Kerala recently declared tidal flooding a state-specific disaster, highlighting how low-lying coastal areas often face floods from high sea levels and other climate factors. Athulya Pillai’s silent comic, Nanavu, beautifully helps readers grasp the real impacts through her evocative illustrations. She thoughtfully uses a predominantly blue palette to depict the “persistent dampness” that residents in coastal regions experience every day. Focusing on a girl and her slippers as the central figures, Pillai offers a fresh perspective on this issue. Unlike the usual serious facts, stats, and numbers, her artwork adds a touch of lightness to this urgent subject, while still honestly portraying the harsh reality and the cruelty of tidal flooding for those living with it daily.
In this conversation, Pillai talks about the ideas, research, and inspirations behind her comic; things she kept in mind while working on it; why she chose to tell this story through a child’s eyes and much more.
1. Nanavu is a silent comic. What inspired you to illustrate this comic? Why did you feel that this particular story needed to be told without words?
The Common Ground Initiative actually commissioned this project. They put together a team that I was part of. The idea was to see an art exhibition called KaBhumM, which looked at tidal flooding, along with a field visit organized by Equinoct, a tech startup working with communities affected by tidal flooding. I think it was that field visit, being able to see what was actually happening on the ground, that really stayed with me and inspired me to tell this story as a comic.
And the reason I felt the story didn’t need words was because I wanted to amplify the silence of the disaster itself. Tidal flooding doesn’t arrive in the way an earthquake or cyclone might. It is much quieter. It slowly enters everyday life, and people learn to live around it. I wanted the absence of words to reflect that silence.
2. Can you tell us what kind of research went into understanding and illustrating this comic? In an interview, you have shared how it took you around 7 months to finish this book. Can you tell us a bit about that journey: the things you observed, the approaches you were considering to illustrate this issue, or any moments that moved you?
After the field visit, I went through a lot of literature on the subject. I tend to prefer reading about something rather than looking at visuals, especially when I’m trying to develop a story. Reading gives me a different kind of space to imagine things. Since this was fiction, it opened up possibilities and nuances.
During the field visit, we also had a lot of discussion that went beyond the disaster itself. There were these small details that you might only notice if you really knew the context. Like the relationship between the tides, the moon, and Pokkali farming of a salt-tolerant rice variety, and how these things have always been connected. These systems that our ancestors developed around these natural cycles, and how those relationships have changed over time.
Some of these details felt almost poetic, but they also helped me understand why tidal flooding happens the way it does, and why communities are experiencing its effects more intensely today. Those nuances became an important part of how I started thinking about the story.
3. I love how you explain tidal flooding in Kerala through this beautiful story of a girl and her slippers. Why was it important for you, or why did you choose to tell the story through a child’s eyes rather than an adult’s? The book doesn’t portray flooding as simply a catastrophic event; it shows it as something people live with. Were you consciously trying to move away from the conventional imagery of climate disasters?
One of the biggest things for me was not wanting to portray the people affected by tidal flooding as helpless or as victims who don’t have the agency to change their situation.
I think telling the story through the eyes of a child allowed me to bring a certain lightness to the story to an otherwise heavy subject. There’s a juxtaposition between what is heavy and what is light. I wanted the story to hold both at once: the landscape as the child experiences it, with all its beauty and familiarity, and the landscape and the disaster as the reader slowly comes to experience them through the comic.
4. What are some books or illustrated books that have inspired you? Are there artists, illustrators, writers, filmmakers, or visual traditions/practices that have significantly influenced you? Can you talk a little about them?
One of the books that really stayed with me is In the Land of Punctuation, published by Tara Books. It adapts an old poem by the poet Christian Morgenstern. What I found really interesting was the way punctuation marks- commas, semicolons, full stops, and exclamation marks are used to create a kind of political satire. It’s quite dark, but also very playful in the way it approaches the subject. There’s also a beautiful handmade, screen-printed edition. I really loved the way the book looks and feels in your hands.
I also take a lot of inspiration from films. I love Satoshi Kon’s work, which can be bizarre and whimsical at the same time, and Wong Kar-wai’s films, especially the way they explore identity through atmosphere and cinematography. There are so many moments in his films where nothing is being said, but the scene still makes you think or feel something.
And then there are crafts that I really enjoy: things with a lot of repetition, like cross-stitch, crochet, and beadwork. I think that rhythm and repetition have somehow seeped into the comic as well. There’s something about repeating a small action or visual element that can slowly build meaning, and I think that became quite important to the way I made this comic work.
5. What are you currently curious about that you haven’t yet turned into a book or illustration? What are some issues you think should be talked about more but are not?
At the moment, my friend Pankaj and I are also working on a book called Listening to Trees. It explores our relationship with trees. It’s not a scientific book, but more of a visual and textual exploration. It’s been an ongoing project for a while, and I hope it’s a book someday.
I do feel that, with social media, there is a lot of conversation around issues like climate change. There are also some incredible films, artworks, and music being made around these subjects. The issues are being spoken about, but I wish more people were talking about them, thinking about them, and perhaps becoming a little more in tune with what is happening around us.
6. What do you think is the responsibility of an illustrator when the subject is not merely fictional, but someone’s lived reality?
Yeah, this (comic) was a bit tricky because it’s very easy to misrepresent or miscommunicate something when you’re telling a story entirely through visuals. So I was quite careful about how I approached it.
There was also a question of compassion and responsibility. This is someone’s lived reality, and I didn’t want to treat it as something that could simply be fictionalized or taken for granted. It’s someone else’s story, and I wanted to be mindful of that while still finding a way to tell it through my own medium.
I tried to make the representation as accurate as possible, and I also took help from Sreeja at Equinoct and the team at Common Ground, sharing the visuals with them and getting their feedback along the way. That helped me make sure what I put on the page was grounded in the reality of the people and place I was trying to represent.
