In a week when India’s internet and social media rallied around the Cockroach Janata Party — a satirical response to controversial remarks by the Chief Justice of India about the country’s youth — it feels fitting to return to the political power of humour.
From George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Art Spiegelman’s Maus to political memes and what seems to be a parody party, satire has often emerged most sharply when reality itself begins to feel absurd. Few contemporary artists understand that better than Rachita Taneja, better known online through her comic platform Sanitary Panels.
Known for her deceptively simple stick-figure comics critiquing politics and internet culture, Taneja has spent the last decade documenting the emotional climate of contemporary India. Now, with her debut book Touching Grass (Bloomsbury), she brings together years of political satire into a collection that asks what endless doom scrolling and political uncertainty are doing to us emotionally.
Touching Grass, literally
The title itself comes from internet slang — “go touch grass” — usually used online as a dismissal, a sarcastic instruction to log off and reconnect with reality.
“When I was figuring out the narrative and the format of the book, I was thinking how do we move past this feeling of consistent doom and gloom,” she says. “The thing that I kept coming back to was reconnecting with the offline world in terms of building connections with people, tapping into community and reminding ourselves that we're not as isolated as we feel.”
Divided into sections titled ‘doomscrolling’, ‘touch grass’, ‘lock in’, and ‘IRL’, the book uses internet vocabulary to critique internet dependency itself. “I thought it would be funny also to use these very online terms to talk about the fact that we need to actually go offline,” she says.
Taneja repeatedly returns to the idea that doom scrolling creates the illusion of engagement. “The only thing that doom scrolling does is make us want to doom scroll more,” she says. “It’s a paralysing feeling.”
Speaking indirectly
The book’s introduction directly references democratic decline and censorship in India, but Taneja is careful to distinguish censorship from self-censorship. “A lot of what we believe is self-censorship is actually just censorship,” she says. “If you are facing legal threats, trolling, threats of violence and then you don’t say something, that’s censorship.”
She acknowledges that fear inevitably shapes artistic language. “The beauty of satire is that it can ridicule those in power in obscure ways.” The risk, however, is real. “None of us want to be martyrs at the end of the day,” she says matter-of-factly.
Visual minimalism
Taneja’s comics rely on a stripped-down visual style: basic stick figures paired with minimal text. Her influences range from Randall Munroe’s xkcd and Crocodile in Water, Tiger on Land to meme culture across Tumblr, Reddit and Imgur. “The juxtaposition of heavy messaging with light imagery kind of gives me this foot in the door,” she explains. “I can disarm people with the visuals and then hit them with the message or the punchline.”
Her comic panels are drawn to feel unintimidating, especially for readers who may not engage with long political essays or jargon-heavy discourse. “When I was young, the first thing my eyes would go to in a newspaper was the political cartoon,” she says. “Even if I didn’t understand the context, it was still the easiest thing to engage with.”
Political art does not need art degrees; it’s not about being an artist, she says. “If you want to communicate something, you can do it through whatever tools and skills you have at your disposal.” In her early days, she was “just someone who was criticising, making comics for a tiny audience online”. It’s good practice to be vocal and critical, she adds.
In absurd times
From the authoritarian pigs of Animal Farm to the shocking absurdity of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, political satire has historically exaggerated reality to expose the absurdity of power. But in today’s India, reality itself increasingly feels difficult to parody.
“That’s a regular joke that we cartoonists make with each other,” she says with a laugh. “It’s hard to make absurd comics when everything around you is already absurd. Satire is a reminder that this is absurd and shouldn’t become normal.”
Hope as political necessity
Despite its loaded themes, Touching Grass is ultimately a hopeful book. Taneja says hope is inseparable from political action. “I think anyone who’s trying to do something to make things better is an optimist,” she says. “We cannot organise or build a community without hope.”
That insistence on collective life forms the core of the book. For Taneja, touching grass is not simply about logging off. It is about refusing numbness, refusing passivity, and refusing to accept cruelty as normal. Ultimately, for her, “touching grass” becomes less of a joke and more of a reminder to step outside the endless cycle of online reactions — not to escape reality, but to refuse to become numb to it.