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Towards a postcolonial critical literacy: Bhimayana and the Indian graphic

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Article in Studies in South Asian Film and Media · March 2012

DOI: 10.1386/safm.3.1.3_1
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SAFM 3 (1) pp. 3–21 Intellect Limited 2011
Studies in South Asian Film and Media

Volume 3 Number 1
© 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/safm.3.1.3_1
Pramod K. Nayar
The University of Hyderabad
Towards a postcolonial
critical literacy: Bhimayana
and the Indian graphic novel1
Abstract Keywords
This article argues that the graphic novel of BR Ambedkar’s life, Bhimayana, gener- graphic novel
ates a postcolonial critical literacy. Critical literacy forces the reader to link personal critical literacy
experiences with socio-historical and institutional power relations, and alerts us to postcolonialism
reflect on issues of otherness in the text. In the first section, the article argues that Ambedkar
Bhimayana’s innovations of form and content, and its extensive metaphorization Dalits
and multiple registers serve to combine a personal story with the history of a Bhimayana
condition – of caste-based discrimination. In the second section of the article, I focus
on the critical literacy the text initiates and demands of its readers. I suggest that 1. I am grateful to the
referees for comments
the work fits into an already existing interocular (where the visual intersects with on an early draft of this
images from other visual media, such as television) field, and draws upon a popu- article, and to S. Anand,
lar register. It is this everyday register of comics – commonplace in the form of the publisher, Navayana,
for facilitating the
comic strips in newspapers and periodicals but also as comic books – that enables use of images from
Bhimayana to debate social issues in a medium that is far removed from other forms Bhimayana.
and genres such as newspaper reportage, commentaries and Amnesty reports where
human rights issues are mostly addressed. The text is therefore significant in that
it situates debates about caste and human rights in the popular cultural realm. A
postcolonial critical literacy is the demand made on the reader to recognize, in this
supposedly non-serious medium, a social problem.
SAFM_3.1_Nayar_3-21.indd 3 2/27/12 9:54:06 AM

Pramod K. Nayar
2. Young people are Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand’s Bhimayana (2011), illustrated by Durgabai
traditionally taken
to be the purveyors
and Subhash Vyam, is a graphic novel of the early life of Dr Bhimrao Ramji
of the medium of Ambedkar (1891–1956), one of modern India’s most significant thinkers, the
graphic novels that man behind the country’s Constitution, and the revolutionary who initiated
‘challenge information
about society, radical changes in the legal, political, cultural and social domains in pre- and
detect prejudice and post-Independence India directed at improving the life of the historically
inequality, seek diverse subjugated populations of India – the so-called ‘untouchables’, or Dalits, as
points of view, and
engage with difficult they are now known.
social issues’, as one This article argues that Bhimayana situates debates about caste, discrimina-
commentator on
the medium puts it
tion and human rights in the popular cultural realm when it appropriates the
(Schwarz 2007). comic book medium. It is Bhimayana’s adoption of popular-populist regimes of
the verbal-visual (or image-text) that constitutes a radicalization of form, even
as it contributes to a critical literacy about casteism, atrocity and human rights.
Critical literacy forces the reader, through the use of narratives and autobi-
ographies, to link personal experiences with socio-historical and institutional
power relations. It uses other texts on contemporary historical realities to
reflect on issues of otherness. It also uses multimodal (visual plus verbal) semi-
otic strategies where multilingual and multi-register texts are used in multilin-
gual classrooms (Morgan and Ramanathan 2005; Chun 2009). Critical literacy
sees texts as situated within unequal social fields – in Bhimayana’s case it is
caste – and demands that the reader become alert (called ‘meta-awareness’,
Ramanathan 2002) to the position she takes vis-á-vis not just the text but the
social domains represented in it. It refuses to see the reader–text relation as
that of subject (reader) and object (text), but sees all subjects as subjects-in-
process, where reading the text produces the reader. A rich and varied visual
culture has an important role to play in the reconfiguring of Indian modernity,
as some scholars have persuasively argued (Freitag 2003; Ramaswamy 2003).
Bhimayana is a valuable constituent of this visual culture now.
This article argues that Bhimayana is a significant text due to the criti-
cal literacy it calls for towards modernity and postcolonial India’s continuing
negotiations with caste when it takes a pernicious social issue (caste) into a
new medium, even as it offers a whole new visual and verbal experience of
the medium (the graphic novel). Bhimayana, the article proposes, contributes
to a postcolonial critical literacy that can help young people in contemporary
India engage with social issues such as caste.2
Bhimayana is located in the tradition of popular comic books, of which there
has been a wide variety in India. In 1964, Indrajal Comics (owned by the leading
newspaper group The Times of India) began marketing King Features Syndicate’s
comic books featuring Phantom, Mandrake, Flash Gordon and Buz Sawyer in
Indian languages. In 1976, the company introduced the indigenous comic book
Bahadur. Raj Comics, perhaps India’s largest publisher in the medium and the
owner of comic book characters Nagraj, Super Commando Dhruv, Bankelal,
Parmanu and Doga, among others, publishes around 80,000 copies annually
(Khanduri 2010: 188, n. 3). Brought up on Amar Chitra Katha (aligned with that
most popular medium in India – cinema – according to Chandra (2008: 9)), and
a large variety of comic books (in English as well as the vernacular), and now
with the increasing availability of global comic books and series from compa-
nies like Vertigo, DC, Marvel, Jonathan Cape, Virgin and Dark Horse, India’s
English-speaking youth (embodied in the form of the two metropolitan char-
acters in the opening sections of Bhimayana) recognize the format quite easily.
Home-grown graphic novels – as opposed to comic books – have appeared from
Penguin and other publishing houses since 2004 with work by Sarnath Banerjee,

