An Indian Comic Artist Asks, “What Makes India’s Sons?”

Baba Sashank, an Indian comic artist from Hyderabad, asks what fuels the fire of rape culture in his comic strip, “What Makes India’s Sons?” The strip freezes moments in the life of a fictional male (be it an uncomfortably familiar one) and poses questions about social influences that might make a person inclined towards sexual violence: “Is it the discrimination between same blood, in his own nest?” “Is it the constant exposure to female objectification; persistent everywhere?”

Sashank doesn’t make any explicit claims, but he asks us to think critically about how seemingly innocuous practices may promote rape culture. This is a direct challenge to mainstream media’s coverage of sexual violence, which often reads like a dystopic gossip column caught up in the weeds of what she wore, how much he had to drink, why she was alone in the first place. This comic strip encourages us to talk about rape not as an isolated incident between a victim and an assailant, but as a side-effect of a country-wide gender and power imbalance which we may be complicit in maintaining.

Shreena Thakore, cofounder of No Country For Women and frequent contributor to Homegrown elaborates: “The problem of rape is not limited to the act of rape; it is situated within a larger social discourse on imbalances of gender, class, caste, religious and political identity. Everyday manifestations of these imbalances are often overlooked, misunderstood and trivialized, leading to a culture of silence that sanctions injustice. Effective solutions to rape demand a comprehensive understanding of rape that contextualizes it within existing sociocultural power structures.”

The questions asked in Sashank’s comic are a push for India to begin reflecting on and questioning these power structures.