Follow the River of Stories: Comics, Folk Culture, and Social Justice in Delhi

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FOLLOW THE RIVER OF STORIES: COMICS, FOLK CULTURE, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN DELHI

Jeremy Stoll

Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology, Indiana University December 2012

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Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Doctoral Committee ______

Pravina Shukla, Ph.D.

______

Henry Glassie

______

Michael Dylan Foster

______

Susan Seizer

May 23rd, 2012

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Acknowledgements

Although my fieldwork only lasted four months, I feel responsible to the people that I met in Delhi in that time, and to the creators within India’s comics culture. While in the field, many of these artists brought me into their homes and studio spaces, into their creative process and into their own understanding of the world. I would like to single out Orijit Sen, who warmly welcomed me into his studio and into Delhi’s comics community; Tapas Guha, who bravely brought me into his home and studio to witness his creativity in practice; Vishwajyoti Ghosh, who offered tea and insightful conversation at his dining room table; Parismita Singh, who questioned my questions and helped me stay critical; Amitabh Kumar, who made me feel less a researcher and more a friend; Vidyun

Sabhaney, who offered her friendship, enthusiasm, and creative insight side by side; and Sarnath

Banerjee, whose friendship and regular walks I miss to this day. Through thoughts and words, they generously helped me to understand India’s visual and comics culture through their eyes. As a scholar, it’s my job not just to contextualize their work and engage readers in a process of growing their own understanding of these stories, but also to live up to their kindness. In some ways, I can never live up to that generosity. This work is the beginning of that process of living up to the gifts of kindness and knowledge that they gave to me.

This is also the beginning of my living up the scholars and teachers who helped me along the way. I am particularly grateful to Professors Henry Glassie, Pravina Shukla, and Michael Dylan

Foster, who each, in their own way, were essential in my getting to Delhi and processing my experiences into something written. I am especially grateful to Pravina for working closely with me as I have gone through the many steps of getting a doctoral degree in Folklore; her incisive feedback and unfailing support have been a necessity. I am also grateful to Henry for having faith in my comics research and always helping me sort through my thoughts so clearly, even when I did not want to, and to Michael, for his comprehensive feedback and support. Last, I am grateful for the v support of my minor advisor, Susan Seizer, who has helped me to stay enthusiastic about my research while continuing to ground my work in Communication and Culture. When I look back on my doctoral coursework and research, I am happy to remember the many supportive comments, warm conversations, and hugs. Thank you so much for helping me along the way.

I must also acknowledge the help of my friends and family, first and foremost those three who have read multiple versions of this work: David Lewis, Jennifer Heusel, and Valerie Wieskamp.

Thank you for all of your feedback, help, and support in repeatedly revising and restructuring this work. I owe you each a chocolate babka and much, much more. Michelle Melhouse was always helpful, and I cannot express my thanks for having such a wonderful friend and Graduate Recorder.

Thank you to every one of my friends who helped me through the steps of creating this, especially

Brenna Cyr for being adventurous, Steve Stanzak for listening, Ozan Y. Say for commiserating,

Sarah Dees for clarifying, Tim Dolan for helping me print out that first, rough copy, and Stephanie

Fida for always being awesome. Much gratitude goes to the friends that I made in the process of going to Delhi, too, particularly Sanjay and Rina, who provided a home, Vidyun Sabhaney who fixed my camera and took me to a Tegan and Sara concert on Thanksgiving, and above all Puja Batra-

Wells and Shweta Wahi who made it even feasible for me to be in Delhi in the first place. And thank you to my family, as well: Sara for helping me sort my thoughts, Mary Lyn for helping me be calm, and my brother Tim. In particular, I am grateful to my mom, for her continued support in everything I do, and to my dad, for helping me through a rough time when his time was rougher, and for always being so clear-headed in his heart. I could never have made this without each of you in my life.

I also want to thank the many institutions that supported me throughout my academic career and research. I am unendingly grateful for the financial and overall support I received from the India

Studies Program at Indiana University, in the form of a Dissertation Travel Grant funded by the vi

TATA Group, contacts with the American Institute for Indian Studies in New Delhi, and general support while in the field. In addition, my research would not have been possible without the training I received in Hindi during the summer of 2009 at the University of Wisconsin Madison’s

South Asian Language Institute (SASLI), as funded by a Foreign Language and Area Studies

Fellowship through the Center for the Study of Global Change at Indiana University. Upon returning to the United States, I received a fellowship through the Caroline and Erwin Swann

Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon in 2011 that supported my doctoral work and enabled further research at the Library of Congress. I would like to thank Martha Kennedy especially, as she guided me through the Library’s holdings and helped me to discover many examples of comics and cartooning in India that I otherwise may not have encountered. Finally, in the spring of 2012, I was chosen to present at the Modern South Asia Workshop at Yale University, among a group of incredibly talented and insightful young scholars. For that experience, from which I gained a great deal of helpful feedback and a greater understanding of Asian Studies as a field, I am incredibly grateful to the South Asian Studies Council and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for

International and Area Studies at Yale.

Last, I want to dedicate this in part to my friend Kara Bayless, who passed suddenly during the fall of 2010 when I was staying in Delhi. She should have gotten to live much longer, and we should have taken the Tran-Siberian Rail together, but I am infinitely grateful for the time that we had as friends.

In the end, though, this manuscript is dedicated to the many artists, authors, and editors with whom I worked, who were always gracious, often brilliant, and more patient than I could ever ask anyone to be with someone asking questions like ‘what is comics?’ Although not every voice is present here, in this work, each one was essential to helping me gain an understanding of the current comics scene in New Delhi and in India, more broadly. I came away with a great deal of good vii memories, the beginnings of friendships, and memories of some of the best chats, especially about comics, that I will ever have. You each showed me more kindness than anyone has a right to, and I hope that the words that follow will help me start to pay back in kind.

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Preface

This dissertation is dedicated to celebrating the creativity of a group of artists named the Pao

Collective and to their ability to craft meaning and community through the visual-narrative medium of comics. They are centered in the mega city of Delhi, though their work takes some members throughout India and others to cities in Europe and around the world. Their ranks include a wide array of people, with different experiences, storytelling styles, and skills, but five make up their core. They include: Orijit Sen, the creator of India’s first graphic novel and a foundation for this creative community; Sarnath Banerjee, a conversational master of storytelling who found a space for comics in book publishing; Amitabh Kumar, a media researcher and mural artist who sowed the first seeds of Pao; Parismita Singh, a visual storyteller and education researcher who has expanded the possible audiences for comics, and Vishwajyoti Ghosh, a political cartoonist and international comics creator dedicated to more socially invested stories.

As a scholar and author, I am committed to investigating the practices of everyday life, with a focus on visual storytelling and community. As a comics creator, though, I am further interested in how people are able to build and sustain community through the creation of visual narratives, especially comics. Having a foot in both worlds has been invaluable in my research, something that many with whom I spoke noted. For instance, in teasing out a common theme or approach among the graphic novels that had been released by 2010, Sarnath Banerjee pointed out that, “It’s very difficult to say that there’s a common thread. But maybe I don’t realize it. Maybe we don’t realize it, but maybe you can, as somebody who has an outsider’s objectivity, who has a better understanding. Maybe I should be asking you.” As a creator myself, I am able to view creators’ perspectives from outside of their community, while still invested in many of the same problems and concerns that they are. This perspective has helped me to work towards a comics ix insider’s understanding of Delhi’s comics culture based on hours of conversation and generosity from the members of the Pao Collective and many other creators, publishers, and others.

My goal and hope is that the following pages provide a sense of what it has been like for these authors and artists to create comics and build community in Delhi between 2010 and 2012.

While the number of graphic novels and comics continued to increase over these years, so too did the Pao Collective and other creators face many of the same problems that have troubled the medium in India. Accordingly, this book is dedicated to celebrating the creativity of this group of artists named the Pao Collective and to their ability to craft meaning and community through the visual-narrative medium of comics.

The Story Teller

Yet, this research began long before I traveled to India and met each of the amazing people that this book will introduce. In fact, it began in the seeds I sowed as a young adult when I first started making comics. Although the illustrations may have been crude, I quickly realized that I was intensely interested in the ability of images to communicate stories. So, upon enrolling at the

University of Michigan, I started looking for ways to incorporate my interests into my academic career. I majored in Creative Writing and Art, with a focus on screen-printing in Fiber Arts, in pursuit of my passions. As a textile artist, comics creator, and writer, I was intensely interested in the overlap between visual and narrative art.

However, I was only able to build a sense of confidence in my interests upon meeting graphic novelist, professor, researcher, and Professor Phoebe Gloeckner. At a friend’s insisting, I enrolled in a course on creating comics with Gloeckner, and I honed my skills, including how to use of a pen and nibs, how to take advantage of brushwork, washes, different kinds of marks, x and, above all, how to tell a story in the comics form. Through her course, I composed and revised two separate six-page comics narratives, each of which would be published in anthologies that Gloeckner and several students developed for press. The summer afterwards, I assisted Gloeckner in researching her work on the lives of women murdered in the city of

Ciudad-Juarez, Mexico. As a fiber artist and, by then, future folklorist, I assisted her in researching palmistry, mythology, and methods for making the dolls that were to be the central part of her story about Ciudad-Juarez. By witnessing Gloeckner’s creative process, I recognized the importance of the medium’s ability to illustrate everyday life in a compelling way.

As a student at Indiana University’s Folklore Institute, I built upon my multidisciplinary background in visual narratives and ethnography in my MA work and thesis, “Through the Page

Darkly: Japanese Comic Art and Vernacular Religion.” By illustrating connections between traditional Japanese storytelling and the experience of reading and writing comics, I showed that manga, like earlier storytelling traditions, negotiate the relationship between the individual and community. Furthermore, based on the example of Junji Itoh’s Uzumaki series, I argued that manga both fulfill those needs for readers and call them to take action on social injustice.

Meanwhile, I continued making comics on the side. I wrote and illustrated three separate six to seven-page stories and published them in collections side by side with my own prose stories, as a zine I titled Narrative. I self-published using Photoshop to edit images and a printer to make copies as a means to stay focused as a creator while still analyzing the very kinds of things I hoped to create.

During the defense of my MA Thesis, my committee chair, Professor Henry Glassie, pointed out that many of the themes in which I was interested seemed likely to be present in

Indian comics culture. In particular, my interests in environmental issues seemed especially xi salient, and I quickly began searching out whatever I could find on comics made in India. At first, all that I could find were many, many references to and copies of issues from the Amar

Chitra Katha series. I read multiple articles where scholars enthusiastically analyzed these books and their potential for future research, but I felt there had to be more to India’s comics culture. In performing further research online, I discovered a name and a title: The River of Stories by Orijit

Sen, India’s first graphic novel. Reading the electronic version of River that I was able to access online was a revelation, in that Sen tells the story of a journalist who interviews and writes an article revealing the abuse of adivasi tribes in the building of the Narmada River Dam.

However, I was troubled by the labeling of this work as a ‘graphic novel’ because, although generally rooted in creator’s personal perspectives of their work, the term is often used to justify the medium as a genre of literature. The truth for me, as a creator, was more obvious: that comics is a medium based in certain reading and creative practices. In researching Sen and graphic novels in India, I discovered a group of creators who similarly argued for comics a medium or art form independent of any other: The Pao Collective. Through their blog, I encountered the interviews and essays that inspired me to apply for funding to travel to Delhi to do fieldwork. In particular, it was Sarnath Banerjee, another comics creator and member of Pao, and Sen who inspired me, as they argued that comics is an independent medium or art form.

I wrote both Sen and Banerjee by email, and they responded in kind, encouraging and expressing an interest in my research. As a creator with only a few published comics under my belt, though, receiving their emails was astounding. Sen in particular encouraged me to come and meet him when I arrived in Delhi so that he could help me meet people and get my footing. Both his and Sen’s gracious support made the process of traveling across the world much easier, and they each helped me to establish myself within comics culture there. xii

The Story to Be Told

It is September 7th and I am walking through the warm, dense air of a sunny afternoon in

Safdarjung Development Area (SDA) in Delhi. I am on my way to meet Orijit Sen in his studio in Hauz Khas Village. His graphic novel, The River of Stories, set a strong precedent as the long form comics narrative in India, while his work as co-founder of People Tree has made the shop that sells fairly traded goods a Delhi establishment. Through both, Sen works alongside many others to make people aware of social injustice through creative arts, whether it be a comics narrative or designs for clothes and other goods.

I remember all this as I pass through the small SDA market that lies just down the road from the larger, main one, and the shops where I shop for dried, sweet pumpkin, and sodas to soothe my rumbling belly. I have come to Delhi to meet and talk with contemporary comics creators who argue for comics as a medium independent of any other. Sen, as the first one I was able to contact, is the first I meet, and, having read his River of Stories, I am already in awe. I am nervously sorting through my thoughts, organizing what I know about Sen so that I can ask the right questions, the questions that will help me to comprehend how he understands his storytelling.

In River, Sen tells the story of a journalist who meets with and learns from a community of adivasi tribal villagers who are dealing with the injustices of the Narmada River Project. The journalist enters their community to document their struggle, after encountering the story through his own housekeeper, who provides a doorway for readers into the narratives of these communities and of their mythologies. Sen represents the mythological as an important part of the community and of the novel, as the reader is led through several creation-related myths that xiii are related through and alongside the main story. His meshing of social issue, rich storytelling, and masterful images has brought me here, fundamentally because he is working with a medium that most people do not even know exists: Indian comics.

As I sort my thoughts, the dust accumulates on my skin and hair, but I am charmed by the wind in the trees of Rose Park and small shrines to Ganesh and Lakshmi on trees, a sign of the upcoming festival season. Within ten minutes, I am on the road to Hauz Khas Village, passing a local temple and several Mughal ruins, each finely formed structure of arches and long-lost tile work guarded with a fence but open to the public. Beyond River, Sen has continued to shape the comics medium in India through his membership in and collaboration with the Pao Collective.

As a group, their mission is to catalyze India’s comics culture by demonstrating its potential as a medium independent of art or literature, as well as the simpler goal of making stories alongside each other.

A taxi honks from behind me, and I step aside into the dirt beside the road to let it pass.

In organizing my thoughts and sorting through what I know of these people who I have yet to meet, I have lost track of time. I am already entering Hauz Khas Village, passing parked cars and rubbish heaps, the entrances to Deer Park and Rose Park, then the fence that marks the village and the arts institute just beside it. I have already followed a branch off of the main road, which itself is barely large enough for two small auto-rickshaws to pass side-by-side, and I am passing the Naivedyam South Indian restaurant. Soon, after taking one left just past Naivedyam, then another around the corner, and yet one more to enter a smaller street, I am passing Yodakin

Books, where I soon discover proprietor and head of Yoda Press Arpita Das’ impressive collection of independent press publications, including many of Delhi’s graphic novels. I find xiv myself standing in front of the house that Sen described on the phone, and I begin walking up the stairs to reach his and People Tree’s studio.

Through the many conversations that Sen and I have there, I will hear of and then meet many of the creators in Delhi’s comics community. Each of these conversations will happen in

English, although by this point, I have trained for two years in speaking, reading, and writing

Hindi. By the time I have almost reached the top of the stairwell to the studio, though, all my qualifications flee my mind, and I am terrified. Orijit and his wife Gurpreet, who is equally a part of running People Tree, welcome me warmly, and after a few moments, it becomes clear that I should not have let my nerves get the better of me. Already, Orijit and I are sitting in his office, sipping tea, and exchanging stories about my trip and then our experiences with comics. To one side is the door to the rest of the studio, and to the other side is a pair of doors leading to a balcony that overlooks the street below. I feel the sparse wind from the window as we begin the first of many long talks that will be the cornerstone of my fieldwork in Delhi.

The Method of Telling

Through my conversations with Sen and these other artists, I go on to meet and interview over twenty artists, authors, editors, and shop owners in Delhi. In performing these interviews, I have relied on ethnographic fieldwork and research with comics creators in Delhi, India, in order to demonstrate how they adapt the comics medium to their own creative repertoires, to their communities, and to the issues or ideas that they each find compelling. Although I worked with over 20 artists, authors, editors, fans, and otherwise, I have focused on one group of five who represent some of the strongest voices in both Delhi and India’s comics culture. In particular, I focus on the Pao Collective because of their combination of masterful storytelling and their xv outspoken approach to the comics medium as one that is neither literature or art, but something else entirely.

Throughout, my analysis is thus grounded in those conversations through the words of

Orijit Sen and other comics creators. As research grounded in this community, I have structured my dissertation around their voices in order to investigate the central tensions of Delhi’s comics culture with the knowledge and context that a creator’s perspective provides. Accordingly, each chapter is guided by one of the five members of the Pao Collective, barring one exception where all of their voices come together to discuss what makes for an excellent comics story.

In those interviews, I talk to these brilliant and engaging men and women who create comics and graphic novels about so many things: what comics means, how they relate to storytelling, where comics started and will go in India, how they find meaning in telling stories through comics, where comics overlaps with activism, and more. A few creators, like Sen, will open their studios and homes, even their creative processes, so that I can bear witness to how they turn the idea of a story into a visual narrative that uses images, text, and their overlap to craft a medium that is so much more. In terms of these interviews, I spoke with Sen about his creative process and comics culture in the studio for the People Tree fair trade store located in

Hauz Khas Village; conversations with other creators, including Sarnath Banerjee among others, took place either in their homes or in local cafes during the same time period.

Follow the River and a Quick Note about Language

Through their knowledge and insight, I have approached the comics medium in India through comparative and international perspectives, and by understanding comics narratives there as both material and narrative culture. In the process, I work from a folkloristic approach and so analyze xvi the movement of these visual narratives through creation, circulation, and consumption in the context of their particular community. In continuing this research, I look forward to continuing to receive feedback and gain insight from these creators. I view them as the experts of comics culture in Delhi and India; my goal is merely to buttress their words with a strong sense of the context for their creativity.

Finally, a quick note about language: in the following pages, I will be discussing interviews that sometimes involved words in Hindi as well as English. I will thus be putting

Hindi words in italics to demarcate them as such, in the context of much longer interviews that were almost exclusively in English. In addition, citations in this manuscript are done according to contemporary styles of citing comics works. While publishers, such Marvel or Raj Comics, are not italicized, graphic novels and series titles, such as The River of Stories or Bahadur, are.

Individual issues of longer series titles are placed in quotes, and any works involving more than one author will have information on all authors provided.

In addition, while several terms for comics exist, stemming from multiple approaches to these visual narratives as a genre of literature, an art form, or even hybrids of literature and art, I argue that comics represents a medium for storytelling. This is based in part on the views of the creators who make up the Pao Collective, who argue that comics are more than merely literature or a fine art. Yet, many of these same creators use the language of art and aesthetics to describe their work; I thus use the term medium to express this difficult balance of languages and support an understanding of comics as independent of other media.

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Jeremy Stoll

Follow the River of Stories: Comics, Folk Culture, and Social Justice in New Delhi

Follow the River of Stories illustrates the importance of visual narratives as a form of social commentary on development and social injustice in contemporary India, which is the world’s fourth largest producer of comic books and graphic novels. Little research has been done on India’s thriving comics culture, beyond several studies of the series Amar Chitra Katha, or Immortal Picture Stories, which only published regularly until the late 1980’s. In contrast, this study focuses on the recent rise of graphic novels through the lens of one artists’ group, the Pao Collective, who argue for comics as an independent art form. In the process, I demonstrate the power of these visual narratives through an ethnographic approach utilizing participant observation and in-depth interviews. Accordingly, this research is based upon fieldwork performed in 2010, during which I interviewed and worked with artists, writers, editors, publishers, and readers in New Delhi. Grounded throughout by the voices of Pao’s members, I investigate how Delhi’s comics creators push for a reorientation of communities around local contexts and increasing social awareness. I begin by historicizing the comics medium in India, and then work toward a definition of comics built upon the experiences and critical responses of individual creators. I then explore how these creators construct their narratives through appeals to folk culture in order to build and sustain community. Finally, I point out how these artists and authors are able to increase social awareness through their storytelling, with a focus on environmental issues in particular. My dissertation thus links social resistance to the creation of visual narratives and communities that organize around those stories. Accordingly, my work shows the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship in understanding how communities engage with globalization and social and environmental injustice.

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Table of Contents:

Chapter 1: Introduction 1 India’s Comics Culture 4 Scholarship of India’s Comics 6 A Folkloristic Approach 10 The Pao Collective 14 More than Words and Pictures Combined 21 Celebrating Comics in Delhi 23

Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Comics 27 Amitabh Kumar 28 The Roots of the Comics Form in India 32 Western Comics and Education 36 Nationalism and the Amar Chitra Katha Series 39 Bahadur, Tinkle, and the Appeal to Everyday Life 42 Regionalization and the Superhero Genre 45 Creating the Comics Shelf 48 The Pao Collective Returns 51 A History of Creative Excellence 53

Chapter 3: Defining the Form 58 Parismita Singh 59 Comics as Language 63 The Graphic Novel 68 The Dangers of Comics 74 Comics as Storytelling 76 The Limits of the Graphic Novel 79 Comics as Practice 82 A Definition of Comics 84

Chapter 4: Mastering the Form 89 Criticizing Comics 91 Comics Creator as Auteur 96 Comics Creator as Master Storyteller 101 A Special Comics Story 107 Transformative Potential 111 Social Responsibility 115 Masters of the Comics Form 121 Stories with the Spice of Life 126 xix

Chapter 5: The Appeal to Folk Culture 130

Sarnath Banerjee 132 What is Folklore? 135 Indian Comics Tradition 141 Why Folk Culture? 145 Finding Meaning 151 Why Comics? 156 The Localization of Comics Storytelling 160 Telling Stories about Human Experience 164

Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 168 Orijit Sen 170 The Process of Visual Storytelling 172 Parts of the Whole 176 The Individual in Creativity 183 Technology and Community 186 Delhi Comics Community 189 Finding a Way to Thrive 193

Chapter 7: Illustrating Social Awareness 196 Vishwajyoti Ghosh 199 Storytelling for Communities 202 The Power to Support Creativity 205 A Tradition of Individual Invention 208 The Power to Educate and Inculcate 211 Overcoming Difficulties 214 The Power to Unite and Divide 218 Reaching Out through Storytelling 219 The Power to Tell Stories Responsibly 223 Socially Active Comics 228 Building Just Communities 231

Chapter 8: Conclusion 236 The Insights of the Pao Collective 238 Counting Our Losses 243 Pull Back the Curtain 245

Bibliography 247 Images 266 1

Chapter 1: Introduction

In February of 2011, downtown Delhi was witness to the first annual Comic Con India. With multiple, simultaneous sessions, including book launches, workshops, and special events, the

Con was attended by about 15,000 people, with several participating in costume contests (Dodd

2012).i There, a wide variety of comics publishers came together, from non-governmental organizations with comics on social justice, to Amar Chitra Katha and their educational comics, companies just publishing their first volumes, individual artists, and giants of India’s comic culture.

