Honourable senators, some artists paint beauty, others paint truth, but once in a while, one picks up a pen and draws a way forward. Nigar Nazar is one of them. She is the first female cartoonist in Pakistan and first female cartoonist in the Muslim world. A quiet force who redrew the map with lines of hope, empathy and imagination.

She started medical school but found her calling not in stethoscopes, but in sketchbooks. In a country where comic illustration wasn’t formally taught, she taught herself. To many, she is simply known as the creator of Gogi.

I remember being a young woman, flipping through the morning paper and spotting Gogi — clever, bold, always ours. There she was saying what so many of us were thinking, but couldn’t say yet. She wasn’t just a comic strip. She was a voice, a mirror, a quiet kind of revolution. Nigar used her to talk about things that weren’t easy: girls’ education, health and inequality. Her comics appeared in newspapers and on buses, hospital walls, school gates — even in refugee camps. Whenever people needed a reason to think or to hope, Gogi was there.

When schools were shut down during COVID-19, Nigar didn’t wait for learning to return. She brought it to the children. She packed Gogi books onto a camel and travelled to a village in the desert. She named the camel Roshan, “the illuminated.” As she put it, she wanted to light a candle against the darkness of illiteracy. Where buses couldn’t go, Roshan brought stories and gave children a way to keep learning.

This is just one example. Her outreach programs have shared more than 34,000 books. There is a story of a girl whose parents decided she wasn’t going to school anymore. She read the comic strip to her parents about the importance of education, and her father decided she should continue going to school.

But her true legacy lives not just in print. It lives in every child she has reached, every boundary she blurred and every smile she drew.

Honourable senators, today we honour more than an artist. We honour a torchbearer, a trailblazer. She’s not just celebrated at home. She shared her vision across borders, from classrooms in Islamabad to cartoon congresses in Turkey and Nepal. As one student said, “Gogi is the symbol of womanhood in Pakistan.”

Nigar is a Fulbright Scholar, she has the highest civilian award and is one of BBC’s 100 inspiring women. She reminds us that, sometimes, the most powerful revolutions begin with quiet determination and commitment. Thank you.