South Asian Review

ISSN: 0275-9527 (Print) 2573-9476 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsoa20

The Fear of Iconoclasm: Genre and Medium

Transformations from Comics to Graphic Novels in
Amar Chitra Katha, Bhimayana, and Munnu

Nandini Chandra

To cite this article: Nandini Chandra (2018): The Fear of Iconoclasm: Genre and Medium
Transformations from Comics to Graphic Novels in Amar�Chitra�Katha, Bhimayana, and Munnu,
South Asian Review, DOI: 10.1080/02759527.2018.1515801

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2018.1515801

Published online: 02 Nov 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 7

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rsoa20
SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW
https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2018.1515801

The Fear of Iconoclasm: Genre and Medium

Transformations from Comics to Graphic Novels in
Amar Chitra Katha, Bhimayana, and Munnu
Nandini Chandra
Department of English, University of Hawai‘i at M
anoa, Honolulu, Hawaii

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The Indian graphic novel tells stories through indigenous or Received 14 July 2018
mythographic prisms. This implies frequently departing from the Accepted 31 July 2018
comic medium’s typical grid structure of regular panels inter-
KEYWORDS
rupted by gutter space. The comic medium’s linear and sequential
Medium; genre; form;
narrative is often identified by graphic novel theorists with an comics; graphic novels;
‘Enlightenment’ logic inadequate to a vernacular reality. At the biography; panel; gutter
same time, in so far as it is about the life narrative of an icono- space; iconic
clastic 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 pen-
chant 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 pre-
ceded the comics industry in India, has historically grappled with the anxiety of rep-
resenting 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 produc-
tion 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

CONTACT Nandini Chandra nc8@hawaii.edu University of Hawai‘i at M
anoa, Honolulu, Hawaii

ß 2018 South Asian Literary Association
2 N. CHANDRA

(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 for-
mal 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, priori-
tizing 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 express-
ing 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 bildungs-
roman. The graphic novels, on the other hand, present the secular tale of an individ-
ual (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 sub-
stance 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 tran-
scendental being in a typical bhakti posture. This provides the justification for a hier-
archical 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
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 3

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 uni-
fied 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 pat-
tern 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 pro-
duce 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
4 N. CHANDRA

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 lit-
tle 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, cul-
minating 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 cul-
ture, 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 þ gap þ 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 con-
tradictions. 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.
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 5

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 uncon-
scious. 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, but it is not able to create
a new media. This latent media then unleashes the motion of opposites and reversals,
contradicting the oppositional truth of the graphic narrative.
Parts II and III of this essay explore the iconic and iconoclastic impulses of ACK
and the chosen graphic novels respectively. Part II explores the representation of
icons in three different moments in three different issues of ACK comics. The oscilla-
tion between the iconic and the subsumed bhakti self in the comic is most evocatively
suggested by the all-encompassing presence of Krishna’s Vishvarupa (The Gita),
which creates a mise-en-abyme like a vortex of bodies in the process of being swal-
lowed up (Figure 1). These bodies are nothing but the various images and icons bor-
rowed from the different biography-based issues of ACK featuring different Hindu
icons. The abstract and general meta-structure, which simultaneously generates as
well as swallows up the icons, is, then, a very good representation of commodity fet-
ishism, the mediation that rules our world. The individual self is caught in this larger
web of abstraction just like the various Hindu icons are caught up in an inexorable
relation to the Vishvarupa (the cosmic all-form).
Part III looks at the graphic narrative’s effort to establish a form of communication
in which the self becomes a victim of history while trying to gain some mastery over
it. The sense of history and time is empirical, and yet it is invariably given a mythic
depth and circularity within the narrative. This is because the mythic structure
(a time away from clock time) is the only way to recreate the conditions for an
autonomous self, conducive to the biography model. We will explore this sense of
autonomous time through the two different possibilities suggested by the two signifi-
cant graphic narratives: Bhimayana (2011), by Srividya Natarajan, S. Anand,
Durgabai Vyam, and Subhash Vyam, and Malik Sajad’s Munnu (2015) respectively.

ACK’s Iconic Humans

ACK is the unofficial national comic of India animated by the principles of devo-
tional Vaishnava Hinduism, a neutralizing philosophy of love and devotion that
became especially popular in the 7th–9th century CE. Its version of avatar (god as
human incarnation)-based Hinduism is marked by the belief that from time to time,
whenever evil or ignorance is on the increase, the supreme being must incarnate itself
in some form, or descend to earth, as an act of grace, so that the forces that stand for
good might be reinforced. According to the Matsyapur
ana (1981):
_
Giving up his divine body, Visnu is born among men, when the age [yuga] returns,
when time has become slack. _ _
6 N. CHANDRA

Figure 1. The Gita (1977).

Lord Hari is born when the gods and demons go to war, when in the past the demon
Hiranyakasipu was ruling.1
_
The Vaishnava bhakti model of ACK draws inspiration from the Bhagavad Gita, a
text that reconciles incompatible views, in which “all views are simply facets of the
one divine mind” (Kosambi 1962, 16). Consequently, the dualistic conception of God
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 7

as a supreme being, and the self as both mirroring and supplicating this supreme
being, seeks to neutralize a contradiction. How does this double temporality of myth
and history, incorporating the infinite transcendental subject on the one hand, as well
as its historical manifestation, align with the choice of a modern biographical form
since the mythic template is often about a non-human, usually monstrous, half-beast,
or even fully bestial form?