The company behind this conference, Twenty Onwards Media, is a media house in print, music, and television. They describe their mission statement as being “dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the comic and graphic art medium” (Comic Con India 2012).

Comic Con India has been conceptualized as a platform for comics publishing, especially for independent firms and aspiring writers and cartoonists who want to share their work with comics fans. For many, the first con was exciting largely because it was so new. As one reviewer of the

Con noted, “Ten years ago, hardly anyone in India knew there was something called Comic

Con. Five years ago, Comic Con taking place in India would’ve been a distant dream for a small number in society. Even a couple of years back, an Indian comic con is something which would’ve still been unimaginable. Everything changed last year [2011]” (Bagaria 2012). Comic

Con India was a landmark event because it provided a space for creators, fans, and publishers to come together and celebrate the comics medium. Furthermore, that first Comic Con was an accomplishment for many creators in India, after several failed attempts to initiate conventions in other cities, and it has expanded to many other cities, events, and even a portable version called

Comic Con Express (Nair 2012).ii

Meanwhile, the Con this past year of 2012 showed signs of a quickly growing creative community as attendance rose to 35,000 (Bhushan 2012). Not only did many of the activities from the previous year continue, including costume contests and sessions by new publishers alongside more established ones, but its scale also grew to more than eighty participants, twenty book launches, and thirty-five sessions (Sharma 2012). In addition to local publishers and artists,

American creators Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, attended and spoke about their experiences with the comics medium (Image 1-1). Alongside the release of the first issue of the

Indian Comics Journal, Gary Groth, the founder of the original Comics Journal spoke, as well as

Chris Oliveros, founder of Drawn and Quarterly publishers. In a blog post describing his experiences with the Crumbs, Sen emphasized his astonishment at both meeting such big names in comics and bonding with them as fellow comics creators. As he writes in “Guiding God through Daryaganj,”

“[T]he Crumbs proved to be even more inspirational up close, in the flesh, than as distant divinities—for they possess a quality that has nothing to do with media hype. It’s a quality that comes from elsewhere—from their immense personal and political honesty, from their lifelong commitment to their craft, and from the depth of their partnership as artists, lovers and grandparents…I felt privileged to be able to show them some of my work. Robert didn’t say too much, but the way he looked at my drawings was very gratifying. He didn’t just look. He LOOKED – his eyes behind those owlish glasses roving over the pages, drinking in every detail, not missing a thing. We exchanged a few technical notes about perspective and tones and that sort of thing, and even some about balancing the demands of work and family! Finally, he said with just a little mischief in his eyes “I love the way you draw trees. I think I’m going to steal your way of drawing trees!” Steal my way of drawing trees…indeed! Nothing would please me more, God!” (Sen 2012)

These figures’ presence provided a certain validation for organizers, fans, and creators because through this con, India’s comics scene is able to form connections with international comics culture, as well as publishers in other areas of the world and with other specialties.

At the same time, their presence highlighted some of the tensions within the comics community in Delhi, as well as India more broadly. For some critics, like Shone Sathish Babu, the Crumbs represented the highlight of the entire Con. “The artist’s role here, going by the

3 nominees short-listed for the awards, seemed reduced to that of a Photoshop-android – a technical virtuoso churning out picture perfect panels that only serve as a means, not even a simulacrum of an artistic end. It seems like our graphic novelists do not take inspiration from anything apart from other graphic novels, which probably explains the grease-monkey-ish treatment of the plot, the writing, and even the image aesthetic” (Sathish 2012). Although

Sathish seems overly derisive and negative about Indian comics, his criticism points out one of the central concerns underlying the Comic Con India, namely that what many view as comics’ nascent stage may in fact merely be its failure.

However, as Jatin Varma, the founder of 20 Onwards Media and Comic Con India, notes, the presence of the Crumbs was more important to a larger shift in comics culture in India:

“‘You can’t create a superhero all the time, especially when you come from a country where people believe in numerous Gods who have superpowers of their own. So, by making comics more realistic and closer to normal life, we can target a niche area” (Sharma 2012). Turning to more realistic storytelling provides a means to move beyond the strongest precedents, comics that tended to be more educational or draw on pulp genres of literature. Accordingly, the author of a book that premiered at the 2012 conference, Chairman Meow and the Protectors of the

Proletariat, stated that “‘Things like Raj Comics [a superhero focused publisher] have more kitsch value today than anything else. People are moving away from mythology, which dominated the genre” (Arora 2012). Contemporary comics culture in India is thus dealing with anxiety about how to balance its own history with the potential for a future. Although much of the marketing of comics and graphic novels continues to target children through educational themes, storytelling that illustrates peoples’ lived experiences and engages with local communities provides a means to do so.iii

What sets this event apart from other comic cons is not just the cultural context, nor the urgency that many creators feel when discussing a need for creative space and community.

Unlike comic cons in the West, which tend to occur in public convention centers and other generally public spaces, the Comic Con in India has been scheduled this year and the previous one in downtown Delhi’s Dilli Haat, a self-described folk art park modeled on the traditional weekly markets of Indian culture. Dilli Haat is normally the site of a folk arts and crafts market, including regional food stands, handlooms, handicrafts, and cultural events or activities. Its stalls are allotted to traditional Indian craftsmen for fifteen days, so that they can be available to visitors for demonstrating their craft and displaying or selling their wares (“Dilli Haat” 2012).

Situating the largest community event for comics creators, fans, and publishers in this place demonstrates a central theme of this dissertation, namely the overlap between folk and comics culture.

India’s Comics Culture

Historically, Indian comics creators have moved from merely imitating Western comic books to producing narratives that attempted to adapt the form and content to Indian audiences and culture. Although India trails just behind the United States, Japan, and Europe in comics production, few of this country’s comics circulate to international audiences (Hawley 1995). In the past, mainly the educational comics of the Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories) series were available outside of India, and the increasing regionalization of comics narratives during the late 1980s led to the end of their publishing new issues (Rao 2001).iv However, in recent years, a group of graphic novelists in Delhi have been working to transform the comics medium in India; this transformation is centered on understanding comics as storytelling

5 grounded in local communities. The graphic novel form has allowed these authors to transform comics into a kind of storytelling for and about particular communities and their everyday lives.

By grounding their work in local communities and lived reality, these creators are able to craft urgent and compelling narratives. Many of Delhi’s comics creators thus craft a comics medium that directly relates to audiences’ daily lives via folk culture; in the process, they demonstrate comics’ importance and credibility as a medium. Doing so also provides them with a greater chance of making a livelihood from their work, while similarly demonstrating that adults can be fans and even artisans of the comics form. These include the work of Orijit Sen, whose The River of Stories arguably represents India’s first graphic novel, or long-form comics narrative, and the creators behind Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability, which CNN rated as one of the top five international, political graphic novels in 2011 (CNN.com 2011; Image 1-2).

Likely as a result of this work, holding the second annual Indian Comic Con in the folk arts venue of Dilli Haat does make sense. The Haat is relatively central without being caught up in much of the traffic congested areas such as Connaught Place or Raj Path. There are already food venues on site, and the Haat is regularly used by artists to show and sell their wares (“Dilli Haat”

2012). The difference between the traditional marketplace and Delhi’s Comic Con is certainly an important one, but the connections between folk art and comics are inevitably stronger.

In the following pages, I explore those connections and the seeming contradiction of grounding a mass medium like comics in the expressive culture and practices of day-to-day life. I focus on creators in Delhi who have argued for understanding comics as a medium independent of literature or art (Overdorf 2010). In particular, this work focuses on the efforts of one particular artists’ group, the Pao Collective, which includes Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee,

Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Parismita Singh, and Amitabh Kumar at the core and many other creators

6 connected to them. These creators, among others, draw connections to a variety of influences, from traditional storytelling to visual arts, everyday experiences, and artisanal models of creativity. By focusing on and deeply situating their stories within particular communities,

Delhi’s comics writers and artists are able to argue against cultural and other assumptions about the poor quality or lack of maturity of the form. For creators in India, comics as a mass medium historically associated with children and vulgar content can be difficult to negotiate. However, as a history, culture, and tradition of creativity, though, comics provides a foundation for a community and an industry that defies clear recognition.

Analyzing the Pao Collective as an example of comics culture in India shows the importance and usefulness for creators of approaching the form as a socially-engaged medium.

Furthermore, by focusing on how creators build and engage with communities, I illustrate how creators reframe the medium as part of a tradition of artfully executed storytelling capable of addressing the complexity of life in India today. For these creators, reframing comics as storytelling enables them to open up spaces for comics culture in Delhi that, like Dilli Haat, were formerly reserved for fine or traditional arts, allowing comics a greater credibility and wider reach.

The Scholarship of India’s Comics

My research highlights the process of making stories in Delhi labeled comic books and graphic novels.v In focusing on comics in India, I am specifically illuminating the storytelling medium of a group who has been too often ignored by scholarship and international readership alike. In

“From Self Knowledge to Super Heroes: the Story of Indian Comics,” Aruna Rao describes the history of Indian comics, from the first Western comics in the 1970s to the nationalist comics of

7 the 1980s, and the regional, often superhero-focused comics of the 1990s. Although Rao details the history of both religious and adventure comics, she places a great value upon the Amar

Chitra Katha series (ACK) of the 1970s and 80s because they deal with religion and history instead of superheroes and pulp storytelling. Similarly, Karline McLain, in 2009’s India’s

Immortal Comic Books, focuses solely upon the Amar Chitra Katha series; she analyzes the roots, artistic processes, and cultural contexts for ACK in great depth. Yet, there have been a great deal more comics publishing houses, artists, authors, and stories in India than ACK. While several authors have looked at other children’s and superhero comics, especially Raj and Liquid comics, only a few have directly addressed graphic novels and creators working to establish an independent or alternative comics culture.vi As the most widely published and read Indian comics, though, books from this series are the ones that most scholars have focused upon, to the detriment of understanding or even considering the wider context of India’s comics, storytelling, or visual cultures.

Such a focus on ACK has revealed a tendency within this vibrant series to tell stories with a nationalist, Hindu bias. As Nandini Chandra notes in The Classic Popular, that bias breaks down into a series of critical absences, namely of strong women, of ethical and heroic minority figures, and of the diversity of communities or cultures within the modern Indian nation.

Similarly, in History, Masculinity, and the Amar Chitra Katha, Deepa Srinivas argues that the

ACK series “…shows that popular culture is the crucial site where the contest for hegemony takes place. It draws our attention to the pedagogic effectiveness of history as popular culture”

(Srinivas 2010:192). In the process, Srinivas pulls out these issues of representation as the result of a masculine ideal that demands women, lower castes, and other groups to persevere toward social uplift (Srinivas 2010). Yet, each of these authors ignores or only tangentially mentions the

8 broader context of India’s comics culture, including so much more than the Amar Chitra Katha series.

This work aims to fill that absence. While scholars have illuminated the deeper meaning, importance, and workings of India’s religious comics, mainly the Amar Chitra Katha series, few of them deal with much else. Most importantly, almost none of them address the work of contemporary comics creators or the graphic novels and comics currently coming out of Delhi and the rest of India.vii Although Aruna Rao recognizes the move of comics production from

Mumbai to Delhi, due to a growing regional audience in North India, she was writing in 2001, before the rise of graphic novels and other longer comics narratives. Yet, these works are important because they illustrate a shift in comics culture and community toward a localization of the medium and a move toward smaller scale production practices.

What material is available on graphic novels, independent comics, and the contemporary mainstream in India can primarily be found online, in the form of book reviews, newspaper articles, interviews, and blog posts by Indian or India-based authors.viii Yet, most of these sources tend to show a bias, either for or against particular authors, formats, or publishers, with little analysis of aesthetic standards or context. For example, in “When the Truth Is Graphic,”

Anindita Ghose admirably describes the current comics scene by detailing various creators’ works one by one, noting what each contributes or develops. Yet, Ghose compares Ghosh,

Kumar, Sen, and other creators’ works to that of internationally renowned creator Joe Sacco, and finds them wanting. In so doing, the author fails to consider each author’s intentions, unique style, relative advantages or disadvantages, or the context for their creativity. Instead, Ghose shows a bias toward educational comics, concluding that “With educational institutions gearing up for this new wave, it appears that the surf might be coming ashore” (Ghose 2010). Only

9 institutional support, it seems, can provide the right set of circumstances to live up to the author’s vague standards for aesthetic judgment. Other authors similarly leave the basis for judgments of comics quality relatively vague, and instead seem to emphasize a need for stories that they, personally, would enjoy more than what exists.

Rather than setting contemporary comics and their creators up against the wall of ill- defined criticism, though, the strongest of these sources have worked to illustrate larger patterns.

In “Graphic Literature in India,” Margaret Cohen emphasizes creators’ perspectives in providing an overview of the current state of Indian graphic novels. Similarly, in outlining the formation, activities, goals, and future of the Pao Collective, in “Why So Serious,” Anush Reema Jumdar describes independence as a primary goal for these contemporary artists and authors.

Accordingly, she quotes Sen: “‘it is a code in the Collective to stay independent from external forces such as corporate sponsorship and what comes with that money’” (Sen Qtd. in Jumdar

2009). Others highlight particular authors and projects

These authors shine a light on current creators and their shift toward a model of creativity that emphasizes skill and mastery over comparison to literature, fine art, or other nation’s comics cultures. One of the strongest and most in-depth examples is Jason Overdorf’s piece on “India’s

Comics Boom: The Pao Collective.” He concisely demonstrates the larger pattern that contemporary Indian comics are moving away from being formulaic or children-oriented and toward becoming a mature medium. However, in surveying what he calls a ‘renaissance’ in

India’s comics scene, Jason Overdorf describes Pao as a literary movement, inspired by graphic novelists like Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi. This is despite the fact that he quotes

Banerjee and others in his piece, describing the medium as independent of literature, art, or other forms (Overdorf 2010).

Still, Overdorf does an excellent job. He reviews their building up of storytelling sessions, comics exhibits in gallery spaces, and graphic novel reviews in showing that The Pao

Collective is representative of a larger shift away from the dominance of ACK (Overdorf 2010). ix

Each of these pieces helps to demonstrate the importance of the members of Pao as pioneers of the Indian long-form comics narrative. All together, the online presence for the Pao Collective and similarly oriented creators shows them to be crafting stories that masterfully question what it means to be a part of India today, from understanding history to remaining socially critical in daily life and much more. They are the reason for this work and the research behind it: to bring attention to their excellence.

A Folkloristic Approach

As much as Indian culture has transformed the comics medium, it has also played a role in transforming culture. Thus, while comics seem to be merely a Western medium capable of spreading across cultural boundaries, the comics of India represent a unique manifestation of a sequential, visual, and narrative art form or medium that combines images and text. In my research, I combine interviews, images, contextualization, and analysis. In the process, I am relying upon intensive fieldwork performed in the fall of 2010 through the use of detailed notes, audio recordings, and photographs. Here, I use fieldwork as defined by folklorist Kenneth C.

Goldstein, as a people-intensive practice done using the tools of participant observation and interviewing. I began my research in the vendor’s space, by visiting and analyzing shops where comics and graphic novels were sold in Delhi. However, I focus intensively upon the creative process and how artists craft meaningful relationships between art and their communities.

Documenting creators’ perspectives and insights thus demonstrates the vibrancy and vigor of

Delhi’s comics culture through the work of its comics masters.

Primarily, my research approach is inspired by Henry Glassie’s call to study artistic creativity in other cultures “from the inside out” and recognize that their arts represent much more than mere responses to Western art and culture (Glassie 1989). In performing this research on India’s comics culture and working alongside many comics creators, editors, and fans, though, I am focusing upon the associations made by people dealing with these terms in their own lives. In this case, I demonstrate that, far from Western or direct descendants of the British

Punch magazines in their roots, Indian comics have developed into creative expressions unique to the individuals and communities involved in their creation.

This work relies upon a definition of folklore that holds the social unit as central to any attempt to understand how communities do and continue to exist. Accordingly, I draw from Dan

Ben-Amos’s definition of folklore as “artistic communication in small groups” (Ben-Amos

1972). However, for creators, these terms serve a utilitarian need, providing a means to connect their own creative work to artisans who came before and associations that can provide legitimacy and support for their livelihoods. Various people with whom I spoke focused on the associations between folk culture and contemporary storytelling in the comics medium, from relating stories of finding inspiration in folk art to recounting stories that they witnessed or heard as children and adults. Making these connections relates to Henry Jenkins’ work on convergence culture, where fans build communities around media texts (Jenkins 2006). Creating comics in this context is a means of maintaining social ties and improving the narratives at their center.

Most creators with whom I spoke tended most strongly to define folklore more as a kind of culture, similar to Patricia Sawin’s definition (Sawin 2002). By incorporating a stronger

12 emphasis upon reciprocity between audience and performer into Bauman’s understanding of performance, Sawin comes to a revised notion of folk culture as “uncommodified, aesthetic, small-group communicative interaction” (2002:30). In the case of comics creators in Delhi, the connection between what they do and such definitions is not as strong because they tend to rely on their work for at least some of their income, because they are appealing to broader audiences, and for many other reason. As Orijit Sen notes, “In a performance art, you begin to absorb the performance, but there, the dynamic is much stronger. The performer and the audience are like one. It’s not like you as an audience are sitting passively, one on one, looking in each other’s eyes, waiting to see a reaction. Playing with that is very different—very exciting. But [making comics] is a very much more inward process.” As a result, although the perspective of folklore above may guide the framing of this analysis, the creators with whom I worked guide the structure and the purpose of this research toward demonstrating how these stories work in a variety of ways in their communities.

Accordingly, I am working from Glassie’s understanding of folk art, one that focuses upon the needs and perspectives of creators as well as scholars, despite earlier tendencies in folkloristics to focus on collecting culture as artifacts. In historicizing folk art in The Spirit of

Folk Art, Glassie details several Western approaches to understanding and valuing folk art, with a focus on nationalistic, radical, and existential models that dominated from the 1700s to present.

For Glassie, each of these models, understanding individual as national expression, focusing on continuity within tradition, and recognizing folk art as creativity in individual action, should provide elements within a toolbox from which scholars should derive more practical models for particular research goals and problems (1989). Contemporary artists, too, draw upon these and other models for understanding folk art, mainly those that have strong roots in their own cultures.

As a result, I am also working from Ray Cashman’s understanding of the folk as “a network of people brought into engagement by an idea” (2008: 12). In particular, from folk to group and network, Cashman views this concept as evolving into a notion of a ‘local community’ that expresses the mutual constitution of imagined and lived experiences in a place. Accordingly, my research begins with the multiple frames of reference that mutually constitute creators’ understanding of their own creative processes, narratives, communities, and cultural contexts.

Throughout, I base my work in Glassie’s definition of tradition as “the creation of the future out of the past” in recognizing the importance of a common model of storytelling for artists working within the essentially commodified medium of comics (2003). I also draw on folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s recognition of folklore’s ability to simultaneously work within and question larger, hegemonic forces in understanding how and why contemporary artists turn to the comics medium when connecting activism to folklore (1998). Thus, for some creators, the appeal to folk culture through comics opens up mass audiences and supports local communities. Similarly, publishers and creators may highlight the performative quality of storytelling emphasized in Glassie’s definition of folklore in order to show how comics, folklore, and social justice are already intertwined.x I emphasize the balancing act that creators perform in negotiating the hegemonic and subversive qualities of folk culture when referencing the aspects of storytelling that serve their particular agendas, whether they be nationalist or more critical. In general, by highlighting the socially active aspects of comics as a storytelling medium, I demonstrate that both have more serious and complex functions and implications.

By focusing on the intertextuality of Indian comics, based upon their references to folk culture, spiritual experience through darsan, and other Indian image cultures, artists have re- narrated comics as an inherently Indian narrative form.xi As in the case of Teri Silvio’s analysis

14 of Taiwan’s “Digital Video Knights-Errant Puppetry,” the remediation of traditional narratives entails a domestication of media to meet the needs and goals of particular artists (2007). In this case, the striking presence of comics in enacting cultural and political awareness is for many artists and readers representative of its domestication to Indian culture. Indian comics thus seem a continuation of the tradition of visual narratives that voice social criticism and negotiation of global forces through popular, especially visual media. Above all, my research will focus on how these connections have been strategically made by artists themselves in framing their creativity as inherently connected to their own experiences of local realities and, often, social injustice. In this way, I demonstrate that Indian comics are not merely a response to Western culture but are uniquely adapted to specific, local contexts by artists in order to make them relevant to their own and others’ experiences.

The Pao Collective

The Pao Collective as a group is directed toward raising the comics medium up as an independent art form or medium. This work focusses on them and their stories because of their extraordinary skill and critical perspectives on comics creation and community. Its individual, core members, namely Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee, Parismita Singh, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, and

Amitabh Kumar, represent some of the most important names in Delhi and India’s comics culture (Image 1-3). Yet, this group came about almost accidentally. Kumar originally brought the five of them together for his research with Sarai Centre for the Study of Developing Societies on India’s comics culture. Following that, there naturally arose a desire to come together and share each other’s work. As Kumar narrates, “It was actually all of us. Because all of us were not isolated, but we were all doing our own thing. Vishwa’s book hadn’t come out. Parismita’s book

15 hadn’t come out. Sarnath’s had. Both of them. And we really wanted to do something that was for us. Primarily, we, directly as comic book creators, profit from conversation, from responding to each other’s works. Some of the best responses I’ve had are from Pao, which is a phenomenal thing.” Each of the members benefits from working together, like Kumar, because they are able to grow creatively based on feedback and reflection from one another.

For Kumar, who first met the other members as a researcher of comics, working with the other members has been extremely beneficial as he has worked with the biggest names in Indian graphic novels. As he continued, “I’m with the best, and I’m learning from the best, and I’m practicing with the best. With Orijit, with Sarnath, with Vishwa, and Parismita. So, it’s fantastic.” The collaboration meant working alongside the masters of his chosen medium in learning to excel in crafting visual narratives. In so doing, Kumar and the other members of the collective also work to make it possible for artists and authors like themselves to make a living from creating comics alone. In particular, they argue for the compelling quality of comics narratives and, in making such stories, they also work to develop a readership and larger community in India. Even the collective’s title derives from the necessity of visual storytelling for its members; as Orijit Sen stated in an interview in 2009, “We hope to earn our daily bread from our art. Also, Pao has such a great punch-like sound to it” (Sen Qtd. in Jumdar 2009). The Pao

Collective supports comics culture in India in a multitude of ways, from creating excellent visual narratives, to collaborating creatively, holding comics events, developing anthologies of creators’ works for publication, and generally publicizing the creative potential of the medium as a powerful one.