Towards a postcolonial critical literacy
Naseer Ahmed and Amruta Patil, even though, editors admit, both the graphic 3. Among the non-fiction
graphic novels dealing
novel and the non-fiction graphic novel, of which Bhimayana is an example, are with social issues
still very much niche genres (Mitra 2011; Daily News and Analysis 2011).3 Critical such as terrorism are
attention to the medium and genre from Indian academics has also emerged Ahmed Sultan and
Partha Sengupta’s
in the recent past (Chandra 2008; Nayar 2009; Khanduri 2010). Bhimayana taps The Believers (2006)
into this history of comic book consumption and the consequent visual literacy and Naseer Ahmed
about the medium. and Saurabh Singh’s
Kashmir Pending (2007).
Bhimayana is also in the tradition of globally acclaimed graphic novels
such as Art Spiegelman’s celebrated Maus, and the works of Joe Sacco and
Marjane Satrapi, among others. For my purposes here, I define graphic novels
as stand-alone stories in the format of a comic book, but not categorizable
merely as the ‘funnies’. Lila Christensen suggests, correctly, that ‘in contrast
to superhero comic books, graphic novels are more serious, often nonfic-
tion, full-length, sequential art novels that explore the issues of race, social
justice, global conflict, and war with intelligence and humor’ (2006: 227). Like
Spiegelman’s Maus, Bhimayana radicalizes the form of the comic book as well
as the genre of the biography.
A postcolonial critical literacy emerges primarily due to the demotic, or
the commonplace/everyday, register of the graphic novel form. Following
Gretchen Schwarz’s argument that in order to explore critical literacy one
must begin by paying attention to form, a process that involves a rhetorical
analysis, I first examine the formal features of Bhimayana before turning to
the literacy it generates. Critical literacy, as noted above, sees the reader as
constituted within the process of reading, and asks the reader to be aware of
his or her negotiations with the text. This suggests that the form of the text
has a significant role to play in the ways in which the reader is drawn into the
text while being made aware of the social structures from within which he or
she is ‘performing’ the reading.
Breaking form
Bhimayana renders a serious subject – Ambedkar’s life and the experience of
caste-based oppression – in a medium famous for superhero tales and fanta-
sies. It uses episodes from Ambedkar’s Autobiographical Notes (first published
in 1990). Like Sacco or Spiegelman, Anand and Natarajan, with the Vyams,
also take the medium’s traditional fantasy plots and turn them, instead, to
social critique. First, a brief outline of the book.
Bhimayana is divided into three ‘books’. A preliminary framing segment,
‘One Day’, sets the scene for the narrative to follow. Two girls in an uniden-
tified Indian metropolis begin talking about reservations and Dalits. One
of them voices a hatred of the ‘quota’ system (the affirmative action policy
through which seats in educational institutions and employment are
‘reserved’ for particular castes and communities identified as historically
depressed and marginalized) that ‘favours’ the ‘Backward and Scheduled
Castes’ (Natarajan et al. 2011: 11). The other girl then responds with informa-
tion about continued caste-based oppression in India and the nature of this
oppression (denial of equality, violence directed at particular castes). Then she
embarks on Ambedkar’s story. Book One, ‘Water’, describes his childhood
and experiences as an ‘untouchable’ in school when he is insulted, made to
sit apart from other children, and even denied water to drink. News reports
about violence against ‘untouchables’ in contemporary India are set beside
Ambedkar’s story, his arrests and campaigns. Book Two, ‘Shelter’, describes

Pramod K. Nayar
Ambedkar’s Baroda days when, despite his job, he encountered hostility from
Brahmins and Parsis as a ‘lower caste’, once again situating his experiences
alongside that of several thousand Dalits being beaten, killed and denied basic
rights. Book Three, ‘Travel’, depicts a few of Ambedkar’s later experiences as
a leader of the so-called ‘untouchables’. It also details the Ambedkar–Gandhi
differences over equal rights and separate electorates (under the British
government) for Depressed Classes (as the ‘untouchables’ were then called
in official language).
Bhimayana uses a new typeface, which the publishers term ‘Bhim’ after
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, thus working the subject of biography into the
very language of cultural production. The non-linear arrangement of the
pages breaks the routine linearity of the graphic novel form. Instead of boxes
and gutters, we have dignas, the traditional artwork of the Gond tribes. The
dignas that serve here as the ‘frames’ for the story are actually the auspicious
designs Gonds apply to walls and floors in their homes (see Figure 1). This
means that the story proceeds in a fluid style as the dignas crisscross the
pages rather than cut them up into neat, square boxes. It suggests less a
neatly compartmentalized movement than a simultaneity. One could
think of the visual language of Bhimayana as a convergent design, where
moments, stories and episodes sit adjacent to each other on a page but not
in any linear sequence at all, suggesting a mixing and merging rather than
an ordering.
By using Bhimayana as a title, with its echoes of the Hindu sacred epic
Ramayana, Srividya Natarajan, Anand and Navayana (the publishers) invite
an intertextual connection and a dissonance. The dissonant note is already an
implicit critique, for it is already the story of ‘Bhim’ (as in Bhimrao Ambedkar),
just as Ramayana was the story of Rama. Instantiating a textual but also histor-
ical and socio-cultural uncanny in its echo, Bhimayana alerts us to the persist-
ence of the past, but not as a temporal antecedent as much as a repressed past
(the uncanny, as commentators would tell us, is the return of the repressed,
see Royle (2003: 154–55, 177–78)), of a story that has not been told. The socio-
cultural uncanny is the persistence of caste as a nightmarish reality, even as it
is denied, or deemed to be a thing of the past. Caste, according to the disbe-
lieving, ill-informed and prejudiced girl in the framing narrative, is not an issue
in contemporary India, but well in the past. Echoing Ramayana, Bhimayana
suggests that there are other pasts not often ‘read’ in the epic: pasts that
include caste-based discrimination. Thus, (1) not only is caste not addressed
when speaking of the Indian past (the repressed of history, so to speak), (2) it
is not only in the past either. It is at once a part of India’s hoary past and
troubled present. Anand explicitly references this textual/historical uncanny
when he notes in his short essay at the end of Bhimayana, ‘A digna for Bhim’,
that Gandhi’s experience of racism in 1893 South Africa has become an iconic
moment in the ‘global history of anti-colonial struggle’ but Ambedkar’s expe-
rience of caste-based discrimination in the 1901 Bombay Presidency has been
‘forgotten’ (Natarajan et al. 2011: 103).
The Ambedkar story in Bhimayana is at once a biography and something
more. It ensures that the individual’s story is merged with, or stands for, the
story of a collective. The collective is not a group of identifiable individuals,
but rather types in Bhimayana’s non-realist mode of representation, akin to
Spiegelman’s Maus. Spiegelman’s non-realist and symbolic representation
of his characters (Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice) drew attention to the
de-humanization of victim and perpetrator in the genocidal state: the Jews