Iconophilia
ACK’s iconophilia is definitely conducive to the iconic goals of biography. Vishnu
may take on lower forms like the fish, boar, and tortoise, or liminal ones like the
half-lion-half-man avatar Narasimha. Yet in the heroic age, the Vishnu incarnation is
synonymous with the two perfect men, Rama and Krishna, the ideal humans. In con-
trast to the avatars that are born just for the sole purpose of destroying evil, the
heroic human forms are propelled by reformist motives to redress evil, and to help
manage it. This pacifying quality is translated in terms of an inner peace and outward
physical beauty in the ACK representations.
The Indian nation in ACK is often imagined through this double helix of
mythic and historical time, overlapping with the universal and iconic form of
Vishnu as Vishvarupa (Figure 1). In this simultaneously expanding and contained
metaform, Vishnu appears to have already swallowed the previous avatars and the
noble warriors in the great battlefield of the Mah
abh
arata. For the ACK heroic
icon, violence is not expressed through actual physical action involving the human
body as much as it is driven through the engorgement metaphor. The ACK
Vishvarupa, for instance, is in striking contrast to the terrifying cannibalistic figure
described in the two chapters of the Bhagavad Gita, which presents the
Vishvarupa as an all-destructive embodiment of kala or time, grinding the whole
of the cosmos, past, present and future to a standstill (Bhagavadg
it
a
11.26–32, 1933–1966).
ACK started in 1967. While it was part of a neo-Hindu project, the comics were
not explicitly allied to the RSS Hindutva agenda; i.e. explicit Hindu fascism. RSS is
the parent body of the currently ruling rightwing Hindu party, the BJP, known for its
hate politics and open idealization of Hitler on the one hand, and Zionism on the
other. I argued that ACK’s rhetorical power and persuasion stems from an ethos of a
wider and shared Hindu sensibility or concept of Hinduism as a way of life – itself
no less right-wing, even if less militantly so – rather than a bellicose conception of
Hindu identity based on racial purity. For instance, while it fully participates in the
demonization of Muslims, its topology of exclusion is not limited to Muslims alone.
Forms of bhakti or devotion that do not posit a manifest human form, such as
Shaivism, are considered suspect. Shiva is often worshipped through aniconic symbols
such as the lingam and the Nandi bull. The exclusion principle can also be seen
working through the appropriation of the Buddhist tenet of non-violence or ahimsa.
Shiva and Shiva-worshippers are usually identified with animals, tribals, and Asuras
or demons, who are likewise portrayed as belligerent.
8 N. CHANDRA

Conflict of Registers and Temporalities

While comics lend themselves to iconic representations, they also work to undermine
icons. The biographical imperative accommodates this contradictory dynamic of icon-
ization and de-iconization. While the mythologies assume a fully developed tran-
scendent subject, the biography traces the life of an individual growing from
childhood to maturity. While the mythic subject seems undifferentiated from nature
and the non-human, the differentiated subject of biography becomes human precisely
through splitting into subject and object, man and beast. The comic form happily
reproduces this splitting of subject and object. It is not clear, however, which is sub-
ject, and which object, since, at the level of the printed text, all the images are objects.
Usually a subject needs to be marked by an outward appearance. It must look like
the prototype of the Vedic Aryan god, who must in turn look like the neighborhood
hunk at the same time. In other words, the image must correspond to a combination
of the banal and the superhero. If the body is shown only in a grimacing pose, as is
likely in the animated cartoon format, then there is danger of this basic phenotype
getting obscured. Hence it is important to establish the iconic or still-life presence of
the gods to remind the reader that the secular characters roaming the earth’s surface
are really gods. This puncturing of the comic narrative with the statuesque form is
meant to shelter the reader’s gaze from the harsh light of the grotesque or comic
angles through which animated figures are generally viewed.

The Three Tableaux

It is ironic that the iconic image, usually a flattened-out statuesque figure in ACK,
represents the Hindu self’s standpoint most adequately. Let us look at three different
appearances of the iconic in three different ACK comics to establish how the Hindu
subject position is expressed through them, and what in the image contributes to
reader identification.

The Icon as Transcendent Whole

In the picture of God as Vishvarupa (cosmic all-form) Figure 1 in the comic The
Gita, the supreme-being manifests itself in full frontal glory as a way of showing
Arjuna the illusory nature of his dilemma about whether to fight in the battle or not.
While its fully developed form is a representation of the unrepresentable whole, as it
were (all of past, present, and future), there is still room for Arjuna outside that
whole, even as he is presented as a microscopic dot near Krishna’s sandals. This is a
reminder of how terrifying and immense the cosmic form is, but placing Arjuna dir-
ectly in front of his gigantic visage puts him in danger of being swallowed too.

The Icon as Mirror

In Figure 2, Mirabai is enshrined inside Krishna’s heart as a mirror image of the god,
the ideal size ratio of devotee to god. Both devotee and the beloved god are in sym-
metry with their eyes closed at complementary angles to each other, the perfect har-
mony of the microcosm in the macrocosm, the erotic union sublimated within a
religious bhakti idiom.
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 9

Figure 2. Mirabai (1972).

The Icon’s Indifference to History

In Figure 3, the caption announces that it is Guru Tegh Bahadur’s turn to die, as a
couple of evil-looking Muslims surround him. A belligerent Mughal officer wags his
finger at the Sikh Guru sitting in a meditation posture under a tree. There is another
bare-bodied Muslim figure on the saint’s right side with a butcher’s saw. The actual
act of beheading is implied by the words, “He was beheaded. The Mughals refused to
give his body to his devotees” (28). The iconic form of the saint is shown to be
impervious to the drama of hate and violence surrounding him. It is as if even before
he can be beheaded, he has achieved salvation so he will not feel the pain. This was a
controversial issue, as the Sikh community denied the version in which the Guru was
beheaded. Instead, they asserted that he had achieved salvation. Anant Pai, the foun-
der of ACK, probably chose to include this brutal episode to register the hostile
Muslim presence vis-a-vis other religions like Sikhism and Jainism, regarded as an
intrinsic part of the broader Hindu fold (Anant Pai, personal communication, 2006).
The salvation story was meant to appease the Sikh community (ibid), but in the pro-
cess it introduces a historical temporality inside the mythic “life of the
saint” narrative.
10 N. CHANDRA

Figure 3. Guru Tegh Bahadur (1976).

