Graphic Narratives about South Asia and South Asian America

Aesthetics and Politics

Kavita Daiya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000730012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Graphic Design

This book explores the field of Comics Studies in South Asia, illuminating an art form in which there has been a much-documented explosion of recent interest.

A diverse group of scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America examine aesthetics, politics, and ideology in sequential art about South Asia and South Asian America. The book features contributions which address gender violence; authoritarian politics; caste discrimination; environmentalism; racism; and urban street art, amongst others. The unique interdisciplinary span of the volume considers mass popular comic books as well as the graphic novel.

This edited volume would be of interest to those studying the influence of graphic novels, graphic narratives, and comic books in South Asia, as well as researchers interested in what these forms might have to say about important issues in society. This book was originally published as a special issue of the South Asian Review journal.

The Fear of Iconoclasm: Genre and Medium Transformations from Comics to Graphic Novels in Amar Chitra Katha, Bhimayana, and Munnu

Nandini Chandra

ABSTRACT

The Indian graphic novel tells stories through indigenous or mythographic prisms. This implies frequently departing from the comic medium’s typical grid structure of regular panels interrupted by gutter space. The comic medium’s linear and sequential narrative is often identified by graphic novel theorists with an ‘Enlightenment’ logic inadequate to a vernacular reality. At the same time, in so far as it is about the life narrative of an iconoclastic individual, the graphic narrative cannot entirely avoid speaking the language of a rational and sovereign subject. I argue that the combination of an individual’s iconoclastic trajectory, along with the desire to iconize that very trajectory through a mythic or indigenous idiom, leads to conflicts between decisions made at the level of form and those made at the level of subject matter. This is further complicated by the comic medium’s penchant for dialectical reversals. While it is possible to read Amar Chitra Katha’s mythological tales as critical secular biographies, the graphic narratives Bhimayana and Munnu are so driven by illustration in the form of metaphors, puns and allegories that their visual component loses its narrative traction, becoming in many ways merely decorative and artistic.

This paper is about the nature of genre and media transformations in comics. The introduction of new media in a peripheral context has always been mired in debates about the dangers of derivativeness. For instance, the animation industry, which preceded the comics industry in India, has historically grappled with the anxiety of representing and animating an Indian reality in a manner that is “natural to Indian thought” (Bendazzi 2016, 388). It was American technology under the auspices of UNESCO and a US Technical Mission grant that financed and set up animation infrastructure in India. In 1956–1957, Films Division (the Indian state’s film production unit) received both technical expertise (Clair Weeks, a Disney animator) and machines (an Acme camera) to help develop Indian content in animation.

Weeks steered the production of an animation called The Banyan Deer, based on a Jataka tale. To instruct his animators, he used the model sheets from Bambi(Bendazzi 2016, 388), Disney-fying the basic animation template. This practice of using a “western” or “foreign” medium to develop content that is Indian, however, tends to obfuscate questions of form, which do not brook such a clear differentiation between media and message. In this essay, I will examine how anxiety about granting Indian features to the comic medium has motivated and driven the form of the comic in India, and how this anxiety has catapulted into a concrete mutation from the comic form to the Indian graphic novel form in the next generation, generating formal and generic changes that are obviously global in determination, but also peculiar to its Indian legacy. I argue that despite the pressure of making Indian use of a “foreign” medium, the comic narrative was much more formally integrated, happily expressing itself through comic grammar and its medium-related codes, whereas the graphic narrative is less comfortable with the comic medium’s unilinear form, prioritizing the subject matter and holding it above formal constraints, thus forcing it to tell its story rather than show it. Even when it foregrounds the form through the embrace of a supposedly indigenous or artisanal tradition, the primacy granted to subject matter (generally revolving around a negative human condition related to the depredations of modernity) forces it to adopt more textual or literal ways of expressing it, rather than trusting the form to do the job. This separation of form, matter, and medium creates a triple trajectory in the graphic novel such that the beauty or aesthetic imperative driving its formal decisions is not merely ornamental; the comic medium underlying it transforms its contours in such a way as to actively undermine the avowed pedagogic or political subject matter.

