Indian writing has often allowed its readers to discover the world of animals: the violence, the calm, their habitats with and without us, their encounters with humans, and their vulnerabilities, both because of and distinct from these encounters. The joy of inhabiting these worlds: through ACK’s Panchantantra, Kipling’s Bagheera and Baloo, Orwell’s elephant or Narayan’s tiger of Malgudi, or more recently though Perumal Murugan’s tale of Poonachi, the goat or Rajiv Eipe’s sleuth act following Dugga, the dog around town, lies also in the recognition that these are stories of Indian animals and stories that while traipsing along animal trails also follow humans whose lives are entangled with those of animals.
Rohan Chakravarty’s cartoons place us smack in the middle of a wild world that is aware and wary of the human species prowling alongside and all around it and whose predatory behaviour manifests itself through hunting or killing animals, harmful policy, inaction or ignorance. A dentist from Nagpur, India, who discovered his interests lay not in the decaying molars of homo sapiens but in drawing bats casually hanging with each other or the courting habits of the praying mantis, Rohan Chakravarty’s cartoons are sui generis, in that he is possibly India’s first environmental cartoonist. His cartoons appear as the column, Green Humour, a name that embodies the form he is most comfortable with: satire. Over the last decade, the Green Humour cartoon strips have been a regular feature in several newspapers, ‘cartoonifying’ government policies that impact the environment, research that impacts wildlife or the discovery of a new species, and playfully picturing various species being flummoxed by Zoom calls. Rohan is also author of five books – The Great Indian Nature Trail (WWF), Bird Business (BNHS), Making Friends with Snakes (Pratham), Green Humour for a Greying Planet (Penguin) and Naturalist Ruddy (Penguin) that tread the line between conservation and wildlife education and has worked closely with organizations and state governments to create wildlife and urban biodiversity maps.
In this interview, we take a close look at some of Rohan’s work and aspects of his style.
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MS: There are very few dedicated environmental comics artists in the country today – as opposed to comics artists for whom environmental comics form one theme in their larger oeuvre. Do you place yourself in a lineage? Do you see yourself as India’s first (only?) environmental cartoonist? Which artists do you draw inspiration from for your comics?
RC: I personally simply view myself as a cartoonist. My primary goal has always been to make some mischief with my art, firstly for my own creative satisfaction and secondarily to connect my readers with my subject. I don’t think art of any kind that pertains to the environment constitutes any distinct category as such, so I’d say that my series is simply a series of cartoons, comics and illustrations, that happens to speak about conservation and the environment.
When I had started out back in 2010, I was the only cartoonist in India in my knowledge, using cartoons to communicate environmental issues. I am sure there are many others now doing the same with their art.
One of my peers I really look up to has been the Canadian biologist and cartoonist Rosemary Mosco (Bird and Moon Comics). Cartoonists whose work has inspired my journey, humour and art style include Bill Watterson, Gary Larson, Mark Parisi and Nina Paley. The one artist who has singularly been responsible for inspiring me to take up art as a profession in the first place, is the animator Genndy Tartakovsky.
MS: One difference between your column Green Humour and some of your recent books, such as Naturalist Ruddy or Making Friends with Snakes is the intended audience – and the presence of political commentary/advocacy. Your work also appears regularly in the children’s magazine Chakmak and has appeared in Tinkle in the past. How do you approach drawing cartoons for these differing audiences, in terms of both drawing style and content?
RC: I usually don’t let the platform affect the art. I believe that it is the art that should be given the power to affect the platform. Cartoons in my Green Humour column have appeared in newspapers for the last 9 years (The Hindu Blink, Sunday Mid-Day, Pune Mirror, The Hindu Sunday) and have consistently spoken about politics each time there has been a significant intersection with environmental issues. In the years between 2020 and 2021 when some of the most disastrous environmental decisions were made by the ruling government, the intensity and the frequency of political intersections in my cartoons too, accelerated. It was then that I decided that I needed to take my mind off the column and start an entirely new project which would not be political in nature at all, and would simply explore the delight of exploring the natural world. That project was Naturalist Ruddy. In a way, Ruddy saved me from the dreariness of politics!
Making Friends with Snakes had a completely different aim altogether: to simplify communication around snake biology and prepare readers to be better equipped with the base knowledge of Indian snakes. When renowned herpetologist Romulus Whitaker approached me with the idea of the book, he was very clear that he wanted the target audience to be kids who reside around cultivation and are most likely to encounter snakes. The language had to be simple enough for the book to be translated to regional languages and distributed across the country. So far, Pratham Books has translated MFWS into 14 regional languages.
MS: What kind of research went into ‘Making Friends with Snakes’?