In the first frame, the temporal being (Arjuna) is reduced to a Lilliputian. In the
second, Mira is ingested, and in the third frame, the temporal beings survive by
becoming the saint’s killers. It is only in the last case that both entities belong to the
temporal realm, the saint’s canonization transporting him to the ethereal realm. As
murderous and misguided Muslims, their fallibility ironically gives them a status out-
side the suffocating theology of Vaishnavism that demands either vanishing or merg-
ing with the divine. Additionally, their vivid coloring and open animus endows them
with life.
The structure of the comics then invariably reverses the intended ascriptions. The
God icon is the container or form in which the self merges itself, as in the first two
tableaux. It is supposed to be the granter of subjectivity, a shape-giving substance.
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 11

However, we find that the human self that seeks subjectivity via this cosmic substance
is actually fated to dissolve or disintegrate. The only possibility for a subjectivity sep-
arate from this transcendent god is reserved for the Muslim men. Of course, their
agency is a destructive one, leading to murder and hate, but their demonic humanity
is the only one that does not disintegrate in the face of the divine substance.
In so far as the three stand-alone tableaux described above are concerned, all are
single-page splash panels, not split up. These Hindu icons are ornate and monumen-
tal, giving off auratic power. At the same time, their expressions are checked out, in
conformity to the particular aesthetic codes of representing the Hindu divine within
an early 20th century bazaar realism propagated by Raja Ravi Varma lithographs. The
illusionistic realism Ravi Varma followed made his gods resemble turn of the century
Kerala or Maharashtrian Brahmins. ACK adopted this classical Brahminic look as the
look most appropriate to gods. On the other hand, it copied the features of
Hollywood icons from foreign magazines as approximating Hindu Gods too. Ram
was modeled on Johnny Weissmuller, the beefy actor who played Tarzan. Some of
the Vedic female beauties were traced on Sophia Loren’s profile (Waeerkar, personal
communication, December 1995).
Ram Waeerkar, one of the foundational artists in ACK, was asked to draw Ram
with half-closed eyes even as he was shown chasing a deer – “like a drug addict”
(personal communication, December 1995). The aesthetic ideal of equanimity in all
circumstances (good and bad) violates the comic’s realism, even as it marks the
human avatar’s godly presence by not being present in the temporal world. It is as if
these avatars are gods in human disguise going through the motions of life without
actually being present. In Chapter 117 of the “Yuddhak
anda” : (1971) in V
alm
iki’s
_
R
am
ayana, R
ama asks the present gods to tell him more about the nature of his being
_
since he is aware of himself as being merely human, son of Dasaratha. Brahma then
informs him of his divine origins, telling him that he is the Lord Narayana himself.2
Thus, avatars may not be aware of themselves as Gods, and the two heroic ava-
tars,-Rama and Krishna,-are shown to follow and suffer the rules of human society.
This avatar subjectivity – part human and part godly – becomes the acceptable bio-
graphical template of ACK comics. By implication, it constitutes the biographical
form as accommodative of non-humans, even as it tries to strictly define the non-
human as godly or saintly.
But this model of sacred biography literally amounts to a loss of life or petrifaction
of the icon since there is none of the growth or development that makes reading
biographies (especially comic versions) so exciting. What is more, it interrupts the
comic momentum, arresting its pace and possible closure. In order to set the comic
in motion again, the artists have to turn toward the bad guys – the asuras or
Muslims – as repositories of animus. These grotesque monsters are caricatured, exag-
gerated, and drawn with a free hand. It is obvious that drawing the demons is the
real labor of love and devotion for the artists. Through the figures of the demons,
both artists and the subjects gain salvation. In a way, ACK could be seen as propagat-
ing a demon subjectivity by default.
The demons surely fit W.J.T. Mitchell’s description of pictures as akin to a subal-
tern consciousness or possessing “the stigmata of personhood” (1996, 72). They are
12 N. CHANDRA

hairy, with red eyes, fangs, big teeth, gigantic, and disproportionate. While they are
invariably defeated by the Vaishnava avatar, their images stand out and overwhelm
the bloodless passivity of the deity. These villains never inhabit full page single panels,
unlike the tableaux of the deities and saints. Yet they often spill over into the gutter
space, a violation of the strict code laid out by Anant Pai for his artists. Following
Mitchell, one could say that this habit of infiltrating the gutter space is an expression
of the artist’s fear, and hence overestimation of the demon’s power. Nonetheless, this
surplus vitalism attributed to the demons is not meant to celebrate them, but rather
to thwart iconoclasm by giving an iconic form to the enemy itself. It is an act of
wishful mirroring by making the abstract enemy into a visible and concrete entity.
While the Hindu icons register themselves as kitsch, the sketch work falling outside
the frame of Hindu selfhood is drawn with much greater creative energy.

The Subversion of Modern Biographical Tropes

One paradoxical trait of the modern biographical subject is the ability to experience
alienation as a measure of its humanity, even as that experience produces a loss of
humanity. In other words, while the alienated individual may be a defective individ-
ual, the defect is a merit, since talking about it provides the meat necessary for the
dramatization of the self. ACK biographies devoted to the lives of saints and great
men find defect in others rather than the self. They do this by extolling the virtues of
isolation and withdrawal, as a removal of the heroic self from the enforced company
of defective others. Withdrawal is embodied in the traditional life-stage (
asrama) of
celibate student-hood (br
ahmacharya) and the stage of forest-retirement
(v
anaprastha). Great men are evaluated in terms of what they can achieve in condi-
tions of isolation. The years spent in the forest doing austere penance and deep schol-
arship give them distinction. In addition, spiritual practice hones and sharpens their
skills to handle hostile attacks and ideological battles from contending schools of
thought, once they return to civilization. Conversely, the knowledge the saint produ-
ces in isolation is all the more valuable for being free of the corruptions and dogma-
tism of the reigning priestly class shown to be embroiled in endless intrigue. The
defect here is not with the great men, but with the social system whose very condi-
tion is anomie. ACK thus harbors the “merit in defect” trope by figuring a collective
Brahmin (scholars, saints) self which is defective, but which leaves room for creating
individual merit. At no point does it disown the Brahminical establishment; instead it
recognizes the merit of the biographized individual in relation to the totality of the
Hindu world, good and bad. While ACK as a whole espouses the bhakti principle of
love and reconciliation, its biographical subject is thoroughly modern in being con-
versant with the tactics of domination and competition. In contrast, while the recent
graphic biographies acknowledge antagonism as a principle of everyday existence, the
actual biographical subjects are apologetic, and use the merit in defect trope almost
to a fault.
In the next section, we will look briefly at two contemporary cult graphic novels,
Bhimayana (2011) and Munnu (2015), which use the biographical format to record
and document their radical alterity. The most visible method is the use of allegory to
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 13