4. Michael Boatright
has proposed that
when characters in
graphic novels are
drawn unrealistically,
with over-emphasized
‘cartoonish’ features,
they invite you to see
yourself in them rather
than see Others
(2010: 472).
Figure 1: A digna. Reproduced with permission. Bhimayana: Experiences of

Untouchability. Art by Durgabai and Subhash Vyam. Text: Srividya Natarajan
and S. Anand. © Navayana Publishing 2011.
were not ‘persons’ in Nazi eyes, they were just types (Orvell 1992: 120–21).
Indeed, it is the anti-realism and heavy symbolism that makes us conscious –
to reiterate, critical literacy includes an incessant alertness to form, and
the ways in which a text’s formal properties work on the reader – of this
condition of de-humanization. Bhimayana does not seek realist presenta-
tions of people either. The characters do not necessarily allegorize a real-
ity of their own, but we, as readers, are asked to enter their world, to see
ourselves in what is going on.4 In the non-realist mode of Bhimayana we see
a type, the oppressed, rather than clear-cut individuals. We have identical
faces of Dalits listening to Ambedkar (Natarajan et al. 2011: 48) and identi-
cal faces representing ‘orthodox Brahmins’ (Natarajan et al. 2011: 50–51),
for instance.
This is an important move in Bhimayana. The iconography that invites us
to enter the world of Ambedkar’s India also offers a window into an India that
is startlingly contemporary: we see similar instances of atrocity and oppres-
sion today as well. It is the lack of uniqueness of characters, and their simi-
larity to, and resonance with, the experiences of Dalits and other oppressed
today that constitutes the first step towards a postcolonial critical literacy. With
this literacy readers connect texts to social iniquities and the de-humanized
‘otherness’ – symbolized in the ‘types’ rather than ‘individuals’, as I have
suggested above – that caste engenders: the world of Bhimayana, the experi-
ence of untouchability, the horrific injustices were not unique to Ambedkar’s
India: we see them even now. Disavowing uniqueness is a political move in
this text, for it merges Ambedkar’s experience with that of millions of Dalits
today – a narrative move that is coterminous with the visual–verbal juxtapo-
sition of Ambedkar’s story with reports and headlines of contemporary anti-
Dalit oppression elsewhere.
Bhimayana relies heavily on symbolism and a densely metaphoric visual
narrative. The opening conversation between urban youth, one seemingly
ignorant of the very persistence of caste in India, offers the first of these
powerful metaphors. The speech and thought balloons, Anand’s afterword
on the art of Bhimayana informs us, are designed to function as metaphors:
bird speech balloons for characters whose ‘speech is soft’, for ‘lovable char-
acters, the victims of caste’ (Natarajan et al. 2011: 100). Speech balloons
for ‘words that carry a sting’ from ‘characters who love caste, whose words
contain poison, whose touch is poisonous’ are designed like a scorpion’s sting
(Natarajan et al. 2011: 101). After the girl, the first-level narratee to whom the
second girl is telling the story, has understood the poisonous nature of caste,

Pramod K. Nayar
her thought balloon becomes shaped like a bird, to suggest a transformation

