Stand Up, Comics!

The graphic book genre has taken interesting baby steps in India in the past decade

Given that my brothers and I were even as young children heavily into reading, it’s difficult to fathom what may have prompted my father – a reasonably typical Bengali middle-class man, a government servant – to start plying us with Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), Classics Illustrated and Tintin comics. The most likely explanation was that they were meant as sources of inspiration for my brother Orijit (at the time still spelt the ‘official’ way, Arijit), who had shown a prodigious talent for art at a very young age. Whatever it was, it paved a path of exploration for us that we have continued to travel on into our adulthood. If anything, Orijit has even been something of a trailblazer, as far as India is concerned – as a creator, as a mentor, and as a centre of gravity for the community of comics artists, writers, readers and scholars (yes, there are already those as well!) to develop around.

That community has, in the past decade or so, really started finding its feet. And just as every baby has its own individualistic way of growing up, the graphic book in India too has evolved in an idiosyncratic style. In this article, I plan to look at some of those special features that mark the local comics genre (different people refer to the products by different names – comics / comix, graphic novels or graphic books, illustrated texts, sequential art, visual narratives – but the terms are amorphously defined and usually interchangeable, and I’m using them as such). Due to the limits of my own reading, I am compelled to restrict this to comics in the English language. There are also, naturally, limitations of space and also of awareness and memory, so there are many wonderful works that have not found mention here.

Subject to Change

If you start exploring the Indian comics world, one of the first things that catch your attention is that many Indian comics of the serious kind have explored socio-political themes. This trend started with what is generally considered to be the granddaddy of them all, ‘The River of Stories’ (Orijit Sen, 1994), which was published by the environmental NGO Kalpavriksh and spoke of the tribals of the Narmada valley and their struggles to ward off the devastating effects of the Sardar Sarovar Dam project.

In later years, Vishwajyoti Ghosh made the Emergency the subject of his ‘Delhi Calm’ (2010). He also worked with writers and artists from Pakistan and Bangladesh to bring out ‘This Side, That Side’ (2013), an anthology of stories about the Partition, from the perspective of a generation that had not lived through it. Political upheaval from Kashmir to Kerala has been fodder for comics creators. The latest in this list is ‘Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir’ (2015), by Kashmiri artist Malik Sajad, which looks at the conflict in the strife-torn state from an insider’s view. Sumit Kumar’s ‘Amar Bari Tomar Bari Naxalbari’ (2015) is a mildly satirical take on the roots of the Maoist movement in the exploitative tea gardens of north Bengal. The recently-released ‘Indira’ (2018; text by Devapriya Roy, art by Priya Kuriyan), bookends Ghosh’s 2010 work by telling the story of a younger Indira Gandhi and her rise to power.

Two books published by Navayana – ‘Bhimayana’ (2011; art by Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam, story by Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand) and ‘A Gardener in the Wasteland’ (2013; story by Srividya Natarajan, art by Aparajita Ninan) – delved into the lives and teachings of Bhimrao Ambedkar and Jotiba Phule, respectively.

The perils of a consumerist world are at the centre of the Halahala books by Appupen (‘Moonward’, 2009; ‘Legends of Halahala’, 2012; ‘Aspyrus’, 2014; and ‘The Snake and the Lotus’, 2018) while ‘Our Toxic World’ (2010; art by Priya Kuriyan, text by me, Aniruddha Sen Gupta) looks at the deleterious effects of toxins from various sources in our everyday lives.

Gaysi, a Mumbai-based magazine with an LGBTQ focus, brought out “a queer graphic anthology” in 2015. The same year, the Goethe-Institut of the Max Mueller Bhavan collaborated with Zubaan Books to come up with a woman-themed collection called ‘Drawing the Line’.

But not all Indian graphic books are on socio-political themes. Mythology – in particular, the Hindu epics Ramayan and Mahabharat – also acts as source material. Amruta Patil takes a deep dive into the latter with her ‘Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean’ (2012) and ‘Sauptik: Blood and Flowers‘ (2016). Samhita Arni teams up with patua artist Moyna Chitrakar to look at the former through feminist eyes in ‘Sita’s Ramayana’ (2015). Vikram Balagopal’s ‘Simian’ (2014) is a fangs-bared, claws-out biography of one of the few characters who spans both epics, Hanuman. For Amar Chitra Katha, of course, these epics have formed the mother lode since the 1960s, but they finally seem to have run out of stories to mine from them, and have now moved on to other inspirations.

There have, of course, also been books that have their own individualistic plotlines. ‘Corridor’ (2004), which one could say re-ignited the movement in India was, like all of Sarnath Banerjee’s work, a tale of quirky characters caught up in “the fragmented reality of urban life”. Banerjee followed up ‘Corridor’ with ‘The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers’ (2007), another story in the same mould, set in Kolkata. The next big thing in Indian comics, ‘Kari’ (Amruta Patil, 2008), was one of the few Indian comics that tried on what is a common theme amongst graphic novels of the western world – the exploration of the inner life of its protagonist. In ‘The Hotel at the End of the World’ (2009), Parismita Singh did a comic version of the hoary travellers’ tales, set in north-eastern India.

