When journalism retreats, satire finds the cracks in power and slips through. In India, ranked a dismal 151st out of 180 nations on the 2025 RSF World Press Freedom Index, those cracks have become chasms. With media ownership increasingly concentrated in the hands of groups linked to those in power, the country’s editorial class has largely learned to look away or play to the tune of power. But as TV journalists have turned away from telling the truth to power, unlikely voices — such as podcasters, independent newsletters, and, perhaps most visibly, cartoonists — have stepped into that void. Rachita Taneja, whose webcomic Sanitary Panels has, over the past decade, slowly become one of the most unflinching records of democratic erosion in contemporary India, is one of them.

‘Touching Grass’, Taneja’s debut book published by Bloomsbury India, collects that record between two covers. The cumulative effect is both devastating and unexpectedly galvanising. The book situates itself firmly within the lineage of dissent, refusing grandiose rhetoric while delivering incisive reality checks that puncture the illusion of normalcy imposed upon us. Casteism, Islamophobia, transphobia, the criminalisation of protest, the slow strangulation of civil liberties — Taneja explores these social injustices through sharp comic strips and political cartoons that are both deceptively simple and deeply resonant. Her signature stick figures, stripped of all visual complexity, are a formal argument that the ugliness she documents needs no embellishment.

There is a long tradition of the cartoon as a political weapon — from William Hogarth’s gin-soaked London to K. Shankar Pillai’s post-Independence India and R.K. Laxman’s Common Man — and Taneja inherits this lineage with full awareness of what the form can do that prose polemic cannot. A comic strip in an unassuming corner of a newspaper — or in her case a seemingly throwaway social-media post — demands nothing of its reader. It’s an ambush. It’s guerrilla warfare disguised as fun. It’s asymmetrical combat against state propaganda. As journalists face arrest under anti-terrorism laws, tax raids, and systematic harassment, the deceptive lightness of a stick-figure strip offers both protection and proliferation. Taneja has been arrested, trolled, and threatened — and has drawn through all of it.

Divided into four parts — doomscrolling, touch grass, lock in, and IRL — the book also serves as Taneja’s memoir of her practice as a political cartoonist with narrative interludes that complement her cartoons with insights into her life, thought process, and creative influences, from revolutionary figures like Assata Shakur to organisational resources like The Commons Social Change Library.

The book’s title, “touching grass”, refers to the internet slang for logging off and confronting reality, and alludes to the central provocation of Taneja’s practice. She argues that doomscrolling is, in fact, detrimental to political work: it makes us feel stuck and powerless, and foggier, while the only real winners are the social media companies that harvest our outrage. This is a braver argument than it sounds, coming from someone whose entire platform was built online. It asks us to distinguish between being informed and being activated — and insists, urgently, that they are not the same thing.

Follow @sanitarypanels on Instagram.

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