Each member adds to this effort through their work as a group and in their individual creative skills and repertoire. As the creator of India’s first long-form comics narrative, Orijit

Sen has set up much of the expectations for creators telling stories in this medium. As described

16 in Pratik Kanjilal’s review of the Pao Anthology, “One Plate Pao Bhaji,” his example has established comics storytelling in India as a medium or at least literary genre, for common human experiences: “Sen has taken the genre of superheroes and supermice, slapstick and long- perspective swagger, and forged his own monochrome style to tell a deeply human tale” (2012).

Kanjilal thus points out Sen’s pivotal role in India’s comics culture as changing the stories possible in the comics medium. In particular, he has developed his style through a focus on shorter stories and illustration work, as well as comics projects related to increasing awareness of social problems, such as his work in Chennai on AIDS and HIV. As the earliest author to focus on long-form visual narratives, Sen has helped to establish the kinds of stories that creators tell in the comics medium in India.

Although Orijit Sen is well-known for his careful and masterful illustration and line work, he is also known for his friendliness and eagerness to help other creators develop their own storytelling skills. Over the years, Sen has inspired most of the current generation of authors and artists. In particular, as the co-founder of People Tree, a shop, studio, and design house based out of downtown New Delhi, he regularly drew and worked on comics in the central studio. Stumbling upon Sen making stories there was often the first place where people encountered comics in India. Several creators with whom I even talked about their conversations with Sen there and how his friendly attitude to their curiosity encouraged them to get into the medium. His enthusiasm for the form is catching, and he provides critical yet supportive and insightful feedback as easily as drawing breath. Sen represents the central figure in Delhi’s comics culture and a sort of father figure for many creators, as someone to whom they can turn for ideas, inspiration, constructive criticism, and even practical advice on a regular basis.

As the creator of India’s second graphic novel, Sarnath Banerjee provides a sense of energy, wit, and the practical importance of storytelling, whether in comics or other media. In

Corridor, Banerjee investigates the nature of stories by weaving together those of several characters in a city strongly resembling contemporary Delhi (2004). He illustrates day-to-day life in urban India through their experiences, much as he has done in later works, The Barn Owl’s

Wondrous Capers (2007) and The Harappa Files (2012). In Barn Owl, Banerjee tells the story of a young man who must return to India for his father’s funeral after growing up there and leaving to live abroad, as well as how he becomes entangled in the search for his father’s lost possessions. Meanwhile, in The Harappa Files, he strings together several stories which each illustrate some aspect of attempting to find meaning and live one’s life in a contemporary, urban community. Banerjee’s work in each of these three graphic novels is important both because, like

Sen, he has shifted the focus of storytelling to everyday life, and because he is the most prolific creator in Delhi’s comics community.

Much of the reason that Banerjee cited for creating comics lay in the value he felt for storytelling as a practical and useful part of life. However, in so doing, he has worked to establish a shelf in book stores for comic books and graphic novels. In particular, he worked to create a space for his own work, Corridor, when there was no clear space for comics narratives targeted at adults readers in India. As he has grown as a visual and narrative artist, though,

Banerjee has come to view the comics medium as unable to live up to the flexible and powerful qualities of the storytelling one encounters every day. From telling stories to connect with other people to using them to simply communicate, he highlights the importance of narratives as something that people do each day. As a result, despite having created the comics shelf in Indian

18 book stores, Banerjee has become more important for pushing creators to more critically engage with the medium as one of many possible routes for telling stories.

As a political cartoonist and comics creator, Vishwajyoti Ghosh is important for the critical tone of his storytelling and his interest in social issues. Ghosh got his start when he received an award for cartooning from the Times of India; to this day, he has maintained regular strips in newspapers, along with a regular blog where he posts his continued political cartooning work. Accordingly, he values storytelling that engages with political and social issues. As the creator of 2010s Delhi Calm, Ghosh retells the events of the Emergency in 1975 in a critical yet imaginative way using a water color style that has become characteristic of his work. Similarly, his recent “RSVP” story, published in Pao: The Anthology of Comics (2012), criticizes contemporary arts culture in Delhi through more direct references to the traditional, kali-ghat painting style that has influenced his work.

However, Ghosh, like Sarnath Banerjee, recognizes the comics medium as merely one possible venue for storytelling. Not only does he publish regular political cartoon strips, but he also has published a series of postcards titled Times New Roman and Countrymen (2009). In addition, Ghosh works as Creative Director for the design firm, Inverted Commas, and has helped to design developmental comics to educate disadvantaged groups and start conversations about social problems. This has included the publication of comics in large, urban cities that work to educate street children about sexually transmitted diseases. Through his wide array of stories, Ghosh thus simultaneously demonstrates the many possible forms of the comics medium and the potential for storytelling that engages with social problems.

Based upon her experiences as a researcher, Parismita Singh approaches the creation of narratives as a kind of storytelling, whether in oral or comics narratives. Singh is the author and

19 artist of The Hotel at the End of the World, a graphic novel that tells the story of a mother, father, daughter, and two strangers who visit their hotel in Assam. She is often inspired by stories that she hears, both in her own, everyday life and in her fieldwork with children in Assam on problems with educational institutions. While her experiences during that research have inspired her storytelling, they have also informed her distrust of comics that do not reach out to wider audiences.

In particular, Singh is critical of creators’ roles as narrators of others’ lives, especially when authors themselves come from a privileged position. Her goal as a creator is to reach out to different kinds of groups, often simultaneously, as she does through Hotel. She has described how she built the narrative to appeal to adults, despite counting a child among its main characters, each of whose stories are told in the longer work. Yet, her storytelling tends to fracture narrative due to a suspicion of an objective authorial voice; thus, in Hotel’s layering of narrative upon narrative, the larger story is broken up into stories that each of several characters tell. Through stories and research, Singh argues against comics as traditional or graphic novels, but instead as a medium for storytelling that should be brought to more diverse audiences.

Amitabh Kumar is a comics writer, artist, and researcher whose fieldwork in 2009 brought together the various members of the Pao Collective. While interviewing several comics creators in Delhi, Kumar recognized the need for a space where creators could come together to collaborate, receive feedback, and otherwise support a community. In speaking with the founding members of the Pao Collective, who also happened to be some of the most prominent members of Delhi’s comics scene, Kumar found five like-minded creators who also hoped to change how people, in general, approached the comics medium in India.

Kumar has also added a distinctly historical voice to Delhi’s comics scene. Due to a combination of interest and detailed research, he has an extremely strong understanding of the history of comics in the region and India more broadly. This mastery is demonstrated by his work on the comics project, Raj Comics for the Hard-Headed (2008), where he details the history of Raj Comics, a then often overlooked comics publisher based in Delhi that has specialized in stories about superheroes since 1986.xii Kumar’s other work, as a comics designer, artist, and writer, show a larger concern for history, including his artful contribution to

Tinker.Solder.Tap, which portrays the transition from radio to television in one Delhi neighborhood (2009). Through his knowledge of the past, Amitabh Kumar has developed both compelling comics narratives and strong collaborations, as he has helped authors and artists meet and form productive relationships, including the authors of Mice Will Be Mice (2012), Vidyun

Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

Separately, each of these five creators has established an individual voice and style, while contributing to the larger community of comics culture in Delhi. Yet, united as the Pao

Collective, they are able to do much more, from organizing gallery shows and book releases, to organizing and producing anthologies of creators’ work, popularizing comics narratives, and changing public perceptions of their medium along the way. The rest of this work is dedicated to investigating the excellent work that they have done through this remarkable collaboration.

More Than Words and Pictures Combined

Like Kumar, each of the members joined both to push the medium forward and to help each other grow as creators. They could thus find support from Pao, based on feedback, conversation, and eventually working together to produce an anthology. As Kumar notes, “For me, it made a lot of sense. I’m sure for them at their respective points of life it would have made a lot of sense then, and I hope it still makes sense now.” Coming together especially made sense in terms of the changes in the comics scene in Delhi and in India more generally, where corporations still tend to dominate the market from mainstream work to book publishers.

Individual creators face a comics culture where larger publishers like Campfire Graphic Novels,

Liquid Comics, and Amar Chitra Katha media dominate through corporate production. Making a livelihood on comics creation is difficult, but forming a collective provided potential opportunities for connecting with other authors, artists, publishers, editors, and others who might open doors.

Despite the growing number of graphic novels and continuing runs of serial publications, many creators have expressed concern that there are not enough long-form comics being published each year to support a strong creative culture. In part, the problem is one of interest.

Several publishing houses have worked to recruit more creators and to incorporate more graphic novels into their catalogues. These include Penguin India, Harper Collins, and Blaft Publications, among several others. Yet, even those with such ambitions remain cautious. As Kumar describes,

“It’s just that people are still afraid to invest in it. I know of some business houses who have invested in comics in a huge way, but even there, they’re playing it safe.” There is a sense that profits cannot be made from the ‘mini-comic’ format or short form that earlier comics publishers used. Further, as multiple creators with whom I spoke stressed, it takes a long time to create a long form comics narrative or graphic novel, and publishers or editors are often hesitant about

22 investing in them as a result. Publishers and others are also hesitant because the industry itself is still developing. Unlike in the United States, Japan, or other comics with an established industry, comics in India do not have a reliable readership or pool from which to employ authors or artists.

There is also an unwillingness to be creative or challenge certain existing assumptions about comics as a medium. As Kumar further explains, “In India, the only successful comic book markets have existed on translation and distribution. And until we crack those, as models, it is going to be very difficult for comics to really make money.” ACK, Raj Comics, and other publishers that were successful specifically focused on publishing in multiple languages and on distributing over broad, often national, regions. Creators then begin to wonder whether there is something in the Indian context that prevents the growth of a significant comics publishing industry. “And then you look at a comics culture like manga, and it’s such absolutely stunning narrative. And the American comic book culture that is so strong. And the French bande dessinée. Look at the global landscape of comics, and you think, there must be something very odd here. But what’s wrong is a lack of innovative strategies…which is why we actually found

Pao.” The creators behind the Pao Collective thus come together not just for greater support but also because individuals will face greater difficulty in attempting to transform the way that comics narrative, long or short, are understood in India.

However, through the resulting collaboration and community of Pao, they are able to come together and challenge existing assumptions in order to move the medium forward. In the process, the various creators in the Pao Collective have reworked comics culture and even what it means to tell stories in the medium. As a result, doing so now means taking on a context and community unique to comics culture in India and even in specific cities like Delhi.

Celebrating Comics in Delhi

Given this context, this dissertation is dedicated to celebrating the creativity of the Pao

Collective in crafting meaning and community through the visual-narrative medium of comics.

Although centered in Delhi, their work takes some members throughout India and others to cities in Europe and around the world. Pao includes many people from many walks of life, including more established masters of the comics form, less experienced fine artists, political cartoonists, and individuals in careers that seem far afield.

For the purposes of this work, I have focused on their core members: Orijit Sen, Sarnath

Banerjee, Parismita Singh, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, and Amitabh Kumar. These core members, though, work alongside more independent creators, like Vidyun Sabhaney, a younger writer and collaborator with Shohei Emura, a manga-style comics creator, both of whom are enthusiastically working to make shorter comics popular in India’s comics culture. Other, more prominent figures include Amruta Patil, author of the third graphic novel in India and a masterful teller of painted stories, and Samit Basu, an acclaimed author of graphic and literary novels. Still, there is a much larger swathe of creative and talented people in this community, including Priya

Kuriyan, an extremely talented artist and oft-collaborator with Sen’s brother, writer Aniruddha

Sen Gupta, the talented painter Abhishek Singh, abstract graphic novelist Dyuti Mittal, comics writer Akshay Dhar, and Amabarish Satwik, a surgeon-storyteller.

Furthermore, Delhi’s comics community relies heavily on talented and visionary editors like Arpita Das, head of Yoda Press and proprietor of its book shop in Delhi, and S. Anand, a collaborator on Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability in 2012 and head of Navayana Press.

This visual narrative culture also includes children’s comics authors like collaborators Tapas

Guha and Subhadra Sen Gupta, who are well-known for their adaptation of Satyajit Ray’s

Feluda Mysteries. I also had the opportunity to talk with creators form other areas, like Bharath

Murthy, the founder of the comics anthology Comix.India and a comics creator himself. If it were possible, I would writer a chapter from the perspective of each person that I interviewed, including over twenty authors, artists, editors, publishers, and fans. However, India’s comics culture encapsulates so much more than what I encountered in my fieldwork, including established figures like the talented and nigh-legendary Pran and the Gupta brothers behind Raj

Comics, as well as many individual creators who are less established. Many more cities boast growing comics communities, including Mumbai, which is home to Comix.India, and Bangalore.

However, I focus on the core five members of the Pao Collective as narrators of the contemporary culture surrounding the sequential art of comics in India. Accordingly, each chapter is distinctly grounded in their voices, through extensive quotes, contextualization in their cultural and creative backgrounds, and analysis of their narratives. Furthermore, each of these five members guides the investigation of five key concepts to understanding comics, especially long-form publications labeled ‘graphic novels.’ Based on his comprehensive knowledge of and research background on comics history, Amitabh Kumar guides the investigation of comics’ roots in Chapter 2, which illustrates the shift from early indigenous comics to Western ones, and then back again. Meanwhile, Parismita Singh’s critical awareness of the debates surrounding the terms and aesthetics of comics culture structure the discussion of definitions in Chapter 3.

At that point, I break away from this author-guided tour of contemporary comics in Delhi in order to analyze what makes for excellent comics in this context. Accordingly, Chapter 4 is built around the voices of all five creators who are the focus of this work. Understanding creators’ standards for strong comics then leads to an analysis of creator’s descriptions of their work as storytelling, particularly in relation to traditional storytelling and folk culture. Sarnath

Banerjee guides this discussion in Chapter 5 because of his stated interest in telling stories as part

25 of daily life and because of his dissatisfaction with the medium in doing that work. Based on an understanding of the creation process as a potentially performative and transformative one, in

Chapter 6, I document the creativity of India’s father of the graphic novel, Orijit Sen, as the basis for analyzing the formation and structure of communities in Delhi’s comics culture. The final main chapter, Chapter 7, then explores an additional theme in Delhi’s comics culture, namely a sense of social responsibility and the tendency for creators to represent injustice in their stories.

In particular, this investigation is guided by Vishwajyoti Ghosh because of his work in educating people on social problems with design firm Inverted Commas. Ghosh also turns a critical eye to the current state of the comics form but emphasizes its value as a medium. While I conclude with a review of the continuing, remarkable publications of comics culture in Delhi and India more broadly, I have structured this account in this way in order to highlight tensions within this community and how individuals creatively work to resolve them.

The culture of comics reading and creation in Delhi and India may not be as established as in other countries, especially Japan, France, and the United States. However, the number and talent of creators is stupendous and growing every year. It will still take time for the community to be able to sustain and support itself, especially younger comics creators who are neither well established or experienced. There are many signs of change, though, from the presence of internationally renowned authors like Robert and Aline Kominsky-Crumb at the 2012 Comic

Con India to courses available in comics and cartooning through institutions including World

Comics India. In the following pages, I explore some of those signs and what they mean for comics and community in Delhi.

i Comic Con India builds upon the precedent set by American comics conventions, where fans, creators, publishers, and otherwise come together to celebrate comics, launch books or projects, and otherwise interact with each other (See Pustz, Comic Book Culture, 1999).

ii One should note, though, that shortly after Delhi’s Comic Con, Mumbai was able to successfully hold one as well, after several failed attempts. In 2010, I noted several Facebook posts and a website for a Mumbai Comic Con that looked to be happening in November of that year. However, when I spoke with creators about whether or not it would happen, they expressed disillusionment, noting that several attempts had been made to have a convention there, with little success. Upon the success of these large-scale conventions, Comic Con Express versions followed in a variety of book festivals and cities like Bangalore. iii The most prominent and influential international creators are thus Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, and Hergé. Just about every person I met who enjoyed comics in India pointed to these three creators as important figures for Indian comics culture. More recently, though, a few creators I interviewed have noted that Japan’s comics culture seems to have a stronger influence on their own, as multiple Japanese authors and series, including Osamu Tezuka, have become more popular. iv While Amar Chitra Katha continues to publish the occasional new issue, with the latest being “Anant Pai—the master storyteller,” they have shifted away from a regular schedule characteristic of most corporate comics companies. However, ACK has become anything but a standard comics publisher, having branched into television, video games, and still selling over three million issues of comics each year (Pandey 2012). v In the process, I discuss the tensions between these terms and the difficulties creators and fans often face in justifying the medium; see Chapter 3. vi The most notable of these few that address graphic novels and independent comics are Suhaan Mehta’s “Wondrous Capers: The Graphic Novel in India” in Multicultural comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle (2010), Paul Gravett’s “Indian Comics: A Visual Renaissance” (2010), and Dipavali Debroy’s “The Graphic Novel in India: East Transforms West” (2011). vii As noted above, there are exceptions. Further, this absence is most likely the result of limited distribution of works not produced and published by corporate publishers with a larger budget and resultant wider reach. viii In fact, much of the preparation for my fieldwork, research, and for the composition of this longer work began with comparing Wikipedia articles to their provided source citations and other pieces found through online search engines. The usefulness of this method increases every month, as more publishers provide detail about their histories, more journalists and readers web-publish, and fans of India’s comics continue to update online encyclopedia entries with working and up-to-date links. ix At the same time, though, the author lists the ‘new’ move in Indian comics as toward indigenous heroes, modernized myths, and urban satires, despite only the latter being a departure from previously common themes. This is because several creators and publishers that Overdorf mentions, including Liquid Comics, Kriyetic Comics, and Project C actively build upon the precedent of ACK. Furthermore, the author compares comics as a mature medium to film and television, setting up the comics medium as not quite a valid medium, one that requires another to serve as precedent. (Overdorf 2010) x Vivalok Comics, published by the Viveka Foundation, do this most explicitly, with an introduction in their volumes that explains the connections between comics, social justice, and folklore (Sankunni et al. 2002). xi Here, I use Richard Bauman’s definition of intertextuality as “the relational orientation of a text to other texts” (2004:4). xii Despite its sometime obscurity, then, Raj Comics remains one of the longest running Indian comics publishing companies.

Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics

In terms of the history of the Indian comics medium, the Pao Collective is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the early 1970s, the only comic books in India were Western ones, including the adventure stories of The Times of India’s Indrajal imprint, namely The Phantom,

Archie, James Bond, Flash Gordon, and other Western comics, as well as those published by

Diamond Comics (Rao 2001). While these comics themselves were not directly influenced by other narratives in Indian culture, their readers certainly were, a fact that publishers took into consideration when choosing which titles to produce. As multiple scholars note, Amar Chitra

Katha’s Anant Pai was instrumental in pushing the then-editor of The Times of India to choose to publish stories featuring the Phantom and related characters over Superman. In this way, Pai helped establish Indrajal Comics as an early publisher even before his own Amar Chitra Katha

(ACK) came to fruition, with its intended format of half English-language comics and half locally-produced, Indian tales (McLain 2009; Rao 2001). As Pai himself has explained, he felt that Lee Falk’s The Phantom was easier for more readers to relate to because of its jungle setting, albeit one in Africa (Rao 2001). The title’s success opened the door for further ventures into the comics medium in India, with Pai himself building ACK in Indrajal’s shadow.

While Indrajal and other publishers set a strong precedent for the comics medium in the

1960s and 1970s, Amar Chitra Katha eventually transcended them in popularity. ACK’s religious, historical, folkloric, and other stories built upon rather than imitate these earlier examples. As both fans and scholars have noted, Pai’s later comics often color history with the tone and structure of superhero narratives, drawing on the bold style of Western comics in combining traditional and comics serial narratives (McLain 2009). This combination of popular culture and generally Hindu religious belief has led to contemporary criticism of ACK for Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 28 crafting a biased and nationalist vision of Indian communities and culture. Yet, Pai and the creators with whom he worked did establish a national comics culture and distribution system that paved the way for later creators.

The longest-lasting comics publishers came out of the transition from ACK’s national production and distribution system to more regional ones. Although ACK has continued to re- publish their over four hundred comics in various editions, from massive omnibus formats to single issues, they ceased regular creation of new comics in the late 1980s (McLain 2009).

Meanwhile, Raj Comics rose to the fore of comics creation, starting in 1986, by translating superhero and other comics genres into Indian culture. Their titles range from the Spider-man inspired Nagraj, whose title character swings from buildings on ropes of snakes, to the more violent Super Commando Dhruva, and the strange Fighter Toads, who were inspired by the

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Kumar 2008). Although Raj Comics never attained the same level of cultural affirmation received by ACK, which was accepted into libraries and classrooms by English-medium schools in 1978, they have continued publishing for over twenty-five years

(McLain 2009).i In the meantime, Orijit Sen composed the first Indian graphic novel in 1994, and there was thus a strong precedent for Indian comics narratives, albeit one dominated by ACK and genres from Western comics and pulps.

Amitabh Kumar

This chapter provides a historical account of the path from comic books to the later rise of graphic novels, simultaneously situating India’s comics narratives and culture in this context.

Throughout, this account is grounded in one creator, Amitabh Kumar’s, experiences as an author and researcher on Indian comics and culture. As an artist, he graduated from the Faculty of Fine Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 29

Arts, MSU Baroda. He has been a researcher with Sarai Media Lab, within the larger Sarai

Center for the Study of Developing Societies, since 2006. As a researcher there, Kumar pursued an interest in comics by interviewing comics creators, including both the other members of the

Pao Collective and the creators behind Raj Comics. These interviews, along with Sarai’s comics collections, formed the groundwork for the Research Project on Raj Comics and Graphic Novel

Culture in Delhi. Through this research, he began collaboration with Raj in creating a comics narrative to celebrate and historicize the Raj Comics repertoire.

