Prospects of Comics Studies in India

International Journal of Comic Art Vol. 15, No. 1, 2013

NOTE: This article has a few out-dated details; please read alongside my Comics in India chapter in the Routledge Companion to Comics, or refer to that piece instead. Despite a diverse and long history of the comics medium in India, much scholarship has tended to focus on just a small sampling. As the most widely published and read Indian comics, books from the Amar Chitra Katha series are the ones that most scholars have focused upon, to the detriment of understanding the wider context of India’s comics, storytelling, and visual cultures. While Amar Chitra Katha would eventually transcend earlier comics and visual narratives in popularity, such works are important for their ability to engage local or regional arts and international comics culture. More importantly, few scholars have addressed the work of contemporary comics creators or the graphic novels and comics currently coming out of Delhi and the rest of India. This article provides a historical account of the path from comic books to the later rise of graphic novels grounded in one creator, Amitabh Kumar’s, experiences as an author and researcher on Indian comics and culture. As a comics creator and researcher, he celebrates the importance of other publishers and creators in maintaining comics as a narrative medium. Based on Kumar’s perspective, as he works to establish a historical narrative himself while engaging with that precedent in crafting his own comics, this article traces the roots of the comics medium in India, from political cartoons to superhero comics and graphic novels.

In The Routledge Companion to Comics, Editors Roy Cook, Frank Bramlett, and Aaron Meskin., 2016

Many authors and artists in India are conscious of or even directly engaged with international comics, especially from the USA, Japan, and Europe. Yet, Indian comics remain relatively obscure in those same countries. When they are recognized, readers and reviewers tend to frame them as novelties, rather than part of a vibrant comics world. Despite the rich history of this medium on the subcontinent, many critics and scholars remain mired in earlier educational or later transnational comics publishers. This not only loses the complexity of such works, but also holds such works to transnational and often corporate standards. The result is a lack of appreciation for comics communities and an over-emphasis on works that reach readers within well-established industries outside of India. This chapter highlights the tapestry of the medium in this context – with a focus on the people, titles, publishers, and moments that remain important for creators and their communities in India today.

Religion Compass, vol. 5, no. 10 (2011): 598-608. This article provides an overview of the birth of comics in India; a discussion of the available scholarship to date, which has focused largely on India’s most prominent comic book series, Amar Chitra Katha, and its connections to classical Hindu mythology and modern Hindu nationalist ideology; a roundup of recent developments in Indian comics since the creation of Amar Chitra Katha; and briefly offers some suggestions for further research.

South Asian Review, 2018

International Journal of Comic Art, 2017

In this article, I look at how comics creators in the Indian comics world frame themselves as people working with and united by a shared medium. I will bring together the voices and work of Berlin-based graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee, Delhi-based creator Priya Kuriyan, and itinerant illustrator Prashant Miranda to illustrate this concern. In looking at how they each struggle to cultivate comics in or of India, I am grounded in fieldwork performed in Delhi in 2010 and 2013, as well as more recent interviews, online articles, and personal blogs. Drawing out these creators’ experiences will reveal the difficulties of arguing for comics as an art form without transforming comics-making into a profit-oriented endeavor. Their voices and works will specifically demonstrate the multiple ways that artists and authors re-mediate visual storytelling to enrich their everyday lives, needs, and comics communities.

Culture of Comics Work, Edited by Casey Brienza & Paddy Johnston, 2016

In my interviews with comics creators from 2010 onwards, I have encountered many creators who point out that the roots of comics culture lie in the broader visual culture of India, whose traditional visual storytelling primes readers for critical engagement with visual narratives. This understanding allows them to push for a greater awareness of the comics medium as an international form with the potential for great variation beyond corporate production. Several authors and artists explicitly work to establish an alternative or independent comics culture that is focused on creators, their craft, and the communities that form around them. In particular, Orijit Sen of the Pao Collective in Delhi, Vidyun Sabhaney of Captain Bijli Comics in Delhi, and Pratheek Thomas of Studio Kokaachi in Cochin are working to develop more independent and community-focused platforms for their own and others’ work. This chapter briefly explores how each of these creators approaches the work of establishing an alternative or indie comics culture by placing craft and community over industry.