refer to characters’ oppressed or debased condition as Dalit and Kashmiri, respect-

ively. Bhimayana deploys animals as vehicles to ferry the Dalits around, as a protect-
ive shield against man-made places marked unsafe for Dalits. Munnu uses the figure
of the hangul, the endangered red deer of Kashmir, to depict all Kashmiris as a polit-
ically besieged and endangered species. These alternative allegory-imaginaries work
by deliberately avoiding the closures intrinsic to comics.

The Iconoclasm of Graphic Biographical Narratives

Bhimayana
Bhimayana is a collaborative bio-graphic on the life of the Dalit reformer and revolu-
tionary leader Baba Saheb Bhim Rao Ambedkar, published by Navayana, an artisanal
publishing house focusing on Dalit issues. Ambedkar fought for the rights of the peo-
ple considered untouchable. Dalits have lived under conditions of servility and apart-
heid for millennia. The graphic biography makes use of the digna style mural art of
the Pardhan Gonds – a tribal group from central India – to paint the story of caste
exploitation. The book is based on Ambedkar’s autobiographical notes, titled
“Waiting for a Visa.” The text is written by Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand, while
the artwork is by Durga Vyam and Subhash Vyam, with the marginalia drawn by
their daughter Roshni Vyam.
The artwork is extremely beautiful. Its beauty stems from the ornamental nature of
this particular form of tribal art. The Pardhan-Gonds traditionally used a variety of
seasonal clay collected from the forest and the river beds to decorate the walls and
borders of their homes as a means of protecting and purifying it. While the Pardhan-
Gond art uses traditional motifs and designs of trees, birds, plants, and animals from
their environment, the improvisation of the digna patterns to make more imaginative
renditions goes back to the pioneering efforts of Jangarh Singh Shyam in the early
1980s. Pardhan-Gond art is sometimes referred to as “Jangarh Kalam,” after Shyam,
who started his visual experimentations in Bhopal under the mentorship of the mod-
ernist artist Jagdish Swaminathan, the then director of the Bharat Bhavan, a multi-art
center for developing interactive art practices between verbal, visual and performing
arts (Vajpeyi 2012).
The Vyams were uncomfortable with reproducing the typical comic panels, as they
felt their art needed some freedom to breathe. Instinctively, however, they devised the
digna patterns in the shape of tubular panels. These pipe-like shapes traversed the
page in the form of narrow alleys and pathways, leaving the rest of the page empty.
These paths host trains, buses, and other automobiles, moving in serpentine and
winding loops. Sometimes the trees, grass, grazing animals, and birds are the co-pas-
sengers, sometimes they are the drivers, and at other times part of the scenery outside
the vehicular shapes fitted into the digna. When they occupy the empty spaces out-
side the digna, they act as fillers in what looks like a faded chintz wallpaper.
Thus, three different aspects need to be noted here at the level of the mutations of
the panel and gutter space relationship: (1) There is an inversion of the traditional
comic gutter space. The digna patterns, which are traditionally marginalia or borders,
are enlarged to become panel-like. The resultant empty space outside this digna then
14 N. CHANDRA

would seem by default to be the gutter space; (2) But unlike the comic images divided
into panels, the images inside a digna are interconnected into a continuous whole
like the experience of a journey. If at all there are breaks, the break is captured in the
form of a train container asymmetrically joined at the junctions, suggesting a train
that has been derailed from the tracks. The same faces would appear in every box as
a small concession to comic grammar, which depicts duration in space through the
repetition of the same characters enclosed in the same space; (3) The empty space
outside the digna does not really serve as a space of closure or connection, since all
the connections take place inside the digna. The two spaces – inside the digna and
outside it – are totally apart. Additionally, the empty spaces outside are huge and
unstructured, merging into the page ends. As a result, it loses the tacit and uncon-
scious appeal of the gutter space. Instead, the mediation process or closure between
any two separate digna patterns – say those spread across two opposite pages—
demands a more open and challenging act of interpretation, not subliminal
connections.
This situation in which the border tracks of the digna are exported to the center of
the page could be seen as a homology of Dalits living on the margins being relocated
at the center. However, one should also note that, at the level of the form and graphic
language, while the digna might be enlarged to occupy the center fold, it still remains
a digna or decorative marginalia. In other words, while the Dalits might assume cen-
trality, there is no rupture of their traditional habitat or status vis-a-vis the overall
spatial relations to the social whole. It is then not clear which of the messages the
narrative wants to put forward – the one about putting Dalits at the center, or the
one in which visibility does not make any difference to their marginal position.
The power of this underlying graphic language cannot be ignored even as the
artists find many creative ways of talking about the Dalit condition, both at the level
of visual translation and technique. For example, the venomous speech of the upper
caste characters is depicted through speech bubbles shaped as scorpion stings. Again,
the narrative’s only image of Gandhi is that of a fattish figure lying supine with a saw
in his hand, a metaphor for his insidious sabotage of the Poona Pact. Gandhi was a
reformer in the true Vaishnavite spirit of ACK (even though he turned into one of
their icons much later in the life of the series). He felt that providing separate elector-
ates for Dalits would lead to the collapse of Hindu society and hence he went on a
fast to force Ambedkar to withdraw his demand.
While the graphic biography is really rich in its creative interpretation of the sys-
tematic abuse of Dalits, the use of tribal art to depict a Dalit psychosphere leads to
obvious category confusions. In popular imagination, the tribal (theoretically at least)
is totally removed from the Hindu anxiety of pollution and purity. The extension of
this organic cosmology to depict the discriminations faced by Dalits violates the
Dalits’ historicity. The popular stereotype of the tribal as denizen of hills and forests,
a person with martial dignity and independence, is confirmed by the comic’s organic
incorporation of nature and the implied rural environment. The Dalit, on the con-
trary, ekes out a bare living in the grubby shadow and gutters of brahminical society,
which it effaces. The tribal ecology superimposed on the Dalit does not facilitate
Ambedkar’s constitutional and developmental vision of social democracy. According
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 15

