“Drawing Doomsday” is a chapter from the book “10 Indian Champions Who Are Fighting to Save the Planet by Bijal Vachharajani and Radha Rangarajan published by Penguin.
With sixty lakh visitors annually, Guvahati’s taxi drivers are used to strange requests from tourists. But one found himself stumped. Cartoonist Rohan Chakravarty hopped off the aircraft and booked a taxi straight to the local municipal garbage dump. “It was to see Guwahati’s Greater Adjutant Storks, that have made the dump their home.” he explained. “Never in my life have I seen a more perplexed taxi driver.”
It’s not only in Assam that Rohan finds humour and beauty in dire situations. It’s all in a day’s work for Rohan who creates environment and wildlife cartoons under the name Green Humour. Whether it’s hombills or Polar Bears, politicians or environmentalists, turtles or elephants, they’ve all been given a humorous twist by his pen.
From dentures to green adventures
The only memory that Rohan has of his childhood scribbles is drawing rain and leopards. “While my love for leopards is unchanged,” said Rohan, “I’ve grown up into somewhat of a hydrophobe! If only watching frogs and snakes weren’t a thing of the monsoon!”
What helped to inspire his interest in wildlife was that he and his brother Rohit, a chiropterologist (someone who studies bats), grew up on a steady diet of encyclopedias and picture books that their grandfather gifted them so they knew about ocelots and matamatas by the age of three!
Rohan studied to be a dentist. “I have never been a bright student, particularly of subjects I dislike,” he explained. “Dentistry fit into that bill. My mother has stood by every decision I have made in my life. except getting into dental college, and was very relieved when I made the switch to animation (initially) and later cartooning: she always knew that medicine wasn’t for me.”
When you ask Rohan what prompted him to move from molar to solar power, he responds with a perfect nature analogy. “In the winter of 2014, a kittiwake, a seabird not found in the Indian subcontinent, landed up on the coast of Maharashtra. It was a straggling vagrant, probably blown in by unpredictable winds, and obviously had no idea what it was doing in the Konkan coast. I too, was as aimless in my teenage years as that kittiwake. It was only when met my first wild tigress that the kittiwake in me “kitti-woke up. and decided to merge two dormant passions wildlife and cartoons and spring into action.”
While Rohan’s mother was secretly pleased his father had his reservations Wildlife cartooning did not seem like a viable career choice. There are few cartoonists such as Patrick McDonnell, creator of the iconic series “Mutts”, who have managed to cane a name for themselves in this niche. And in India, most cartooning is political But Rohan’s father quickly changed his mind, when a former patient confessed that the denture his son had made for her didn’t fit her.
When Rohan started out in around 2010, it was difficult to get publishers and readers to take cartoons on wildlife seriously. But he feels that readers have become more receptive over time. 1 don’t know whether i should be thankful for this or not, but the fact that environmental issues are now so grave that they occupy the forefront of many minds, and this has helped my series gain the attention it needed, he said.
Rohan did not study to be a naturalist. “There was a point in my life where I really wanted to become a wildlife scientist,” he said. “But i soon realised that I did not have the patience to wait for an owl to poop so I could dissect its pellets. I think that my aversion to academics (and a staple diet of Yash Chopra films) has helped keep the romance in me alive, something that’s very necessary for being an artist of any kind.” The way he sees it, rather than drowning animals in formalin to study them, he’d rather draw them to leam more about different species. Field visits have helped him understand how cultural differences shape local conservation practices. For example, Neilingding, a military island that he visited in southeastern China, has a designated sanctuary for an animal that most Indians have at least once had their kitchens raided by-the Rhesus Macaque!
Seriously funny stuff
Most environmental sciences books are very earnest when they talk about the planet’s diverse flora and fauna (well, it is a very serious subject). Newspaper reports about climate change, deforestation and wildlife crimes are frightening enough to make anyone want to curl up into a ball like a threatened pangolin, and environment policymakers often seem out to disprove their name People shy away from bad news (and there is enough of that around) so humour is a powerful weapon to make people engage with climate change.