in her outlook and attitude (Natarajan et al. 2011: 93).
Thirst becomes embodied in the form of a fish, as the young Ambedkar
pleads ‘Sir, may I drink some water?’ (Natarajan et al. 2011: 19). The triad of
fish-water-thirst recurs (Natarajan et al. 2011: 21), and is reinforced with the
image of arms extending in a pleading image (Natarajan et al. 2011: 21), all
suggesting a plea. The water pump itself assumes an angry face at the denial
of water (Natarajan et al. 2011: 21). The entire village ‘turns a desert’ when
Ambedkar tries to ‘quench [his] thirst’ (Natarajan et al. 2011: 25). The accom-
panying visual shows a herd of animals drinking from a pond. The village
is only metaphorically a desert because it excludes from its ambit only the
‘untouchables’ while allowing even animals to consume water. Mobility
becomes embodied in a bird, where young Bhim’s ‘heart is a bird in a cloud-
less sky’ (Natarajan et al. 2011: 31).
Representing the Satara massacre (where a Dalit was killed for daring
to dig his own well) in 2008, the visual shows a harvester machine crying
(Natarajan et al. 2011: 46), serving as a metaphor for the feeling machine and
the unfeeling upper-caste humans. Ambedkar’s words function as sprinklers,
energizing the lands with reviving water and freshening the people’s minds
(Natarajan et al. 2011: 48). This reconfigures the image of thirst, water and
deserts from the earlier parts of the tale (see Figures 2 and 3).
Towards the very end of the narrative we see one of the most power-
ful of such visual metaphors. The anti-caste and casteist urban youth debate
Ambedkar’s role in the making of modern India, with the text inked in blue.
The entire visual vocabulary is of a human chain, of people holding hands
(Natarajan et al. 2011: 90–91). The human chain is spread across two pages,
suggesting community and unity. Set within this ‘network’ of human hands is
a face-off between Gandhi and Ambedkar on the question of the ‘untoucha-
bles’. The two are also framed by a semicircle of people listening to them
and witnessing the Gandhi–Ambedkar debate (90–91). The power of this set
of pages lies in the way in which the Ambedkar-blue human chain (blue is
traditionally the colour of Ambedkarites) spreads wider than the subset of
people listening to the Gandhi–Ambedkar debate, symbolically attesting to
the concerns of a larger section of humanity.
In concluding with the human chain, the only image of such a‘positive’collec-
tivity (all other collectivities in the text are either victims or violent oppressors)
in Bhimayana, the text gathers into itself the entire theme of united action
and togetherness. The textboxes carry quotations from Ambedkar’s speeches
and letters where he had demanded equal rights, constitutional protection and
legal remedies against caste-based discrimination. These textboxes also situate
Gandhi’s speeches and letters in a ‘face-off’ with Ambedkar’s textboxes, with
Gandhi expressing concern that separate electorates for ‘untouchables’ – an
Ambedkar demand – are ‘harmful for the Depressed Classes and for Hinduism’,
thus suggesting a conflict of views (Natarajan et al. 2011: 91). What is also
interesting is that cutting across the two pages (carrying Gandhi and Ambedkar
in adversarial positions) and beneath the Gandhi–Ambedkar debate is a textbox
shaped like a book containing words from the Constitution of India, starting,
‘We, the People of India …’ (Natarajan et al. 2011: 90–91). The arrangement of
this textbox, with Ambedkar’s image on the lower half of the page, symbolically
merges, and converges, the two debates into a larger cause. The entire issue is
seen as embedded within the large human chain, and invests the Constitution
with the authority of a larger segment of the Indian population.

Figure 2: Reproduced with permission. Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability. Art by Durgabai and
Subhash Vyam. Text: Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand. © Navayana Publishing 2011.

Pramod K. Nayar
10

This set of visuals of the human chain also resolves the isolation and
fear set in the early pages, wherein an isolated and thirsty Ambedkar pleads
for water, and its continuation in the middle pages where, alone in his
rooms, he is threatened with eviction by a group of armed Parsis (Natarajan
et al. 2011: 68), or is sitting alone in a park at night, homeless and frightened
(Natarajan et al. 2011: 71).
Much of Bhimayana’s metaphorization generates enormous verbal and
visual emotional appeal. Take for instance, the extraordinary ‘pointing-finger’
image. Accusatory fingers, pointed in the direction of the victim of caste,
occur throughout the narrative (Natarajan et al. 2011: 13, 20, 21, 47, 68).
They are invariably in groups, to indicate the numbers arrayed against the
Dalits. If in Maus the Auschwitz inmate’s arm with its tattooed number
is spread across panels (Spiegelman 1986: 12), here it is the recurring point-
ing finger that performs the same task: of isolating and targeting the victim
(see Figure 4).
The Vyams’ art offers an extraordinary contrast between cruel humans
and the sentimental non-human. I have already cited the crying harvester
machine visual metaphor above. The water pump (Natarajan et al. 2011: 21),
in the midst of the water debate, expresses distress and annoyance. The train
on which Ambedkar and his siblings have their momentous journey is cheer-
ful (Natarajan et al. 2011: 27). Similarly, the bus on which Ambedkar and his
colleagues travel is benign-looking (Natarajan et al. 2011: 77).
Cultural and linguistic diversity, with Parsi, Muslim, Christian, Mahar and
various Hindu portraits, serves to show how the untouchables are uniformly
disenfranchised by all social, religious and linguistic groups in India. There is a
clear subtext here, where India’s greatest cliché, ‘unity in diversity’, is reflected
with tragic irony in the unity of Parsis, Muslims, Christians and Hindus in
their ill-treatment of the Dalits. Ambedkar’s thoughts are given to us here:
‘a person who is an untouchable to a Hindu is an untouchable to a Parsi,
and also to a Christian’ (Natarajan et al. 2011: 71). Multiple registers are also
deployed to give us the social and the personal, the collective and individual
story. Rhyming poetry is used to describe caste-based oppression (Natarajan
et al. 2011: 22–23, 37), symbolically showing the clash of registers between the
poetic and the ruthlessly ‘prosaic’ (banal?) nature of casteism. Official letters
from Ambedkar are reproduced (Natarajan et al. 2011: 90–91). Newspaper
accounts of caste atrocities across India are placed in textboxes (Natarajan
et al. 2011: 13, 46–47, 55, 73).
There is a factual biography about Ambedkar (Natarajan et al. 2011: 14)
that, in conjunction with the powerful visual vocabulary of atrocity and
suffering, unsettles us. Speeches by Ambedkar constitute yet another regis-
ter (Natarajan et al. 2011: 48–49, 51). The multiple registers ensure that no
voice is dominant, and that all narration is finally linked up with the histori-
cal events (Ambedkar’s life) and contemporary reality (represented in the
newspaper reportage). This unsettling tone of the work is perhaps its single
greatest achievement as it prods us into acknowledging multiple modes of
telling the story. It also refuses the comfort of claiming, as the young girl
(the first-level narratee) does, that ‘all this happened more than a hundred
years ago’ (Natarajan et al. 2011: 45) when it shifts from Ambedkar’s India to
contemporary India. Breaking the spatio-temporal frames with its contempo-
raneity of the past embodied in these multiple narrative registers, Bhimayana
maps a continuum, from late nineteenth–early twentieth-century India to
the present.
11