to Ambedkar, the Dalit world is based on an experience of rupture and violence, a

lack of unity with nature, while the tribal world hearkens to primitivism.
While the use of tribal aesthetics creates a kind of “safe space” for Dalits, protect-
ing them from a life of stigma and social disgrace, its spiritual tenor mutes
Ambedkar’s message of rupture, inadvertently anticipating Ambedkar’s late spiritual
and mythographic phase, in which he turned to ancient Hindu scriptures, myths, and
parables to lay the ground for an alternative Buddhist heritage for Dalits (Nagaraj
1993, 72). Paradoxically, Ambedkar’s deployment of the mythic was intended as the
source of an ultimate rupture, a liberation from the unrelieved historical and histori-
cist continuity of past, present and future (Nagaraj 1993, 72). The Pardhan-Gond
iconography is able to capture some of that slow and unbearable urgency, but the
mythic proclivity for fused images (sans contradictions) makes awareness of the
commodity’s mediation totally redundant. On page 89, there is a fused image of
Ambedkar with Buddha, Shiva, and Gandhi, amalgamating Gandhi’s spiritual message
of self-purification with the modern-secular approach of Ambedkar. The fusion
imperative takes us in a more affirmative direction, making it very difficult to fathom
the desirability or implication of a rupture. While comics participate in the basic logic
of the commodity form, exploiting its contradictory character to make a profit, the
graphic novel’s appeal lies in creating an alternative activist subjectivity based on a
celebration of the ethics and vitalism of the most oppressed. This is expressed at the
level the graphic novel medium by the radical separation of the two spheres of
the panel and the space outside the panel. Unlike in the comic, the space outside the
panel does not serve the mediating role of the gutter space.

Munnu
Munnu (2015) is a coming-of-age story based on the memoirs of a young and preco-
cious Kashmiri cartoonist, Malik Sajad. It simultaneously weaves a political biography
of the Kashmir valley, and especially his native city of Srinagar, during the ongoing
period of counter-insurgency lasting almost three decades. The different landmarks of
the city are marked with the blood of Kashmiri friends and relatives who were exe-
cuted and tortured by the occupying Indian army. While the personal narrative is
relatively uncensored, the task of writing a formal political biography stretches the
representational abilities of the graphic memoir to its breaking point.
Initially, Munnu seems somewhat derivative of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986), the
biography of a Jewish Holocaust-survivor from Poland, though it is much more than
a “survivor’s tale” (part of the Maus title). The work alternates between an overtly
graphic (i.e., uncensored) representation on the one hand, and a loss of the ability to
be graphic, apparent in the overt use of pictorial metaphors (words as pictures and
pictures as words), on the other. The latter leads to a redundancy of images. This
redundancy, and the concomitant reliance on verbal bridges or commentary to stitch
the narrative together are typical of the genre. But Sajad uses the limitations to com-
ment on the redundancies of the genre.
Like Spiegelman, Malik tells his tale through the beleaguered race depicted as an
animal. In this case, it is the hangul, the endangered Kashmiri red stag, dwindled to a
critically low population thanks to the mass encroachment on their habitat by the
16 N. CHANDRA

Indian army. All the non-Kashmiris are depicted as humans. The novel shares the
characteristic dark humor and self-deprecating wit of Maus. The tortures and
sufferings – that are unbearable to read and watch in the various fact-finding
reports and YouTube videos – become accessible here in an entertaining format.
In this, he probably takes a cue from the Band Pathers, the traditional entertainers
of Kashmir whose job it was to entertain and teach people to laugh in the face
of oppression.
There are two contradictory aspects to the story: the unapologetic narrative of
growth of the seven-year-old Munnu amidst political turmoil (the bildungs), and the
need to downplay that growth as a reminder that the story is about a persecuted peo-
ple (the counter-bildungs). The bildungs tale is rendered without apologia, as an
entertaining narrative supported by the sequential regularity of the comic medium.
But the urge to render the biography adequate to the seriousness of the insurgent
situation in Kashmir, takes it in a more anarchic graphic novel direction, where the
artist is forced to drop his commitment to a purely graphic medium, and find other
more “credible” and “authoritative” ways of telling his tale. In a sense, the anxiety of
producing an accurate social and political history in the manner of fact-finding
reports interferes with the ability to convey the affective valences of the per-
sonal story.
In the first 200 pages, the commitment to the graphic content, or freedom from
censorship is evident. This is the story of individual growth told through the eyes of
a child. Once Munnu becomes Sajad, the successful artist of international repute, a
more anxious tone creeps in. The anxiety of having to document the history of
Kashmir, to put the militancy in the right perspective, takes over, leading to the
defensive posture of standpoint politics. As he tells a group of South Asian artists
with whom he is collaborating on an artwork about children in conflict: “I may not
know much about anything, but I live in Kashmir and I want independence” (192).
But in order to justify this standpoint, he has to set up a respectable dossier. Personal
experience alone is not sufficient. He has to read history books, conduct inter-
views, etc.
In the historiography of the relatively recent genre of the graphic novel, two things
have been particularly observable: (1) The graphic novel brings an unprecedented
intensity and seriousness to the medium through its embrace of self-consciously dis-
turbing topics; and (2) It invariably introduces a memoir or auto-bio-graphic vantage
point as a way of bearing witness to events that are considered outside the pale of
official history. Thus, unlike ACK, which assumes the banner of infotainment or edu-
tainment to mask its fun effects, the graphic novel’s pedagogical role is very genuine
indeed. This pedagogical role, however, tends to burden the comic with different
kinds of narrative pressures aimed at providing an evidentiary base. More specifically,
the devices of documentary, ethnography, and reportage become indispensable to the
task of preserving the consciousness of communities and practices considered endan-
gered. This focus on the preservation of singularity (the non-exchangeable) leads to a
paradoxical accumulation imperative in the neoliberal graphic novel. This is different
from the register of the openly ideological comic book, which is contradictory and
dialectical. The accumulation imperative works both literally and figuratively, by
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 17

