Samarth (Roeqin)
Graphic novelist
Opportunities to experiment and play are the most treasured—especially when the churning of larger projects keep one rolling, definitely or indefinitely, in a specific direction. I’m quite eager to utilise this time to meddle with my own medium, and experience how new contexts, environments and people shift my ways of seeing. These ‘detached’ side-quests are the ones that quite often lead to revelations that remain attached to the soul of one’s work—the stuff that breathes life into it.
Samarth (he/him) is an artist, graphic novelist and an arts educator, based in a village near Ranikhet, in Uttarakhand. He works with the pen name ‘roeqin’ and his practice is primarily centered around sequential art. His first graphic novel, ‘Suit’, was published by Yodapress in 2022. His stories are situated within the contexts he inhabits—the people, settings, and ecologies that surround him constitute the fabric through which his stories are woven. As an arts-educator, he has been associated with the Happy Children’s Library, where he has been conducting weekly Comics and Arts workshops. These workshops, titled ‘Comic Karname,’ are an effort to develop a contextual arts pedagogy using comics and sequential art, for which he received the Leela Mukherjee Artist-Educator Grant in 2024.
