No staring from a distance. This museum wants you to touch the art (gently)

In Delhi, at KNMA’s first library-like space, nothing is behind glass, like you’d expect in a museum. In fact, everything looks like it could run away if you don’t hold it down with a paperweight. And honestly, at any moment, you expect a speech bubble to pop above your head.

Three worlds open one after the other (stitched together by Himanshu S, Bharath Murthy and aqui Thami), sprawling enough to lose an afternoon in. Welcome to please touch gently (zines, comics, ephemera), where the only rule is to keep turning the page. Curatorial advisor Akansha Rastogi says, “We didn’t want to museum-ize this living print culture or put it under vitrines. It is an agile exhibition that moves and changes as the visitor opens it up, at their own pace.”

Before academia called it “self-publishing” and museums called it “ephemera”, zines and comics were simply put out by people refusing to wait for permission. They have always been the scrappy cousins of literature and art—cheap to make, easy to copy, impossible to control. Revolutions have travelled in folded paper, photocopied poems, stick-figure protests, and badly stapled comics.

Curated by artist Himanshu S, who also runs the tiny Fluxus Chapel in Mumbai’s Bandra and co-organises the Bombay Zine Fest, the first room feels like walking into a living, breathing zine. Three huge blue walls are covered in zines clipped neatly with binder clips, like a DIY library gone slightly feral. In the middle is a carpet and a pile of cushions where people are sprawled, lying on their backs, flipping through pages, getting up only to grab the next zine. And the range is chaotic brilliance—cat superheroes, alien romance, a zine earnestly titled The Art and Science of Billboard Improvement, and then suddenly one on dissent, Palestine, anarchy, protest.

And then there’s the wall that looks empty. No zines. Just blue paint. You wonder why until you squint. The title of his section is faintly projected. It reads ‘disappearing is a good way to keep working’. It feels right for a room built for things that were never meant to shout, only meant to be discovered.

Step out of Himanshu’s blue zine universe and suddenly you are hit with lime-green walls and a full-blown mythological déjà vu. Comics author Bharath Murthy’s section feels like someone pressed rewind on Indian childhood and hit play in high definition. One entire wall is taken over by a giant Amar Chitra Katha panel: gods, demons, floating crowns, speech bubbles, and Brahma himself stretching almost floor to ceiling. Glass cases and shelves overflow with comics like Bahadur, Inspector Azad, Shuja, Chacha Chaudhary, Target and Sita’s Ramayana by Samhita Arni. It is mythology, pulp fiction, and campy superhero logic all living together. Raj Comics from the ’80s and ’90s sit like Amar Chitra Katha’s rebellious successors—less moral instruction, more flying kicks and melodramatic villains. This part of the room feels like every railway-station bookstall and childhood trunk exploded into a museum.

Then the nostalgia quietens and another kind of storytelling begins. The second half of Murthy’s space turns towards politics, memory, and satire. Here you find RK Laxman’s weary Common Man, Abu Abraham’s razor-sharp political satire, and Orijit Sen’s The River of Stories, which chronicles the Narmada Valley protests. Front pages of The Times of India from 1976 are blown up on the wall, and you realise newspapers once gave comics the space that opinion columns hold today. Alongside these are comic strips about censorship, press freedom, and familiar contemporary voices, like Sanitary Panels and indie horror strips we usually only see on Instagram. Here, comics appear in Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Bengali, and English. They do not just entertain. They record. They argue. They resist.

And yet, even after all these decades, comics in India still hover on the edge of mainstream culture. They are loved, collected, and deeply nostalgic but rarely given the same cultural weight as cinema, literature or even political cartoons. “The fact that comics in India are yet to become a fully mainstream medium like cinema is, I think, to do with the perception that comics are largely for children, whereas political cartooning and comic strips, which are essentially the same medium, do have cultural legitimacy, appearing in magazines and newspapers,” explains Murthy.

From Murthy’s world of mythic heroes and sarcastic cartoons, you walk into aqui Thami’s room, and the whole atmosphere shifts. It is bright, deep pink. The kind of pink that does not whisper but stands tall and unapologetic. Thami, an artist and founder of the Sister Library, has built her own version of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Pink ribbons form a soft enclosure, zines hang like quiet confessions, and cushions lie scattered on the floor. Women sit cross-legged, flipping through books that speak of bodies, love, labour, rage, and rest. There is no hush, only a low murmur of thought. It feels like a room where someone finally said, stay, read, breathe, you are safe here.

But Thami does not let you leave as just a reader. The room opens into Chhapaghar, the copy room where a long table waits with sketch pens, pencils, staplers, glue sticks, paper, and a photocopy machine that might as well be a time machine. You draw. You write. You take printouts. You keep a copy and leave the original behind on a wall already crowded with raw honesty. Someone has written Free Palestine. Someone else scribbled Free Sudan. One zine is about a muffin. Another simply tells you to remember your name. No one is trying to be perfect. Everyone is trying to be heard.

By the time you walk out, you are no longer just a visitor at please touch gently. You are thinking about paper, about ink, about how revolutions might start from a photocopier. And quietly, in the back of your mind, a voice says, I could make a zine too.

please touch gently (zines, comics, ephemera) is on view at KNMA, Delhi, till January 10, from 10 am to 6 pm. (Tuesday to Sunday).