In the resulting book, Raj Comics for the Hard-Headed, published in 2008, Kumar argues for the importance of Raj Comics in the history of India’s comics culture. In speaking with me, he noted that “What’s startling is that they [Raj] have a consistent aesthetic sense. Artists come and go, but they still draw and compose in the same way. Which is incredible about the machinery. So I want to retain that, which is why I drew detailed storyboards and I gave them a lot of references. I mean, I could have made the comic myself because I gave them so many references.” Their model of comics, which is based on mass production and division of labor, is creatively frustrating. However, Kumar is not interested in criticizing Raj Comics, as others have done in the past. Instead, he celebrates their historical role in maintaining comics as a narrative medium while other publishers closed their doors.

Kumar has continued his comics work with multiple short stories and his illustration of

Tinker Solder Tap, a short graphic novel written by Bhagwati Prasad that tells of the transition to television in one Delhi suburb. As a researcher with Sarai Media Lab, Kumar has also created several murals, most recently combining hand drawn images that he scans and composes as a part of the Projectile Prophecies series, where a secret cult of the future uses sequential storytelling and other images to cause mischief. He has worked as a visiting faculty member for Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 30 the Srishti College of Art and Design and has curated a year-long experimental art space in Sarai

CSDS, as well as an exhibition in the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw, Poland. Through these many routes, Kumar pushes the comics medium, as well as visual narratives more generally, forward while grounding his work in a creative community.

At the same time, he has also developed an individual style. While much of his storytelling continues the common themes of community and history, Kumar’s work also shows the interesting combination of energetic compositions and precise line work. While the composition of many pages in Raj Comics for the Hard Headed can verge on confusing, his later work shows an almost obsessive attention to detail. In this image of one of his murals, Kumar has combined multiple drawings which he did by hand, then scanned into his computer, and combined digitally to form the final image (Image 2-1). Through this process, he is able to scan smaller images and then increase their size, such that the crispness of precision no longer conflicts with the dynamic movement of the image itself, which draws readers through the image.

Yet, this dynamic combination represents an overall playful tone in Kumar’s comics style, as further demonstrated in his work on Tinker.Solder.Tap. In the latter, Kumar images the author, Bhagwati Prasad’s, story through a variety of kinds of images; while straight narrative sequences receive more standard grid layouts on the page, action and other scenes are paired with images that are only somewhat related. For instance, Kumar illustrates a conversation between two constables by showing the building they are discussing, in addition to a cow with two CD discs on his horn (Image 2-2). While unrelated to the story itself, the latter image playfully disrupts the story and reminds the reader of the dissonance between contemporary familiarity with these media and the past reactions to it. Throughout Tinker.Solder.Tap and much Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 31 of his other work, Kumar’s style is characterized by this playfulness, even in terms of the basic structure of his narratives.

As a continuation of that company’s superhero ideals, Kumar crafts a contemporary superhero, Helmet-man, as part of Raj Comics for the Hard-Headed (Image 2-3). More than anything, he became interested in Raj Comics because their model of designing and storytelling is one of the strongest historically. “Basically the story, in its modeling and in its format, is trying to not spoof, because that required making fun of it, but trying to work around the existing

Raj Comics superhero culture, and their modes of designing a page or their notion of comics.”

For him, Raj’s superhero comics remain important because they have set a strong precedent for what is possible in the comics medium in Delhi. As he states, “I chose to go with [their notion of comics]. Because it was a choice that I had to make – to go with it or redraw. And if I did it any other way, then, it wouldn’t be Raj Comics. And me collaborating, it wouldn’t be that. It would be me making them do what I want, but that’s not the point.” Indeed, the point of Raj Comics for the Hard-Headed is to make readers aware of comics as a medium that has strong roots in Indian culture, especially beyond the obvious ones in Amar Chitra Katha.

Kumar’s account thus serves as a strong foundation for a broader account of the history of comics in Indian culture. This is because contemporary creators must engage with this precedent while attempting to reinvigorate the medium with their own creativity. As he notes,

“Since it’s trying to bounce off the superhero landscape of Raj Comics…you’re trying to repurpose an existing cultural form. But the act of repurposing has to be clear. And in some sense, the joy and the humor in the repurposing also has to be clear. So if you have these very dramatic moments. Like, there has to be hope in the world, and I will bring justice for all. For fuck’s sake, no one can be seriously saying that. So it has to be said with an edge.” The history Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 32 of the medium is valuable for creators because they are themselves ‘repurposing’ that form. To ignore precedent would be to simultaneously denigrate what is for them an artistic tradition and to take their own storytelling out of context. Accordingly, the roots of the comics medium in

Delhi, from political cartoons to superhero comics, are important because most contemporary artists interact with them in their work. Here, I illuminate that creative root structure, with Kumar as my guide.

The Roots of the Comics Medium in India

The history of comic books and related visual narratives is unique because of their development from Western comics introduced in the early 1970s and into regionalized narratives grounded in daily life. Even more so, with the rise of graphic novels in Delhi in the 2000s, creators have generally asserted that the comics medium is, in and of itself, a distinctive medium. In fact, creators have often turned to international comics culture in defending their narratives as more than just children’s stories. This is because comics have historically been defended as children’s literature in India, and incorporated as such into education systems in India, where the medium could be approached as more than a vulgar medium capable only of entertainment.ii Unlike in the United States, comics as a medium has long been associated with education in this context, largely due to the importance of the Amar Chitra Katha series in supporting the Hindutva movement in the 1970s and 1980s. The development of comics in India thus involves a move not only from nationalism to regionalism, and even localization, but also from the defensive posture of incorporation into existing children’s literature to independence as a medium unto itself.

As the earliest indigenous comic books in India, the Amar Chitra Katha series set a strong precedent, one which has dictated comics content and style for decades since.iii However, Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 33 the earliest example of comic strips in India is the Avadh or Oudh Punch, a late 19th century satirical magazines that was inspired by the British Punch. The Punch was originally a satirical magazine of comic strips and other material started in 1841 in London (Hasan 2007). Many countries under the yoke of the British empire imitated the Punch in order to criticize their rule.

As the first newspaper with recognizable comic strips or cartoons, Oudh inspired many authors and artists in its weekly publication of poetry, essays, and comics from 1877 to 1936 (Hasan

2007).

Kumar, meanwhile, links the development of the Indian version of the Punch to the longer, historical process of comics’ development. In particular, he connects the Indian medium to progenitors of Western comics in England, namely ‘Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday,’ which is extraordinary for being the first comics magazine to be titled after and illustrate the adventures of a regular character (Sabin 2001). “If you try to connect with the history of comics globally, and

‘Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday’ and the distribution, it [comics] started as a weekly, an illustrated weekly. After the weekly, there was this illustrated pamphlet called the Punch, and a version of that was imported to India.” Kumar thus references the international context for comics culture in India. Before “Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday,” the history of comics in Britain was a movement from the Edwardian broadsheet of the early 20th century to youth-focused funny papers in the

1930s (Sabin 2001). Meanwhile, newspaper strips in the United States developed into supplements and collections until the solidification of original anthologies that closely resemble the comics medium today. Afterwards, adventure and other genre comics in both the U.S. and

England drew on illustrated story papers and pulp novels to push for higher quality art and storytelling (Sabin 2001). Kumar demonstrates that his own understanding of comics history is grounded in an international perspective of its history as a Western medium. Furthermore, Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 34

Avadh and the other seventy or so Punch magazines published in over twelve Indian cities by the end of the 19th century were part of the print revolution in Delhi and the Northwest provinces of

Agra and Awadh (Hasan 2007).

Accordingly, the Oudh Punch is generally recognized as the earliest root of comics in

Indian culture, as well as the roots of the vernacular press.iv Kumar further notes that “Oudh

Punch was this spoof on The Punch basically, and that to my mind, is one of the earliest forms of illustrated texts. But then again, the argument is that illustrated texts have always existed in

India.” Several creators and readers have connected the Indian comics medium to pre-existing artistic forms and traditions, particularly folk storytelling forms like the patua scrolls of Bengal and the Gond painting tradition. Kumar notes in a blog post for the Pao Collective that the roots of Indian comics are difficult to solidify, as they may begin with Oudh, with the illustrated

Daastan-E-Amir Haamza manuscript of Mughal Emperor Akbar, or any number of image-texts

(Kumar 2008).v When asked about the place of Indian, visual culture or storytelling in the history of comics, Kumar pointed out that defining the medium is a tense and difficult process. “It automatically gets into a very complicated territory when you use the word Indian. Because there are just so many layers to that. Because now it has also entered the domain of the sort of graphic, published books found in book shops. There is this katha form of storytelling, there is this patua tradition, which is also a form of storytelling, there is various traditional forms all around

India.”vi While the Oudh Punch serves as an important entry point for creators to draw together

Indian and international comics culture, by the 2000s, local, visual culture influenced comics in a different, more contentious way.vii Yet, in terms of the roots of the comics form, Kumar chooses to focus on the rather clearer history of the comics medium after independence, as focusing on earlier works seems, at best, unfruitful (Kumar 2010). He points out that arguing over what is or Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 35 is not ‘100% comics’ is futile. In Raj Comics for the Hard-Headed, he asks, “how fruitful would it be to hold onto an imagination of the ‘puritan’ or an ‘original?’ (Kumar 2010). This is an especially vivid point in the context of various creators, like the members of the Pao Collective, who each draw on a variety of sources for inspiration.

Before the widespread distribution of comics, though, the Oudh provided a precedent for comic strips and political cartooning. Among the important figures that creators referred to as sources of inspiration or a sense of history for their art, Mario Miranda, Rasipuram

Krishnaswamy Iyer Laxman, and Manjula Padmanabhan stood out most strongly. Miranda, having begun his career in cartooning in 1953 with the Times of India Group, later moved into illustration and writing, including his own books Goa with Love, A little World of Humor, and others (Miranda 2012; Ramakrishnan 2009). Meanwhile, R. K. Laxman’s Common Man cartoons have appeared in the Times of India for over six decades, within which the titular character comments upon current events (Byatnal 2011). Following these and other cartoonists,

Manjula Padmanabhan, who has worked as a playwright, artist, novelist, and continues to be involved in political cartooning, wrote and illustrated the strip, Suki, in Bombay’s Sunday

Observer in 1982 and later in Delhi’s Pioneer in 1982. She presented the main character, Suki, as an Indian woman with modern sensibilities or, as The Hindu reviewer Mandira Moddie describes, as “…the quintessential free spirited urban Indian owman struggling to make her choices in a seriously unfriendly world” (Moddie 2005). Each of these creators, as well as several others, are remarkable because Indian newspapers seldom ran strips by indigenous authors and artists (Moddie 2005). By crafting stories about life in Indian culture today in a series of panels with all the trademarks of the form, Padmanabhan, Laxman, and Miranda each helped to develop Indian comics as a contemporary medium. Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 36

Western Comics and Education

From there, as noted above, the comic books present in India before the early 1970s were largely

Western ones, from adventure comics like Lee Falk’s The Phantom and tales of World War II in the popular Commando series, to children’s comics like Archie (Rao 2001). In large part, this saturation of Western comics was the result of British influence and import by soldiers or expats living in India (Rao 2001). In the case of the Phantom series, though, these earliest comics were imported in order for publishing houses to take advantage of as yet un-tapped younger audiences.

As Rao and Kumar both note, many involved in India’s comics culture trace the development of comics back to Anant Pai, the man who started Amar Chitra Katha, due to his involvement in persuading The Times of India to publish The Phantom rather than the then-editor’s favorite,

Superman, in their dailies (Rao 2001; Kumar 2010). Based upon interviews with potential readers, Pai argued that the jungle setting would be more familiar to readers while still telling adventurous tales that appealed to young readers. From his point of view, merely importing

Western comics was not enough and likely reinforced problems with the Indian education system. (Rao 2001) Through him, and based upon the precedent set by both the Times dailies and

Western comics, production and distribution shifted to the national level.

As writer, editor, and publisher of ACK, Pai was the leader behind the series, but he drew on several precedents in Indian culture. For one, Chandamama, a family-owned monthly children’s magazine, had already been publishing stories where both illustrations and an oral storytelling style played an important role since 1947 (Chandamama 2012). Similarly, several other publications intended for children, such as the Champak magazine, had already set a model Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 37 for producing stories for young readers that engaged both visual and textual media. Later, in the

1960s, several creators and political cartoonists were publishing some of the earliest comics narratives in India based out of West Bengal. Within that culture, Pratulchandra Lahiri focused on strips for local newspapers, Mayukh Choudhury created action/adventure and historical stories, Tushar Kanti Chatterjee did detective comics for the magazine Shuktara, and Narayan

Debnath crafted strips later published as books (Mukherjee 2011). Debnath is significant, in particular, because his Batul the Great is likely the earliest of India’s superheroes, having been created long before Raj Comics began publishing (Deb 2007). Within this context, it was thus neither the educational approach nor the similarities to Western comics that made Amar Chitra

Katha an innovative series.

Yet, Pai did uniquely work to develop comics as an industry, primarily through a divided model of production, much like that of the later Raj Comics.viii As Nandini Chandra notes in recognizing the roots of ACK comics as “…products of the capitalist mode of production which

[seek] to mask [their] commodity existence,” Anant Pai was likely drawing on international discourse in the creation of India Book House and ACK (Chandra 2010: 202). In particular, as

Pai turned from Indrajal’s intended mix of Western and local stories to ACK, he was likely influenced by UNESCO’s 1967 endorsement of the use of comics for communicating cultural values (Chandra 2010). His use of the term “cultural heritage” thus related to international discourse at the time, a relationship that shaped much of India’s comics culture afterwards. At the same time, though, as a result of the generally Western quality of imported comics, Pai was driven by a desire to focus on daily life in contemporary India. However, by 1967, despite his initial enthusiasm for Indrajal, only three years after the publication of its first issue, Pai grew Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 38 dissatisfied as the local comics section, which he valued most, became replaced by quizzes and other educational content (McLain 2009; Chandra 2010).

Then came a transformational moment, at least as narrated after the fact. As the infamous

Uncle Pai, his persona for younger readers, he describes ACK’s foundational moment:

“In February 1967, my wife and I were visiting Delhi, and we stopped at Maharaja Lal & Sons bookstore. The TV was on in the bookstore…and the program was a quiz contest featuring five students from St. Stephen’s College. When they were asked, the students could not name the mother of Lord Ram…(b)ut then a question came about Greek gods on Mt. Olympus, and the children could answer that question! This is the trouble with our education system: children are getting alienated from their own culture” (Pai, as quoted in McLain 2010: 24).

From that revelation, Pai combined his previous interest in locally produced comics narratives with a personal allegiance to the Hindu nationalist movement of the time in what Kumar calls

“…his (re)telling the youth about India’s culture and mythology” (Kumar 2010). Pai thus crafted the children’s comics series that became Amar Chitra Katha on this revelation of a need for access to traditional culture, a heritage that seemed to be grossly threatened by Western media.

Yet, despite his previous work with them, The Times of India rejected his proposal for Amar

Chitra Katha, and, as a result, Pai turned to India Book House to create the phenomenally popular stories that have influenced generations of Indians (Kumar 2010).

After independence in the late 1940s, Indian leaders strongly emphasized secular education, ignoring the loss of an extended support network for middle class Indians as they migrated to urban centers in search of employment. In this context, Anant Pai developed Amar

Chitra Katha (ACK) as a means to revitalize tradition, both through education and translation of traditional knowledge into popular, mass media. Although Pai first submitted his concept for

ACK to The Times, he finally sold the idea to Mumbai-based India Book House in 1967 (Rao

2001; McLain 2009). With a goal of gaining parents’, teachers’, and children’s approval, Pai and

ACK began with ten Hindi-language issues of retold Western fairy tales before the publication of Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 39

Krishna, created by Pai and illustrator Ram Waeerkar in February of 1970 (McLain 2009;

Chandra 2010). With the stories that followed, Pai recognized the need to re-narrate traditional knowledge to younger generations who had lost access to traditional media, including

Brahminical tutoring for higher castes and folk media, such as storytelling, puppet shows, plays and dances (McLain 2009).

As Rao notes, Pai was not just responding to that moment of witnessing young quiz show contestants unable to name an important figure in the Ramayana. Rather, he was responding to the entrenchment of the Indian educational system in British dogma. Rao describes this problem as,

“The legacy of a colonial school system, based on Macaulay’s notorious assertions (one being that a shelf of a good English library was enough to replace the entire literature of the Orient, and the other that Britain’s purpose in colonizing India was to create a race of men English in every way, except for the color of their skin) had been readily accepted in the missionary schools where the middle and upper classes chose to send their children. When Pai asked a group of children to create a prototype for a comics magazine, he found that all their stories and pictures were derived from stereotypes of the British children’s literature that formed the staple reading matter for most urban, middle-class children. The stories involved daffodils and English boarding schools, but nothing from the immediate reality that these children experienced. (Rao 2001: 38)

Instead of telling stories that had nothing to do with Indian culture, Pai hoped that ACK would expose the then-new generation of middle and upper class children to their family’s cultural roots. ACK was thus designed as a counter to these colonialist tendencies in education, one which would reconnect young, middle class Hindus to their own roots in an entertaining mass medium.

Nationalism and the Amar Chitra Katha

In countering colonialism in education, though, ACK often veered strongly toward nationalism.

In particular, ACK’s comics created a history that accorded well with the Hindutva nationalist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which called for the establishment of Hinduism as the Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 40 national religion and culture (McLain 2009). Part of the appeal of Amar Chitra Katha is part of the problem with this series, namely retelling stories with a wide repertoire of variants in oral, written, visual, and various hybrid forms of storytelling. Fundamentally, the assumption is that there could be one version in one style that defines those narratives (McLain 2009). What makes

ACK unique is their identification as part of a larger, Hindu, visual culture. As McLain notes,

“Thus, these Indian comic books are notably different from their American, European, Japanese, and other global counterparts in that they are part of the spectrum of the sacred for many of their

Hindu readers” (McLain 2009: 18). However, in retelling Indian religious, historical, and folk tales, the Amar Chitra Katha series represented a nationalist turn in Indian comics, one which provided a decidedly biased, and Hindu, version of history. Many critics have noted a bias against women, minorities, and even local or regional versions of events and traditional stories.

Through textual and contextual analysis, scholars Nandini Chandra and Karline McLain note a tendency toward a Hindutva slant in ACK’s stories. In Immortal Picture Stories, McLain shows “…that Amar Chitra Katha comics, as a form of public culture that has reached into the everyday lives of millions of middleclass Indian children over the past four decades, are a crucial site for studying the ways in which dominant ideologies of religion and national identity are actively created and recreated by ongoing debate” (McLain 2009: 22). She examines how ACK affects people over time, as they grew to adulthood and began to understand these comics narratives in different ways. In the process, she uses several examples from the ACK series to show that these comics are centered upon “…a modern, middle class, upper-caste, predominately

Vaishnava strand of Hinduism” (McLain 2009: 208). She thus analyzes several examples of comics from the series that demonstrate a tendency, if not to directly stereotype ethnic groups Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 41 and women, then at least to show Hindu males as decidedly more socially powerful and valuable

(McLain 2009).

However, in The Classic Popular, Nandini Chandra more critically engages with ACK’s narratives, noting a stronger and more insidious, Hindu nationalist agenda in these visual narratives. She analyzes ACK’s comics as cultural commodities that uniquely construct an

‘authentic’ Indian culture that combines multiple, though largely Hindu, aspects of the diversity of local cultures within the nation, and thus continually renegotiates narratives of its rightwing ideology as novel forms of ‘infotainment’ (Chandra 2010: 204). As Rao further notes, the problems of Pai’s educational focus carried over into the art as well, leading to the domination of historical detail, talking heads over action, stilted and overly formal language, and uneven, cinematic illustrations that more resembled Indian calendar art or film posters than comic books

(Rao 2001). Despite Pai’s educational and often Hindu nationalist biases, Amar Chitra Katha set the standard for Indian comics, albeit one that derived more strongly from the Hindutva movement than from other comics.

Yet, these critiques have come long after the original publication of these stories, and it is important to remember ACK’s contribution to India’s comics culture. What began with 20,000 issues in the three years following the first run of ACK’s Krishna then exploded into five regional languages, in addition to English, and beyond, as well as five million issues sold per year

(Kapada, cited in Rao 2001). Despite its often nationalist undertones and agenda, ACK, as the largest and most popular comics series in India, laid the foundation for comics culture by telling stories through comics that would historically have been told in person, through performances and rituals.ix

Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 42

Bahadur, Tinkle, and the Appeal to Everyday Life

At the same time, another comics publisher attempted to rely more directly upon indigenous culture in storytelling than ACK. As Kumar described to me, Indrajal Comics came out of the same creative shift as Amar Chitra Katha. “With the risk [of publishing original comics] paying off, the Times of India group (who were Pai’s former employers and had rejected his proposal to launch the Amar Chitra Katha series) then launched a comic book series of their own – Indrajal

Comics. Indrajal is credited with bringing an entire galaxy of ‘foreign’ comic characters to India.

Characters like Flash Gordon, Phantom, and Mandrake captured the imagination of readers”

(Kumar 2010). Indrajal thus began as a project attempting to tap into the phenomenal success of

ACK and its attendant readership. Kumar specifically notes that Indrajal’s tactic of publishing in multiple languages was likely inspired by ACK’s distributing comics in thirty-eight different languages at one point (Kumar 2010). Where Pai appealed to readers through Indian and visual culture, Indrajal began by relying on the popularity of the comics medium itself.

Later on, though, Indrajal Comics began to appeal to readers in a different way. While it began as the publisher of Phantom and Mandrake the Magician, its then manager, A.C. Shukla, worked with illustrator and writer Aabid Surti to create an Indian version of the adventurer- detective by then familiar to readers from Western comics.x The result, Bahadur, which occurred off and on with Mandrake and Phantom, was different in that it was able to relate to daily life more so than ACK. Bahadur’s stories occurred in contemporary India, with the titular detective chasing down criminals like the then-infamous dacoit bandits of Chambal Valley in Madhya

Pradesh. (Rao 2001: 51). Still, as Aruna Rao notes, the Bahadur series generally shows a Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 43 nationalist bias similar to that of the ACK series, in that the detective makes villagers aware of their obligations to the Indian nation and in that class remains fixed despite any liberal tendencies in the stories (Rao 2001). Bahadur was relatively grounded in the changes and conflicts of then-contemporary India, though, unlike the grandiose and mythologically-oriented

Amar Chitra Katha.