Pramod K. Nayar
12

Towards a postcolonial critical literacy 5. Elsewhere I have

argued that we
Thus far we have seen how Bhimayana subverts the aesthetic and formal need to treat visuals
conventions of the graphic novel. I now propose that this radicalization of and non-visual,
print and cinematic
form enables Bhimayana to forward a distinct agenda – of a postcolonial representations of
critical literacy. atrocities such as
Khairlanji (where a dalit
‘Literacy’ itself is a social practice, of course, and is often used as a means family was massacred
to dominate particular social groups. Critical literacy, in the case of texts explic- in 2006) as allotropic
itly about social conditions and historical trauma such as Bhimayana, is social forms (allotropy being
a phenomenon where
literacy. In Bhimayana’s case it offers a new vocabulary in which to talk of the same element
social trauma, and opens up the cultural realm, through a popular format, to exists in different
issues of human rights. forms) that must be
read in conjunction
The juxtaposition of texts, from newspaper reports on anti-Dalit violence in with each other in
the first few pages, to Ambedkar’s autobiographical text, to Ambedkar’s official order to produce the
culture of human
letters, and extracts from the Constitution of India (see Figure 5), constantly rights in which we then
forces us to move from a personal life story to a larger socio-historical become witnessing
reality – one of the prime requirements for critical literacy. publics (Nayar 2012: 19).
In the present case I
The postcolonial critical literacy of Bhimayana engages the reader through emphasize the shared
its interocularity borrowed from already existing and popular regimes of the visual cultures of
visual. Its rich verbal-visual text functions, to invoke Homi Bhabha’s distinc- atrocities.
tion (1995), as a performative that ruptures the pedagogy of the young girl’s,
and by extension the readers’, beliefs, claims and meta-narratives about India.
The demotic register of the graphic novel appropriated by Bhimayana effec-
tively harnesses complex social issues to a new, urban folkloric medium, even
as it gives these issues a certain ‘cultural legibility’ (I employ the term from
Joseph Slaughter (2007)).
Modernity in South Asia, Sandria Freitag proposes, has been dominated by
the visual and the acoustic (2003: 394). Acts of seeing become acts of knowing as
consumers and viewers impute new meanings to familiar messages. Civil soci-
ety’s informal activities – as opposed to the state’s – especially in the realm of
popular visual culture, often challenge the actions of the nation state (2003: 389).
Freitag’s emphasis on the visual realm of modernity and its moments of inter-
rogation is a useful way of approaching the cultural work of Bhimayana.
The tale opens with an urban youth’s immediate identification of
‘Ambedkar’ as somebody who is represented by statues around the country
(Natarajan et al. 2011: 14). This reference to already existing and therefore
recognizable visual images is crucial, for Bhimayana’s cultural work is to
generate what Sumathi Ramaswamy calls the ‘interocular’ field. The interocu-
lar is the field where the visual intersects with other images from other media,
thereby reconfiguring the familiar (Natarajan et al. 2011: xvi). The statues of
Ambedkar and Bhimayana’s visual representation of the early life of Ambedkar,
the symbolic representation of massacres and suffering – Ambedkar’s as
well as other instances such as Khairlanji – open up a whole new visual
field: of caste-based atrocity that impinges upon us. The purpose here is to
draw the ‘statues’ into the field of common knowledge. Urban youth do not
know anything about either Ambedkar (except his statues) or caste atroci-
ties in India. I am proposing that Bhimayana taps into a visual literacy already
generated by an existing interocular field where we are called upon to move
beyond the statues to the story behind the statues, even as we are ‘shown’
the contexts of both Ambedkar and our (re)reading of his life in the events
unfolding today across India.5 That is, Bhimayana’s interocular field draws
existing visual cultures of both Ambedkar and the horrific representations of
13

