‘Uprooted’ inhabits the generational struggles of some of India’s most vulnerable citizens

Ita Mehrotra’s debut, Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection (2021), was a product of urgency: bold, poster-like strokes, hand-lettered slogans, and the kinetic energy of a movement unfolding in real time. Her new book, Uprooted: A Graphic Account of the Struggle for Forest Rights, by contrast, is a slower, more deliberate act of witness. Its monochrome pages – still etched with the scrappy immediacy of field notes – meticulously trace the lives of India’s forest-dwelling communities, particularly the Van Gujjars. The narrative spans two centuries of displacement: reaching from colonial forest laws that barely tolerated their nomadic pastoralism to today’s neoliberal conservation projects that treat them as trespassers on land they’ve lived with for generations.

Where Shaheen Bagh documented a protest, Uprooted inhabits a generational struggle – one that predates the book’s making and will outlast its final panel. Its pages are dense with the kind of scribbled marginalia that betray long hours spent listening rather than merely observing.

Drawing with, not about

Mehrotra’s style – loose, expressive, and deliberately unpolished – mirrors the fragility and resilience of her subjects, who are also her comrades-in-arms since 2021. Faces are carved with the weight of seasons; forests creep into the edges of panels like uninvited memories. Panels are windows, yes, but also thresholds: doors left ajar...

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