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In January of this year, i began conducting weekly workshops about Comics and Art at the Happy Children’s Library in the village of Seem, located in the Nainital district of Uttarakhand. It is an experiment, an effort to develop a pedagogy that utilises visual narratives as a method for children to perceive the world more keenly and, as a result, more critically. Most of my sessions incorporate ideas that i have been playing with in recent works. The workshop becomes a space to extend these ideas to find out how the children respond to them and take them forward, revelling in their resonance and learning from the occasional dissonance.
These weekly workshops provide me a site for close and prolonged observation of the growth that a consistent practice of art and visual narratives can inspire. For the most part, it was a means of seeking companionship — to have an entire group of co-creators thinking with me. In the process i get to learn about this region and, to some degree, the relevance of my work. For the children, these sessions are a wonderful space to learn and push their own imagination, forcing them to expand the boundaries of their own world. Although art has quite often been trivialised to just being ‘recreational’, the children have sensed the value of time spent in the studio, and have embraced the workshops with significant enthusiasm.
Turning the bend after the village of Biyasi, the entire village of Seem gradually comes into view, sandwiched between green steps of agricultural land. The cluster of homes that make up the main village appear on either side of the road that runs through the middle, cottages painted white, pink, green and blue. Most of the homes have stone tiled roofs, only a handful sporting the flat concrete terraces of newer constructions. One building with distinct red tin on the roof stands a few steps above the rest of the cluster, overlooking the entire village like a little watchtower. This is the library building, and Atul and Jaya’s residence.
The Happy Children’s Library was opened in 2016 by Atul and Jaya Shah as an extension to their home in Seem. In the last 8 years the library has expanded, with the main reading room now housing over 1600 books, an additional studio space and a small accommodation arrangement for volunteers. Today, it caters to roughly 150 children, all of them coming from either Seem, or one of the many adjacent villages.
Jaya reading a book to the children in the Akrot Courtyard
Over this time it has grown to be a second home, a safe haven and a space of nourishment and growth for all the people associated with it. The space is such that one does get absorbed, sucked in, and it is difficult to place what gives it that retentive quality — the children, the environment, Atul and Jaya themselves. There is an abundance of love that exudes from the space and the people that make it.
Children pour into the library a short while after their school closes for the day, and on holidays one would find them reading, studying, or working away on a project from as early as 8 a.m in the morning. Membership at the Happy Children’s Library is free. The members vary in age, the youngest being 7 and the oldest being 18. Most of the children are enrolled in the nearest government schools, and the rest go to locally run private schools. The infrastructure in both, the government and private schools, is far less than ideal, with a lack of available teachers and an inadequate quality of teaching. These are the gaps that the library strives to bridge. The library premises is also used to host workshops in sports, theatre, dance, and art, all of them being conducted by professionals working in various parts of Kumaon, or volunteers who come to work at the library for shorter durations.
A theatre activity being conducted by the LeTS Foundation.
My association with the library began 2 years ago, although my visits were quite irregular in the beginning. A full time job and an after-hours independent practice limited my engagement but i’d always make sure to attend library sessions whenever i would go to meet Atul and Jaya. As is the habit, i’d take my sketchbook along and find a place to sit and draw. The kids would glance at me, intrigued, and peek into my book trying to guess what it is that i’m drawing. They would ask me for my sketchbook and look through it, sitting in groups, observing every little sketch and doodle, and deciphering my scrawl.
In many ways my sketchbook became a link between us, fostering a friendship, possibly because they found so much of my life documented within it, and i’d get little glimpses into theirs whenever a sketch would prompt a conversation. In this manner, the idea for the workshop arose quite organically. It just seemed like something i had to try out, an itch i had been carrying with me ever since i had begun working within the education sector, and owing to this friendship that had been established, i couldn’t have found a better space to try developing a pedagogy around visual narratives and comics.
As i write this, the comics and art workshop has been in progress for 10 months, and it has proven to be a wonderful addition to the library. We have 16 enthusiastic members, all of them roughly between 11 and 17 years of age, and seeing their growth over this period has been an absolute delight. With the workshops, the library now has a growing collection of comics and graphic novels from across the world, and a studio space with an admirable stock of different art supplies to enable their explorations.
A drawing of our studio space made in my sketchbook.
The idea for the workshop stemmed from my personal explorations into making sequential art. It is an extension of this practice into a more communal frame of creation. Having situated myself in Kumaon over the last 3 years, much of my work has been based in this geography, bringing the people, societies and ecologies that i am exposed to into my narratives. The comics and art workshop at the library is actually a process of integration, that allows for the regional flavour to make its way into my own palette, a process that the children enable. I don’t play the role of a facilitator here, and would much rather see myself as a companion and a co-creator.