Pramod K. Nayar
14

caste-based massacres into its ambit and our reading practice. Hereafter, we
will widen our visual field, as Bhimayana causes Ambedkar and caste-based
atrocity to erupt into the present.
The interocularity of Bhimayana abandons the traditional mode of sequen-
tial art in favour of the traditional form of Gond arts. As Sandria Freitag
suggests, traditional art or performance is fine-tuned to accommodate the
new (2003: 371). While Bhimayana does rely on the contemporary fascina-
tion with and circulation of graphic novels, it retrieves an older art form in
order to speak about the present. The styles of Bhimayana as noted above are
unconventional in that they are not what we see in Frank Miller or Joe Sacco.
Yet they are conventional because they are traditional. Freitag observes that
‘The new is dealt with through a deliberate choice of the antique’ (2003: 367).
Retrieving Gond art for the purpose of narrating Ambedkar’s story in the very
contemporary graphic novel format has the effect of situating one of the oldest
forms of oppression – based on caste – in a new medium and genre. In terms
of cultural production this is a radical step, for it simultaneously showcases
the beauty of a traditional art form – and I will return to the problems of
this later in the article – while telling us a contemporary ‘story’. It takes local-
ized, Gond art and cultural practices and deploys them to design a work in
a more or less globalized medium – the comic book. The art of Bhimayana,
in other words, underscores at once the need for a new visual register but
also the contemporanity of the past in terms of both the language of art and
continuing casteism.
In order to speak of the second, Bhimayana suggests, we need a language
that is at once ancient-traditional (‘antique’, as Freitag would say) and new
(the graphic novel way of telling a biography). The power of the interoc-
ular field generated by Bhimayana lies, as should be clear from the above
discussion, not in its exclusivity, but in its hybridized and demotic register
of representation, as Maus did to devastating effect years ago. Writing about
Spiegelman’s Maus, Thomas Doherty (1996) suggests that by delivering
the horrors of the Holocaust in the form of an everyday medium like the
comics, Spiegelman brings the Holocaust closer to the people, because the
graphic novel remains, ultimately, ‘populist art’ (Wolk 2007: 23). This argu-
ment might be extended to suggest that what Bhimayana does is to make
caste-based oppression and its history (hyper)visible by steering clear of
standard modes of documenting oppression (tracts and Amnesty reports)
and by shifting it into the demotic, or populist, register. Richard Wilson writ-
ing about human rights coverage notes that such writing is ‘minimalist’, and
‘strips events of their subjective meanings’ when they cast them into ‘objec-
tive legal facts’ (2009: 209). Wilson argues that it is therefore necessary to
‘restore to accounts of political violence both the surrounding social relations
and an associated range of subjective meanings’ (2009: 209). Such a ‘resto-
ration’ of subjective meanings is possible through the use of a popular inte-
rocular field.
This popular interocular field is the performative. For Homi Bhabha, the
‘performative’ is aligned with instability, a ‘practice that destroys the constant
principles of the national culture’ (1995: 303). Bhabha argues that the ‘perfor-
mative’ destabilizes the stereotypes on which the nation depends and which
miss ‘the zone of occult instability where the people dwell’ (1995: 303). The
performative in Bhimayana is the intrusion of multiple registers within the
overarching demotic register of the graphic novel that disrupts the youth’s
continuum of ignorance as well as our own.
15

Pramod K. Nayar
The demotic register is crucial because it enables a popularization of a

social condition and of historical wrongs. Bhimayana contributes to a post-
colonial critical literacy because it enables the circulation of stories in a
medium and form that draws upon the existing interocular field. The personal
narrative folding into (but not blurring) the social-historical in a popular
format creates a new story-space where we begin to see a history of viola-
tions, a history otherwise available in UN tracts or sociological studies.
Commentators on human rights have pointed to the necessity of such a
space for storytelling. Writing about the role of narrative in human rights,
Joseph Slaughter says:
A public sphere is a story space that not only enables but also shapes
and constrains narrative; moreover, it is not simply a clearinghouse for
the publication of personal narrative truth but a kind of story factory in
which the norms of public discourse become legible both in the social
interactivity of storytelling and in the story forms that it disseminates,
conventionalizes, and canonizes.
(2007: 144)
In a similar fashion, Paul Gready writes:
Human rights work has two primary points of reference, the law and
what we are calling here the story – you could define human rights
practice as the craft of bringing together legal norms and human stories
in the service of justice. Law provides the mechanisms for rendering
power accountable, particularly state power, but also increasingly the
power of non-state actors. Human stories provide a no less essential
resource – attempting to spark the law into life, transcend cultural and
political difference, and cement the solidarity of strangers.
(2010: 177–78)
Writing about popular perceptions of the law through such cinematic repre-
sentations – even fictional ones – Anthony Chase states that ‘Popular percep-
tions [of the law] are constituent elements in the social process by which any
legal culture becomes recognizable to its own participants’ (2000: 559–60). It
has also been suggested that a cultural apparatus of human rights emerges
in a folklorization of political human rights discourses and the concomitant
circulation of apposite narrative forms. We can make universal standards of
human rights folkloric by sliding them into local cultural forms and practices of
thought (Nayar 2011).
Bhimayana opens up the cultural realm to human rights discourses. The
cultural is the space where human rights are staged for common consump-
tion. It is the domain where an implicit discursive operation of human rights –
equal rights, human dignity, protection against torture – can be discerned in
narratives of violations, abuse and rights-denial. The culture of human rights
strengthens and expands the moral project of human rights when literature
and cinema trigger the moral imagination of listeners and viewers about the
fate of Dalits, genocide victims, the destitute and the abused. It is in popular
representations such as Bhimayana’s that the essential critical literacy about
human rights originates.
I am proposing here that a postcolonial critical literacy about the need for
human rights, the historical abuse of certain social groups, and the urgent
16