In the formative moment of Indian comics history, the nationalist series Amar Chitra Katha “Immortal Picture Stories” (hereafter ACK) assumed a biography model for its mythological narratives. The mythological stories were told by keeping a mythic-heroic individual at the center of the narrative, and by building sequential momentum through a deliberate parsing of the mythological story into a bildungsroman. The graphic novels, on the other hand, present the secular tale of an individual (the biography) through mythological references, stalling the narrative momentum by introducing a more contemplative aesthetic. Thus we see the secular narrative imperative of the comic form turning into the mythologizing imperative of the graphic novel. I look at two cult graphic narratives, Bhimayana (2011) and Munnu (2015), to make this point.

The graphic narratives seize on the contemporary self-narrativizing global trends of biography and memoirs but give the life story a mythical frame. This mythic substance is thus common to both comics and graphic narratives, albeit in different forms. Usually, it takes the form of a prior or pre-given subjectivity that demarcates the realm of what is human within a non-secular or religio-cultural context. In ACK comics, there is a continuous play of big and small through transpositions between the iconic god-figure and the human-god-like heroic individual submitting to a transcendental being in a typical bhakti posture. This provides the justification for a hierarchical Hindu self.

In contrast, in the graphic narrative, the secular modern individual is presented through an alternative mythic universe with liberatory potential. The use of artisanal techniques – with its undertones of primal narratives and origin myths – inadvertently stalls the dynamism of this supposedly free individual by circumscribing her growth trajectory. This stalling and obstruction of the freedom of the modern self is useful from the point of view of a critique of modernity, but it does not support the context of social justice, which relies on the agential efforts of the rational biographical self who is struggling to make a difference. To highlight the agency of the biographical form, the graphic narrative is forced to rely on more linear sources such as reports, newspaper accounts, and factoids, reducing its graphic aspect to a merely ornamental effect. Before we explore the two very different dynamics of the two forms, the comic and the graphic novel (and the two different possibilities of the graphic novel), we will look briefly at the abstraction inherent to the comic medium, and the reality of its mediation by the commodity form.

Comics as Medium and Mediation

Comics as mass products first emerged in the Indian cultural scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. ACK started publishing in 1967 under the direct influence of UNESCO’s cultural vision – innovating new media as tools for literacy promotion in informal contexts. Despite its fully commercial character, the pedagogical framework, however, served as a very convenient ruse to smuggle all kinds of forbidden pleasures in the gaps between the panels, and between word and picture (Chandra 2008). This systematic gap or gutter space allowed the dialectical interaction between the different fragments of the story, developing it precisely through the unraveling of a unified subject.

In ACK, the transformation of subjects into objects and vice versa is visualized through the standard splitting frame. The comics follow a very regular and linear pattern of about six rectangular boxes on each page in a comic made up of 28 or 32 pages. Within the individual boxes, we find anatomical features, shadows, and objects that serve a metonymic function for the human body, but rarely is the human figure shown in its entirety from top to bottom. This splitting mimics the abstract process of fragmentation of life in modernity, where parts signify the absent whole. Commodity mediation in comics can be explained through an analogy with the game of statues. The figures in ACK are constantly oscillating between action and freeze shots, a pattern of release and petrify, as if subject to the orchestrating gaze of an absent choreographer or curator.

Unlike cinema, where the shots produce the illusion of inexorable movement (unless it is a montage shot), comics are formally characterized by the juxtaposition of what are really still images. The gutter space that demarcates one frame from the other allows the reader to complete or fill the partial or fragmented images to produce a whole. In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1994), Scott McCloud describes the terrain of the comic as panels fracturing time and space, “offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments,” observing, “Closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous unified reality” (67). This active participation of the reader in mapping and meaning-making is not to be seen as defying ideology, however, as is sometimes celebrated in recent appraisals of the medium’s value as alternative culture (Hatfield 2005; Groensteen 2009). The reader is invited to give the most habitual response. Rather, the meaning-making in comics can be seen as the most perfect example of interpellation, and mediation amounts to readers giving a nod to the false unity of capital. But I am not interested here in reiterating the obvious point about comic readers being incorporated into capital, but the fact that the visual organization and grammar of comics makes this process of ideology a representable fact. The comic is able to make this process visible precisely because comics occupy a low position in the hierarchy of cultural objects and the ideological stakes for its makers are also seemingly very low. In other words, the makers of comics are committed to a pure logic of entertainment, and there is little pressure to meet protocols of censorship.