Although stories by later writers and illustrators would show Bahadur fighting dacoit bandits who had by then been captured, the earliest issues showed a hero dealing with at least some of the realities of everyday life for Indrajal’s readers. This appeal to everyday reality contributed to a monthly sales of 580,000 copies in 1981, as well as more liberal storylines to appeal to the more liberal readership of Mumbai (Singh 1982, cited in Rao 2001). Accordingly,

Bahadur’s girlfriend was able to be a modern woman without compromising her traditional roots, defending herself with karate while remaining a loyal and ideal partner (Rao 2001). This stemmed from the creative genius of Surti, who, as the lone illustrator-writer in the early comics industry, carried an experimental style into other adventure-themed comic strips. Yet, just as later creators transformed Bahadur into a more muscular and even more cosmopolitan character, the comics industry began to shift from Mumbai to Delhi, a generally more conservative city, as shown by a shift from Indrajal’s original Marathi and English to Hindi and Bengali, which are both North Indian dialects (Rao 2001). In the end, however, Bahadur fell out of popularity, at the very least with The Times’ editors, and Indrajal closed in 1990. The earliest comics by Surti, though, in appealing to the social and cultural reality of a changing India, were able to ground comics storytelling in lived experience.

Meanwhile, Anant Pai introduced a new means of keeping comics narratives relevant to readers by incorporating fans’ stories and interaction: Tinkle. While ACK and Indrajal both Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 44 ceased regular publishing at the end of the 1980s, Pai’s other publication, Tinkle magazine, has continued through over 500 issues into the present (Rao 2001). Tinkle began as a biweekly comic in 1980 after ACK had taken off; in its pages, short comics were paired with activities and educational sections, as well as stories submitted by readers that were edited and illustrated by

Tinkle’s writers and artists (Rao 2001). With the name and picture of the child often published alongside the submitted story, Tinkle was able to portray both content similar to ACK and stories grounded in readers’ own experiences (Rao 2001). In addition to reader-submitted stories, though, certain humorous strips featuring particular characters also repeated in the pages of

Tinkle (McLain 2009). Similarly, Indian culture was not the only one to be addressed, and several volumes have taken the folklore of other countries as their focus. However, the readership for Tinkle seems relatively narrow, as Rao notes, since the comic mainly appeals to an

English-speaking middle class base. Despite a tendency to ignore the diversity within Indian culture, as much of the submitted stories contain largely Hindu names, references, or content, though, Tinkle provided a model for transforming comics into something more than a platform for nationalist sentiment and educational reform. By appealing to everyday life in this way,

Tinkle laid a foundation of reader participation in comics culture, which later creators would draw upon in crafting activist comics narratives and publishing companies.

Regionalization and the Superhero Genre

Before the development of long-form comics narratives, though, the medium had to be re- established. Following ACK, Indrajal, and Tinkle, several other magazines featured comics strips:

Target magazine hosted several, including the high quality Detective Moochwala by Ajit Ninan

(Rao 2001). By 1990, a national production and reception system proved unsustainable with the Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 45 end of regular publications by ACK and Indrajal. At the same time, just as comics with a nationalist bias and English language base experienced a downturn, regional comics experienced a boom. The most important company to come out of this period, Raj Comics, began publishing superhero and other comics in 1986. Its rise demonstrates a broad pattern of publication coming out of Northern India and resembling the model set by Tinkle more than that set by ACK. As

Kumar notes, “Then there was the mini-comic revolution in the late ‘80s, post the success of Raj

Comics in Hindi. There were two comics centers in India, in independent Indian history. And there has been a very large migration of artists. Earlier, there was Bombay. And there was

Indrajal, there was India Book House [the publisher of ACK]. And then the migration happened to Delhi, with the rise of Raj Comics and Diamond Comics.” Raj Comics in particular set the standard for this next shift in Indian comics’ history, as creators and publishers alike turned to regional audiences over national ones. As Rao demonstrates, publishing houses in Delhi shifted focus, publishing less in English and more in Hindi or Bengali than the earlier companies had in

Mumbai, and they tended to give more freedom to the creators behind the comics (Rao 2001).

At the same time, Delhi-based publisher Diamond Comics led the way for Hindi pulp publishing houses more generally to enter the comics form. Diamond grew out of Diamond

Pocket Books, a pulp publisher, and focused on what Rao categorizes as the following: short gag cartoons like the famous Pran Kumar Sharma’s Pran’s Features series, action-adventure comics, and Film Chitrakatha, or Hindi film photo-novellas. Alongside Diamond, Raj Comics grew out of Raja Pocket Books, another Hindi pulp publisher, and specialized in Indian superheroes with clear Western influences, as well as other fantastic, humor, or action-oriented stories (Rao 2001).

Raj Comics made its mark with Indian superheroes who dealt with both national and international injustice, as well as a visually detail-oriented style clearly influenced by ACK (Rao Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 46

2001). While other publishers like Manoj Comics also entered the comics scene in this period,

Raj and Diamond have lasted the longest, with Raj described as a classic of Indian comics culture and Diamond as a benchmark due to the quality of stories like Pran’s Chacha Chaudhuri, a satirical series with a relate-able grandfather figure as its protagonist (Rao 2001).xi The regional focus of both of these companies allowed them to find a strong grounding among readers and to become the two leading figures in India’s Golden Age of superhero comics.

Within that Golden Age, Amitabh Kumar’s essay in Raj Comics for the Hard-Headed describes the need for a specific type of superhero. He notes that the three brothers behind Raj, namely Sanjay, Manish, and Manoj Gupta, were inspired by their own love of the comics form.

He quotes Sanjay as stating that “‘We were passionately in love with comics and with fantasy comics in particular. So, my brother, Manoj, and I would read Amar Chitra Katha and the other comics that was around at that point of time. What happens is that once something fascinates you, you begin hunting for it. We had read all the Amar Chitra Katha and then went to Indrajal

Comic titles like Bahadur. But even that couldn’t quench our thirst for comics’” (Kumar 2008:

22). Kumar includes their experiences in Hard-Headed in order to demonstrate their passion for the comics medium, especially superhero stories. Their fandom and love of Indian comics led the

Gupta brothers to perceive a need for “…a uniquely Indian superhero influenced by the Indrajal superheroes” (Kumar 2008: 22). As a result, specifically after seeing a Spider-man cartoon on part of the Sunday National Television in the early 1980s, the three created Nagraj. He was envisioned as “ ‘a superhero who would rid the world of crime, corruption, and the newly formed word in the Indian psyche – Terrorism’” (Kumar 2008: 22). Rather than evoking any one, culturally specific vision of India, the Gupta brothers focused on the ideals of the superhero genre as a response to contemporary social problems in India. Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 47

As a result of their regional focus, Raj, Diamond, Manoj, and others tended to rely more heavily upon the creativity of the authors and artists involved as a means to appeal to local audiences. In contrast, for Mumbai-based companies like ACK and Indrajal, creators were generally employed freelance and were relatively less involved in the whole production process than those behind this new wave of comics, with notable exceptions like Aabid Surti and certain of Pai’s collaborators (Rao 2001; McLain 2009). As multiple creators, including Kumar, note, the lack of work available in Mumbai after the closure of these publishers led to the migration of many creators to Delhi for just such a comics production system. That same shift helped to support a particular model of production that continued despite increasing freedom for creators.

For Delhi-based publishers like Raj and Diamond, production occurs along an assembly line, from a story concept created by an editor, to a writer, illustrator, a dialogue writer, cover illustrators, and a final set of illustrators who would finalize the art, as well as any potential translators (Rao 2001). The result is often a relatively incoherent comics narrative, with multiple voices involved in the creative process who did not necessarily have the same goals or ideas for the final product. Kumar stated to me that “I don’t make mainstream superhero comics. Although

I’m vastly influenced and my ideas of dramaturgy are kitschy and derived from them, I cannot make those Raj Comics because I’ve worked with them, and those have been the most mind- numbing moments because it’s like a factory. Because you work with these guys and you understand what the conveyor belt is all about. It’s very strange. Not one guy who makes a Raj

Comic knows how to make the entire comic. The inker can’t pencil, the penciller can’t ink, the colorist can’t do either, the person who writes just writes. And it’s meant to be like that. It’s in their interest because what they want are cogs in the wheel, not the entire wheel.” Industrial models of comics production tend to focus on each aspect of the creative process as a separate Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 48 job, performed by a separate employee, and coordinated by an editor or primary creator.

However, as Kumar demonstrates through his commentary, this model often leads to frustration, especially as comics creators often do more than just one aspect of the production process. As a result, creators like Kumar draw on, but do not ascribe to, such a creative model.

Despite its controversial model of production, this period saw remarkable growth in comics culture. As Rao in particular notes, the overlap between comics readers and creators that begins in this period enriched even the pulp-inspired comics of this period with a vibrance based upon an enthusiasm and love of the form. With such an experimental and often chaotic tone, superhero, fantasy, and other genre comics publishers appealed less to ACK’s middle class readers and more to a wide variety of readers, as they were and are available more in bookstalls than bookstores. Their short form, small size, and low price made these mini-comics more accessible than the larger, educational comics of ACK and other publishers. Growing interest in comics like Raj and Diamond led to the development of lending libraries due to a growing practice of youths and even adults sharing copies of comicsxii. Furthermore, their vitality, irreverence, and tendency to push the comics medium toward innovation and more challenging stories set the stage for the next transformation of comics, from short to longer narratives.

Creating the Comics Shelf

In the move to regional comics production, long-form comics narratives too came to the fore.

The work that the creators with whom I spoke most often cited as the first longer work and the impetus for the shift to longer narratives in comics culture was Orijit Sen’s The River of Stories.

Sen’s perennial work was first published in 1994, during the boom in regional comics like Raj and Diamond Comics. His story portrayed the experiences of adivasi, tribal communities dealing Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 49 with the injustices created by the government’s damming of the Narmada River. He describes the difficulties of finding a space for River at the time: “‘No publisher would consider publishing something like a comic book,’ Sen said. ‘We were only able to publish it with the help of a small grant from the government, and the government didn’t know what we were using it for, obviously’” (Sen as quoted in Overdorf 2010). Due to the lack of long-form or adult comics in book shops at the time, Sen had a great deal of difficulty finding a space for River.xiii As graphic novels go, The River of Stories is relatively short at only 61 pages. In addition, current reproductions are distributed in a basic format: photocopied pages, spiral binding, and a clear plastic cover; as a result, River remains a difficult to find but pivotal work: the first Indian graphic novel.

Yet, what defines a graphic novel in this case is not the design or format. For instance,

Amitabh Kumar focuses instead on long-form comics as offering a change for creators. Instead of the industrial model of comics production generally supported in the U.S., creators like Kumar call for a focus on an auteur model of creativity through the shift to graphic novels. In such a model, “The graphic novel is pioneered by a figure. And that single figure is the artist, the singular creator. Or a collaborator. But 2 people or 3 people working together on it. But it’s not something that is industry driven. It’s extremely subjective and deeply personal. And that’s the landscape that I operate within.” While contemporary authors and artists are influenced by superhero and pulp publishers, they tend to argue against an industrial model’s general abuse of creators (Sabin 2001).xiv The graphic novel form thus offered an alternative to the industrial model of production by focusing on the power of creativity and innovation. As will be illustrated in Chapter 4, this shift combines conceptions of folk artisans with the filmic model of auteur analysis to catalyze a reinvention of the comics creator as a master of visual storytelling. Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 50

Following Sen’s pivotal work, in 2004, storyteller Sarnath Banerjee pushed for a shelf for comics and graphic novels in Indian book stores while promoting his work, Corridor, which was considered by some to be India’s first fully realized graphic novel. Through a combination of personal connections and persuasion, Banerjee was able to open up a space for comics in the

Indian book publishing industry. At the same time, though, corporate comics culture in India was preparing for a boom that would lead to a digital model of comics publishing, albeit while generally continuing associations of comics with children and creatively shallow production models. Yet, it was as a result of Banerjee’s work to open shelf space for comics in book shops that other authors were able to approach the creation of original, independent visual narratives.

An essential part of his appeal was likely grounding the creation of comics within an auteur model of creativity that is prevalent in international comics culture. In doing so, Banerjee and later creators could be understood through their exceptional creativity. Kumar describes this shift in creative philosophy as one that is simultaneously very interesting and challenging for those creators considering crafting comics narratives. “The moment that’s very interesting right now, and which is something that I want to pick up my research again and carry on with it.

Because there’s this very interesting moment that we are a part of where, there’s a great philosophy, compared to the earlier times, in the field of comics. Where a lot of amateurs are being pushed and trying to negotiate with a publishing comics, web comics, modes of distribution, comic conferences…So what Comix.India is doing. What people from Project C are trying to do. What Pao is trying to do. There is a lot of activity. And a lot of energy, regarding the future of comics in India.” A shift in focus to the independence and creative skill of comics authors and artists has led to excitement and innovation in the form. Accordingly, comics creator

Bharath Murthy spear-headed the anthologies of Comix.India, where amateur and more Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 51 advanced authors and artists are able to collaborate and be published side by side (Murthy 2010).

Similarly, the comics magazine Project C offers creators the opportunity to workshop their narratives and then find a home in the magazine’s pages (Project C 2012). The Pao Collective is the focus of this particular study because they have focused on developing India’s comics culture from an industry characterized by regionalized corporate publishers to one that, while less widely published or read and while still coming into its own, values creativity and stories true to everyday life. What is most important about this moment, historically, is the shift to a production model that emphasizes creativity, innovation, and, as will be demonstrated in Chapter 6, community engagement.

The Pao Collective Returns

With the 2000s, the graphic novel has grown into its own in Delhi’s comics culture, as one aspect of a wider arts scene there. At the same time that corporate and activist publishers rose to prominence again, the boom of publications in Indian graphic novels was finally taking hold. Following Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor in 2004, he collaborated with Anindya Roy to publish The Believers (2006) and Kashmir Pending (2007) through their Phantomville Press.

However, after the two parted ways as publishing partners, Banerjee published The Barn Owl’s

Wondrous Capers through Penguin Books. In addition, Amruta Patil published her Kari in 2008, to much critical acclaim, and Appupen released his socially critical Moonward. The years 2010-

11 marked the establishment of the Pao Collective in the publication of graphic novels. Over that time, each of the five members of Pao had work published: Tinker Solder Tap by Amitabh

Kumar and Bhagwati Prasad, A Home at the End of the World by Parismita Singh, The Harappa

Files by Sarnath Banerjee, Delhi Calm by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, and When Kulbushan Met Stockli, Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 52 a collection of Indian and Swedish creators’ works that included Orijit Sen and Ghosh. Each of these narratives pushed the comics medium forward in the Indian context, from Singh’s portrait of Assamese culture through the experiences of a young girl to Banerjee’s mixing of short stories to craft an overall narrative that is framed as the coming together of banned government files

(Singh 2009; Banerjee 2011). Meanwhile, Ghosh’s alternative account of the historic Emergency period in Delhi and Kumar’s socially engaged and historically detailed account of television’s arrival in one Delhi neighborhood both demonstrate the importance of representing not just the diversity of communities within in India, but also of experiences of history (Ghosh 2010; Kumar

2009). Finally, the collaborative landmark of Kulbushan shows the diversity and strength of

India’s comics creators, with each Indian creator working alongside another creator from

Sweden in telling stories about what it means to travel across cultures.

During that same period, illustrator Priya Kuriyan worked with Anniruddha Sen Gupta,

Aniruddha Sen Gupta in illustrating and publishing Our Toxic World in 2010, and Sen’s former collaborator and current friend, Bhagwati Prasad, published LIE, a work illustrated by traditional,

Mughal miniature painters. The latter work became part of a wave of graphic novels that transformed the medium by re-structuring it according to traditional art styles. Thus, 2011’s

Sita’s Ramayan and I See the Promised Land both reimagine patua scroll art as sequential comics narratives, while the creators behind Bhimayana use Gond painting style to tell the story of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Over that same time period, Comix.India published all four of its current anthologies, Raj Comics, Tinkle digest, and Liquid Comics were continuing their publication runs, and Comics Jump published their first runs of stories. The graphic novel was taking hold, even as various format anthologies also came onto the scene. Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 53

Within the history of Indian comics, the rise of the Pao Collective is important because they represent a means to maintain authorial control, quality production, and even artistic community. However, where they diverge most clearly from existing precedents, and even from other comics cultures around the world, is in directly engaging with social issues as a means of justifying the medium. Yet, these creators’ motives are not purely economic, nor entirely activist-oriented; instead, they deal with myriad creative choices by considering the presence of their stories and storytelling in other peoples’ lives. In so doing, they are able to craft a comics medium that is beyond literature and beyond art, but rather something else entirely: a living medium that does not need justification in relation to other media.

A History of Creative Excellence

As noted earlier, the Pao Collective has grown out of the shift to understand comics based on authorial or artisanal skill. Thus, each creator works relatively independently, with all but Kumar illustrating and writing most, if not all, their work. Even Kumar, though, who illustrated Tinker,

Solder, Tap but both illustrated and drew Raj Comics for the Hard-Headed, emphasizes author’s views as central in elucidating why he works with comics. “I feel like what I do is more like a medium to transfer my thoughts, my half-chewed ideas, my sense of the world, my sense of the history of the world…Be it a writer, a philosopher, anyone, is to indicate his relationship with the world and the way he sees the world. And that is any man’s journey, any man’s journey is that.

And that’s the only real quest. So I don’t know. That’s what I think comics, or drawing, image- making is for me. I’m sure others would have a much more interesting answer, but for me, it gets its importance because I can’t do anything else.” He places importance on the medium of comics because he, as an author, is able to communicate most clearly through that form. Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 54

Meanwhile, the comics community and culture in India, centered in capital New Delhi, continues to grow in numbers, diversity, and strength. Each year, more artists, authors, and publishers pick up the comics form, for profit, communication, artistic experimentation, or otherwise. Within the history are many narratives that show the heights to which this culture can rise: narratives that speak to cosmopolitan and other communities in a form that grows out of comics, folk art, history, storytelling, and the experiences of everyday life, among the many other roots of Indian culture. While the strength of each entry into this tradition of comics- creation remains debate-able, with various voices criticizing artwork, storytelling, or even subject matter, each one adds to the strength of the medium and shows the importance of this kind of visual narrative in illustrating, understanding, and communicating about what it means to be a human, cultural being in the 21st century.

For many creators, this future remains unstable. As pointed out in the Introduction, creativity tends to be constrained by publishers’ preferences and conception of readership, which may shift drastically from month to month. Accordingly, despite activism and an auteur approach, comics’ future in India remains unclear. When asked about his future in comics,

Kumar narrated how he runs into similar difficulties: “I began researching comics because I wanted to make them. I wanted to understand the business of comics. And that’s why I was interested primarily to create a comic book culture. Because I wanted to make comics and I want to live by them, and I want a system where what I make is bought and consumed. That system hasn’t been achieved yet. Maybe it won’t, and if it won’t, then I will probably be doing other things. Because I need money to survive.” Although the comics community is supportive of individual creators, making a livelihood is difficult for most. Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 55

Accordingly, Kumar has worked in gallery spaces as well as comic books, and he describes how he finds those spaces to be similar to working in the comics form. “I have displayed a composite image. I was quite happy with the effect that it produced and still produces with people who have seen it. Because I have made friends with complete strangers with it and that’s more than other projects have done for me. I hope that it reaches out to as many people as it can. I am, I have been, and I will be aggressively trying to create space where it reaches out to people. And I will try to create an inclusive agenda—the more the merrier, man.

The more people who want to make comics, who want to do stuff, the better for me. It makes business sense, in terms of making a livelihood about it. That’s something I am curious to do. It’s something that I am extremely eager to do.” Like Amitabh Kumar, most of the creators with whom I spoke expressed a desire for more peer interaction and a larger community in general.

However, the standards for such a community become an issue for some creators, whose work varies too far from established norms of design, style, or reader expectation. Chapter 4, in particular, focuses on these tense moments in solidifying comics as a medium in Indian culture.

From its beginnings in Lee Falk’s Phantom comics and earlier traditions of political cartooning, India’s comics culture has grown to include more than just serial adventure stories targeted at preteens. Yet, the greater emphasis on authorial control and high-quality, longer graphic narratives is not a purely Indian phenomenon, as demonstrated by comics scholar Roger

Sabin.xv Furthermore, alternative models still exist, from Raj Comics to more fan centric publications like Comix.India, where creators tend toward collaborative models of creativity in which they merely perform one step in the production process. The most striking feature of

India’s comics culture, though, is the communities that form around the creation and consumption of these visual narratives. While I interviewed these artists and witnessed several of Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 56 them crafting stories from whatever media they had chosen, they often came together for events, from book openings to readings, lectures, and parties. These creators are not just colleagues, but friends and members of a common community who appreciate each other’s work and value their combined creativity and experiences.

This community stems from a common identification with and need for the comics medium. As Kumar noted in a conversation with me, “You know when you have a dream. And you wake up. There’s some bit that you remember, but as time passes by, the memory of the dream becomes more and more abstract. In the loosening of the structure of the dream and its becoming more loose and abstract, parts of it are still hinging on the central sense of it. I’ve tried;

I cannot communicate that in any other form but comics. That sense of moving away. If it were like a map, which is almost like a cosmos where planets are circling around it, and there is the center. I can’t create the center. Comics does it, for me it does, most successfully. And I’ve discovered over the years that I work best when I have a field to play in. I think I am a horrible painter because I don’t give myself the field to play. I’m too intimidated or too seduced by the form and its history, in and of itself, to do something interesting. The only form that I can do anything interesting in is comics.” It is this passion for comics that defines his experience of the medium and of the community. Such passion likely helps to bring creators together, as many of the editors, authors, artists, and otherwise with whom I met felt a similar sense of belonging to the comics medium.