need for reforms is best articulated in the demotic register of Bhimayana,

with its interocularity, vernacular, non-official, everyday life and stories in a
supposedly ‘non-serious’ medium such as the graphic novel. With its economy
of the languages of representation – minimal speech balloons, no boxed-in
narratives, and the seamlessness of narrative movement – Bhimayana is at
once high art and low culture, a mix of genres and subgenres that recalls
antique artwork and the highly commercialized comic book format at one
go. Miles Orvell’s comment about Maus that Spiegelman seems to ‘have
projected the mentality of the cartoon world with the complexity of high art,
aiming at a broader based audience, a middle space between high and popular
culture’ (1992: 111) applies equally well to Bhimayana.
Critical literacy invites readers to take up the ideology of a text, but
it also examines the assumptions of the authors and readers, involving
readers as active participants in the reading process. Critical literacy is also
localized (Boatright 2010), and Bhimayana ensures that the narrative remains
rooted in local conditions and contexts, even though it seeks to situate itself,
and Ambedkar and the caste issue, globally (I will return to this below).
Such an approach to Bhimayana treats this text’s contemporanity of the past
with(in) its multiple registers as uncovering and ‘unlearning’ the uninformed
assumptions about caste in India of the immediate audience (the first listener
of the story) as well as us readers. Bhimayana defies the ‘lightness’ one asso-
ciates with cartoon/comic mode and produces a literary text that bridges the
political and the personal, and thus inaugurates a whole new attitude towards
Indian history.
By engendering a postcolonial critical literacy, Bhimayana offers human
rights, the problem of casteism, and the inner workings of an oppressive soci-
ety a significant cultural legibility. If cultural legibility is the narratological –
representational – foundation of human rights (as Slaughter’s (2007) work
suggests), it demands and implies a popular acceptance of the norms, values and
belief systems about human rights through the consumption of these narra-
tives. In the case of the United States, studies have shown that genres like
the graphic novel have empowered teachers by combining ‘recreational read-
ing’ and ‘advanced themes in literature and visual literacy’ (Seyfried 2008: 45;
Yang 2008). It is this conflation of the popular with the critique (or the critique
within the popular) that enables the cultural legibility of contentious social
issues, and bestows upon concerns about human rights, which are other-
wise debated mainly in the realm of the legal-juridical, a cultural legiti-
macy. ‘Cultural legitimacy’, as I have defined it, is the popular acceptance of
the norms, values and belief systems through the consumption of particular
narratives (Nayar 2012: 12–13). Bhimayana offers the human rights ethos this
essential cultural legitimacy precisely because its register is the popular.
Admittedly, a postcolonial critical literacy alerted by Bhimayana to the
persistence of caste-based discrimination will also be alerted to the globaliz-
ing market and ideological positioning it seeks to achieve, but without taking
away its political and social concerns or power. Such a literacy will take note
of Bhimayana’s commercialization of tribal art forms for the rapidly grow-
ing comic book market in India. (It will also note that Bhimayana has a
strong ‘ethical consumer’ dimension: Bhimayana T-shirts are available from
Navayana, suggesting a clear merchandising-commercial angle to the political
comic book.)
Navayana describes itself as ‘India’s first and only publishing house to
exclusively focus on the issue of caste from an anti-caste perspective’, but
17

Pramod K. Nayar
6. http://navayana. this does not change the fact that it is a commercial venture with a particular
org/?page_id=2,
accessed 26 November
political slant in its choice of books to be published.6 Anand admits in his essay
2011. Navayana’s ‘A digna for Bhim’ at the conclusion of Bhimayana that a book with ‘full-page
suggestion for drawings’ would have resulted in an ‘unwieldy and unaffordable 400-pager’
potential authors is as
follows: ‘we encourage (Natarajan et al. 2011: 101–02, emphasis added). The popular intersects very
you to use caste as clearly with the commercial here. The Pardhan Gonds – the clan to which
an analytical tool, but Durgabai and Subhash Vyam, the illustrators of Bhimayana, belong – are the
not valorize it. The
perspective has to ‘traditional keepers of their people’s heritage and lineages’, writes Anand
be anti-caste’ (http:// (Natarajan et al. 2011: 100). It is interesting to note that the traditional art
navayana.org/?page_
id=1576, accessed 26
forms of the Gonds were losing patronage when attempts were made to
November 2011). showcase them in India as well as abroad (Natarajan et al. 2011: 100–01).
7. http://www.
Bhimayana therefore represents a globalization of ethnic chic, where ethnic,
facebook.com/pages/ rural, tribal and village styles are revived and popularized for commercial
Bhimayana/ purposes by organizations and entrepreneurs. Gond art and the labour that
138839436147526,
accessed 26 November went into Bhimayana are also globally ‘visible’ through Bhimayana, but also
2011. on that most ubiquitous of media forms: Facebook.7 They have also received
8. http://www. attention from globally circulating newspapers such as the Washington Post.8
washingtonpost.com/ The detailed comments on the ‘tribal art’ of Bhimayana in Anand’s essay
wp-dyn/content/ and in other media such as the Washington Post article not only highlight
article/2010/08/18/
AR2010081805854. an ethnic art form, they also shift it out of the realm of the ethnic – rooted in an
html?hpid=artslot, ethnos or ethos – and into what can be termed the global-popular, with its own
accessed 26 November
2011.
market share. ‘Authentic primitive art’, notes anthropologist Sherry Errington,
‘dies’ in one sense because its ‘producers’ (the tribes) are dead or dying, even as
the ‘concept of authentic primitive art is alive and well among collectors, primi-
tive art galleries, and the art market’ (1998: 3–4). In Bhimayana a tribal art form
is used to craft Dalit/untouchable, thereby bringing together the Dalits and
the tribals in a problematic move because historically the relations between
the two have not always been exactly harmonious. It also converts Gond art
into a commercially attractive mode of illustrating a subaltern social issue,
symbolically investing a pre-modern (Gond art dates back centuries) form with
considerable ‘authenticity’, keeping it alive through a publishing project that
targets an elite English-reading public in contemporary India and the world.
Anand claims he was looking to provide the artists with a ‘challenge that did
justice to their sophisticated visual language’ (Natarajan et al. 2011: 100). Thus,
Gond art fits the art market of the publisher, even as the tale to be narrated
for a social cause fits the art form, each authenticating the other, suiting the
other. Ambedkar’s struggles against the tyranny of the caste system could not,
if Anand is to be believed, be represented through the ‘tyranny of conventional
panels without compromising on the [Gond artists’] credo of not forcing people
into boxes’ (Natarajan et al. 2011: 102). In other words, Anand suggests that the
‘tyranny’ of the conventional comic book format (panels) would simply repli-
cate, in art form, the tyranny of a social system. The challenge was to find an
art form that was ‘open’ (which is how the artists describe their work, Natarajan
et al. (2011: 100)) in order to reflect a move towards openness and caste-less
equality in the social domain. A more authentic mode, supposedly, would be
an ‘open’ art form, which thus enters the process of cultural production as well
as a political medium: the comic book, Bhimayana.
Ruth Mandel notes that ‘prestige’ is associated with the consumption of
‘ethnic chic’, represented by oriental rugs, tribal artworks and artefacts, ethnic
cuisine, etc, in First World cities, Third World metropolises and upper classes,
but also has clear ‘political moral dimensions as well’ (2008: 97). Mandel’s
argument is illustrated both in the production and reception of Bhimayana.
18