RC: Romulus had already made a film on snakebite awareness on just the Big Four which feature in the book: the Spectacled Cobra, the Saw-scaled Viper, the Common Krait and the Russell’s Viper. These are the snakes that cause most of the snakebite accidents and deaths in India. He felt it was awareness about these four snakes that needed to be disseminated among a younger audience – his film was meant for an older audience. I already had some experience with snakes. Not that I handle snakes! I am from Nagpur where there are many cultivation areas and issues with snakebites and farmers are common. I was aware of the problems that arose, I had seen these snakes in wildlife and was familiar with their characteristics. I went through the film several times and thought about how to adapt a film script for adults into a very simple story with three or four characters. The story is very conversational, especially because it had to be translated into as many regional languages as possible.
MS: What is feedback like for such work? Do you get feedback often about how your comics are making an actual impact?
RC: I attended a literary festival with school students as participants and came to know from them that Making Friends with Snakes was received well, and that the children had relayed the information they gained to the adults in their families. That was one unexpected outcome of the book.
A lot of readers write to my editors or to me directly with feedback. I have noticed tangible impact several times. For example, some readers who traveled to South East Asia wrote to me saying they refrained from buying civet coffee – highly hyped and responsible for the illegal capture and often, even killing, of civets – after they read my comics. I have a comic about why sea shells should not be collected, and a lot of people stopped doing so once they read it!
MS: You have spoken of this before – our animal friends in your comics/cartoons speak like humans do, and anthropomorphism is a definite element in them. This isn’t new; Tinkle popularized characters like Kalia the Crow, the rabbits Keechu and Meechu etc (ironically another famous character from Tinkle is Shikari Shambu, though no animals are ever harmed by him in the comics). Does anthropomorphism complicate or help you define the relationship between humans and non-humans in your comics?
RC: I am quite dependent on anthropomorphism to build a connection between my subject and my readers. Having grown up watching 2-d animated cartoons that used anthropomorphism extensively, it was natural for me to take that course. While there are critics who think of anthropomorphism as a weakness in a storyteller’s inventory, I personally have no such qualms. I don’t think I would be a storyteller in the first place if I was not exposed to anthropomorphic cartoons.
MS: Alongside your cartoon strips for newspapers and the books, you have also drawn several maps of forests, nature parks and urban biodiversity from around the world. These are often detailed, and provide a bird’s eye view (of course!) of the space. There is a certain similarity between comics and maps, of panels and grids helping the reader navigate time and space. In Naturalist Ruddy, you show us micro habitats: the outside of a porcupine’s cave, potter wasp’s nest or the endemic universe in a bamboo. There are tiny maps worked into The Great Indian Nature Trail. These are undoubtedly different ecosystems. What kind of research and process goes behind representing different ecosystems and comics cartography?
RC: Maps have been my gateway to understanding Indian wildlife and the communities that interact with it better. The first map project I worked on was Pakke Tiger Reserve for the Arunachal Forest Department in 2013. Since then I have drawn several such maps for national parks, tiger reserves, cities, countries and organisations both governmental and non-governmental. The field trips I conduct for researching the biogeography and terrain of my maps have been the most exciting aspect of my journey as an artist, as these trips entail firsthand exploration. Eventually, all I have learned on these trips have influenced my cartoon column, my books including Naturalist Ruddy, and my own outlook as an artist, an Indian citizen, and a human being.
MS: It is difficult to talk of animal habitats and habits without referring to some iota of violence (admittedly, not very unlike the human world!). Consider the chapter “Egad, the impaler!” about the shrike from Naturalist Ruddy where you mention murder, cannibalism and suicide. What goes into the decision process about the degree of graphic description you include in a comic meant for children such as this?
RC: I must first thank you for reading and analysing chapters from Naturalist Ruddy. The quirky animals that are introduced as killers and miscreants in these stories have been some of the most enjoyable experiences of cartooning for me, as the book gave me a chance to present these creatures in a way they had not been before. Documentaries quite often romanticise the role a particular animal plays in nature, and I wanted to reverse that. It is a general misconception that Naturalist Ruddy was meant for children. In fact, I rarely approach any book or story with a specific age group in mind, unless it is specified by the publisher or the commissioning organisation. Naturalist Ruddy being a personal project, played by my rules. Which is why you see a mix of blood, gore, sex, sensation and mystery in Ruddy’s adventures. And trust me it has more to do with the way things actually are in nature, rather than reflect on my own character!
MS: In The Great Indian Nature Trail, each chapter is followed by activities and trivia. This sometimes includes an invocation of literary animals and spaces who have certain characteristics attributed to them, such as loveable bears and mysterious islands. What are your favourite fictional wildlife characters/ spaces and do you have any pet peeves about fictional-environmental representations?
