Sharad Sharma—World Comics, New Delhi, India
Sharad Sharma is introducing the use of comics across India as a low-cost medium through which unheard millions can raise their voices on serious issues of daily concern that are ordinarily neglected by the conventional media.
A lanky self-important man stands peering at a four-panel cartoon poster stuck to a wall. Two women quietly observe him from alongside. “Nonsense!” he pronounces with a dismissive wave before striding away. The two women silently watch him go. They turn to read the poster. “Good story!” one chortles. “Very good!” the other concurs.
This is the world of Sharad Sharma and World Comics India. In this world, government officials in helicopters report that ‘everything looks fine’, while derelict industrialists pollute rivers, and gangsters fleece impoverished farmers for every last rupee. But in this world too, tribal people assert their rights to land, villagers plant trees and restore a degraded forest, and women picket a police station until a feudal lord is arrested for wrongdoing. It is both the world that is, and the world that can be.
With World Comics India, Sharad Sharma has pioneered a cheap and easy medium for otherwise voiceless persons to communicate meaningfully about unspoken truths. Sharad recognizes that most people in India have something to say if they can get a chance to say it. While the urban elite dominates public media, the grinding day-to-day concerns of millions upon millions of others are rarely heard, even among themselves. Multiple layers of discrimination and abuse heaped on huge numbers of people keep them and their problems out of sight and out of mind. Yet these are the people and problems of India.
Sharad is now rapidly spreading and consolidating his work. He established World Comics India in 2002. Through it, he is now organising three annual national events that bring together artists and comics from the 15 states where he has worked to date, to give acknowledgment, new skills and ideas, as well as the confidence to continue. These events are being organized in conjunction with World Comics Finland, which had been informally backing Sharad in his efforts since 1998. He introduced to the Finnish artists, who were professionals, the idea of teaching local people to do the cartooning themselves. Their founder credits Sharad with teaching them how to use comics as a grassroots medium, particularly the wall posters, and demonstrating how to train local activists in making comics themselves.
For Sharad, kudos from abroad are welcome but the measure of his success is back in the villages of Tamil Nadu and Jharkand where it all started. “Locals there today come with suggestions on subject matter for forthcoming issues of the poster,” he says proudly. “And if they don’t receive their copies, they’ll send someone to find out why not, and get them.” The wall posters, it seems, have become indispensable.
From an early age, Sharad Sharma took an interest in depicting the diversity of Indian society. He reaised the innate power in cartooning while he was still in school. From high school through college and as a journalist, Sharad became steadily more involved in socially concerned media. By 1997, Sharad was searching for the groove into which the new kind of social media he wanted to develop full time would fit. Frustrated that the pressing concerns of millions were still not getting a mention in the newspapers, despite his best efforts to the contrary, he became more involved with the wall poster technique. Shortly thereafter, Leif Packalen came to India from Finland, and was similarly disappointed by what he saw in the newspapers and other published work. He started asking around. Was no one in India doing the kind of social cartooning in which he was interested? Yes, there is one person, an activist told him, and introduced Sharad. That meeting gave Sharad the impetus and support he needed to commit all of his time and energy to the wall posters, from which World Comics India was born.
