Just another day in India

A selection from Rachita Taneja’s comic strip “Sanitary Panels” on the patriarchal mindset that normalises rape in India.

The Bengaluru-based artist, Rachita Taneja, has been regularly poking fun at assorted hypocrisies—of politicians, culture moguls, Bollywood stars—through her comic strip. It began in 2014 when some students were arrested for being critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Facebook. Taneja doodled her response and thus was born Sanitary Panels. She has made 700-800 cartoons over the years and has an impressive 1,33,000 followers on Instagram and 48,000 on X.

Since 2016, Taneja has made several strips on the subject of rape. In 2016, she created a panel in response to men using the sentence “Go to the kitchen and make me a sandwich” to show women their place. In 2019, she responded to the multiple cases of sexual violence that had erupted across the country, which was republished in August 2024. In December 2023, she commented on an Allahabad High Court ruling that said marital rape was not a crime if the wife was above 18.

With the R.G. Kar rape and murder taking centre stage, Taneja has made panels on the misogyny inherent in the Indian psyche that normalises the crime, blames the victim, and absolves the rapist. Her panels underline the fact that despite the protests (or their absence, as in case of the rape and murder of a Dalit girl in Bihar), nothing really changes at the core. It is a chilling observation.