Anonymous political satirist PenPencilDraw’s photo gallery is overflowing with images of Bagha, a regal mixed breed many would swear has a Husky or an Alsatian ancestor and Goopy, a silly, exuberant sand-coloured indie, who live with co-author Aakar Patel. Their new collaboration, Discovery of New India, is a graphic novel whose title is inspired by Jawaharlal Nehru’s seminal appraisal of this country published 80 years ago. Bagha and Goopy are the book’s narrators and since anyone entering the Patel residence is warned not to make eye contact with Bagha, many images were required to sketch him. “His tail was the hardest to draw,” says PenPencilDraw. “It looks different from every angle.”
Drawing never came naturally to the lawyer-researcher, but experiments on a recently purchased iPad opened up a new world in 2020. “I used to draw terribly. Some of my classmates from school still remember how badly I drew a human cell in biology class,” PenPencilDraw says. The newly-learned skill on YouTube, combined with legal expertise and academic rigour, turned out to be a dalchawal grade pairing in what they describe as “outrageous times”. It was Day 12 of India’s sudden covid-19 shutdown, or as the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker called it, “the world’s strictest lockdown”, when the comic lover, who grew up on that urban Indian quartet of Indrajal, Amar Chitra Katha, Tintin and Asterix released their first cartoon.
It was a simple black-andwhite listicle titled, How much notice PM Modi will give you. The list ran from two weeks’ notice for an appearance on TV show Man Versus Wild to 2 minutes for an alien invasion. PenPencilDraw’s pandemic inspirations included the Prime Minister and his key ministers; the judiciary; migrant workers abandoned by employers and the state; TV anchors spreading misinformation; and the herbal “cure” for covid-19 marketed by Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali. The images were shared by prominent figures and referenced in publications such as The Economist.
The style was one that combined news and comedy. “I wanted something like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight in comic form,” they say. “Jokes can provide relief, mock powerful figures, or can just show solidarity with gallows humour.” Six years after that first graphic, PenPencilDraw is a key member of the small band of cartoonists whose funny, visual critiques repeatedly hold the political establishment accountable. “The role of the satirist is to make people laugh about the tragedies around us,” they say. These days the political cartoonist says they best enjoy the work that depicts social structures, cartoons that fall in the we-are-like-this category.
In the last decade, humour, both standup and by political cartoonists, remains one of the few spaces for dissent, often at great cost to creators. Months after PenPencilDraw’s debut, the Supreme Court issued a criminal contempt notice to Rachita Taneja whose popular Sanitary Panels stick figure cartoon strips had jabbed the judiciary. “PenPencilDraw’s work consistently holds truth to power in a way that is sharp, witty, sometimes dark, and always accessible,” says Taneja, whose contempt case is still pending. “They are unique in that they go beyond issues that are trending and address structural issues with moral clarity.” Taneja’s critique of authoritarianism, Touching Grass, was published earlier this year.
The community has faced police complaints, vandalism and notices to social media companies to block their work, but PenPencilDraw’s Tintin-style pastel palettes have so far ducked this bullet. “It actually makes me wonder if I’m doing a good job,” they say, jokingly. “What good am I if I don’t even get a takedown notice?” The only legal notice they ever received was from India’s biggest dairy maker about a cartoon where the cooperative’s popular mascot had just learned about the artificial insemination of dairy cows.
In Discovery of New India, Patel uses the dogs and two children (one upper caste, one Dalit) to weave a narrative around PenPencilDraw’s work, some of it new and some previously published. Their tales of New India reference how constitutional values have repeatedly been compromised, traipsing with Goopy-style energy from the hazardous lives of sewer cleaners to the conspiracy theory of “love jihad” and the menace of laws surrounding cow protection and preventive detention.
“Technically, I think that their understanding of the issues and the depth at which they are able to know the problems of law is unsurpassed,” says Patel, who knew the cartoonist even before they began drawing. PenPencilDraw also illustrated Patel’s 2022 The Anarchist Cookbook: A Toolkit To Protest And Peaceful Resistance. PenPencilDraw’s ease around the legal system is showcased repeatedly in cartoons that draw attention to the misuse of complex laws such as the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, the National Security Act, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the sedition law that was rebranded in 2023. The cartoonist applies their take on the nitty gritty of labour rights, environmental policies and custodial violence with the smoothness of a moisturising lipstick. Stories from Kashmir, often blacked out by mainstream media, always find a home here.
Their deep research provides a clear guiding light through the fog of misinformation. Who else would read a research paper on a constitutional assessment of uniforms, then break down Karnataka’s 2022 hijab row using DC Comics’ Justice League superheroes? Every once in a while, their cartoons might shake up the progressives too. Like the one after Iran’s January 2026 anti-government protests in which thousands were killed. The cartoon depicted Ali Khamenei covering up bodies with the line, “Anyone opposing this is a Trump supporter, okay?” Irate responses included: “I see no effort in your cartoon to call out western hegemony.” PenPencilDraw says it gave them a sense of how polarised things are and the positions people expect liberal cartoonists to take. “These tend to be based not on any sense of universal human rights but on ideas of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.”
Think of them as the quiet, reticent, teetotaller friend you have, eyes alert and blazing, noticing the smallest details, their mind making connections as you speak. They are presently reading space opera Saga and Transmetropolitan, a cyberpunk series about a journalist in the future. An early inspiration was the sharp political pen of Abu Abraham. “I thought ‘wow, this would be such a cool job to have’,” they say. PenPencilDraw remembers encountering many of Abraham’s most iconic images such as the one depicting President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed casually giving the go-ahead for Indira Gandhi’s 1975 Emergency while soaking in a bathtub or Abraham’s take on the fable of the blind men (depicted as politicians) and the elephant (wearing wire-rimmed glasses and meant to represent Gandhi’s vision for India).
A version of this fable also appears in Discovery of New India where PenPencilDraw replaces the elephant with a cow. “A well-done cartoon is able to communicate information, analysis and a joke at the same time. It draws on certain shared knowledge, between the artist and the reader. So assuming that person knows what you’re talking about, you are kind of telling them your take on it, but it also has to be funny,” they say. “If all that comes together, I think that makes a really great political cartoon.” PenPencilDraw says they are privileged enough not to feel threatened in a country that persecutes many for speaking against the establishment.
Discovery of New India is dedicated to Umar Khalid and other political prisoners who have spent years in jail without trial. “Political cartooning may become more coded if the state gets more authoritarian. Maybe, like in China, some day we will need a Winnie-the-Pooh to depict a President Xi Jinping.”
Priya Ramani is an independent journalist based in Bengaluru and the founder of @indialoveproject.