Postscript: 41 Years On, Why Bhopal Matters
In Postscript, we reflect on the editorial choices we make and abandon. Plus all things behind the scenes
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Forty-one years after the night that poisoned Bhopal, India’s worst industrial disaster is at risk of fading into the footnotes of history. But for the women who live in the neighbourhoods surrounding the abandoned Union Carbide factory, the gas never left. It lingers in their breath and bones, in pregnancies lost and children born sick, in the groundwater they drink and now in the bodies of their grandchildren.
This year, on December 2, we chose to tell the story of Bhopal through the eyes of these women–because they asked us to. “Share our stories, share the truth, so that people don’t forget us,” they told reporter Tulika Bansal, who has documented their lives with care and rigour. These women not just survived but also were at the forefront of the movement to secure justice and accountability.
For activists like Rachana Dhingra, who has spent more than two decades fighting for survivors, the framing of Bhopal matters. “The Bhopal gas leak is not a human rights violation or merely an industrial disaster,” she insists. “It is corporate crime.” Calling it by its name forces us to confront how corporations continue to violate safeguards and laws, from Ennore to Sterlite and beyond.
As always, we cast a gendered lens that reveals the invisible burdens women have carried since 1984– the crushing care work for families disabled by gas exposure, the loss of livelihood and education, the mental-health toll of survival, and the stigma of contaminated bodies. These burdens rarely figure in compensation mechanisms designed without women’s realities at their centre.
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To chronicle their stories is to offer younger generations lessons in courage and vigilance. Laws may be robust on paper, but without constant monitoring and public pressure, they remain fragile. Justice is never handed over. It must be demanded. As the poet Dushyant Kumar wrote, “apni koshish yeh hai ki soorat badalni chahiye”. (our effort must always be to change the very face of things.)
Today, many young Indians barely know what happened in December 1984. Yet the catastrophe did not end at dawn on December 3. It continues through toxic groundwater, chronic illness, reproductive harm, disability, and decades of official denial. It continues as corporations hide behind mergers and legal manoeuvres, and as the State buries scientific findings that prove ongoing contamination.
Remembering Bhopal is therefore a political act. It means recognising how state and corporate failures created not one but two disasters—the gas leak and the decades of poisoning that followed. It means honouring the women who have marched to Delhi and Mumbai, filed petitions, demanded clean water, medical care, fair compensation, and the right to raise families free from poison.
Bhopal shapes the future of environmental justice, gender justice, and corporate accountability in India. Most of all, we tell it so that the women who have fought through grief, illness, poverty, and exhaustion for four decades are never erased from our collective memory and their strategies and struggles have lessons for us all.
Look out for the two-part series, a podcast and a comic book that chronicles the story of the Bhopal gas leak in December.
How I Imagine a Feminist Visual Story
Our visual journalist Urvi Sawant takes us through her process of making the visuals that you have come to love.
Sometimes I sit with my sketchbook and wonder: what even is a feminist visual? Drawing someone else’s life feels like a responsibility I am still learning to carry. How do you make ‘care’ visible? Or solidarity? Or the many ways in which people resist and rebuild the world?
At BehanBox, every story begins long before I put pencil to paper. It starts in editorial meetings, where we talk about the stories we want to tell. Reporters return from their fieldwork with truths on the ground and bare it all. We dissect them, find gaps, understand the bits that don’t fit the puzzle and ask the big questions: Who is unheard and invisible? Who is harmed? Who must be held accountable? These discussions become the foundation for my illustrations.
People often think illustration is solitary work, but in reality, everything I draw is stitched from the labour of the journalists who go out, listen, observe, hold someone’s story with patience, and bring it back so I can make sense of it visually.
I remember a meeting when I kept returning to the same visual trope of women with raised fists, to show dissent, one of our team members looked at my sketch and gently asked, “Can you think of other ways in which women resist daily?” This question has followed me everywhere in my art. Since then, I’ve tried to notice many nuances of women’s lives that escape mainstream thought and discussion and hence representation. For instance, care that sustains movements or the everyday negotiations women make while navigating patriarchy.
Along the way I’ve had small revelations and plenty of mistakes. While drawing a sketch, I often keep thinking: How do I draw anger without softening it? How do I show aspiration alongside struggle? How do I avoid easy shortcuts when illustrating a story about technology? How do I depict the lives of Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim women, gender diverse persons, women with disabilities, ASHA workers– people who are rarely recognised as knowledge holders and public intellectuals?
Every choice in a sketch matters – from the skin tone, the expressions to the body type, so that the people I draw feel real, rooted, and powerful. These are women with swag who negotiate their lives with grit even though the structures fail them.
Much of what I do comes from the artists and storytellers I’ve learned from and been inspired by – anti-caste artists like Shrujana, Bigfatbao, Vikrant Bhise, and many more who are actively doing this work today. The art and visual journalism of Sanitary Panels and Green Humour are also constant sources of inspiration for me.
If I were to describe my process in the simplest terms, here is how it goes. First, I try to understand the people in the story and the structures they are framed by: policies, law, data, and power. Then I think about the purpose of the illustration. What do I want the audience to feel? How do I want them to act? Like a magpie, I collect all the interesting pieces that stay with me after reading the story – anecdotes from activists, fragments of quotes, photos from the field. And finally, I start sketching, letting the pieces find their own rhythm until a visual language begins to emerge.
That’s all for this month’s Postscript, Behans. Our eyes, ears, hearts, and inboxes are always open for your thoughts. Write to us or comment below.
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