What Rohan draws and talks about is serious. But it’s also seriously funny:
When I had started out I was drawing cartoons with the sole purpose of making some mischief every day and feeling good about it. The awareness that resulted in readers was a mere by-product. But this changed over the years… Humour has always been my go-to tool to put forth my point and I believe that it is a lot more effective in making an audience retain as well as respond to information compared to most other media of communication. While it is hard to measure the effect that Rohan’s work has on his readers, some stories show how strong these can be. A comic about the illegal trade of the Pygmy Marmoset the world’s smallest monkey which is found in the Amazon. for the pet market convinced a Peruvian reader to not buy one. After reading his comics on the cruelty behind civet coffee in southeast Asia, some travellers from France reconsidered their buying practices. Rohan’s comic about eco-friendly sanitary products inspired many to make the switch.
On binge-watching nature
Rohan’s idea of entertainment is sitting in his balcony with coffee and looking around: When I’m in the mood for a musical. I watch the magpie robin composing new tunes on the go. When it’s comedy I’m up for the palm squirrels antics keep me amused. When I want some action. I search for the neighbourhood Shikra that specialises in hunting bats!
Rohan swears his eternal loyalty to a tigress, from whom he drew inspiration to start making wildlife cartoons in the first place, but smaller and lesser known creatures generally fascinate him a lot more than megafauna.
He draws almost every day:
In my school days, I was addicted to watching cartoons (mostly shows by Genndy Tartakovsky and Hanna Barbera), and would often wake up at 4 a.m. to catch reruns of my favourite episodes. This was replaced by video games in my teens, and I often neglected studies to play “Age of Empires” and “Diablo”. Quite fortunately, an addiction to drawing took over in my adult life, and hasn’t died out yet.
One of Rohan’s most iconic creations is the all encompassing map that celebrates the wildlife of India, with 115 species plotted in exactly the spots in which they are seen the most, and 46 biodiversity hotspots. Flamingos in Gujarat’s saltpans, tragopans in Nagaland’s bamboo forests, marmots in the cold deserts of Ladakh and dugongs in the Indian Ocean are all in the map, and still Rohan wishes he had space for more.
Research alone took him almost a year, involving reading numerous field guides, making notes, and picking the brains of many scientist friends from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS). Bengaluru, over filter coffee and chilli cheese toast.
Rohan has illustrated other wildlife maps too, including those of Bhutan, the Greater Bay Area of China and Hong Kong, one of the world’s densest concrete jungles. Many forest reserves in India requested their own. Look through Rohan’s website and you will find maps of Kanha Tiger Reserve Pakke Tiger Reserve, Manas National Park, Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary and Mangalajodi. There are also lessons that Rohan absorbs from the wild and celebrates in his work. For example, Rohan uses wildlife cleverly to drive home a feminist point of view. Apart from talking about the matriarchal elephant family, he’s coined the word ‘hyenarchy’ to show how even the lowest-ranking female gets more importance than the highest-ranking male in a Spotted Hyena society.
He is also aware that it is difficult for women to make a living out of working for wildlife. Like the elephants in my comics, I too am of the belief that matriarchy might just save the world someday! Some of his comics celebrate women in wildlife, such as forest guard Kiran Pathija who walked among lions while patrolling her range in Gir Forest National Park, even during her pregnancy.
According to Rohan, India’s biggest environmental challenges are:
- No cap on population growth
- Unplanned development
- A mad race to urbanize and westernize
- The ruling government’s complete disregard of protecting natural resources
These issues are reflected in his cartoons, many of which tend to provoke. But fear of offending the powers that be doesn’t stop Rohan from commenting on government policies like the proposed Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train route that will cut through the heart of SGNP, home to the largest urban leopard population in the country: or the proposed Mumbai coastal road, which will destroy a fragile inter-tidal ecosystem and destroy the livelihoods of many local fishing communities.
ROHAN’S HONOUR ROLL
Awards racked up:
WWF International President’s Award; RBS Earth Heroes Award; Sanctuary Asia Young Naturalist Award.
(His favourite ‘award’, says Rohan, is wildlife conservationist Belinda Wright telling him: “There are many like me but there’s just one you.”)
Picture Credit : Google
