On the last day of her artist residency at Preet Nagar Ladi, near Amritsar, in March 2019, illustrator-author Ikroop Sandhu (40) was offered an opportunity to work on a graphic novel on Bhagat Singh. The publisher of Yoda Press, Arpita Das, had piqued Ikroop’s curiosity about the venerated revolutionary’s ideology. . Though much has been written about Bhagat Singh, he still remains an enigma. Ikroop’s predicament primarily was to demystify his character — while constantly connecting the narrative to his uncompromising ideology, the question of violence and the depiction of machismo — through words and art.
With only four of his original photographs as reference, a few scholarly articles, his own writings and an array of literary works on him, Ikroop’s three-year journey of discovering Bhagat Singh resulted in Inquilab Zindabad: A Graphic Biography of Bhagat Singh, the first-ever graphic novel on the freedom fighter (published by Simon & Schuster India in association with Yoda Press).