As mentioned, my intention was to develop a pedagogy that utilises visual narratives as a method for children to perceive the world critically. Narratives expand the boundaries of our world, and when we fit ourselves into these narratives they also deepen the understanding of the self. These are gifts that the practice of working with visual narratives has given me. Bringing these gifts to the children requires me to verbalise processes that are now intuitive, find ways of introducing ideas in the hope that they might find resonance with the children — it encourages me to look at my own practice with fresh eyes. In my opinion, a good author or artist are those who have within them immense reserves of compassion and curiosity, a capacity through which they can humanise even the most vile characters and subjects. These two qualities are key, and all the rest of our engagements are just means to this end.
Every week, the workshop is conducted over two hours on Fridays and Saturdays. Some weeks we emphasise more on art, other weeks we work more closely with comics and narratives. This is often dictated by the children’s frame of mind, since they come to the library after an entire day of school.
When we work with activities pertaining to art, i encourage them to make sense of the world visually. Activities in this segment range from still-life compositions, to visual map making, to playing with abstraction using paints. A lot of emphasis is given to observation and spending time with a medium. We often explore new mediums during the course of these activities, seeing how our way of working and interpreting changes as we move to the new medium. This widens the scope of representation, which then makes its way into their comics. I also realise how important these activities are in unlearning the conventional ways of viewing ‘drawing’ and ‘art’, the overly limiting good-bad paradigms of judgment, and building a healthier relationship with the act of image making.
A visual-mapping exercise that took the shape of a treasure hunt.
Cloud gazing activity conducted on a sunny day with crisp clouds on the horizon.
Ritual building has been a major aspect of this segment, little routines and practices that we make habitual. These are integrated into every session, such that the kids now facilitate these rituals themselves. Every session begins with a warm-up activity, an exercise that helps centre our attention and energies back into the studio while also re-establishing our connection with the page. Drawing for a minimum of an hour is another ritual, that they have taken to quite well. When we began these workshops, The thought of drawing for an hour used to intimidate the children. Now, they are able to work in focussed silence for 2 hours straight, consumed by their ideas and the way they make their way onto the page. No activity is ever concluded without a review — we go through each other’s work slowly, asking questions, appreciating aspects that stand out to us, and end by looking at our own work and acknowledging aspects that we would like to improve.
Reviewing each other’s works - a post activity ritual.
Activities pertaining to comics are a lot more experimental. The activities in this segment are usually intended to explore narratives as opportunities to play, learning the dynamics of the medium in the process. Comics prove to be a fantastic tool for such exploration. They offer avenues to piece narratives together in ways that are modular, allowing the children to play with the sequence of events. The connecting thread could be as simple as the narration, or as complex as the juxtaposition of images, sounds and layouts. To this end, i also introduce activities that take their attention to soundscapes in comics, dialogues, visual sequences and cause-effect relationships.
Along with comics, we also work with dialogues, sounds and expressions.
An activity titled ‘बात-चीत’ that explores dialogues in comics
Many of these activities require the children to engage with the process of world building. We take specific prompts that bend a rule in the world around us. The children then imagine what this implies, how this changed rule percolates through systems and relationships in the known world, and how they might be able to depict this new world on the page. The more deeply they think, the more they are forced to look at the known world as it is. For example, taking the prompt ‘If trees could walk…’, the children are compelled to think of questions like ‘what would a forest look like?’, ‘how would we farm our fields?’, ‘what does a garden mean?’— each being resolved with documenting an image on paper. The resulting images are a wonderful way to fuel one another’s imagination, and when we finally make comics on the same prompt, the worlds that emerge have a richness to them resulting from a diversity of interpretations.
Comics, with regard to the the workshop, have also acted as a lens to understand storytelling from a reader’s perspective. Quite often when the children tell stories, the narration reads as a mere sequence of events — one which might make sense in their heads, but the relevance of this sequence is not evident to the reader. These activities push them to piece the events together in ways that makes the relevance clear, finding ways of communicating actions, emotions, emphasis and impact.
Most of the initial comics were simple one-pagers with predetermined panel layouts. (Click on the image to zoom)
When we review comics after an activity, we read each comic together, interpreting them aloud. This process is often quite revealing for the creator of the comic, as they often notice that something that they have drawn or written has been interpreted to mean something else. Sometimes, these ‘mis-interpretations’ can offer an even more delightful telling of the story. It makes the process of creation iterative. The children find out what was communicated, what was interpreted differently, and then they choose what they would like to change or retain in the comic.
The library itself proves to be such a conducive space to engage with these explorations, i couldn’t have asked for a better space to nurture such a workshop. The variety of books, all of them brilliantly written and gorgeously illustrated, makes planning a workshop in visual narratives such a wholesome experience. I spend hours pouring over books in the library before my sessions, and these inform many of the activities that we do. A large portion of the books being in Hindi, it has offered me the opportunity to familiarise myself with children’s literature that has been published in the language and improve my own proficiency in reading. I also quite enjoy the fact that i get to issue books, one of the perks of being associated with such a space. The culture that springs from such spaces seems to percolate into our very being, and the little thrill i get tugs at familiar memories from when i was much younger—the excitement at issuing a set of books in my name, anticipating the flights they contained within their pages.
