“Sediments is my elegy for the fabled youth!”
A Conversation with Shubham Bose Roy
I always thought that an autobiography is a vanity project. Or rather was. Till Prerna, my partner, showed me Sediments, by Shubham Bose Roy. Sediments is a retelling of their social life as a transfeminine genderqueer person in Delhi. The panels, multilingual texts, non-commitment to a particular style- the project left me wondering about the parallel lives we live.
Shubham and I have shared friends, parties, conversations, and neighborhoods. Yet, only Shubham felt the urgency to reflect on it creatively and in a way that challenges our understanding of individuals as much as it challenges the format of a graphic novel. They correct me, “It is more of a graphic piece than a novel. a collection of artworks. Not a novel. Yet.”. I spoke to them recently to find out more about their work, specifically Sediments, where I stood corrected on a few more counts.

Shubham is a freelance graphic designer, visiting faculty at a design school, a queer rights activist and a graphic artist. And their life is still not at the tail end of experiences. So why work on a graphic piece now? “It was a way of coping. The initial ideas emerged when my mom passed away in 2017 and this work has also evolved with my healing process around that time. The grieving was not just for my mom's passing away but also for how we individually dealt with toxic masculinity all our life” they say. “ Also, I grew up fantasizing about that aspirational urban youth promised to us by popular culture, painted with idylls of love and romance. Until I reached my 30s and realized, it was rather shit. This popular culture, like most other things, was created upon the binary as well, neither of which I ever fit in. Sediments was imagined as an elegy for all those fantasies about that fabled youth”.
The choice of the medium, however, was a personal preference. “I am a visual artist. I write here and there but I find the visual medium rather visceral.” The incoherence of design elements is evident in the collection of artworks that include human forms- erotic and otherwise- to abstract pieces. Was there a particular reason? They remark that “Apart from visually translating different states of mind, it was also a way of keeping myself from being bored with just one style.”
But the abstract panels really disrupt the flow. Were they intentional? “Well, the artworks are organized in three chapters. And the abstract panels serve as an interlude.”
Sediments is the second part of a trilogy
When I read Sediments, I was intrigued by the process of making a finite world for the graphic piece(s) from an infinite pool of stories that they must have experienced. “Sediments is the second part of a trilogy. The first part was Sakuntalam”. I confess that I had no clue. “Sediments begins where Sakuntalam ends. I hope to begin work on the final part in a few years.”
But even then they are well aware of the narrative choices in their illustrations. “ Growing up, I always thought about the narrow range of sexuality represented in gay erotica that I could dig up back then. It usually ended up looking normative, even when it was not. Even erotica which portrays transfemininity, it is still the idea of a man that is being served. I wanted to focus on the feminine desire instead.”

Now I can say “keh to diya!”
Writers often recommend writing for one person. Who was Shubham making Sediments for? “For anyone who identifies with transfemininity. This work is in solidarity with the experiences of living between the binaries in a male body. There is an implicit expectation for a queer person in a city like Delhi to say something about the community. Now I can say “keh to diya!” I am also nervous about what their reaction will be.”
And what do they feel now about Sediments? “To be honest, the entire work comes from the feeling of not belonging. The patriarchal world has been an unwelcome place for me and my art is about that sense of exclusion I live with.”

In Sediments, Shubham conveys an experience that is alienating and sensual, and mainstream and marginal at the same time. Sediments reflects on the idea of autobiography as much as it questions the format of graphic storytelling. It is more than a unique story of (un)belonging in a city. It is an act of defiance.
