Our usual take on ‘ Gulamgiri’ is that it rips open the mask of Brahmanical tyranny, both in terms of manufacturing of history and using that to justify a number of cold blooded, well-planned and structured injustices meted out to Dalits (shudras and atishudras). What does the book attempt to do? It aims to bring us the basic polemics of Phule’s ‘ Gulamgiri’ in visual form. Having said this, the book stops short of being the single most important signpost in the sub-genre of Indian graphic novel because Srividya Natarajan’s wordplay and her choice of scenario to distill Phule’s thought is not able to match the minimalist starkness of Aparajita Ninan’s luminous drawings. It is needless to say that this work must be in your bookshelves and that you should buy more than one personal copy and gift to others. At 128 pages, ‘A Gardener in the Wasteland’ attempts a very ambitious sweep to pull off a graphic rendition of Jyotiba Phule’s ‘Gulamgiri’ (1873) and nearly pulls it off.
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