RC: The Great Indian Nature Trail was a rather simple series, and it was done in a very straightforward way, as WWF India (the publisher) was clear that it would have to be targeted at school kids spanning a broad age group, and that the stories had to have human characters (WWF has a policy against the anthropomorphising of animals). It was meant to be a very generalist introduction for a young, pan-Indian readership, into wild India. I personally enjoy my work a lot more as a storyteller when my protagonists are animals, and not humans. So even though The Great Indian Nature Trail is a very special book being my first comic book, it isn’t among the projects I have thoroughly enjoyed executing.
I certainly have a lot of pet peeves about fictional environmental representations. A certain degree of ecological accuracy matters to me, and it is something I look at as the responsibility of any creative communicator telling stories about science. So each time I see a penguin and a polar bear together in a cartoon, I do shrug in disapproval. Each time a bald eagle squeals in an Indian film, I cannot help but cringe!
MS: How have you explored the interconnectedness of human and planetary health in your comics? Your comics on bats and the Corona/Nipah virus come to mind.
RC: A lot of my cartoons have explored this interconnectedness. There have been cartoons about mangroves protecting coastlines against tsunamis, dams exposing fragile foothills to seismic mishaps, deforestation leading to the rise of viral diseases and so on.
MS: Several of your works must have involved traveling to forests and sanctuaries; what have some of the most exciting trips for work been? Do you take along a photographer, like Chunmun, to document what you see? Do you sketch on the field?
RC: I prefer working alone and I have been my own photographer on all field trips (which is why I take such terrible pictures!) Some of my most exciting travel experiences have been in North-East India, exploring rainforests with the members of the Bugun and Shertukpen communities. I remember seeing a Bugun Liocichla, one of India’s rarest birds (named after the Bugun tribe) in my very first morning at Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary! Naturally, experiences like these fuel an innate passion for the project itself (which in this case was a map of Eaglenest for the Arunachal Forest Department).
MS: These trips must be as much about engaging with people as they are about encountering wildlife, especially those people that cohabit these biodiversity-rich spaces. Comments?
RC: My own perspective of what wildlife conservation means to human beings has changed after interacting with indigenous people. Their knowledge and their oral history passed down from generation to generation is far more vibrant, diverse, and most importantly, inclusive when compared to what urban residents like you and me have learnt. What we have learnt comes from a very colonial understanding of wildlife conservation, whereas what they have learnt comes from actual interaction. I spent time with a hunter’s family when bushmeat was being cooked. Despite being in that space where the head of the family, the hunter, had just killed and cooked Barking Deer meat for his family, I gained a lot of respect for the community for being conservationists. You know, the way they hunt, all of it is done in such a meticulous manner. All factors are considered before a particular piece of land is involved or a particular animal is killed, whether it is bleeding, what month is best to kill it, what gender the animal is . . . it is beyond the understanding of an urban resident how a sense of balance already exists in these communities. I went to Arunachal thinking I would disagree with the views of a certain community but I ended up increasing my knowledge.
MS: Your cartoons balance drawing about wildlife and urban biodiversity. Is it easy to switch between the two?
RC: I don’t see a difference . . . even urban wildlife is wildlife. The spider in my bathroom or the lizard on my wall, I look at them as wild animals. There are some things that make an animal wild . . .whether a spider in my house or a polar bear in the Arctic, I would approach them the same way.
MS: A lot of research must go into your art, especially since your cartoons give us much species-specific information.
RC: A lot of these are based on observing these species in the wild. There are also instances where I have not seen a particular animal, but then I read extensively about it. For example, if a new species is discovered, I like to shed some light on the science around it and that involves reading research papers and speaking to the scientist if I know them to understand the discovery better. A lot of the clues and stories in Naturalist Ruddy are based around scientific papers. The mysteries are designed in the manner of decoding scientific papers, converting them into mystery and suspense that Detective Ruddy then solves.
MS: What medium do you draw your comics in? Has this changed over the years?
RC: The ideation and drafting always happens on paper with a pencil. The finished art that you see published, is executed digitally on Adobe Photoshop using a Wacom graphics tablet. I have dabbled with a few software like Illustrator and Flash before realising that Photoshop suits my needs best.
MS: What would you say is the difference between a comic, a cartoon and an illustration? Does it matter at all, and if it does, have you worked across all of these?
RC: I don’t think Manna De would like it if you called him a rapper! So it does matter to me that my readers use the correct terminology when consuming art of any kind. As far as definitions in the publishing world are concerned, a cartoon usually refers to a humorous visual with or without words or captions, presented in a single panel. When the panels are multiplied into a sequence of such images, it is called a comic strip. An illustration refers to the visual interpretation of textual information. And I certainly have been fortunate to have worked on all three!
