There is a page early in Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability where a young Bhimrao Ambedkar sits in a school in Satara, thirsty, surrounded by water he is not permitted to drink. Durgabai Vyam renders that water as something alive like flowing, patterned, radiant — and the contrast between the visual generosity of the image and the narrative fact of its denial produce a sensation no expository prose could generate you feel, before you have formed a conscious argument, that something is wrong. Not historically wrong. Wrong the way a physical fact can be wrong. Wrong the way thirst is wrong. That sensation is what this book is about and what makes Bhimayana genuinely difficult to teach without preparation. Its argument is carried as much by form as by content. Durgabai Vyam's refusal of the panel grid is a philosophical statement about continuity and the refusal to enclose suffering in manageable frames. Her reinvention of the speech bubble “birds for speech that carries dignity, scorpions for speech that carries venom” is a semiotic innovation with no real precedent in the Western graphic tradition. The digna patterns filling every surface are an argument, rooted in Gond cosmology, that no part of the world is neutral. A reader who has not been taught to see these choices will miss a significant portion of what the book is actually saying. This companion is designed to prevent that loss.