Comic books and graphic novels are an amalgamation of artwork and literature. It is an interesting medium which can be used to tell a story in an alternative way from other mediums. The medium itself is so distinctive because of the measured way in which it combines visuals and words. We live in a visually driven digital age. Different media channels have benefitted from this. Films, TV, Newspapers and magazines- are available on hand held gadgets. And there are readers who believe in the traditional experience of these mediums. Even comic books are now available digitally. But according to trade figures, the comic book industry throughout the world is struggling despite the digital convenience. Its appeal is niche and the Industry isn’t exactly a money spinner like Films. The Indian Comic book industry has managed to exist and prosper in by far; one of the toughest commercial environments in the world. The distribution channels for comic books are non-existent in India. The readership is miniscule. For years, they have told stories influenced by Western comic books. They were bound by the harshness of the market. They managed to exist and survive. The situation has now changed for the better. Indian comic book industry is now a different animal altogether: a perseverant beast; to be precise. Numerous comic cons (pop culture conventions) have been successful in India. The Industry has embraced elements which are rooted deep in its countries culture. Stories have been spun around sadhus, goddesses, mystiques, warriors, ghosts, pop culture icons, unusual creatures and even social issues. This has added to the existent crop of superheroes and detective based comic books. Apart from this, there is also a dedicated Graphic novel industry now. This research delves into contemporary comic books and graphic novels which are an indicator of this change. The metamorphosis has been backed by narrative, aesthetic and distinctive qualities of these comic books and graphic novels. This inquiry attempts to provide a definitive compilation of distinctive conceptual, visual and storytelling elements that make the Indian Comic book Industry what it is today. 107 contemporary comic books/graphic novels by 28 publishers were a part of this study. Patterns, range and uniqueness emerged amongst the chosen material. The research also identified other dimensions for further research of Indian comic books.

Virgin Comics, a transnational corporation with offices in India and the U.S., has tried to put its chosen medium—the comic book— to novel use. In 2006, Virgin (now Liquid Comics) began marketing titles that remobilize Hindu mythology for the global entertainment market. Paying particular attention to the series Devi (2006-), this article situates Virgin’s comics within several discursive and institutional conjunctures. First, I trace how Virgin’s chief “visionaries” sought to “modernize” the Indian comic. By bringing the vocabularies of Nehruvian developmentalism to bear on this popular cultural form, Virgin signals that in post-liberalization India the aesthetic has outpaced the industrial as the byword of global modernity. Second, I consider Virgin’s attempt to render the comic book a fully fungible medium, which facilitates the development and exchange of intellectual property across entertainment platforms. Newly dematerialized, Virgin’s ethereally cosmopolitan comics are nonetheless haunted by the material specificities of the postcolonial nation-state.

In this deftly constructed study, Pramod K. Nayar's orientation is towards engendering an acceptance for the Indian graphic novel which is still fairly new to the connoisseurs, scholars and students of Indian Writing in English. Through an investigative and analytical approach he looks at the Indian graphic novel that possesses all the requisites of a literary text. Talking about the form of the graphic narrative, he argues that it has an edge over the other dominant genres as it simultaneously engages the reader to the act of reading and perceiving and that its form is enriched with range and versatility. It embodies a unique interplay of word and image, the literal and the symbolic layer of interpretation and even its gaps or absences render a field of signification. It not only communicates with its readers, but directly involves them and makes them the key players in the production of meaning. Its 'seeable' and 'sayable' mode allows the reader to inhabit the virtual space. Embedded with the power of the visual-the verbal-the gaps, the graphic narratives have become a potent medium to satirize and critique upon the follies of the society. Pondering over the appropriate form in which to represent or examine the issues of the nation, Nayar finds the medium to be the most befitting one. He vehemently asserts that the Indian graphic novel is perhaps the new literary form that the nation has been 'longing for'. He contends, " For this freedom of representation, for taking the process of critique into a medium associated with just entertainment, for its opening up an array of story-telling strategies and for its insistence on tackling more social commentary and cultural critique of the nation's lacunae of flaws, the graphic novel heralds a major shift within IWE. " (p. 8) Nayar's claim is undisputed, but one cannot brush aside the fact that the Indian graphic narrative's move from margin to mainstream may perhaps not be so easy in an academic culture where there is limited scope for experimentation and inclusion of the 'new'. Also this form has to rigorously compete with the dominant literary forms of IWE. Undoubtedly in the West, the graphic novel has witnessed a spectacular rise which has put an end to the debate on its legitimacy and the credit to its renewed status goes to the several promotional platforms such as publishing houses, literary magazines, journals, university classrooms that have been instrumental in establishing it as a work of