Visual Arts in India

The novel “Kashmir Pending” begins without words. Slabs of horizontal frames, colored in queasy salmon and khaki green, show a young boy hurling a rock at a soldier. Three silent pages lead to a close-up of the soldier’s rifle-- and his garish orange thumb.

By page 5, the boy has grown into a man. This time he is behind bars. His white Muslim skullcap glints from the recesses of the dark jail. The image is stark, but the text has a softer cadence. “When I am not reminiscing over my past, I am praying for strength and forgiveness,” says the prisoner.

Very few people in India have read this book. Published in 2007, it sold less than 5,000 copies and failed to get much mainstream exposure. It portrays the futility of violence—and given the polarized opinions fueling the Kashmir conflict, that message would not suit everyone. But the expressive images and nuanced story of “Kashmir Pending”—written by Naseer Ahmed and drawn by Saurabh Singh—illustrate the promise of a genre that’s now confined to a niche market in India, yet is steadily winning local converts. Some call it “graphic literature.” Others prefer “comics for mature audiences.” Clearly, it’s more than brawny superheroes and bubbles that say “BLAM!” and “ZAP!”

 

Challenges and strategies

India has now reached a stage where more conventional comics can be downloaded on mobile phones—and if the story features an explosion, the phone will vibrate, too. India has also surged ahead of Asian competitors with its prowess in 3D digital animation. With such hi-tech wizardry available for the consumer, why should anyone care about something old-fashioned like the printed page?

But it turns out that some people care very much. And the enthusiasm extends from Coimbatore to Kolkata, Delhi, Bangalore, Kerala and even Himachal Pradesh. The regional breadth is matched by the diversity in style, tone, and subject matter. Graphic story-tellers have probed the difficulties of living through Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule (“Delhi Calm,” by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, 2010), finding a cure for premature ejaculation and romantic ambivalence (“Corridor” by Sarnath Banerjee, 2004), grappling with right-wing crackdowns on cinema (“The Believers” by Abdul Sultan and Partha Sengupta, 2006), and confronting an identity crisis when married to a rock star (“Killer” by Rimi Chatterjee, 2010).

Serious or amusing, dark or triumphant, such tales take tremendous work. The 246-page “Delhi Calm,” for example, was initially discussed with HarperCollins Publishers India in 2005. Its first pages were submitted in 2007 and a multi-pronged editing and revision process continued to grind forward until the pages finally went to the printer earlier this year.

So it’s not surprising that some authors would yearn for a greater sense of community while pursuing such long-term projects. Even shorter pieces, collected in anthologies or little magazines like Comix India can benefit from a supportive word or an irreverent spark. In India, such communities have gained momentum over the past two years with help from websites and blogs, university-based discussions, workshops, exhibitions, a writers’ collective, and a glimmer of international collaboration.

“We need to encourage as much variety as possible. One needs to prove oneself in a magazine so the publishing industry can keep a lookout for emerging talent,” says Bharath Murthy, the 32-year-old Coimbatore-based editor of the first two volumes of Comix India. The magazine, which made its debut in March 2010, has skirted commercial pressures by printing each volume on demand and offering it for sale through its website. That virtual venue also stimulates discussion and support by offering room for feedback from readers and authors alike.

Nurturing talent and pushing for more exposure are also key goals of the Pao Collective, which began meeting in New Delhi in 2007. For now, the group has no funding and no regular workshop space. Its members get together about once every fortnight in Hauz Khas Village, in an office run by Orijit Sen, whose pioneering 1994 graphic novel, “River of Stories”, recounts the protests over the Narmada Valley dam.

“Part of the agenda is to build awareness and locate a talent pool and work with that talent pool,” explains Amitabh Kumar, a 25-year-old member of the collective and a designer/artist who works in the Sarai Media Lab in New Delhi. “The more people get together, the more it gives birth to a critical mass of new practitioners. It’s so new, it’s so fresh. To have a cohesive identity, it’s important that we know of each other’s existence.”

“We try to build a versatile student who can push himself to bring things together. You write your own story, you ink it, you print your own book and bind it,” explains A.V. Varghese, academic dean for the professional diploma programme at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore. While student work tends to dwell on personal history—such as a son’s struggle to empathize with an alcoholic father—Varghese advises, “You push it so it touches people at a universal level.”

In the Indian context, however, “universal” cannot be interpreted as “populist.” Commercial print runs of 3,000 to 5,000 make hardly a dent. And the language, for the most part, is English. “It’s quite strange and also a little shocking that so far no serious graphic novel has surfaced in Hindi,” says Kumar at the Pao Collective.