As Kumar pointed out, this ability to draw people together is an important goal of the Pao

Collective and of the creative process itself. The strength of their narratives, and of the comics culture or industry in India, relies upon this community that they create each day, through conversations, meetings, events, and their continued reliance on each other in making sense of Chapter 2: A Creator’s History of Indian Comics 57 life in India today. In the next chapter, I turn to a definition of the comics medium in India before, in Chapter 4, addressing how this community forms and then, in Chapter 5, how it sustains itself over time.

i As described by Karline McLain, ACK comics were accepted as ‘chitra katha,’ or, as described by Anant Pai, “…’a series of pictures, telling a story, developing a situation, or presenting the same character in varied circumstances” (2009: 42). Through the 1978 India Book House seminar, “The Role of Chitra Katha in School Education,” which was attended by urban school principals and the Union minister of education, Pai was able to argue that comics bear no inherent threat to literacy. As McLain quotes him: “‘If there are bad comics, let us oppose them as we oppose bad books or bad movies, but let us not frown on comics as a medium of education’” (2009: 42). Pai and ACK were thus able to overcome common fears and criticism of the comics medium by focusing on the medium as having great educational potential. ii See Chapter 3 for discussion comics as a ‘vulgar’ medium. iii ACK published original material starting in 1967, while Indrajal only did so beginning in 1976, with Aabid Surti’s Bahadur, though the latter began publishing Western imports in 1964. iv Hasan argues that the Punches led to the establishment of vernacular press, particularly concerned with independence from British rule (2007). v In particular, Kumar is likely referencing the work of the Dastangoi, a group who retells several hundred year old Islamic stories through the use of language and expressive hand gestures. They draw on the historical evidence of storytelling traditions surrounding the Daastan-E-Amir Haamza in performing these traditional stories for contemporary, youth audiences (Kapur 2011). vi He continues, “But I say that as someone who is not very inspired by them. Orijit would be a good person to ask this question. Did you already ask him? What did he say?” This question reveals a curiosity about what other creators responded, as well as the importance of community. During my conversations with various creators, many asked how others had responded, particularly what more established creators like Sen and Banerjee had said. See Chapter 5 for more discussion of community and comics culture. vii Such an appeal is the focus of Chapter 4. viii Similar to Raj Comics, Amar Chitra Katha separated the production of comics into each of the separate steps, such that each story was created by multiple individuals performing different tasks. Editors, headed by Anant Pai, coordinated the various members of the production team in order to make stories cohere. See McLain’s work in particular on this process (2009). ix Upon Pai’s passing, Pao member, political cartoonist, and graphic novelist Vishwajyoti Ghosh created a short comic memorializing his contribution to Indian comics and children’s literature, which he entitled “And Then Came Uncle Pai” (Ghosh 2012). x xi Created by Pran Kumar Sharma in the 1960s, Chacha Chaudhury has become a legendary figure in Indian comics culture and a continuing presence in narratives and at events. Pran himself has become an instructor at the Indian Institute of Cartoonists after publishing over 400 comic, along with several more comic strips (“Pran” 2012; Talwar 2008). xii See Karline McLain’s India’s Immortal Picture Stories (2009) for further references to comics lending libraries that proliferated in the past. xiii See Chapter 5 for a longer description of the difficulties he experienced. xiv As Sabin demonstrates, corporate models value efficiency over the quality of narrative or the creative process itself, particularly in England the United States (2001). xv In particular, Sabin provides a space at the end of each historical chapter in his Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels to describe how authors’ rights progressed over time in England and the United States (2001). Chapter 3: Defining Comics

What is called comics has changed over time. Scholars like Roger Sabin have shown how the contemporary comics medium developed from a wide variety of sources, from broadsheets to illuminated manuscripts, American pulp novels, and British penny dreadfuls (Sabin 2001)i. Yet, as multiple authors have noted, the attempt to distinctly define the comics medium, particularly in terms of any originary form, often leads to splitting hairs over small differences. Instead, scholars like Joseph Witek emphasize recognizing the changing ways that readers have been trained by creators and their narratives to encounter particular combinations of images and text as comics (2009). In India, as demonstrated in the previous chapter, the comics medium developed from Western predecessors, but was steeped in indigenous visual culture. Publishing companies like India Book House and Raj Comics then appealed to this context by emphasizing traditional culture, folklore, or, particularly for Raj, putting a unique spin on Western genres.

Although what is called comics in India has changed over time, it is important to recognize that there can be no singular, definitive comics medium.

Instead, a striking diversity proliferates, from political cartooning to comics strips, graphic novels, and the comic book. As Sarnath Banerjee, author of the second graphic novel published in India, stated to me, “It’s nice to define. Because in the process of trying to define and failing to do so, comes a lot of answers. The failure of finding answers is always, I feel, a nice way to reach that conclusion.” Although the answers may not always be clear, the act of questioning is worthwhile because of the clarity it brings. Accordingly, the work of recognizing the comics medium as diverse and changing over time provides insight into the central conflicts and discussion of the medium. Chapter 3: Defining Comics 59

In the previous chapter, the history of the comics medium in India revealed some of the many tensions at work when creators put pen, pencil, or electronic pad and pen to the page. In defining the medium, though, it is necessary to explore the relationship between comics creators in Delhi and international scholarship on the medium. Their understanding of comics as language, particularly through semiotics, leads to the raising up of the graphic novel form around the world as the maturation of comics. Yet, in the Indian context, comics was more specifically and more strongly tied to educators’ dialogues on how to improve literacy, particularly through the work of Anant Pai. This context clarifies how and why contemporary creators come to an understanding of comics as storytelling. Further, this chapter works to reveal how such a perspective reveals the limitations to the long-form narratives of the graphic novel. I then conclude by noting that the confluence of these many influences and precedents can be understood most clearly through a definition of comics as a way of reading and creating narratives that is grounded in the lives of creators and their audiences. By untangling these various threads, this chapter will reveal that comics is a medium for storytelling like any other; that is exactly what is unique about comics in India.

Parismita Singh

In this chapter, I will consider how creators define and evaluate comics in Delhi. Throughout this exploration of how comics is defined as a medium, the work of Parismita Singh will serve as a guide. As a creator, Singh has struggled with the terms available in India’s comics culture. In crafting a space on the bookshelf for comic books in India, early creators like Orijit Sen and

Sarnath Banerjee, who created the first and second long form comics, respectively, framed their work as ‘graphic novels.’ By the time that Singh’s The Hotel at the End of the World was Chapter 3: Defining Comics 60 published in 2010, Sen and Banerjee had thus already established the medium as an emerging one (Image 3-1). As most of the creators with whom I spoke saw it, this was a move based on marketing, and the term can thus be most clearly understood in this context as a means to reach wider audiences after the production process. Accordingly, creators call their work a graphic novel so that editors are able to understand and, in turn, push for the publication of their long- form comics narratives. For her part, Parismita Singh would not even call herself a graphic novelist. In one of our conversations, she stated that “There’s so much of this question of whether you see yourself as a writer, or as an artist, or whatever. Slowly, I have begun to feel more and more that I really see myself as a storyteller.” Singh is thus able to bypass categorization by thinking of herself as a storyteller rather than a comics artist. However, the ability to appeal to the publishing world raises other problems, particularly in terms of who reads one’s books. In publicity for her first book, The Hotel at the End of the World, Parismita Singh stated that “It’s a comic book, although not for children” (Penguin 2009). This quote shows how

Singh was able to hedge her bets, emphasizing the intended, adult audience while still veering away from the complicated ground of ‘the graphic novel’ as a term. Accordingly, she does not frame her storytelling as mass mediation or as traditional, but as her personal take on the world.

Singh’s wide array of publications each demonstrate this personal perspective through her unique artistic style. While she is currently working on her second graphic novel, which is targeted at young adults, she has also published several shorter stories, specifically as a researcher for Sarai Center for the Study of Developing Societies in North Delhi and in various other publications, including Time Out and Katha Prize Stories 13. Throughout these narratives,

Singh draws with fluid lines that provide a depth and density to the landscapes and people she portrays. In Hotel, in particular, it is Singh’s dedication to detailed and impressive landscapes Chapter 3: Defining Comics 61 that stand out in images of mountainous views, clouds that portend ominous events, and people reflecting on their experiences of the world (Image 3-2). When one of her characters confronts an image of peace that conflicts with his understanding of war, she divides him from that peace through an outline that surrounds his person and is as dense as the bridge supporting the characters in the background (Image 3-3). Furthermore, her image draws on Japanese scroll paintings, demonstrating an awareness of fine art, and highlights her reliance, visually, on the page as a whole image, rather than on individual panels drawn in detail. Although she tends to rely on impressive backgrounds and visually stunning compositions, Singh is able to skillfully communicate the emotions and other information about characters through her sensitive renderings of those landscape. As a result, characters remain relatively simple, emphasizing their rootedness in those specific places and their communities.

Based on her artistic style and discussion of comics, Singh and other creators in Delhi clearly work within the framework of storytelling, though not necessarily in a traditional or modern way. Singh understands this move based upon her own enjoyment of stories and their telling. “I really really like good stories, from all over. I feel like it’s a great resource, simply because I enjoy it so much. But with this question of folk stories, I’m not interested that much in transmitting folklore. I see myself more as a storyteller, because you sort of make the stories your own.” She is inspired by traditional storytelling but not beholden to tradition and thus is more excited by the chance to do something unique. She thus stated to me that “You hear a very good story, and you really like it. But at some point, you want to claim it for yourself, which means that you basically add stuff to it and you make it suit yourself.” Yet, Singh contradicts the divide she sees between a storyteller within a tradition and one with the ability to be more innovative. “I always feel like [adding stuff] is something that the average village storyteller Chapter 3: Defining Comics 62 under the tree would have done. Or something that my grandmom would have done. So she heard a story somewhere. She would not care about historical authenticity, or checking all these facts. She would just claim it.” In claiming the story as one’s own, traditional storyteller, grandmother, or comics creator each color it with their individual perspectives, rather than focusing on the tradition or folklore. Accordingly, Singh continues, “But if you are a storyteller, you basically have—you don’t follow the same rules, you just join the dotted lines as they please you. So, I think that’s something distinct about a storyteller’s approach.” Singh is thus uneasy about finding inspiration in traditional storytelling and folklore because the weight of tradition may in fact limit, or even prevent, creativity,. She thus draws on folklore as only one of many frames of reference and demonstrates the larger pattern among contemporary comics creators to incorporate multiple frames of reference, in order to avoid being limited by any one. In this case, framing comics as storytelling emphasizes creativity based upon one’s experiences of life, rather than as grounded within any one of these frames.

In sorting through this veritable tangle of defining comics, and with it, the graphic novel,

Parismita Singh and her work provide a helpful guide for understanding how comics have continued to develop in contemporary comics culture. For Singh and other creators, this is because understanding comics as a kind of storytelling fundamentally bypasses the difficulties of telling serious stories in a playful medium. In particular, creators have worked hard to portray their storytelling as more than narratives in a vulgar medium, something that distracts children from good narratives, from literature, or from education. As she stated to me, Singh incorporates stories in the following way: “With [my forthcoming] book, I’ve used stories that I’ve actually heard from people that I know who those people are. It’s not like sometimes, you just forget who you heard them from. So with this book, I have actually used 3 stories that I’ve heard. And then, Chapter 3: Defining Comics 63 what do you do? For instance, I have this central story that I’m using for this young adult novel

I’m working on right now. I initially heard it as this story about this little girl—because I also do all this education work in the villages. So I had this little girl who just wouldn’t talk very much and she had this small backstory that was really funny. But now, what do you do? Do you say this really happened and the real details are this way? How do you work around that?” In grounding their stories in others’ everyday life and repertoires of stories, authenticity becomes a problem for comics creators. As a result, in defining comics, creators continually turn to other frames of reference. Yet, as Singh notes, these new ways of legitimizing or understanding comics narratives, by focusing on creativity above all, bring their own complications.

Comics as Language In my interviews with comics creators in Delhi, American and European comics scholarship served as one of the primary frameworks for defining comics. Creators draw on and challenge international comics scholarship, so it’s necessary to define comics first in this perspective. The field of Comics Studies, despite beginning as quite literary in terms of theoretical grounding, has grown to include multiple perspectives: literary, fine arts, filmic, ethnographic, and a diversity of other approaches.ii Yet, as multiple scholars and creators have noted, particularly multidisciplinary scholar Charles Hatfield, many of these approaches have remained relatively limited in scope, focusing on legitimizing comics by incorporating the form or specific works into a ‘real’ art form like literature, film, or the fine arts (Hatfield 2011). Accordingly, comics scholars have debated a definition of comics, both because of their own diversity of backgrounds and because the field is still relatively new. Throughout the diverse definitions of the medium, the medium directly confronts the tense relationship between the visual and verbal in the search of legitimization and in the tense structure of the medium itself. However, the most defining Chapter 3: Defining Comics 64 element of these visual narratives, rather than any particular disciplinary perspective, continues to be the context in which they are created and read.

In Western culture, scholars and audiences in general have associated comics with due to an association with children’s literature and other ‘low’ narrative genres, such as pulp and science fiction.iii As a result, not only readers but also scholars have been generally unable to appreciate this medium on its own merit, instead referring to established media like literature or the arts to establish their credibility. According to theorist Thierry Groensteen, comics continue to search for cultural legitimacy, despite a recent upturn in appreciation, because of an early dichotomy between educational literature and visual entertainment (Groensteen 2009). Many of the recent revivals or booms in comics production the world over have their roots in educator interest, as in the pedagogic focus of India’s Amar Chitra Katha comics, which I return to in

Chapter 7. However, Groensteen points out how American and European educators viewed comics as taking the place of literature when they flooded the market for teenage and children’s literature in the 1930s. At the time, pre-existing associations of children and the lower classes as exhibiting a lack of intelligence or imagination also fed into the labeling of comics as vulgar

(Groensteen 2009). The Comics Code of the 1950s, which was formed by publishers in order to avoid government regulation, thus enacted an aesthetic division between genres and art forms based upon a literary and educational bias (Sabin 2001).iv By understanding this medium as intrinsically harmful to developing minds, educators in the first half of the 20th century divided the world into separate realms of the educational word and the entertaining image.

As a result of such preexisting conceptions of comics’ place in a high/low dichotomy, early scholars began most definitions of comics as an art form with the relationship between the visual and the verbal. In Understanding Comics, comics creator Scott McCloud analyzes the Chapter 3: Defining Comics 65 comics medium as one with broad origins, from the Bayeux Tapestry to European broad sheets and American pulp novels, but with incredible narrative potential. As he was writing in the early

1990s, during the re-emergence of creator and reader interest,

McCloud focuses on comics as a powerful intermediary between high and low art.v He thus breaks the creative process apart visually in order to demonstrate the process and power of telling a story in the medium. He demonstrates the potential of comics to tell stories of infinite styles and appearances (1993).

McCloud thus argues through image and word to demonstrate the unique way that the comics medium enables greater creativity by balancing the two in order to create meaning. He especially focuses on the power of the gutter, the separation between one frame and the next, in the layout of a page and in the flow of narrative. He describes this potential accordingly: Chapter 3: Defining Comics 66

McCloud thus argues that this narrative space provides an entry point for reader creativity and in fact requires the reader’s imagination to fill in what is left out of the picture. Later scholars would note that, despite being a foundational text in comics scholarship, McCloud sharply divides form and content throughout his work.

Accordingly, he defines the form as centered around the opposition of the image and text, as

“juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information, and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud 1993:9). In persuasively Chapter 3: Defining Comics 67 speaking to multiple audiences, both elite and popular, McCloud resorts to the division of the verbal and the visual, as well as style and content, in order to lend credibility to the comics medium.

Similarly, in Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels, arts journalist Roger Sabin engages with the division of the verbal and the visual in order to argue for comics as a serious medium.

Sabin provides a historical account of the development of American and British comics, but defines the medium as one of tensions. He describes how the developing academic literature of the 1990s has “…shown that comics are a language; they combine to constitute a weave of writing and art which has its own syntax, grammar and conventions, and which can communicate ideas in a totally unique fashion” (Sabin 1996:8). Sabin thus relies upon an understanding of comics as language, grounded in semiotics, whereby the division of visual and verbal work separately together to craft meaning. In contrast to McCloud, though, Sabin’s goal in historicizing the comics medium is to point to its uniqueness and that of each artist’s work

(2001). He describes how individual creators have balanced that relationship to tell stories in unique and powerful ways. Sabin thus resolves the image/text dichotomy by stressing the uniqueness of any given work of comics narrative over pre-existing qualitative norms.

More recent comics scholarship has argued in favor of a more complex definition of comics as two modes of experience, the textual and the visual, combined with their own interpolation. Literary scholar Charles Hatfield argues that comics are a hybrid medium, an image-text, where image and text each communicate something separately, and yet together communicate more complex meanings (Hatfield 2005). Accordingly, Hatfield states that

“[c]omics demand a different order of literacy: they are never transparent, but beckon their readers in specific, often complex ways, by generating tension among their formal elements” Chapter 3: Defining Comics 68

(2005:67). Although he divides image and text in a similar way to McCloud and Sabin, his analysis highlights the tensions and overlap between multiple understandings of comics. He thus describes how comics can be understood as both narrative and illustration, both aesthetic objects and temporal narratives. In balancing these tensions, creators negotiate the meaning and potential interpretations of narratives, and thus craft a more complex narrative than any written one.

Despite the recognition that image and text overlap in order to create meaning, this conception relies upon the division of images and texts as distinct elements. Although Hatfield notes that readers may experience comics as more than just a text or an image, he emphasizes their juxtaposition as the crux of narrative impact since it is only in balancing the binary of image-text that creators are able to intensively engage readers.

From its beginning, comics scholarship has run up against the wall of the visual/verbal dichotomy in arguing for the medium as a serious one. However, each of these authors has served an important purpose for the field of Comics Studies. While McCloud opened up the medium to wider appreciation and deeper analysis, as grounded in earlier works by creators like

Will Eisner and scholars like Lawrence Abbott, Sabin provided a clearer sense of context and history. Similarly, Hatfield pointed out the need to attend to the complexity of relationships created by understanding comics as a juxtaposition of image and text. All of them argue for the exceptional quality of the medium based upon the multiple tensions inherent to it. Yet, these creators most clearly demonstrate how comics has been understood in terms of literature, in that the image and text have been understood as binary elements of a larger language, each fighting for dominance in determining meaning.

Accordingly, the creators behind the Pao Collective have had to deal with assumptions about the division of image and text, as well as comics being a low art. As the creator of the Chapter 3: Defining Comics 69 second graphic novel, Sarnath Banerjee, states, “There’s still people who think when you bring image and text together, they both get diluted. They see the image as an abstraction of literature that loses weight, but actually comics allows for greater abstraction through the combination of both.” For Banerjee, Singh, and the rest of the Pao Collective, those who separate image and text merely reaffirm the purity of literature and art, rather than recognizing comics as its own medium. Thus, the Pao Collective’s agenda of arguing for comics as an independent medium makes more sense in this context.

The Graphic Novel In arguing for the comics medium as one like any other, creators certainly rely upon international comics scholarship. In particular, European scholars tend to provide a less biased account of the comics medium due to an earlier appreciation of it as an art form; in fact, they generally conceive of comics as the ninth fine art. However, in comparison to American scholarship, there seems to be a resultant greater tendency to approach comics as art, rather than as something combining art, literature, film, and a variety of other media. In India, the rise of the graphic novel in comics culture and book publishing provides a thread on which creators are able to tug in teasing out the comics medium as a serious one. Yet, at the same time that long-form comics narratives are marketed as more serious, cool, or more mature works, creators recognize that the medium is one much like any other.

The arrival of the graphic novel in Indian culture came in the late 1990s and 2000s with a greater liberalization of Indian culture. Parismita Singh describes this period as an important one, particularly in her own recognition of comics as a medium for storytelling and communication.

When asked how she got into graphic novels and the comics medium, Singh responded: “I like to draw and I like to write. So, it was really one of those things that just happened.” At the time, she Chapter 3: Defining Comics 70 and other creators did not have much access to comics and graphic novels from outside of India.

Their arrival would change how creators approached the medium. As she notes, “Things are very different now in comics than they were 10 years ago. Things were happening outside, but here it was difficult to access much happening outside. Around the time I was at university, say 1997 or

8 to 2000 or 2002, it was an interesting time internationally for comics. It was the whole liberalization thing. More stuff was available. The whole world was accessible in a certain way.”

With the liberalization period, beginning in July of 1991, the Indian government began a series of economic reforms to open international trade, deregulate, privatize, and otherwise neo- liberalize the national economy (Wolpert 2008). In this period, international comics culture came into India, with the arrival of works by important creators from other countries. Before this period, the comics culture reviewed in the previous chapter, which revolved around children’s comics publishers like Amar Chitra Katha and genre publishers like Raj Comics, dominated, and the variety of stories imaginable was relatively limited.vi Yet, with more comics available from outside of India, authors and artists were able to recognize that there was more to the medium than appeals to traditional culture and the Indianization of Western superheroes.

With liberalization came a greater freedom in creating comics, as artists and authors were exposed to more variations in the comics form and content. As Singh narrates, one particular creator held a particularly strong influence among Indian creators during this period: Art

Spiegelman. Spiegelman, an American cartoonist and former comix author in the 1970s, won the

Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel, Maus, in which he illustrated his father’s experiences of the

Holocaust as a graphic novel. As Singh stated to me, “That’s about the time that Art

Spiegelman’s Maus became very big. It’s not something that I just wouldn’t have had access before. Maus did well internationally and was suddenly marketed in a certain way. I had a friend Chapter 3: Defining Comics 71 who brought Maus back from the U.S. Just to see comics take up a subject like that and really be able to handle what was obviously a fairly difficult story, I think that was the first time that I really realized the potential of what one could do with image and words.” As Singh notes,

Spiegelman was not only dealing with very serious material, but his work was also marketed in a new way: as a graphic novel. As a result, the comics medium became more than it had been before, as Spiegelman, among others, demonstrated the ability to tell different kinds of stories through it.

Singh describes her own changing view of comics at the time as shifting from her own history with the medium in her youth to recognizing its larger potential. In particular, she notes that her experiences in Paris, France, demonstrated the diversity of stories possible through the medium. “Then I had a very brief stint in Paris for about 6 months. In France, they just have so many comics. So I started playing around. I started taking it more seriously. Because I was doing comics in elementary school, but it just was not something that I took seriously enough, in terms of a career or putting in so many hours a day. But then I really felt like I had found my form, so I kept at it...I tried lots of stuff, but I really felt like I was really comfortable in this particular medium.” Comics provided an opportunity for Singh to combine her various skills that, on their own, did not allow her to create stories that felt ‘comfortable.’ By recognizing the greater potential for the comics medium, though, she was able to find her own authorial voice within it.

Singh had found her medium.

However, for creators like Singh who feel such a strong connection to comics, the medium remains merely one among many. At particular times or in particular places, one may be more popular or more apt in describing certain topics or relating to specific audiences, but any medium should be respected on its own terms. Parismita Singh points out the futility of trying to Chapter 3: Defining Comics 72 understand comics in comparison to other forms when asked if there is something unique about it. “Everything has its own place. In the sense that I enjoy reading a comic, I enjoy reading a well-done comic, right? In the same way, I really do enjoy reading prose, I enjoy reading poetry, and I enjoy watching a film. But I’m rarely in a situation where I’m thinking that one form is more powerful than another. Why would graphic novels even aspire to compete with these other forms? Why does it ever have to be competing with any kind of story told orally? It is true that, historically, there are times when some things become more popular than other things…I use the

[comics] medium, but it’s as good as anything else.” Singh thus highlights the lack of value in comparing any medium to others in an attempt to show any one as superior. Creators like Singh diverge from the precedent set by international comics culture, scholarship, and even publishers, which both tend to emphasize the exceptional quality of the comics medium in comparison to or as studied from the perspective of other arts. For the creators with whom I spoke, in general, comics and graphic novels are merely one means of doing storytelling, no better or worse than any other.