The history of comics in the US is a testament to the decline of the medium from the time of the hysteria created around comics’ corrupting influence on children, culminating in the Comic Code of 1954 (Wertham 1954; Hajdu 2008, 311). This does not mean that there was no censorship of comics before the scare started, but that this censorship was more routine, and the taboos invoked were intrinsic to mass culture, leading to what Adorno describes as the continuum between pornography and prudishness (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 111). The titillation works by slipping things into the gaps rather than representing them directly. It was thus part of the gap/gutter logic of comics. From the readers’ perspective, they could enjoy both the puritanical repression (the moral lip-service) and the titillation afforded by the image conjured up by that very repression. The pleasure had not yet advanced to the status of what Marcuse calls “repressive desublimation” since comics did not pretend to be transgressive or liberatory. That dynamic comes later with the emergence of the Underground comix celebrating counter-culture with its explicitly adult content led by Robert Crumb, etc. The term “comix” was adopted as a means of “distinguishing themselves from their Code-approved counterparts” (Witek 1989, 51). Comic readers were able to enjoy the false unity without bothering too much about its falsity or being too aware of its problems. As long as comics paid lip service to a puritanical superego, it did not interfere with the cheap thrills and easy escape afforded by the genre.

The recognition of the comic as an intrinsic unit of the culture industry, however, should not make us overlook its serious functions. This serious function relates to the repeated activity of closure to which the reader is subjected. Technically, closure takes place after every two panels. This is what distinguishes it from the cartoon, which is usually contained in one single box. The repeated panel + gap + panel structure allows the reader to participate in a repetitive motion of meaning-making. While the single act of closure is a subconscious exercise, the repetition compels the reader to revisit the earlier closure, acknowledging revisions and reversals in the previously arrived meaning, thus making the process of subsequent closures aware of its unconscious workings. The construction of the unified totality is therefore riven with internal contradictions. These contradictions are further complicated by the dialectic of part and whole, visible and invisible, speech and image, and so on. The alternative or rival truth of mass comics, then, lies not in what they contain in terms of a stated content, but the opposites they set in motion, made possible precisely by repeating reified motions and stereotypes. The stereotypes clash and bore holes into each other.

For the more highbrow graphic novel, the first step begins with a disavowal of its commodity status. Its self-location in a space of radical alterity disables this dialectical process of creating truth through falsehood. Whatever unity is realized by the end involves a heavily editorialized and psychoanalyzed commentary. There is continuous interference with the subliminal mediation that goes on at the level of the unconscious. Despite this interference, the comic medium still has a skeletal hold over the graphic narrative, since it has built itself on the potentials of the comic medium. The graphic novel might embody new genres and a new form, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Note about Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Editorial
• Introduction: South Asia in Graphic Narratives
• 1 The Fear of Iconoclasm: Genre and Medium Transformations from Comics to Graphic Novels in Amar Chitra Katha, Bhimayana, and Munnu
• 2 Mapping Postcolonial Masculinity in Sarnath Banerjee’s The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers
• 3 Endangered (and Endangering) Species: Exploring the Animacy Hierarchy in Malik Sajad’s Munnu
• 4 Appupen’s Posthuman Gothic: The Snake and the Lotus
• 5 Graphic Delhi: Narrating the Indian Emergency, 1975–1977 in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm
• 6 The Art of Postcolonial Resistance and Multispecies Storytelling in Malik Sajad’s Graphic Novel Munnu: A Boy From Kashmir
• 7 Slow Violence and Water Racism in Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri
• 8 Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri as Text/Image Activism and Cli-Fi
• 9 Nationalism and the Intangible Effects of Violence in Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir
• 10 Indian Graphic Novels: Visual Intertextualities, Mixed Media and the “Glocal” Reader
• 11 Aesthetics, Gender, and Canon in Anti-Caste Graphic Narratives, A Gardener in the Wasteland and Bhimayana
• 12 The Representation of Gender and Sexuality in Priya’s Shakti (2012)
• 13 The Urban Experience of Displacement: Re-Viewing Dhaka through Street Art and Graphic Narrative
• 14 I Am the Maker of My Image: Marvel’s No Normal and the Comic Book Muslim Woman
• Index