The challenge remains to push graphic literature out of its rarified niche,” says Bangalore-based art historian Suresh Jayaram. “Graphic novels should be like Bollywood films, available to everybody.”

Some practitioners, like Murthy at Comix India, argue that India should follow the lead of Japan, where manga is often produced on cheap paper with scant ink. Forget about Europe, he says, where comics are “almost like a luxury item, like perfume.” But others argue that years of dedicated work should be rewarded with better paper, quality design, and full colour. In straddling the category of “art book,” the graphic novel has a hard time escaping a relatively high price range of Rs 300 to 500 (US $6.50 to $10.80).

In discussions with his publishers, Vishwajyoti Ghosh has raised the prospect of a Hindi version of “Delhi Calm.” But there’s a snag. “The difficulty is that the price point has to be less than 100 rupees,” says Karthika V. K., publisher and chief editor of HarperCollins India. That would be five times less than the price of the English version. They are still searching for a solution, perhaps in tandem with other publishers.

 

Artists and works

Orijit Sen’s work is considered to be India’s first modern graphic novel, although Sarnath Banerjee’s “Corridor” in 2004 managed to kick-start a broader trend of experimentation with the genre across the country. (Banerjee, who also belongs to Pao, was a co-founder of Phantomville, a comic publishing house that ran into financial difficulties and is now virtually defunct.)

In one sense, it can be difficult to measure India’s graphic literary scene. Just about a dozen full-length graphic novels have risen to the surface in recent years, including the lustrously colored “Kari” by Amruta Patil (HarperCollins Publishers India, 2008), a black-and-white “The Hotel at the End of the World by Parismita Singh (Penguin Books India, 2009) and the bright Rajasthani miniature-style “Lie: a Traditional Tale of Modern India,” written by Gautam Bhatia and illustrated by Shankar Lal Bhopa, Birju Lal Bhopa and Ghansham (Tranquebar Press, 2010). The dystopic “Moonward” (Blaft Publications, 2009) by Appupen conveys the claustrophia of modern existence in multiple shades of gray.

Yet there seem to be countless works-in-progress, with authors ranging from restless IT executives in Bangalore to political cartoonists from Kerala to students at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad or Srishti in Bangalore. Academia is helping to fuel a sense of discovery, with courses on graphic world literature taught in Jadavpur University in Kolkata, as well as at NID/Ahmedabad and Srishti in Bangalore. A lively academic conference on comics and graphic literature was held in Thrissur, Kerala in March 2009—although Kumar from the Pao Collective mourns that the papers have not yet been circulated for more general consumption and debate.

“It will be a lasting genre in India. I have no doubt about it. It’s not a passing fad at all,” argues E. P. Unny, a Delhi-based newspaper cartoonist who attended the Thrissur gathering. Reared in Kerala—a state with a rich tradition of political cartooning, patterned on a British model—54-year old Unny recalls devouring the cartoon serials in the local Mathrubhumi Weekly. He is now in talks with a Kerala publisher to bring out a collection of his longer graphic stories, mostly written in the local Malayalam language.

In judging the success or failure of a graphic novel, much depends on the interplay of words and visuals. Some authors strive for a written style that somehow mirrors or amplifies the drawings. Others aim for a sharp contrast.

In Bhatia’s “Lie” – described by the author as a tale of “corruption, greed, caste prejudice, materialism, and gender inequalities”— the satire gains traction with breezy modern prose embedded in a traditional miniaturist style. Take the little man with the comb-over hairdo, perusing the matrimonial ads. He comes across a “highly promiscuous and demanding Iyengar Brahmin nymphomaniac” searching for a suitable groom. Throwing up his hands, this wealthy CEO cries, “Aren’t there any ordinary simple girls for my son?”

In Parismita Singh’s work, however, the fabulist prose seems to match the mood of the pen-and-ink drawings. “When commanded to take his daughter’s soul…the night walker had wrestled with death and yielded his own instead,” she writes. As for the art, “Some drawings have the feel of Chinese paintings as they share a similar spatial sensibility,” writes reviewer Geetanjali Singh Chanda, who previously resided in Hong Kong and now teaches at Yale University in the US. “Other sketches have the feel of Tibetan tankhas where the central character is in the middle and layers of circular panels around her depict the various new things that enlarge her isolated existence.”