In contrast to publishers’ rhetoric in marketing graphic novels, then, there is nothing inherently special about the graphic novel form in India. Through greater length, there is an accordant greater ability to facilitate longer and more complex narratives. However, such an ability does not reflect any inherent quality of the form, but rather a stylistic choice that creators make in terms of the length and complexity of any given narrative which they are creating or telling. Singh similarly responds to the question of the difference between comics and graphic novels: “To begin with, this is another question I find really boring. I think, in India, they did decide to market comics in this way in the publishing industry. They did decide to market Hotel as a graphic novel, because you have to do these things to get people interested, to increase the Chapter 3: Defining Comics 73 readership.” She notes that this labeling of her own work had more to do with creating buzz around her book than anything related to the narrative itself. Similarly, she describes the broader marketing strategy in Indian publishing. “It was a very convenient thing to say, ‘Oh, we have the first graphic novel’ and ‘Oh, this is something new, and oh you must read it.’ So, this is a debate that is more to do with the way that something is marketed. It has to essentially do with marketing.” Singh sets aside the differentiation of comics and graphic novels because it is a matter of publishing work in a compelling or eye-catching way, rather than having anything to do with the inherent structure or quality of a narrative. The term ‘graphic novel’ in this context thus represents a particular narrative of publishing, by which editors and publicists are able to frame creators’ work as exceptional in order to increase readership.

At the same time, Singh emphasizes that she feels a sense of ownership or belonging to the comics medium. This relationship between creator and medium defines the former’s creative experiences, and that process is grounded in storytelling in a variety of ways. Similar to Singh,

Sarnath Banerjee notes that “The graphic novel is a t-shirt. It just puts an emblem on comics; it is just a vessel that contains modern man, common politics.” Banerjee further points out the contrast between the relatively urban phenomenon of the graphic novel and comics more broadly understood as the combination of image and text in storytelling: “There is more than just its form. Image and text have achieved very mature levels.” Accordingly, he points out the accessibility of comics in that there are multiple regional comics cultures in India, from adventure and superheroes to anthologies and literary adaptations. vii For Banerjee, “the graphic novel as a precious little thing is very new. Calling it a Graphic Novel is new, because it has always been here.” The graphic novel, formally, is no more mature than the comics medium Chapter 3: Defining Comics 74 more generally, but rather differs in cultural and historical context from previous forms. In the case of India, it is largely a matter of marketing.

The Dangers of Comics Even framing the graphic novel as a maturation of comics in the publishing world, though, requires a certain precedent. In the case of American, British, and other Western comics, the cultural and historical context is one where the combination of image and text has generally been understood as a children’s medium in recent decades, despite earlier, adult proto-comics (Sabin

1996). In India and Delhi, similar attitudes toward comics have led to biases toward the medium as a low art that is generally read by children. In seeking validation for the Amar Chitra Katha,

Anant Pai in particular addressed such biases in arguing for comics as an educational medium.

Just as Western comics scholars have tended to fall into pre-existing, and often disciplinary, biases toward comics, scholars and educators in India have maintained a bias towards comics. In “Comics as a Vehicle of Education and Culture,” Anant Pai draws attention to this bias, starting with one teacher’s account of the “corrupting influence of comics on young minds” (Pai 1995: 107). Yet, Pai himself argues that such moments, in this case a teacher receiving popular culture references when asking students about astronomy, are key opportunities for using comics as educational tools. Pai points out that the most significant stumbling block to comics in Indian culture is a bias among educators that they serve as “a disincentive to reading good books” (1995: 110). Such biases have been supported by studies that he cites: “A number of psychologists and educationists, after in-depth studies, have come to the conclusion that ‘excessive comic book reading is a symptom of maladjustment, but rarely, if ever, the cause of maladjustment’” (Pai:112). He points out these examples as evidence of larger patterns in the way people approach comics. Pai thus slowly pulls educators away from their pre- Chapter 3: Defining Comics 75 existing biases, shifting from comics as harmful to merely a sign of other harmful patterns of learning or encountering texts.

As demonstrated in the previous chapter, this shift is grounded in the UNESCO endorsement of comics as a means to pass on cultural values in 1967. Accordingly, Pai defines comics by its enchanting power over children: “A comic is a series of pictures, telling a story, developing a situation or at least presenting the same character in varied circumstances. The comics medium is an excellent blend of both—story and pictures; and hence the spell-binding effect of comics on children” (Pai 1995: 108). In fact, Pai focuses on this “spell-binding” ability in much of his discussion of comics as a medium, and, in this case, bases his argument for reframing educational comics as “chitra katha” (picture stories) upon its usefulness in maintaining student interest. Specifically, he frames Indian comics as both exceptional and uniquely educational. He writes: “Many consider comics alien to our culture. The chitra katha or narrating a story through pictures is not at all new to this land. What is new in the modern day comics are the speech balloons” (Pai 1995: 113). He turns to the formal structures of visual storytelling to emphasize a minor difference between comics and other, often traditional media.

In this manner, Pai is able to historicize comics as an Indian art form, rather than the popular narrative medium that many teachers would otherwise hold responsible for student’s lack of attention. The result, though, is a purely instrumental perspective of comics that raises one particular genre, educational comics, above all others. In the process, Pai re-positions the comics that he created and edited as inherently different from what was at best a low art and at worst a direct threat to learning.

Anant Pai’s perspective of comics culture in India provides a useful summary of the primary biases against comics as a medium, namely that comics narratives appear vulgar when Chapter 3: Defining Comics 76 approached in terms of education and literacy. The comics medium is not limited to education and literacy, though, something that should be obvious from looking at even most contemporary bookshops’ limited displays and holdings. Furthermore, ACK, other educational comics, and even superhero and adventure comics certainly hold less power than Pai argued. As Parismita

Singh noted in one of our conversations about Indian comics scholarship, “Okay, there are these problems with Amar Chitra Katha, and now I realize, to my shock and horror, that a lot of it was racist and had a nationalist vision. We must talk about it, and even Raj Comics and publishers like that. I cannot stand the stuff, because it had nothing to do with the kind of culture I grew up with. I cannot identify with it. Which is fine! Why should I have to identify with every kind of comic in the market?” She notes both the need to discuss these issues, albeit, as she notes later, without going overboard, and points out the diversity of comics stories. Singh thus shows the

ACK series to be part of a larger cultural and comics context, one with a diverse array of stories for which Pai’s narrow definition of the medium is ill-suited. Even as a reader and creator, Singh can and should not encompass the entire culture. Instead, she embraces the diversity of published stories in the past and those possible in the present.

Comics as Storytelling

Accordingly, rather than only including educational comics or those stories inspired by traditional narratives, contemporary Indian comics should be defined more flexibly over connections to traditional storytelling that are often to the exclusion of other influences.

Specifically, creators emphasize context. When asked about the influence of folklore upon the medium, Singh noted that “Even with writing, basically, a lot of what we are trying to do is imitate life, and, sometimes, be better than life. All of it, writing, drawing, all of it is closely connected with living. Sometimes, I think the oral might be closer to life, but sometimes, it’s the Chapter 3: Defining Comics 77 distance that writing a comic book or novel can give you. But, as far as folklore is concerned, I primarily don’t see it. Because a novel is not folklore. And neither is a graphic novel.” In discussing folklore’s influence, Singh shifts to placing comics among other media in terms of what they can or cannot do. While she sees connections to novels in terms of distancing, folklore is too clearly connected to everyday life to be made static. Comics narratives in India exist within a larger context of other narratives, from novels to films, performances to ritual. The comics medium is one like any other, with its own advantages and disadvantages.

In working toward a more flexible understanding of comics, storytelling provides a means to engage with multiple media and even one’s own experiences. In Singh’s case, she describes how her work on an education project in Assam has informed her understanding of storytelling. When asked about her favorite storytellers, she instead turned the conversation to how she understands storytelling. “I think people are telling stories all the time. Because stories help you understand. Stories give you a window into the past because sometimes, in India or anywhere obviously, from the times we grew up to now, things have changed so much.” Singh thus understands storytelling as cutting across media because they are fundamentally grounded in lived reality.

Many other creators voiced a similar sense of stories and storytelling.viii In particular, though, Singh describes how her fieldwork in Assam helped her to recognize storytelling’s importance across media. “So, you would be somewhere, and you would be talking to people about why kids are dropping out of school. And suddenly someone would start telling you about this period of violence that was happening 5 years ago. About how it completely changed the landscape. And how things have changed so much for children now the school is there. What they are telling you is a story. At the end of it, I realized that that was what I was doing. I was Chapter 3: Defining Comics 78 just talking to people, and listening to their stories, and that did help me get some kind of perspective on what was right or wrong about the schools there. Of course, even reports are stories. Even a lot of anthropology for me is essentially just looking at stories.” Just as witnessing stories allowed Singh to gain a better sense of perspective within a community in

Assam, storytelling undergirds everyday life, journalism, and even scholarship. By framing comics as another iteration of storytelling, then, creators are able to situate the form and their work within it as a part of lived experience, albeit the part to which they have laid claim.

This framing of comics, though, also provides a means to appeal to different audiences based upon the story at hand. In this way, the intended audience can change relative to the content, style, format, reproduction, and means of distribution. Creators like Singh are thus able to appeal to adults and children simultaneously. While Hotel appealed mainly to adults, she has focused upon children for her regular strip in the Siruvar Malar, which is the supplement book of the Dina Malar News Paper in Tamil Nadu (Image 3-4). Furthermore, in creating different kinds of stories for different audiences, creators like Singh are able to overcome the problems of

ACK’s precedent. As Sanjay Sircar notes in his discussion of comics in India, Anant Pai argued for comics as growing out of Indian traditional culture: “’[Pai] argues that only speech balloons in comic strips are alien to India, and points to graphic art such as the Ajanta frescoes and folk culture traditions of narrative sequence as antecedents to comics’” (qtd. in Nayar 2006: 89). The

ACK series is thus built upon a foundation of connections to previous traditions of visual storytelling in Indian culture. Such an appeal allowed Pai and other creators working within that series to simultaneously justify the comics medium as traditional, albeit Hindu, narratives, in order to appeal to a wide audience of readers and their parents. Contemporary creators overcome Chapter 3: Defining Comics 79 this precedent through recognition, and even representation, of the diversity of underrepresented communities.

Although Pai does something similar to the recognition of comics as storytelling, mainly by drawing connections between comics narratives and established artistic traditions, the stories of the ACK series are dangerous because they are pretenders to the throne of folk culture. As

Singh states, “That is the whole argument of Amar Chitra Katha that is bent at all our parents:

‘I’m going to buy 20 sets of these books for my children so that they know Indian culture.’

Suddenly, comics becomes a medium of keeping alive Indian culture. And I really don’t buy that kind of nonsense. I mean, I just go and write. Comics and newspapers also are a little dangerous because then you only have one version brought out by one company. Otherwise, you would have had your grandmom’s prejudices, your aunt’s perspective, and a whole lot of others. You put all these duties and responsibilities onto books when people say ‘comics are a medium of preserving folklore.’ Amar Chitra Katha and all of that makes me warier and more suspicious more than anything.” Although she has pointed out the need to not overstate the problems with the ACK series, Singh does emphasize that so much responsibility for folk culture cannot be carried by one medium. Furthermore, she points out that “It’s a good thing that we’re working on folklore, but the primacy of the oral is something that, just by my instinct, is going to go on. It’s not just going to fall by the wayside.” Whether creators pick it up or not, folklore and oral traditions will continue by their own devices. As a result, and as expressed earlier, Parismita

Singh is less concerned with passing on folklore than with her own storytelling as a creator.

Again, she emphasizes the importance of many individual creators and their voices within comics culture, rather than arguing some universal quality to comics storytelling.

Chapter 3: Defining Comics 80

The Limits of the Graphic Novel

Just as the biases that Anant Pai points out, along with ACK’s response to them, tended to limit comics to educational content, the introduction of the graphic novel form tends to cut off the medium’s ability to appeal to diverse audiences. As Amitabh Kumar pointed out earlier, the significant length of graphic novels requires stories that can fill such a longer form. Furthermore, the nature of the publishing industry through which stories must be adapted limits the nature of stories that creators are able to tell. In particular, when asked whether class or other divisions in audience play a role in creation, Singh emphasized the former. “Of course! See, publishing is a class issue. What language am I publishing in, right? What are the languages that everyone is publishing in? My big fear with comics, because it was a popular medium, is that now, it’s going to become not such a popular medium. To just have these books, that’s the biggest thing. They are expensive. I want to do a book on good quality paper, but, at the same time, to have books priced at 500 and 600 rupees.” Negotiating quality standards and the cost for those standards creates one of many dilemmas for creators. With lower quality paper or production, images or text may become less readable, and ink color or shading becomes less consistent, among many other problems. Yet, the higher the quality, the higher the price, and the less one’s readership can afford one’s books. As a result, creators may find it more difficult to argue for their work as serious storytelling, given that the quality of production remains low. However, choices about production quality and even the size of a story to be told are based on the divide between creators and readers who may not have the resources to purchase and own well-made graphic novels.

Class differences play an important role in creation and publication, especially for creators who craft their stories for readers from diverse backgrounds, different geographic regions, or various regional languages. As noted earlier, ACK and other publishing companies Chapter 3: Defining Comics 81 established an early precedent of publishing in a wide variety of languages, although the largest breadth was concentrated during the Golden Age of India’s comics culture. For Singh, in particular, such differences are important because she hopes to reach both adults and children in some of her storytelling. She highlights the divide between most graphic novelists in Delhi and the audiences for whom they would like to create stories. “Like anything else, the graphic novel, of course, is a class thing. Considering that you’ve been hanging out in South Delhi [a wealthy suburb] and meeting all the comic book artists there, what does it say? I think this is what it is. I think there are hard questions to ask here. But I don’t’ know if comic book artists can ask these questions. Yes, we can, in the sense that we do workshops in other places. But, eventually, it has to be the publishing industry. I don’t know. This is definitely an anxiety. And not something I envisioned myself doing when I started.” By pointing out that the creators with whom I was working by and large live in wealthier areas of Delhi, Singh highlights the potential distance between creators and certain audiences. The earlier-noted English-language focus of contemporary comics in India shows a similar slant, such that many creators expressed anxiety that their means to a livelihood cuts off the potential to reach most middle and lower class audiences. Furthermore, Singh argues that it is the publishing industry that must come find a way to reach, since it is the publication system that determines production costs and infrastructure.

In framing their work as storytelling, though, creators attempt to negotiate these tensions, especially by telling stories in other media. Several creators, including Parismita Singh, have moved across media to find other ways of reaching readers who cannot afford the price of graphic novels. Singh herself is working on the aforementioned, regular comics strip in a Tamil newspaper in order to reach children in their homes. As she states, “It’s so special that you actually have a newspaper that’s willing to do an in-house translation of my work. I don’t speak Chapter 3: Defining Comics 82

Tamil. And then, you’ll actually have all these small, Tamil children who will wake up first thing in the morning and read your story. I think that’s really special. I hope this kind of a trend continues. I hope that the publishing mainstream takes note.” Alongside Singh, comics creator and co-editor of the regular anthology Comix.India, Bharath Murthy, is creating a comic strip in the same newspaper. As will be seen in later chapters, other creators from the Pao Collective’s core five have done workshops in different areas of the country, participated in programs through which they create and distribute comics on social problems, work with design houses that collaborate with street children in crafting educational comics, and many other initiatives. As storytellers, they are able to translate their work across contexts and media, while still dealing with narratives that, like any other medium, are grounded in lived experience and daily life.

Despite their problems, earlier comics like the ACK series worked to overcome judgments about the comics medium that were based upon an aesthetic system that raised narratives that fit tidily into existing categories of art and literature over more hybrid media that defy categorization. While the graphic novel provides a means to overcome the resulting bias against comics that are not educational, the limitations of long-form narratives raises the question of the costs of doing so. Specifically, the costs for creators of framing their work as a graphic novel entails both limitations on the possible stories one can tell and on people to whom one can tell stories. However, understanding comics and graphic novels as mere iterations of one form of storytelling allows creators to craft narratives in either, as well as other formats, while maintaining their identification as comics artists.

Comics as Practice At the same time, though, scholars working with the comics medium tend to perpetuate aesthetic divisions that privilege certain media over others through an evaluation of stories based upon Chapter 3: Defining Comics 83 their personal disciplinary backgrounds. As a result, the purity of a medium becomes valued above all else, where the closer a narrative comes to a certified form, the more value it accrues

(Hatfield 2011). However, in this case, creators tend more often to defy such evaluations of their work or of the comics medium in general. As in the case of the Pao Collective, an increasing number of contemporary comics creators emphasize that the medium should not rely on literature, art, or any other established medium for credibility. For creators like Singh, comics is more akin to a form of storytelling that is done and that changes over time, place, and people involved.

Similarly, more recent scholarship has pointed out that comics can be best understood as how audience members read a text based upon cultural or regional adaptations to context. Joseph

Witek analyzes how artists used arrows and grids in early 20th century comic strips in order to show how the practice of reading comics became “both assumed and manipulated by comics creators in the construction of the comics page” (2009: 150). Further, Witek bases this analysis in a critique of formalist analysis for attempting to craft an essential definition of comics based upon sets of textual features. Whether based upon aesthetic or literary analysis or otherwise, he sees the analysis of comics as persistently troubled by nit-picking arguments that become too focused upon details rather than upon the overall behavior and unique quality of the comics medium. Rather than wasting time attempting to define the formal qualities of an ever-changing, ever-adapted medium, it seems more important to engage with the experiences of creating and reading comics narratives.

Accordingly, Witek focuses upon the importance of audience interaction in the reading, viewing, and otherwise sensory experience of comics. The comics medium can thus be recognized by “…a historically contingent and evolving set of reading protocols that are applied Chapter 3: Defining Comics 84 to texts, [such] that to be a comic text means to be read as a comic” (Witek 2009:149). In different cultures, these reading protocols change, as when Japanese manga move from right to left rather than the Western practice of reading left to right (Schodt 1993). Further, size may determine the order of narrated events in some comics traditions, as in Russian political cartoons

(Alaniz 2010). Ultimately, Witek’s definition best relates the understanding and analysis of comics by beginning with how audiences encounter a story. Although not delineated in his piece, creators, who are often readers and fans themselves, must take note of these practices in order to craft stories in the medium that are understood and, further, enjoyable. Indian comics, then, can be recognized as stories that are created and read as comics by people in India.

Such a definition requires that scholarship become rooted in readers’ experiences, rather than in preexisting analytical biases. Focusing on reading as active behavior thus reveals comics as manifestations of larger traditions of narrative developing out of specific socio-cultural contexts. Whereas previous scholarship has framed these unique narrative tools as expressions of individual artists, a context-based and creator-centric analysis understands them as expressions of larger cultural practices. For instance, the increased use of multiple voices and narratives within one larger narrated story in American and British comics of the late 1980s and early

1990s connects to similar reading behaviors, from Bakhtin’s multi-vocal novel to more recent postmodern fiction (Bakhtin 1994; Williams). In the end, as a way of reading, comics is defined by the context in which audiences encounter, read, and interact with comics as texts, their narratives, and images. It changes with time and place. Yet, this work demonstrates through a focus upon creators that comics is not just a way of reading, but also a way of creating and even analyzing storytelling itself.

A Definition of Comics Chapter 3: Defining Comics 85

With Parismita Singh as our guide, this chapter has focused on reworking a definition of comics for creators in Delhi and India today. While Western scholars have historically focused upon fitting this medium into pre-existing disciplines or art forms, the comics medium resists incorporation into literature, fine arts, or any other field. Instead, as demonstrated by the comics creators that form the core of the Pao Collective, comics should be recognized as a medium in and of itself. At the same time, the Indian precedent of educational comics like Anant Pai’s Amar

Chitra Katha series has supported a bias against narratives that are not framed as cultural heritage. Creators like Singh, though, focus on the danger of such an approach, and they instead emphasize comics as storytelling. As one medium among many available, comics, and its many iterations of comic books, cartooning, graphic novels, and more each hold particular advantages and disadvantages. For creators in Delhi today, the turn to graphic novels does not represent the maturation or evolution of comics, but instead one way to tell a story of words and images. Their work thus reflects a definition of comics as practice that has been developed in more recent comics scholarship. For contemporary comics artists in Delhi, then, comics are stories that are created and read as comics by people in India.

The comics medium is not merely one medium among many others, though. As pointed out by Singh, creators identify with the form and feel ownership or belonging for it. Crafting stories in the medium creates opportunities not just for telling but also for creating community.ix

In defining comics, creators are not merely referring back to scholarly articles that they have read, or even their particular experiences. They also focus upon the situation of storytelling in contemporary India and in other communities to which they belong or are connected.

Accordingly, Singh describes the influence of the Amar Chitra Katha series alongside traditional media for visual storytelling and children’s literature and education. This shift in focus, from the Chapter 3: Defining Comics 86 justification of comics to its contextualization, pushes creators, readers, and other community members to recognize the potent power of visual storytelling. As Orijit Sen, creator of India’s first graphic novel, points out, comics is “‘…a vehicle for understanding ourselves, and for young people a medium like this could be a really strong creator of identity, a mirror for what we are, and a means of questioning our values’” (Overdorf, 2010). In this context, comics becomes a means of reaching out to unite people around a common interest in storytelling and reflection upon how they imagine the future. This once vulgar medium or sequential art of tensions can thus be recognized as a set of connections poised, in the hands of skilled masters of the medium, to address the wide array of human experience.

Yet, as one means of creating stories, the power of the comics medium should not be overstated. Again, Parismita Singh notes her wariness of a stance that positions Indian comics as exceptionally powerful. “I’m very wary of this glorified position of Indian comics. I am not saying that comics or art cannot bring up issues, but you’re not going to stop global warming. I wish it were so, but I am not really all that convinced. It’s a medium; it has its place. I would want kids to look for good comics. I would want kids to make their own comics. But I feel that we need some perspective. Comics is one medium among many, many other media.” Comics and graphic novels remain merely one means among many others available to artists and authors in India today. Although the medium holds certain advantages and powers of representation, one should not take the appeals to comics’ exceptionalism at face value, particularly when those making such appeals profit from comics production, distribution, or positive critical reception.