heaping stuff on the page as well as accumulating capital out of alternative or oppos-
itional histories.
Munnu dramatizes the necessity of the accumulation imperative for the graphic
novel form. Even if Sajad wanted to escape the pressure of documentation and
archiving, he cannot. At best, he can convey his reluctance and protest at having to
go through the motions of accumulation. It is not fun to record the pain of survivors
or bear the guilt of having to digest a chicken patty paid for by a widow’s entire
monthly wages. The demand for freedom may get legitimated through this accumula-
tion process, and yet this legitimation goes against the very losers of history, whom
the graphic novel claims to represent, since legitimacy transforms that which it legiti-
mates into a means of validation for the bourgeois standpoint.
While the representation of encounters, disappearances, and rapes of Kashmiri
civilians is informed by knowledge of the structures of imperialism and global capital-
ism (there is talk about the Indian occupation of Kashmir as funded by the US), yet
in tandem with the endangered metaphor of the Kashmiri, Munnu insists on
Kashmir’s singularity, its unique identity, and unique texture. He resists the forced
comparison of the insurgent situation in Kashmir with the Arab spring, or the
Intifada. He shows these comparisons as being fueled by the local media and aca-
demic industry of Kashmir experts. However, the more he affirms the singularity of
Kashmir, the more the structural issues come to the fore.
In the chapter titled “Footnotes,” miniature painting becomes the more suitable
artistic template to document the arts and crafts of Kashmir. The lines acquire greater
finesse and prettiness (Figure 4). In the earlier section drawn in the more comic
book-style, we noted that the young Munnu is not very good at following the pains-
taking artisanal work of his father, who carves intricate paisleys and chinar motifs on
walnut frames. While both artisanal work and comic art are painstaking, and depend
on repeating the same figures and designs over and over again, they respond to dif-
ferent aesthetic demands. The latter’s commitment to storytelling and sequential pro-
gress cannot afford the slow contemplative gaze of mural art. At the same time,
hand-based comic art with painstaking designs needs sophisticated printing technol-
ogy to reproduce all the nuances, not the flattening effect of digital renditions.
Comic drawing intended for commercial mass-scale production has always focused
on being able to recreate aesthetic effects rather than create a truly aesthetic form. It
works more as a signifying system, and that is why scrawls and doodles are the nota-
tional means by which it creates these effects – what the ACK comic artists refer to
as bh
ava. Sequential comic art cannot afford to be either too realistic or succumb to
ornamental circuitousness. It needs closure, and abstract figures are the best tools for
it. Whether this is rendered through stick figures, simple line drawing, or the hangu-
lization of humans, the point is to keep the narrative free flowing. Ironically, this
kind of “sketchy” work is best achieved by retaining the distortions and incomplete-
ness of line drawings.
The graphic novel is first and foremost committed to the aesthetic. Its appropri-
ation of kitsch too is an aesthetic project, using the hand to decorate bazar images. In
its pursuit of art and artisanal techniques, there is great risk of losing the wood for
the trees. In Munnu, however, this dilemma of capturing the singularity of trees in
18 N. CHANDRA

Figure 4. Munnu, 2015.

the valley over the woods might either stupefy the audience with the sensuous details
of the phenomenological world, or might provoke them to question the point of all
this singularity.
Close study reveals homonymous parallels: similar structures, but different mean-
ings. The domestic incidents of torture are as inventive and cruel as that of the
Indian state. The teachers seem to learn from the hated masters – undressing stu-
dents, holding them up by their hair till clumps fall off, smearing their bodies with
clay, throwing them over nettles, beating them unconscious etc. The full force of the
comic’s violence becomes possible only through the relaying effect of the different
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 19

