Visuality and Identity in Post-millennial Indian Graphic Narratives

‘Can You See Her the Way I Do?’: (Feminist) Ways of Seeing in Amruta Patil’s <i>Kari</i> (2008)

“…Another strand of criticism has highlighted the complex relationship between the city, modernism and the subject (Nayar, 2016;Nambiar, 2013;Davies, 2019) and interrogated the ways in which city and urban spaces are re-appropriated within these narratives, often through the critical gazes of their protagonists (Nambiar, 2013). Broadly, then, criticism in this area has formulated the ways in which these texts have enabled a new mode of visuality, of seeing, vis-à-vis modern Indian experiences and national identity (Nair, 2017;Nayar, 2016;Varughese, 2017;Varughese, 2018). Kari (2008), published during the first wave of production, alongside Sarnath Bannerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh's works, stands out despite its common theme of engagement with the city through its focus on the 'unusual […] deeply introverted, asocial and queer' protagonist.…”

Urban comix: Subcultures, infrastructures and “the right to the city” in Delhi

“…Sen's publication and distribution practices follow US comix movements that employed similar "'underground' distribution" methods, but also demonstrated "a diversification in graphic style; a budding internationalism, as cartoonists learned from other cultures and traditions; and, especially, the exploration of searchingly personal and at times boldly political themes" (Hatfield 2005, x). E. Dawson Varughese (2018) observes that Hatfield's genealogy of the form "might easily be applied to the Indian context and its 'graphic narrative' production", while demonstrating at length how the introduction of the specific term "graphic novel" has been absolutely "instrumental in forging a new identity of text-image production within the Indian (literary) market" (18)(19). Though acknowledging the importance of the term "graphic novel", I want here to contend that it remains productive to consider simultaneously this work as alternative comics, or even "comix".…”

“…As Deepa Sreenivas (2010) observes, the "generations of middle-class children that grew up on it during the 1970s and the 1980s, have their ideas of citizenship and selfhood formed by it" (5-6). Meanwhile, E. Dawson Varughese (2016) has shown at length how the "Indian graphic novel interfaces with a legacy of the Amar Chitra Katha series of comics (despite the clear differences in content, style and form)" (495; see also Varughese 2013Varughese , 2018Varughese and Lau 2015).…”

Slow Violence and Water Racism in Sarnath Banerjee’sAll Quiet in Vikaspuri

“…Pramod K. Nayar (2016) argues that the Indian graphic narrative as "a new representational mode that re-invigorates the canon" of Indian Writing in English because of its multivalent representational strategies and its insistence on tackling cultural critique of the nation's flaws (7-8). Emma Dawson-Varughese (2018) similarly observes that Indian graphic narratives revolve around "a visuality of the inauspicious," such as social ills, religious intolerance, caste etc., to "disturb ideas of Indianness in the post-millennial moment" (10). Sarnath Banerjee's work is a major intervention in optimistic discourses of a nation aspiring to be a global superpower.…”