Mindscape In Cyberspace

Story Illustration for Newspaper (1990)
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One more story illustration from the early days of my career as an artist and designer. Pen and ink is still one of my favorite analog drawing media and I guess, my love for this particular media has started back in 1989-90, when I was working on these illustrations for a Bengali Daily.

When a group of scholars and academics involved with a publishing initiative that seeks to bring out significant works on political theory, approached me to design covers for their upcoming publications, I was genuinely very excited. Their approach demonstrated a disregard for the cover and visual identity of the publications. Portraits of writers independently done by recognized illustrators were used, with a conventional serious color scheme of gray-blue, irrespective of the subject of that particular publication. They needed covers for two of their next publications emphasizing the content.

The Paradox of Freedom
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For the first book, “The Paradox of Freedom” my challenge was, how do I express the idea of “paradox” in the context of India’s freedom from British rule, and its emergence as a nation? How do I assemble these ideas with the writer’s strong Marxist viewpoint? I decided to use solid bold text to form a puzzle-like complex structure with flipped and interlinked letters, randomly filled in with the familiar saffron, green and white of the Indian flag. Approximating the look and texture to that of the Soviet propaganda posters, I used the communist red for the background to suggest a Marxist reading. The result was quite effective.

Revolution by Consent
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Designing acover for the second book - “Revolution by Consent” was more challenging for me. How to communicate an abstract idea like ‘consent of the people’? How to represent revolution graphically? I started working with the idea of the mass and abstracted it through a set of hands raised as if in protest signifying a revolution. A closer look at the gesture of the hands in silhouette demonstrates that instead of protest, the hands represent consent or agreement to a cause. The cause is the backdrop - the first few words of the Preamble to the Indian constitution. The red color seeping into the Preamble represents the Marxist framework used to read these historical events.