forms of torture, confirming the comic form’s metonymic construction of the whole
through parts. The Indian state’s occupation is of course the big part. But like the
other parts, it is not a cause, but a symptom. It is this pervasive confusion between
cause and symptom that confounds the narrative, as a dilemma between appearance
and essence.
On the last page, in a chapter drawn entirely in black against the backdrop of a
blackout, two Kashmiri men are shown as sexual predators, going after a poor home-
less Kashmiri woman. Given the fact that they are all hanguls, the ending presents a
very disturbing image of cannibalization, returning the novel to the universe of
abstract domination, where the enemy is not externalized, but self-annihilating. It is
then not about India-Pakistan, or the arbitration of an international community, but
recognizing the unity of a contradictory comic book self – inside out, superficial and
deep, implosive and explosive.
Ironically, it is the tyrant maulvi at Darasgah (who had mercilessly beaten him
when he was five years old for writing a love letter to a girl) who helps him overcome
the guilt that drives much of the internally directed abuse. The guilt is a definite
medium for creating a collective self and solidarity, but that collective self is also a
defense mechanism and false in many ways. The Maulvi gives him the prayer: “Oh
Allah, show me things the way they are and not the way they appear to the eyes!”
(179). Apart from showing how the passage of time can bring out the friend in the
foe, the injunction to overcome appearances compels him to go beyond the comfort
zone of a false unity and solidarity brought about by the sense of collective guilt.
One way this critical re-evaluation takes place is when he re-archives his brilliant
and witty cartoons published in Greater Kashmir within the pages of his memoir as a
sign of his ambivalence toward his earlier work as a cartoonist. This gesture epito-
mizes the “merit in defect” trope. It highlights his precocious success as a cartoonist
and foregrounds the need to overcome the cliches and redundancies of one’s art. One
of the cartoons about the young child militants of Kashmir has the following caption:
“ … and the young boys fell like toppling dominoes” (333). Cartoon wit depends on
images to visualize the mot juste, a visual punning that replicates the words in
images. However, this tautology of the visual fails within a graphic narrative mode
because it yields static and locked images.
The graphic novel impulse of Munnu is to constantly draw on different visual
styles, and simultaneously call attention to their inability to add up. Usually this
incapacity to aspire to a totality is celebrated in terms of a fusion image (as seen in
Bhimayana). The fusion image is a spectacular substitute for an immanent or embod-
ied critique of modernity. It also signifies the union of the affective and the concep-
tual without actually navigating the contradictions of these different registers. In
Munnu, the anxiety about being true to Kashmir’s state of emergency fails to result
in a fusion image, even as it begins with the image of Kashmiris as hanguls.
These hanguls offer a vision of a surplus and alternative humanity by bearing wit-
ness to the martyrdoms of fellow Kashmiris and taking on the guilt of being survi-
vors. But while bearing witness and guilt may constitute forms of surplus humanity
and solidarity, guilt is a slippery and virulent emotion. Like anxiety, it is more prone
to entangling itself with everything rather than attaching itself to a single fetish object
20 N. CHANDRA

(Ngai 2005, 210). The final image of cannibalism is proof of this. Thus, through its
separation of kitschy comic style, and more artisanal appropriations typical of the
graphic novel, Munnu is able to show both what succeeds as a representation of a
Kashmiri self, and the limits of that representation.
While the reality of Kashmir is identified correctly as a permanent state of emer-
gency, this emergency amounts to a tautological standstill. To bring about a real state
of emergency, as Walter Benjamin alluded to it, requires something more drastic
than showing Kashmiris as endangered:
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that “the state of emergency” in which we live
is not the exception, but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in
keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about
a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the real struggle against
Fascism itself. (Benjamin 2007, 257)
The image of an endangered species might be a good allegory of the Kashmiri situ-
ation, but it cannot in turn endanger the discourse of endangerment.

Conclusion
In the past decade, the Indian comics industry has seen a shift from the feel-good
comic to the feel-bad art of the graphic novel (Sen 1994; Patil 2008; Ghosh 2010).3 In
so far as it deliberately chooses the unpleasant, it effectively departs from the dis-
tracted reading that comics were originally about. In the division between the seen
and the unseen, between the light and the heavy moments, the traumatic comes to
occupy the visible part of the visual economy; insidious market desires and voyeurism
etc. – that form part of the visible economy of the comic medium – seep into the
underground. As we saw in Bhimayana, decorative motifs flood the unconscious
realm of the gutter space. It is as if the artist is consciously or unconsciously seeking
to compensate for the difficulty of reading about bleak documentary topics such as
Kashmir and the plight of Dalits by ornamentally aesthetizing the frames. One is thus
drawn to the artistry on the page as a possible way of avoiding the trauma, as an
an(a)esthetic. Instead of turning pages, this slows down the narrative, not for the pur-
pose of contemplation, but as a way of avoiding thought. The market pressure to pro-
duce alternative narratives leads contemporary comics and graphic novels in India to
create a caricature of the dialectic of part and whole, the visceral and the contempla-
tive. A preoccupation with a primal mythic past, synonymous with the vitalism of a
lost organic community, then serves as a subaltern sales pitch, in which ornament is
synonymous with mass appeal. In this drive for subalternization, the abiding mon-
strosity of comics – traced here from Amar Chitra Katha to the present – has lost
its fangs.
The images in comics are speaking images, imbued with a subject-object con-
sciousness. This is usually a grotesque and monstrous state (like the specter of talking
animals in real life), pointing toward a loss of humanity or an excess of it. The pre-
ponderance of fused bodies of human-animals, or the blurring of line between nature
and humans offer testimony to this. But the invariable division of characters into
sober and crazy, good and bad, within the dynamic of a given comic narrative
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 21

portions out one half of the comic for the monstrous effect. While at the narrative
level, only the characters deliberately ascribed as monstrous are monstrous, at the
level of the medium, all are image-objects and therefore monstrous.
In his essay, “What do Pictures Really Want?”, W.J.T. Mitchell introduces the
image as object, and imbues it with the standpoint of the radical other. Effectively,
Mitchell rephrases the research question from what pictures do to what pictures
want – from power to desire – “from the model of power to be opposed, to the
model of the subaltern to be interrogated or better to be invited to speak” (1996, 74).
This reverse alignment of the image from being a reified object to a desiring subal-
tern subject is located in a totemic or animistic universe.
I have tried to show that in the neoliberal graphic novels, the prioritization of life
over knowledge of the exemplary life has the effect of making the biography more
ontology than epistemology. This prioritization of surplus life pushes it in the direc-
tion of an affirmative biopolitics in which an excess life triumphs over the constrain-
ing effects of neoliberalism and biopolitics. According to Benjamin Noys (2011)
(writing in a different context), the form of the life-cult (Wyndham Lewis’s term) is
nothing but a romanticization of the vitalism of poverty or bare life, “a mythological
placeholder for an absent or failed politics” (3). However, the coordination between
the affirmationist tenor of the graphic novel and the contradictory impulses of the
comic medium is likely to create rogue effects. The imperative to look for politically
charged (invariably traumatic) subject matter on the one hand, and the neoliberal
media’s cannibalistic urge to devour different forms and styles in order to a(n)esthe-
tize the political thus foregrounds the medium’s limits and failures. Yet these limits
and failures are objective ones embodying a reality that has gone rogue as well. In so
far as the graphic novel replicates fusion images and tautologies, its iconoclasm risks
becoming iconized as well as creating an intense stupefaction that does not clarify
anything. At their best, the makers of the form confront this impasse and incorporate
this systemic defect into the narrative of their collective self as merit and decoration.

