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Postcards sits down with Ita Mehrotra — visual artist, researcher, and educator — to explore how illustration functions as advocacy, archive, and act of witness. The episode traces her practice from Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection (2021), which documents the 101-day anti-CAA sit-in led by Muslim women in Delhi, to Uprooted (2025), a slower, monochrome account of the Van Gujjar and Taungya communities' generational struggle for forest rights in Uttarakhand. Across both works, Mehrotra positions drawing as a form of "visual testimony" — a way to archive erasure, dissent, and memory that official records and data-driven policy reports routinely miss.
The conversation moves through her methodology of "drawing with, not about," her self-reflexive presence in her own frames as an outsider and city-dweller, and her deliberately "unpolished" aesthetic — smudged pencils, bleeding panels, absence of colour — as an ethical rather than stylistic choice. It also covers her community-based practice: workshops in Bihar, Mumbai, and Delhi (Khirkee Voice, Loka School, SNEHA) that turn art into a tool for collective visioning and citizen participation.
Beyond the books, the episode widens into broader territory: the politics of visibility and public space (Shaheen Bagh's transformation of a highway into a home), the tension between documentation and memory, the emotional labour of socially engaged art, and why authoritarian regimes so often target artists first. A closing segment probes AI-generated imagery and authorship, asking what happens to lived experience when images can be produced without it.
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https://youtu.be/lVpMDgaCchs?si=spvTKunkqDlKeVZB
https://open.spotify.com/episode/50Ra3Q5sMCQwqt80fuvlaE?si=iIGX_rUmRau9qKFQ-NZK_w
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for everyone who is a part of the ‘books before movies’ club
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for everyone who is a part of the ‘books before movies’ club
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because we do not believe in gatekeeping ;)
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for all the cinephiles out there
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Please find below the entire transcript of the episode.
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