about things that are happening is similar on both sides. I think that comes from knowing that I’m in and a part of a democratic society. Also, comics-making works very well with children and young people. It’s something they absolutely love. A great way to think of basic literacy in places where there’s zero literacy is through comics. It’s a great tool to work with others so that’s a more practical way of how the two worlds come together.

Ila Manish: You have a background in Arts and Aesthetics. We noticed that you play around with visual style (see: Fig.1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4) — gutter space, colour palettes, and spatial layouts — across your different works. How do you choose the right aesthetic for and within different kinds of works?
 

Fig. 1 | Mehrotra, Ita. Drawing Home. Goethe Institute Bangalore, 2018.

 

Fig. 2 | Mehrotra, Ita. Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection. Yoda Press, 2021.

 

Fig. 3 | Mehrotra, Ita. Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection. Yoda Press, 2021.

 

 

 

Fig. 4 | Mehrotra, Ita. Posters of Protest

 

IM: That’s something that evolves. ‘Irom Sharmila’ was my first comics work and therefore a lot of trial and error, as part of Drawing the Line. By the time I was working with Shaheen Bagh, I had a better sense of the grammar of comics making. But even now, I don’t think that I’m ever confident about my drawing skills. It’s something that I have to work on because I come to drawing in phases.

One of the visual choices I make is to have everything feel hand-drawn. It is hand-drawn and I don’t like to move away from this by making it too clean. I like how lines move, and the errors that happen at times—that feeling of ‘this could be a sketchbook: you can sort of trace how somebody might have made this’, is something I want to retain within what goes out finally. Working in black and white keeps with that because it’s the way the pencil works on paper. Certain words are also drawn out. In Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection, there’s Hindi text and certain sounds that are drawn out. This also comes into the visual: how you relay the graphic image of the text becomes quite interesting to play with—lines that form drawing, and those that make words…

SD: The narratorial voice in Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection is predominantly English. We wonder who your target audience is and whether you’ve considered publishing a Hindi version of the book. More broadly, how open do you think the Indian graphic narrative space is to translation? Is there an audience for work in vernacular languages?

IM: Honestly, the first question that I had for the publisher was if we could do it in both Hindi and English. They are interested in publishing it in Hindi, but it will take time, it will happen in the next couple of years. It’s a market decision: the English graphic novel will sell better and at a higher price. But the rights to publish it in Hindi are with the publisher, not me. I think it should be translated—my biggest sorrow with the book is that it’s still only available in English. Thankfully, all the people I interviewed for this book spoke at least some English. So, the book has gone back to them. And down South, having it in English works better. Books ideally in India need to be in several languages, not even just Hindi and English, but it takes many people and institutional support to actualise these decisions.

Ila Manish: Thank you for talking with us! Before we wrap up, could you tell us a bit about your current projects, and what the near future looks like for you?

IM: I’m working slowly on a book that is centred around forest rights. It builds from an ongoing engagement with young people within forest-dwelling communities around the Uttarakhand foothills. I had spent time with some of the first leaders of the Chipko Movement, nearly a decade ago in villages in Uttarakhand, and that experience and ecological concerns from then have stuck on with me. This is a long-standing engagement that asks: who owns and looks after forests, who should have claims to them, and how does one possibly understand the longevity of the relationship between people and forests? It’s environmentalism that doesn’t go towards the conservationist agenda but towards people’s understanding of forests. It’s a complicated terrain and there is an enormous amount to learn from communities, the history of forest policies in colonial and post-colonial India, including ongoing changes as we speak. And of course, only a fraction of it ends up in the book – but the process counts!