When Anand concludes his short essay ‘A digna for Bhim’, he carefully posi- 9. At least one
commentator has
tions the book, and Ambedkar’s story, within a global marketplace of think- noted that the rich
ers and intellectuals: he lists ‘Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, Nelson artwork of Bhimayana
Mandela and Malcolm X’, to make Ambedkar’s story ‘universal’ (Natarajan might actually work
against its avowed
et al. 2011: 103). He claims that the artwork of Durgabai and Subhash Vyam political stand. Jai Arjun
contributes to this universalization (Natarajan et al. 2011: 103). This sense of Singh writing in the
the (marketable) global-popular nature of ethnic chic is indicated – though it Sunday Guardian states
that
is still too early to predict the course of popularity for the text – in the coverage
Bhimayana has received in the Times Literary Supplement (Gravett 2011), the given that the
text is meant to
Guardian (Singh 2011), and other international periodicals and newspapers. be a primer for
The work’s paratexts – a foreword by John Berger, blurbs by Joe Sacco and the relatively
uninformed
Arundhati Roy – indicate the process of globalization at work. Sacco under- reader, is there
scores the ‘artistic heritage’ used by the Vyams to ‘craft a distinctive graphic a danger of the
biography of one of India’s bravest and greatest leaders’ (Bhimayana, inside book’s form utterly
overwhelming its
jacket blurb). Roy comments that Bhimayana tells the Ambedkar story in ‘the content? When I
most unusually beautiful way’ (Bhimayana, inside jacket blurb). A commenta- revisit Bhimayana –
tor on CNN lists it alongside Satrapi’s Persepolis, Spiegelman’s Maus, Sacco’s and I know I will – it
will mainly be for
Palestine and Didier Lefevre’s The Photographer as one of the top five political the art. I don’t
comic books, thus suggesting a globalization of Bhimayana within the domain know if its impact
as a conscience-
not only of commercial comic books but also human rights issues, ethnic raiser is equally
strife, discrimination and war (Calvi 2011). It is this linkage of ethnic chic with strong.
commercial art and global political morality that a postcolonial critical literacy (2011)
ought to note about Bhimayana.9 There is some
Despite these problematic issues of cultural production, Bhimayana is a justification for
Singh’s concern, if
key text in bringing human rights, the problem of caste-based discrimination the comments by
and the life of Ambedkar into everyday life. With its ‘antique’ art, subversion at least one reader
of form, and the visual vocabulary of atrocity and social inequality, it offers are any indication.
Says Soumya
a different voice – the cultural legibility and legitimacy – to the language Sivakumar, ‘it is a
of oppression and rights. When it subverts the genres, it also encourages a magnificent work
of breathtaking art
critical examination of the available registers of justice, the institutional forms that symbolises
through which rights and claims can be made, and the corrective discourses the soul-stirring
being put in place. The postcolonial critical literacy it demands and fosters in biography of an
exceptional leader’.
us is an anterior moment to a larger reformatting of the public space through (2011)
the production, dissemination and consumption of such stories.
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Suggested citation
Nayar, P. K. (2011), ‘Towards a postcolonial critical literacy: Bhimayana and
the Indian graphic novel’, Studies in South Asian Film and Media 3: 1,
pp. 3–21, doi: 10.1386/safm.3.1.3_1
Contributor details
Pramod K. Nayar’s recent publications include States of Sentiment: Exploring
the Cultures of Emotion (Orient BlackSwan, 2011), An Introduction to New
Media and Cybercultures (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Postcolonialism: A Guide for
the Perplexed (Continuum, 2010), and Packaging Life: Cultures of the Everyday
(SAGE, 2009), among others. His work has appeared in the Journal of British
Studies, Postcolonial Text, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, Nebula, the Journal
of Creative Communications, Studies in Travel Writing, Prose Studies, South Asian
Review, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Notes on Contemporary
Literature, College Literature, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and else-
where. Forthcoming books include one on human rights narratives and
another on colonial discourse.
Contact: Department of English, School of the Humanities, The University
of Hyderabad, Prof. C.R. Road, Gachibowli, Hyderabad 500 046, Andhra
Pradesh, India.
E-mail: pramodknayar@gmail.com
21

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Towards a postcolonial critical literacy 5. Elsewhere I have

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The demotic register is crucial because it enables a popularization of a

In a similar fashion, Paul Gready writes:

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need for reforms is best articulated in the demotic register of Bhimayana,

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Chun, C. W. (2009), ‘Critical literacies and graphic novels for english-language

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Sivakumar, S. (2011), ‘Evocative masterpiece’, The Hindu, 1 May, http://www.

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