It is 2010, and Srividya Natarajan and Aparajita Ninan are crossing a street in New Delhi. They see a man slapping a schoolboy who has just kicked a football into a private compound. “Son of a chamar whore,” the older man spits, backhanding the child. “Wrecking the property of your betters!”

It prompts the women to think about India’s present, and how different this might be, in truth, from the India of the 1840s, when Jotirao Phule first established himself as an anti-caste activist. In hidebound Satara, Maharashtra, pushed to activism by the polarization of the castes, Phule launched eloquent, enraged attacks on religion, Brahmin privilege and caste polarization. He wrote and spoke in order to shock, to have people do more than listen idly to a mild voice of reason.

Phule would go on to become one of India’s most important social reformers. Natarajan, a writer, and Ninan, an artist, produce the meta-textual A Gardener in the Wasteland as a contemporary reflection on his 1873 polemic, Gulamgiri (slavery), and what it might mean to Indians today. Gulamgiri is a bruising criticism of Brahmin supremacism and a call for social justice for the castes which bore the brunt of an oppressive system. Natarajan and Ninan, in this graphic book, approach Phule’s text as newcomers, discovering the raw force of Phule’s arguments as he attacks Hindu myth and religious practice. Phule goes on to found the Satya Shodhak Samaj (literally, a society of truth enquirers) to work for caste liberation.

A Gardener in the Wasteland—Jotiba Phule’s Fight for Liberty: Navayana, 128 pages, Rs 220.

Phule’s literary style did not rely greatly on subtlety, but A Gardener in the Wasteland might have benefited from some. Phule as a visual figure takes time to emerge from the early sequences, as the authors feel their way through the past and present to find a handle both on talking about caste and about Gulamgiri. The style switches between absurd and realistic with ease, but Ninan’s art is laid on a little too thickly to admire wholeheartedly. Some panels work: A sequence in which Phule talks about Brahmins as the sun around which the working world revolves, pulls off a lovely sight gag. Some don’t: The link between casteism and racism in North America, while historically important to a national dialogue about caste, is flat and awkward in the telling here.

Natarajan, in an afterword, describes Phule’s method as “sometimes absurd, sometimes serious, sometimes positively tedious”, but at least in A Gardener in the Wasteland, his project comes across as vital, vibrant and refreshing. The framing story of Natarajan and Ninan’s discovery is less special. But their greatest joint success is in their discovery and delineation of Savitribai Phule, the woman married to Jotirao as a child bride, who became a teacher and thinker in her own right, and remains an iconic feminist and anti-caste activist to this day (in Maharashtra, at least, the Phules are not forgotten as Natarajan’s narrative says they are, although the extent to which their work is known, or remembered, outside of school history lessons may be debated).

Didacticism is not a bad quality in a book, but it is not an excuse for loose storytelling either. Since A Gardener in the Wasteland is a book which demands that its art not be separated from its message, it must be said that it can be less than successful on delivering the latter because of its missteps in the former. It will not convert doubters who think India is “post-caste”. But as a reclamation of history and as the celebration of two modern Indian heroes, it remains a breath of fresh air, and a great introduction or reminder of how important the Phules’ story is.