Acknowledgments
Sincere thanks and acknowledgment due to Jesse Knutson (for translations), Malik Sajad (for
copyright permission to use image from Munnu), and Neel Paul on behalf of ACK Media for
giving copyright permission to publish the three images from The Gita, Mirabai and Guru
Tegh Bahadur, respectively.

Notes
1. tyaktv
a divy
aṃ tanuṃ visnur m
anusesv iha j
ayate /
__ _ _
yuge tv atha par
avrtte k
ale prasithile prabhuḥ // MatsP_47.34 //
_
dev
asuravimardesu j
ayate harir
isvaraḥ /
_
hiranyakasipau daitye trailokyaṃ pr
ak pras
asati // MatsP_47.35 //
_
2. अात्मानं मानुषं मन्ये रामं दशरात्मजम् ।
I think of myself as a man, R
ama son of Dasaratha.
सो ऽहं यस्य यतश्चाहं भगवंस्तद्ब्रवीतु मे।।१०
Tell me lord who I am and where I come from.
इति ब्रुवाणं काकुतस्थं ब्रह्मा ब्रह्मविदां वरः।
22 N. CHANDRA

To him who was speaking this Brahm
a best of those who know brahma
अब्रवीच्छृणु मे वाक्यं सत्यं सत्यपराक्रम।।।११
spoke: listen to my true speech, you who have truth as your power
भगवान्नारायणो देवः श्रीमांश्चक्रायुधः प्रभुः।
You are the blessed god, lord N
ar
ayana, the lord who has the discus as his weapon [i.e.
_
Visnu]
__
एकशृङ्गो वराहस्त्वं भूतभव्यसपत्नजित् ।।१२
You are the one-horned boar, conqueror of past and future enemies. (translated by
Jesse Knutson)
3. In general, Indian graphic novels tend to adopt disturbing episodes from recent history
on issues of social and political marginalization and oppression. The first graphic novel
River of Stories (Sen 1994) is about the forced displacement caused by the building of the
Narmada dam; Kari (Patil 2008) is about the loneliness of a lesbian woman in a big city,
and Delhi Calm (Ghosh 2010) about the political Emergency imposed by the Indira
Gandhi government. But Sarnath Banerjee, the author of Corridor (2004) pioneers a
more comic and flippant style.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes to Contributor
Nandini Chandra teaches in the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i at
M
anoa. Her book The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha (1967–2007) was published by
Yoda Press in 2008 from New Delhi.

References
Banerjee, Sarnath. 2004. Corridor. Delhi: Penguin Group.
Bendazzi, Giannalberto. 2016. Animation, A World History Volume 2: The Birth of a Style,
Three Markets. New York: Routledge.
Benjamin, Walter. 2007. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by
Hanah Arandt, 253–264. New York: Schocken Books.
Bhagavadg
it
a: The Mah
abh
arata 11.26-32. Critical Edition. 1933–1966. Edited by V. K.
Sukthankar, K. Belvalkar, and P. L.Vaidya. Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.
Chandra, Nandini. 2008. The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha (1967–2007). Delhi: Yoda
Press.
Ghosh, Vishwajyoti. 2010. Delhi Calm. Delhi: Harper Collins.
Groensteen, Thierry. 2009. “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimacy?” In
A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, 3–12. Jacksonville, MS:
University Press of Mississippi.
Hajdu, David. 2008. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed
America. New York: Picador.
Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jacksonville, MS:
University Press of Mississippi.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments. ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kosambi, D. D. 1962. Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture. Bombay:
Popular Prakashan.
Matsyapur
ana. 1981. Pune: Anand Aashram.
_
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 23

McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1996. “What Do Pictures “Really” Want?” October 77: 71–82. www.jstor.
org/stable/778960
Nagaraj, D. R. 1993. The Flaming Feet: A Study of the Dalit Movement in India. Bangalore:
South Forum Press.
Natarajan, S., S. Anand, D. Vyam, and S. Vyam. 2011. Bhimayana: Experiences of
Untouchability. Delhi: Navayana.
Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Noys, Benjamin. 2011. “Vitalism of Poverty, Poverty of Vitalism.” Electronic. http://www.aca-
demia.edu/689255/The_Poverty_of_Vitalism_and_the_Vitalism_of_Poverty_
Pai, Anant, and Yusuf Lien. 1972. Mirabai. Mumbai: The India Book House.
Pai, A., and P. Mulik. 1977. The Gita, Amar Chitra Katha: The Glorious Heritage of India.
Mumbai: The India Book House.
Pai, Anant, and Souren Roy. 1976. Guru Tegh Bahadur. Mumbai: The India Book House.
Patil, Amruta. 2008. Kari. Delhi: Harper Collins.
Sajad, Malik. 2015. Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir. Delhi: Harper Collins.
Sen, Orijit. 1994. River of Stories. Delhi: Kalpavriksha.
Spiegelman, Art. 1986. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books.
Vajpeyi, Udayan. 2012. “Jangarh Kalam”. Pratilipi, Issue 13, December. Bengaluru, India.
Electronic. http://pratilipi.in/jangarh-kalam-udayan-vajpeyi/
Wertham, Fredric. 1954. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart.
Witek, Joseph. 1989. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art
Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jacksonville, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
The Yuddhak
anda: : The Sixth Book of the R
am
ayana. 1971. Critically Edited by P.L. Vaidya,
_
Baroda: Oriental Institute. _