One indicator of the potential diversity of the genre is the occasional blooming of the offbeat. Books such as ‘Sudershan (Chimpanzee)’ (2012; story by Rajesh Devraj, art by Meren Imchen), about the rise and fall of an ape in the jungles of Bollywood; ‘Ghosts of Kingdom Past’ (Harsho, 2015), a densely-drawn ghost story set in Kolkata; and ‘When Crows are White’ (2012; art by Garima Gupta, text by Jerry Pinto), an urban fable about the blackness of crows.

Besides the two mentioned a few paras above, anthologies have also been very much a feature of the Indian comics scene. The fact of the matter is, creating an entire book-length comic on one’s own is a huge amount of work which does not reap any great gains, so few people are able to figure out the logistics to make it worth their while. But there are many comics artists, especially young ones, yearning to use the medium to express themselves, and anthologies provide a useful channel for them to convert their ideas into ink-and-paper reality. Apart from those mentioned in earlier paragraphs, ‘The Pao Anthology’ (2012, optimistically subtitled Volume 1), ‘The Obliterary Journal’ (2013), ‘Dogs!: An Anthology’ (2014), and others of their ilk have brought the work of many unknown creators to light. In 2016, ‘First Hand: Graphic Non-fiction from India’ added to that burgeoning list; the second volume, themed ‘Exclusion’, has just been released and features more new writers and artists.

Putting it Out There

As is evident from the list above, India’s comics scene abounds in individual creators, with a smattering of writer-artist duos. There aren’t too many ‘comics factories’, with writers, inkers and fillers each doing their assigned jobs in an assembly-line environment. There have been a few which have been fairly successful, ACK spearheading them. But even in their case, it’s not quite the conveyor-belt-with-anonymous-workers approach. Several ACK artists have recognisable styles that people associate them with. ACK Media, the company that brings out the Amar Chitra Katha comics, also produces Tinkle magazine, which includes a number of long-running and one-off short comics.

Besides ACK, the Indian market has seen such publishers as Indrajal, Raj Comics and Diamond Comics. A gang of international heavyweights led by Richard Branson, Shekhar Kapur and new-age guru Deepak Chopra got together to launch Virgin Comics in 2006, evidently more as a plaything for Chopra’s son Gautama (who characterised himself as Gotham Chopra) than with much serious intent. Re-branded as Liquid Comics, it evaporated within a few years. A recent entrant is Campfire Comics which, despite working with Indian writers and artists, has quite an eclectic catalogue, mixing a soupçon of Indian mythology subjects with large doses of European classics, works by Shakespeare, Greek mythology and biographies of famous people.

One startlingly different aspect of the Indian comics industry from its counterparts in other parts of the world has been the involvement of many of the biggest publishers, who would not go near such titles in the international market. Penguin (‘Corridor’ and other works by Sarnath Banerjee, ‘The Hotel at the End of the World’, ‘The Pao Anthology’, and several other books), Harper Collins (‘Kari’ and other works by Amruta Patil), Hachette (‘Sudershan (Chimpanzee)’), Sage (‘Our Toxic World’) and Scholastic (‘When Crows are White’) have all tried their hand at comics publishing here. So have several of the smaller publishers of alternative books such as Yoda Press (‘This Side, That Side‘ and the ‘First Hand‘ anthologies), Zubaan (‘Drawing the Line’), Navayana (‘Bhimayana’ and ‘A Gardener in the Wasteland’), and Blaft (‘The Obliterary Journal’, ‘Moonward’).

There has also been a small coterie of hopeful indie publishers of comics. Sarnath Banerjee started Phantomville in 2007, but like most pioneers, it petered out quite quickly. Captain Bijli Comics got off the ground with ‘Mice Will Be Mice’ by its founder Vidyun Sabhaney and artist Shohei Imura in 2012, and has published the Dogs! anthology since, besides being associated with the ‘First Hand’ anthologies. Another interesting player in the market is Kokaachi, which has come out with several volumes of anthologies of shorts such as ‘Twelve’ and ‘Mixtape‘, some of them in its earlier avatar of Manta Ray. This bubbling cauldron of creative individuals and collectives gave rise to the recent Indie Comix Fest, which was held as a counterpoint to the more corporate Comic-Cons in several cities in May this year.

The Audience is Growing

Comics have largely been seen as a young person’s pastime. But the current crop of graphic books is challenging that notion and is moving into the mind space of older people as well. But the audience is growing in another way as well. As millennials age, they take less baggage with them about the place in the literary universe of these illustrated books, and as a result, there are more and more people for whom the fascination with comics stays, as it has with Orijit and me, well into adult life.