What if history could be entered through a dream? What if the people who fought caste oppression were not only remembered as icons, but could be met, spoken to and imagined as friends?
These are the questions that form artist and writer Siddhesh Gautam’s The Blue Book: An Anti-Caste Graphic Novel — a work that brings together history, memory, imagination and conversations around self-reflection. Gautam is also the book’s protagonist. Through a series of dream sequences, he travels across time and space to meet influential figures from the anti-caste movement in the Indian subcontinent and engages with them in intimate conversations about caste, identity, resistance and belonging.
A movement of many
The book brings Gautam into conversations with figures such as Savitribai Phule and Dr B.R. Ambedkar, alongside Guru Ravidas, Meera and even Gautam Buddha.
The book, he says, questions the idea that one person can become “the artist of the movement” or “the scholar of the movement”. A movement is made up of people with different professions, experiences and levels of scholarship, he says.
This idea of collective struggle also informs his views on caste. Gautam believes that while caste has survived for centuries through social structures, the “state” has not taken enough decisive steps towards its “annihilation”. “Caste [system] continues to be reproduced, repackaged and redesigned. Caste and class, language, elitism and scholarship are creating new hierarchies and new categories of people…” Representation, he says, is important because people who have experienced these structures are more likely to understand the need to challenge them.
His argument extends to reservation, which he sees as necessary because historical inequality cannot be erased within one generation. “I am a product of reservation,” Gautam explains. “Without that, I would not have found a place, language, or medium for expression.”
He points to his own family's educational journey — Gautam is the first in his family with a college education — to explain why he believes access cannot be measured simply by giving someone a seat in an institution. It took several generations in his family to reach the kind of educational spaces where he eventually studied, Gautam adds.
In blue and white
The graphic novel is largely drawn in blue and white. Having worked in black and white for years before experimenting with colour, he wanted to return to a single-colour approach and see what it could offer.
“I wanted the price to remain accessible without compromising on the quality of the printing or colours,” Gautam further adds. “From a production standpoint, it made more sense to work with a single colour and make the most of it.”
The illustrations lend the book a surreal, dreamlike quality. To balance expanses of flat negative space and solid dark blocks, the artist employs meticulous hatching and fine dash marks to depict elements such as foliage, tree canopies and fields.
Dreams, doubts and history
Gautam has been fascinated by dreams since childhood and would even journal them, he tells TMS. In the book, the dreams offer a way to look inward while also examining society. He deliberately steered the book away from the conventions of traditional history and non-fiction, he says. The process allowed him to imagine a different kind of relationship with people who are often presented as larger-than-life figures.
In the book, they become people he can speak to, question and even share his insecurities with. “I wanted to document my insecurities with them,” he says, describing the conversations as a way of creating “friendliness and intimacy” between himself and figures who are usually remembered as stalwarts of the movement. While caste is the spine of the book, Gautam does not want to deliver “a political message”.
A world to belong
“I have been trying to belong to something bigger than a country,” reads one line in the book.
For Gautam, belonging cannot be limited to borders, flags or a particular idea of ancestry. He says history allows him to imagine a much larger relationship with the past — from the people who first made cave drawings and discovered fire to the earliest forms of life.
He also pushes back against narrow ideas of heredity and identity. Instead of asking which particular group or country he belongs to, he wants to imagine a connection with the entire world and with life itself. “I want to belong to the whole world, to all living organisms, and to everything that breathes,” he says.
That expansive imagination is at the heart of The Blue Book. Its dream sequences do not simply transport Gautam into the past. They allow him to bring the past into conversation with the present.