At the moment, it’s difficult to predict which creative option will hold sway: works produced by someone who both writes and draws, or works emerging from collaborations between a particular writer and a particular artist (or group of artists, as was the case with “Lie”.) Publishers have balked at paying hefty up-front fees to illustrators, so the work requires more patience than taking on corporate or NG0 projects.

 

Tapping the traditional

Concerns over limited readership highlight the irony of contemporary developments in graphic story-telling in India. After all, this is a country with a rich tradition of local artists who tell stories with pictures. One prime example is the Patua artists in West Bengal, who still roam around with their long, colourful scrolls. Moreover, price was no barrier when it came to the popularity of Amar Chitra Katha (or “Immortal Captivating Stories”), an illustrated series launched in 1967 that conveyed the magic of Indian epics and history to generations of children and adults.

Meanwhile, some publishers have seized on the idea of bringing grassroots art forms into the realm of the modern graphic novel. By the end of 2010, Chennai-based Tara Books plans to issue “Sita’s Ramayana,” with illustrations provided by Moyna Chitrakar, a Patua artist and storyteller who resides in a village in the Midnapore district of West Bengal. The text was composed by Samhita Arni, a 26-year old screenwriter and novelist living in Bangalore.

“You’re halfway there with the Patuas. Their art is essentially narrative. We felt this is a form that could be nudged a little further into a contemporary space,” notes Gita Wolf, publisher of Tara Books. Chitrakar had already come up with the bulk of the illustrations when Arni was tapped for the text. By focusing on Sita, rather than her husband Ram, the book is meant as a “strong and compassionate commentary, an alternative version of the great epic which has a long tradition,” according to the publishers. But the process was definitely challenging. Ms. Chitrakar does not read or write, and Arni does not speak Bengali, the Patua artist’s mother tongue. The book was completed after a series of translated discussions, additional drawings and textual revisions.

 

The gender question

Overall, there are fewer women than men on India’s graphic literature scene. But as Amruta Patil points out, that’s fairly standard worldwide. Even the second issue of Comix India with the theme “Girl Power” featured only three female contributors out of a total of sixteen.

One of those tales, “Killer” by Rimi Chatterjee, hardly presents a rosy picture of female empowerment. Yet it does forge a certain rapport with the main character, in surprisingly few pages. A young woman falls in love with a rock star named Lucifer, drops out of school to follow him on tour, marries him, gets pregnant and has an abortion at his request. “When I wasn’t with him, I felt like a discarded toy,” she confesses. Her submissiveness and devotion receive scant reward. When Lucifer is murdered, his fans turn on the wife and hound her into prison.

A keener sense of self-awareness and poetry pervades Patil’s novel “Kari.” The book defies any quick summary. But it speaks of love between women, the bonds between the living and the almost-dead, and the struggle to be different while still cherishing parental love. On a lighter note, it mocks the self-important seriousness of India’s advertising industry.

Translated into French and Italian, the book also features some outstanding art. “She has mastery over creating atmospheres—deep, dark and beautiful atmospheres,” observes Banerjee, whose next work, a series of short pieces titled “The Harappa Files” will be published by HarperCollins in January 2011. Banerjee says that he is now retreating from the novel form, leaving that territory for further exploration by his peers.

 

Words vs images

Overall, one of the main problems lurking on the scene is a tendency to over-indulge in words. Visuals often suffer from verbose narratives. (One exception is “Moonward” by Appupen.) While some readers insist that they savor a “layered” approach that requires several readings, others find it a vexing exercise. Certainly, that problem is not limited to Indian authors. Witness the anthology called “When Kulbhushan Met Stockli,” with contributions from both Swiss and Indian authors. Financed by Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, it wallows in text.

At least one story, however, manages to poke fun at all the blabbing. In “My Swiss Warm Up,” by Anindya Roy and Rajiv Eipe, a bunch of Swiss teammates grow impatient with a boastful Bengali player who screws up on the field. “What happened?” demands one burly Swiss. The exhausted Indian replies, “Unfortunately, we Bengalis also have a habit of multi-tasking…In the last three minutes, while I was dribbling the ball ...I was also organizing my photo exhibition…writing a screenplay…trying to find an eco-friendly solution to the global food riots…improving our health care and education system, etc. etc.”

His speech is laughed off by the Swiss player. “Ya…Keep talking…blah blah blah yak yak yak.” Of course, they share a friendly beer afterwards.

“We’re going to see an improvement, in time,” maintains Chatterjee, who teaches graphic literature at Javadpur University in addition to working on her own pieces, such as “Killer.”

“One thing I have learned, as a writer, is to trust the picture.”