Drawings made in my sketchbook during our workshop sessions.
Our work across the first 5 months culminated into a comic book that we titled ‘Comic Karname’, a compilation of comics made by the children. Each comic is an account from their lives in Seem, simple stories that capture their context. Across the diversity of their depictions and representations, the comics blend into a cohesive representation of their reality, as they see it.
Some of the comics in Comic Karname. (Click on the image to zoom)
The stories were an outcome of an open prompt which i had offered to the children, to make comics about incidents from our lives that incited an emotion within us - happiness, anger, fear, sadness, longing, grief, loneliness. Through the process of production, i noticed how the children were delving into the account that they wanted to depict, and it was fascinating to see them grapple with visual depictions of emotions that aren’t as easy to express. It was one of the first evident signs i received that the children are not only growing as storytellers, but that they are thoroughly taken up by this workshop and what it has to offer.
Most days, i draw with them. As they chip away at an activity, i would either do the activity with them or sit sketching them as they work.
Ever since i moved to Uttarakhand, i had been sensing a divide between my practice and my context. To put it simply, i couldn’t see comics in the environment around me, and the environment around me was missing in comics. To add to this, i wasn’t able to tangibly sense the relevance of this medium beyond what my practice offers me daily, and the impact that the works of other authors have on me. I felt a need to find a way to ground my relationship with the medium into the setting that i had chosen to be my home.
The workshop, with all that it has given me, has helped seal this divide. The comics that the children create have so much of the regional and the contextual that is present within its panels, they immediately bring the landscape into our imagination. More importantly, along with this outer world, they also provide a little glimpse into their inner world, hinting at the way they see things, how they think things through, what troubles and what can delight, and what is salient or note-worthy for them.
Some of my favourite panels that contextualise the book so well. (Especially the panel that says ‘हमने रास्ते में बकरे को कटते हुए देखा’)
Some of the panels that speak of displacement, loneliness, grief — emotions i would have found difficult to portray in a comic.
When we began the workshop, i realised that the children had never really read comics before. The library had just one comic, an Amar Chitra Katha, and that too was in English. Making this medium accessible to them required us to bring more comics into the library that were translated to Hindi. In this process we have not only found some lovely Hindi translations of famous graphic novels and manga, but it has also made it possible for the children to populate the library with their own comics, written in Hindi, that are accessible to their peers. It makes the case for more comics to be translated to regional languages, and for Hindi publishers and publishing houses to include comics in their line-up.
The first print run of Comic Karname was mostly distributed amongst the children participating in the workshop. It was then that i realised that although they have access to such a wealth of books at the library, the children did not possess any books of their own other than the school text books and their notebooks. Comic Karname became the first of that private collection that i hope each of them continue to build and cherish, treasuring these books as necessary components of their homes. It made me realise that this workshop is doing a lot more than just ‘teaching them to make comics’.
The necessity of this workshop becomes a lot clearer when we take into consideration the socio-political setting of this region. Many of the communities that i have interacted with, especially in the villages around Kumaon, are insular Hindu communities. The notion of ‘diversity’, or even ‘inclusivity’ is limited to their textbooks and even that, as we know, has been changing. Due to these silos, it is a lot easier for the saffronised image of Indian society to be realised here, with barely any challenge. Caste divisions run deep, and gender roles are stark and extremely skewed. The two values that we have prioritised in our workshop, compassion and curiosity, are integral to working against the dehumanisation that is ingrained in such social settings. They encourage the children to expand their worlds, to be curious about someone else’s story, and to be compassionate towards the humanity that everyone carries within themselves.
In June 2024, i received the Leela Mukherjee Artist-Educator Grant, an annual grant that is awarded to practicing artists who are also working in the capacity of arts educators. It is instituted by the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation, courtesy of the Welham Old Boys Society. With their support, our effort with Comic Karname has been funded for the duration of a year, from June 2024 to the following June of 2025. The grant has enabled us to invest in art material, comics, resources and also finance the printing of our comic books.
Tannu leading visitors through the first Art exhibition in the studio, in May.
As a dear friend and a mentor told me over one of her visits to the library, the advantage i have is that of time. To have ideas simmer and lie dormant, allow efforts and interests to emerge organically, find comfort with the incomplete and a richness in the intangible— these are all luxuries that time has to offer. Time offers me the room to observe their growth, and it continues to astound me. It also makes room for me to focus on my own growth. Taking up the role of an educator has compelled me to become a more situated artist.
I’ll be sharing updates, notes and reflections from these weekly workshops over my newsletter, Marinations. You can find the link here.
Photo credits:
Aditi Kim Karolil, Devashish Umale, Jaya Shah.
