New Delhi: Artist Saurav, who posts his work under the pseudonym Drawnk, had been going to the Cockroach Janta Party-led protests in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar for three days. When the police used tear gas against the protesters, he allegedly watched a man’s face get torn by an exploding shell. He went home and created a piece titled ‘Clouds of Accountability’ featuring a student with a Bhagat Singh poster being hit in the face with a projectile.
“It was happening right in front of us. Shells were exploding in front of us. There was tear gas everywhere. I even saw that a shell exploded right on a man’s face, and he fainted,” Saurav told ThePrint in Hindi.
The student in the artwork is engulfed in a cloud of smoke. A spray of blood paints his shoulder, roses fall from his hand, and he is falling to the ground.
“May Bhagat Singh be immortal,” reads the text on the poster.
Saurav says the incident at the protest inspired him to create the graphic piece.
“How can a peaceful protest be aggressive? When children were doing it all peacefully, bringing flowers and all,” Saurav added.
The 25-year-old is based in Greater Noida and has been freelancing since his second year at the National Institute of Design.
The delinquent schoolgirl
The figure of the student is a frequent presence in Saurav’s work. The adolescent schoolgirl often wears the blue-and-white salwar kameez typical of rural India, paired with a red crescent bindi. That is the last ordinary thing about her. Across artworks, she is surrounded by blood and gore. She embodies a brutal agency.
She fights fellow students and demons alike. In one frame, she pulls out a caterpillar made of tiny human heads from the folds of her brain. In another, she squeezes the face of her friend as if in affection, causing it to burst open. The piece is titled ‘Koochie-Koochie-Kooooooo’.
Saurav drew inspiration for the character from Sukeban, the all-girl teenage street gangs of 1980s Japan. As of now, he doesn’t have her backstory fleshed out. And he keeps adding a superpower to her repertoire with each new post.
In one piece, titled ‘Arrested?’ she explodes the heads of three policemen. It was uploaded on 31 December 2025. It’s impossible not to connect the piece to the recent State vs student confrontation, to see it as an expression of anger against the system. But according to the artist, such a theme was far from his mind.
“Mostly it’s about what I think looks cool, what’s surprising to me, what’s enjoyable. A lot of people ask me why I drew something a certain way. The answer is not that complicated; it’s me drawing what I like and what I feel,” Saurav said.
For now, Drawnk is trying to stay away from the visuals coming out of Jantar Mantar. For his own sanity, he said.
“Police brutality is wrong, and officers should be held accountable. There is so much violence happening everywhere currently, but let’s not forget that the thing that keeps humanity alive is love. Let’s continue supporting the cause peacefully,” the artist added.
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