This land is your land

Editor’s Note: In her scintillating new graphic novel, Uprooted, Ita Mehrotra interrogates the relationship between forest dwellers and their forests. The book shines a light on the forest rights' movement in India, through stories of the Van Gujjars and Taungyas. They have lived in the forests of the Uttarakhand Terai for generations, but their intimate relationship to their land is under threat from exclusionary conservationism, antagonism, encroachment, and the catch-all idea of ‘development’. Uprooted is about the history of their struggle, and the hope and resilience they possess.  

Mehrotra is a visual artist and graphic novelist who has previously penned the hard-hitting Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection (2021). In Uprooted—compiled from her notes and drawings from the past four years—she looks at the forests and resettlement colonies, as the communities forge their own paths, reclaim their identity. The two excerpts featured below, from Uprooted by Ita Mehrotra, have been published with permission from Westland Books.

Mehrotra’s graphic novel posits a sharp contrast between the attitudes of different generations dwelling in the Uttarakhand Terai.

The two excerpts featured here, from Uprooted by Ita Mehrotra, have been published with permission from Westland Books.