As Singh pointed out near the end of one of our conversations, the future remains unclear for comics and graphic novels in Delhi and India. When asked whether she has seen evolutions or changes in the comics scene there, she replied that “Things have changed a lot in the last ten Chapter 3: Defining Comics 87 or fifteen years. As you probably know, it takes a long time to produce comics. So, even someone like Sarnath Banerjee, someone who produces quite a few books and who is fairly prolific, that’s only one person. So, in another five years, it will be much easier to answer this question in terms of stylistic changes and stuff like that.” By the year 2010, only around ten long-form comics had been published as books through mainstream publishing, including several graphic novels and a few anthologies; in 2012, another ten long-form comics and anthologies were released, demonstrating the increasing momentum of graphic novel publishing. Yet, as

Singh notes, it is rather difficult to point out any long term patterns at this point in the creation of comics narratives in Delhi.

Furthermore, the creative and production process for longer works requires a much greater amount of time. As she states, “Books take a long time, so there’s no telling what will be.

Everyone knows about comics, but for real production, to have a lot of books come out, that will take time. For a book to come out every month, that will take a little bit of time.” In her discussion of the future for India’s comics culture, Singh emphasizes the need for long-form books to come out on a regular basis, such that readers can follow the work of at least four to five specific authors, each with a significant body of work. However, by 2011, only a very few creators had more than one long book out, namely Sarnath Banerjee. The future thus remains relatively unclear.

In imagining what that future might look like, Singh focuses on the importance of the publication and distribution system. In particular, she notes that it is editors’ attitudes toward the comics medium that determines how often creators’ work gets published, in what format, and according to what standards. As she states, “I’m a creator. I’m not a business person. So much as

I feel strongly about the system, I cannot step back and start my own alternative distributors. Chapter 3: Defining Comics 88

That’s not where my talents lie. So along with this whole publishing thing, with Penguin, Harper

Collins, and all these publishers who publish in the English language, I am really hoping that we are going to have more. I hope that there is going to be a newspaper that will be willing to pay me some kind of basic amount that will make my work accessible in another language in another part of the country.” Based upon her own experiences in publishing, Singh emphasizes a need for more venues for comics narratives. She points, in particular, to newspapers, as she had at the time begun working with the Tamil newspaper project. Yet, it is not only publishers and their chosen formats that determine what comics is in India today; as noted above, it is the practice of reading and creating particularly stories as comics that make them so. Accordingly, in order to understand how comics are created and read in Delhi, it is important to understand how comics narratives are evaluated. The following chapter thus focuses on what makes for a good, or

‘special’ comics story-telling.

i While Roger Sabin focuses on more direct precedents for the contemporary comics medium, David Kunzle highlights the importance of Rodolphe Töpffer’s invention of the comic strip as an art form that closely resembled current graphic novels in the early 1800s. Meanwhile, Paul Gravett incorporates both perspectives in pointing to the need for alternatives to an industrial, mass production model of creativity (Sabin 2001; Kunzle 2007; Gravett 2008). ii Charles Hatfield has argued for a stronger grounding in multidisciplinarity, rather than mere interdisciplinarity or the rather useless approach of each scholar working only from their own field. See Charles Hatfield, “Indiscipline, or the Discipline of Comics Studies,” Transatlantica: American Studies Journal 1 (2010), September 27 2010. http://transatlantica.revues.org/4933 iii See Groensteen, Thierry, “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” In A Comics Studies Reader, Eds. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (2009): 3-12. iv The publication of Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent in 1954 led to widespread concern over the effect of violent, gory, and sexual images on young readers; in response, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings that year with a focus on comics that then led to publishers acting before the government could. The Comics Code prevented creators from using the above kinds of imagery, as well as stories that in any way disrespected authorities or marriage, showed evil winning over good, or portrayed a number of characters and actions related to horror and crime genres. See Roger Sabin’s larger discussion of the influence of the Comics Code in American comics culture in Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art (London: Phaidon Press, 2001). v Interestingly, since then, both academics and artists have referenced his work in arguing for the power of this medium, especially its focus on the tension between word and image. vi See previous chapter. vii Here, Banerjee specifically references the Bengali comics scene when he notes that, “Along the way, it’s been “influenced by Bengali journals with comics that came out now and then.” viii This approach grounds the appeal to folk culture that is the focus of Chapter 5. ix This will be further explored in Chapter 6. Chapter 4: Excellent Comics and Special Storytellers In the previous chapter, I investigated how people define comics in India and concluded with a conceptualization of this medium as one based on practice; comics, then, are narratives that people read or create as such. However, in order to get a clearer sense of what creators understand the medium to be in Delhi from 2010 onward, this chapter will further explore standards for evaluating these narratives. In particular, I shift from defining the medium to putting the voices of the five creators who are the focus of this work into conversation.

Accordingly, Amitabh Kumar and Parismita Singh return, alongside Sarnath Banerjee, Orijit

Sen, and Vishwajyoti Ghosh.i Their voices will reveal how creating comics changes one’s understanding of the medium.

As many scholars have noted, an important part of any community is the interaction between its members. Grounded in the study of folklore, this work approaches the community of comics creators in New Delhi in 2010 as both comprised of and more than those interactions. In his study of everyday storytelling in Aghyaran in Northern Ireland, Ray Cashman teases out two threads of scholarship, the first that focuses upon the social imaginary and the second that considers the network of interacting individuals. Cashman then brings these two potentially opposing threads together with the help of Henry Glassie’s scholarship and Dorry Noyes’s discussion of the term “group,” noting that the imagined and the networked communities mutually constitute one another. In this way, he is able to come to a conception of community as

“a network of people brought into engagement by an idea” (Cashman 12). In this case, the various members of the Pao Collective are brought together by the comics medium, particularly by the idea of good storytelling within and resultant power of that medium.

Dealing with the relationships within comics communities, though, means recognizing certain issues and influences that are unique to the medium. In Comics Culture: From Fanboys Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 90 to True Believers, Matthew Pustz explores American communities of comics readers and creators, whose identities often overlap, and the spaces in which they form connections with each other. Pustz grounds his work in Henry Jenkins’s model of fandom as a “…community of consumers defined through common relationships with shared texts” (Jenkins 2006). Community members, as fans, interact based upon common knowledge of narratives that allows for communication and the creation of relationships around those same narratives. For Pustz, what comes fans share “…is a culture, a body of knowledge and information, an appreciation of a medium that most Americans have diagnosed as hopelessly juvenile and essentially worthless”

(1999: 22). Although Pustz focuses on American comics culture, the previous chapter has already demonstrated the existence of similar biases against the comics medium in Indian culture. Accordingly, from both folkloristics and comics studies, the community of creators and fans that is Delhi’s comics scene can be understood and likely defined by the narratives through which they are united.

Such communities also face unique difficulties, specifically the salience of commodification in comics culture. As Pustz notes, “the bottom line is that comic book publishing—even for alternative comics—is an industry governed by economic forces that have perhaps damaged the media’s artistic potential” (1999: 17). Creators, like the members of the

Pao Collective, may have to stifle their creativity in order to support their livelihood, whether by changing the way they tell stories, as mini-comics, cartoons, comics or graphic novels, or by editing their work to meet publisher’s standards. In this case, creators’ emphasis on comics as storytelling is productive because it helps them to overcome economic issues and give greater weight to the standards and relationships that they and other community members value. Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 91

Accordingly, a particular community is created by this interaction between network and social imaginary, and between the ideals of creation and the realities of publication. This chapter explores the processes of evaluation and the standards for an excellent comics story in order to unravel this constant renegotiation of community and the narratives around which this group of creators has grown. Starting with an example of the criticism that these creators have faced, the voices of all five members of the Pao Collective guide an investigation of what makes for a master comics creator, as both artisan and storyteller. This informs the later account of what makes for an excellent comics narrative, in that authors value both the power to affect readers in some sense and the grounding of stories in their social context. In this way, these ideals for the imagined community of Delhi’s comics culture come together with the actual network of relationships.

Criticizing Comics In exploring a definition of comics in India today, the previous chapter demonstrated several existing ways of encountering visual narratives in criticism and scholarship. In particular, most research has approached the medium through another, pre-established art or discipline, such that comics have been considered according to standards for literature, art, film, social science, history, etc. In the analysis of long-form comics narratives, reviewers thus separate the elements that make up the whole story that is told through graphic novels. The example of Parismita

Singh’s The Hotel at the End of the World is useful both because it is relatively recent (2010) and because there was a greater attention paid to her artwork.

In their reviews, writers tended to take the work as art and text separately. In her review of the state of visual narrative art in India, Margot Cohen focuses on the kinds of stories being told in long-form comics there and the relationship between image and text within them. In terms Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 92 of Singh’s work, Cohen notes that: “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” (Cohen

2010; Image 4-1). Cohen thus begins by analyzing how well the text of the narrative fits into the artwork, with a focus on the quality and mood of that writing. Upon establishing the work of words, the author then turns to the art work: “As for the art, ‘Some drawings have the feel of

Chinese paintings as they share a similar spatial sensibility,’ writes reviewer Geetanjali Singh

Chandra, 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’” (Cohen 2010; Image 4-2). At that point, not only does Cohen divide the evaluation of text and image, but she also focuses upon each as representative of narrative literature and visual art, with appropriate standards for each. In particular, the art is evaluated according to pre- existing artistic traditions rather than other comics or even similar kinds of stories.

In our conversation, Parismita Singh noted her dissatisfaction with reviewers who do not engage with comics as simultaneously image and text, as inherently independent of other forms.

“With a lot of my reviews, they would quote all these dialogues, but you cannot talk about the art and then about text. Yet there are very few people just talking about it as a whole. You have to imagine these are the people who become the experts tomorrow. But you have to view the picture and text together.” Similar to scholarship, then, reviewers read comics as separately literary and artistic. Singh is concerned because such basic and paramount mistakes in evaluating the current long-form comics narratives in Delhi will likely lead to a pattern similar to that in much scholarship on the comics medium. Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 93

As Singh points out, the combination of image and text is the very foundation of the medium. As noted in Chapter 3, a definition of comics relies upon the ways of reading and creating that are unique to the form. From McCloud’s discussion of the gutter to contemporary creators in Delhi who emphasize independence from other media and more recent scholarship that focuses on comics as practice, one cannot separate image from word in this form. However, many reviewers approach it in just this way, which is disappointing for creators arguing for the independence of the comics medium. Singh pointed out to me that “So a lot of the reviews are very disappointing in that way, because they just focus on some of the text, or they just hated the drawings.” Rather than reading and viewing the image and text together as the medium called comics, criticism has tended to encounter these narratives as visual and textual. This leads to frustration because creators approach storytelling in the medium as similar to doing so in any other, yet the most vocal readers frame their work as novels that happen to be illustrated.

Even when reviewers approach long-form comics according to the kind of storytelling in which creators are participating, there is still little to no sense of the comics scene or larger context for their work. In the reviews for Singh’s first book, those moments where the narrative is evaluated as a revision of folklore or storytelling thus suffer from a continued reliance upon other artistic traditions. Accordingly, in her review, Preena Shrestha states that “The Hotel at the

End of the World can be taken to represent this [upsurge in interest in Indian graphic novels] in all its joyous, convention-breaking glory” (2012). Shrestha thus evaluates Hotel according to the precedent of folk narrative and other revisions of traditional stories, highlighting how “…the surreal plays an important role in Singh’s revisions of folklore” (2012). Yet, upon establishing this context, the review then turns to an evaluation of text and art as still relatively separate.

“Drawn in a style that feels highly reminiscent of Buddhist art, with swirly clouds and mountains Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 94 and high-up hill towns, including a beautiful Mandala reference thrown in, this portion is dedicated to the Chhyang Lady’s tragic past and her ‘mixed-up karma…” (Shrestha 2012; Image

3-3). The author characterizes the piece as ambiguous, yet fails to include references to other comics narratives. Furthermore, the style of the art remains separated from the style of text, which together define the style of the story as a whole.

Further, even when the precedent for similar kinds of stories is established, criticism tends to judge the art and text separately, leading to gaps that are framed as creators’ faults, but which would be more accurately understood as those of the readers. At worst, reviewers bias the text by pointing out the inherent flaws in the art that they see but still praise the storytelling, as if the two could be separated. Thus, despite establishing some precedent, Shrestha concludes that

“While it would’ve been nice to see a bit more attention paid to backgrounds, as well as expressions and movement within panels, which appear a bit too jerky as they are, the roughly drawn portions are occasionally broken by stunning full page illustrations—such as that of the bridge to China—that reassert and remind you of Singh’s artistic capabilities” (2012). The author thus criticizes the art of Hotel throughout, rather than recognizing that in those moments of perceived weakness, the text may be balancing out the narrative. More accurately, critics like

Shrestha fail to engage in a reading of graphic novels like Hotel as comics, considering them instead as continuing literary and aesthetic traditions that often have little to nothing to do with creators or their narratives. Still, the reviewer notes that “While not the best of what the medium has to offer, part of the appeal of The Hotel at the End of the World has to do with its symbolic value in playing a role in changing an industry that was long-begging for more creative risks.”

She thus frames Hotel as having symbolic rather than critical value because she fails to engage with the story as a part of the practice of the comics medium. Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 95

In contrast, the Pao Collective has publicized a limited number of reviews of their work on their groups blog. Of the two that they have thus certified, or at the very least publicized, both contextualize the work of the authors and artists they analyze. Accordingly, in “India’s Comics

Boom,” Jason Overdorf historicizes the work of the Pao Collective and describes other comics narratives being published at the same time. In addition, Overdorf incorporates multiple quotes from the various members of Pao into his review of both their work and the larger increase in graphic novel publishing in Delhi. Similarly, Anindita Ghose, in “When the Truth is Graphic,” describes the work of Vishwajyoti Ghosh as a member of the Pao Collective and the larger comics culture in Delhi. Indeed, Ghose analyzes Ghosh as an artist with a clear repertoire, creative background, and community within which he creates stories. In so doing, Ghose also provides a picture of the long-term history and context of comics culture in India. Both Ghose and Overdorf demonstrate the importance, for creators, of critics who recognize the larger context for creativity and community. More importantly, in spotlighting these accounts of contemporary comics in Delhi, the members of Pao endorse critics who follow creator as guides to that culture rather than judging their work or their community according to some external or personal standards.

As these reviews demonstrate, long-form comics need to be understood on their own terms, as both contextually situated in a particular place and time and as comics narratives that should be created and read as such. As Singh notes in response to reviews of Hotel, “One review said it was really charming. The artwork is shit, but it’s a very charming novel. But if the artwork is shit, then the book is shit. You cannot enjoy a book, you cannot enjoy a comic if you felt the artwork was shit. You know, at least get your concepts clear.” There is thus a need to establish the standards for comics narratives in Delhi. The rest of this chapter explores those standards Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 96 among the creators who make up the core of the Pao Collective, especially as they conceive of their own roles within creative and other communities.

Comics Creator as Auteur

The most important context for reading comics and graphic novels in Delhi is to understand comics as a practice of reading and creating such narratives. As already established, doing so will provide a clear sense of the precedents and surrounding culture that shape how these stories are told. In this particular context, creators have turned to long-form comics, or the graphic novel, as a marketing move. However, in the process, creators reframe themselves as masters of an art form or medium by emphasizing the creative work behind book-length comics. The members of the Pao Collective, in particular, seem less interested in the graphic novel as literature or art than as a means of focusing on creative process and individual creators as deserving of recognition.

As an alternative to the industrial production model of mainstream comics, the graphic novel form offers an emphasis on the power of creativity and innovation. Such an approach to the medium of comics draws upon film studies, specifically French film critic and director

Francois Truffaut, who argued that “…directors could leave their imprint on the films they made” (Smith 2011:178). Following Truffaut, film scholars like Andrew Sarris consider film directors as auteurs, or individuals that stand out from other creators in their field due to their remarkable talent (Smith 2011). In particular, an auteur analysis considers the technical skill, personal style, and relationship between the director’s vision and other competing ones in production; the goal is to gain a stronger grasp on the medium by gaining a clearer understanding of those who have affected its development (Smith 2011). Within comics studies, such an Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 97 approach places an industrial model of production in sharp contrast to an auteur one. In the latter approach, creators are understood as auteurs, or, in the context of Delhi, artisans, who “…tend to take a lot more of the effort to create a single work upon themselves, handling multiple production tasks individually” (Smith 2011: 179). The artisan spends more time on each step in the creative process and relates each step to the ones preceding or following from it; creativity is a consciously valued experience, unlike the industrial model where each step is more likely to be measured in terms of efficiency. This approach has generally been more often associated with graphic novels, where artistry serves to not only aid in storytelling but to clearly mark a particular work as exceptional and thus novel.

For Amitabh Kumar and many contemporary comics creators in Delhi, the term ‘graphic novel’ denotes less any formal requirements and more a focus on the individual author. Authors and artists thus focus on the graphic novel as a term for something larger. As Kumar explicates,

“No object or commodity by definition exists by itself. The very definition of what a graphic novel is, is not contained within it. It’s around it. So therefore the graphic novel is defined by the negative space, or the space that every other cultural, visual form in some sense has left. So it’s not what a graphic novel is, but perhaps what a comic book is not, or what an illustrated manuscript is not, what a poster is not, what a novel is not, what a painting is not.” Rather than approaching long-form comics as literary and thus deserving of the title, graphic novel, Kumar and the members of the Pao Collective work toward recognizing the long-form narrative as one more iteration of comics.

Accordingly, comics creator Sarnath Banerjee highlights the importance of storytelling in general. He again emphasizes comics’ place as one of many media for doing the work of telling.

“For me, telling is much more important than drawing, painting, sculpting. These things are all Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 98 mediums and facets of how you tell a story. It’s the most urgent, or the closest to your mind.

When you’re writing, you’re using skills, and you want to write beautifully. You want to write lovely words and get a little pretentious to show how beautifully you write, how fantastic your sentence structure is, and how idiomatic you are. When you’re drawing, you’re trying to draw beautifully and you’re trying to use colors, which are nice. And you should be allowed to do all that. But when it comes to stories, stories are best told, like anything else. Like a fish is best steamed.” Banerjee places oral stories above others because they seem the most natural. Even though he notes that creativity is important to any narrative act, stories orally told do the work best.

Creator Vishwajyoti Ghosh also puts storytelling above all else, though he frames it as the foundation for creating comics and other narratives. In terms of history, Ghosh highlights the move from a focus on imitating the Western comics form to a focus on stories. When asked about the history of comics in India, Ghosh replied that: “I would like to think it’s straight from centuries back, from folk paintings and miniatures. But people forgot about it for a while. Then

ACK actually brought comics to the mainstream, and then Raj stole that model. But they used

DC and Marvel comics’ language. It’s only going to evolve from here. This whole burst of folk art into comics was inescapable. I’m glad it’s now rather than later. This boom will happen, then things will settle down, and people will want to read the story more than the art. I can see this process having happened in US; people got sick of bad comics stories. Statistics showed a drop in readership, but then other authors emphasized the story. It’s actually just about the story.” The move to the graphic novel in India, then, mirrors a similar shift in American comics culture, from

‘vulgar’ stories to larger, more serious ones with different standards of excellence.ii Storytelling represents a shift to higher standards for creativity in this case. Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 99

Those higher standards are grounded, as Kumar has already pointed out, in a broader culture of storytelling, both visual and textual. That includes much more than the precedent of oral storytelling alone, which, at least in terms of traditional performances, differ significantly from doing so in comics. As foundational creator Orijit Sen puts it, ““In a performance, the dynamic is much stronger, the performer and the audience are like one…I like the idea of storytelling in those forms, and I’m very excited by that. There have been a few others over the years, where I’ve attended live storytelling sessions, which have had an impact on me and my stories. But at another level, literature and cinema, for example, these are the other areas of storytelling which have influenced me. Sen highlights stories from a variety of media when asked about the influence of folklore on his work, from the prose of Satyajit Ray to a Bangla primer given to him as a child. . Traditional storytelling thus represents one of many influences, the importance of which depends on the creator in question.

For creators like Parismita Singh, our guide in the previous chapter, folklore is an essential influence. Not only do readers understand her work as revisions of folklore, as demonstrated by the earlier discussion of reviews for Hotel at the End of the World, but she herself also views oral storytelling as a continuing influence. “Because I’m working on my second longish piece right now, I do see that there are certain influences that seem to keep coming back. But usually it’s really difficult to tell what influences really are. Because you might have really enjoyed reading a lot of books by a certain author; it does not necessarily mean you are influenced in your work in any sort of explicit way. I think what I do see coming back is that I do enjoy a particular landscape, and I really, really like stories.” Although Singh highlights

Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman and his work on Maus as one of the biggest influences on her work, it is storytelling that continues to shape her creative process. When asked what for her Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 100 makes for a good storyteller, she noted: “Of course that would depend vastly on the genre. I guess the medium, not so much the genre. I guess that I still feel like nothing beats a good story, like a good oral rendition. Just a story told, not in a formalist way.” Framing their work as graphic novels thus is both a marketing and a practical move, in that doing so shines a light on comics as a medium for high quality storytelling.

The term graphic novel becomes a problem when it supports comic books’ status as potentially low-brow or children’s literature to raise up long-form narratives. Amitabh Kumar notes that responding to such critics actually affirms that there is something to it. “When you say that it’s supposed to be more serious, you are still operating under the underlying notion, which is sad but true, that comics is for children. Which is not true. Anyone who’s read anything worth their time would be witness to that.” Again, Kumar points out the wide array of comics and the fact that blending them all together as children’s stories ignores so much as to be ignorant of the form.

However, the term graphic novel does not necessarily aid in combatting such assumptions about the comics medium; indeed, the association between graphic novel and literature tends to cause problems. “I would rather make albums as opposed to graphic novels.

Because, for fuck’s sake, it’s not a novel. The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers should not carry the weight of being a graphic novel. Because it has some wonderful trips and some wonderful moments, and the structure in and of itself is wonderful. It’s so deeply compartmental. I think the problem with these terms and terminology comes when they start taking themselves too seriously.” Overcoming the association between comics and children is important, but Kumar also perceives a need to overcome the association between comics and literature. In particular, the weight of literature in terms of drawing a line between those that are graphic novels and Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 101 those that are not too often relies upon arbitrary or personal standards. Instead, by framing comics as a medium for storytelling, the quality of the creator’s work as an artisan is demonstrated in how well they use the form. By showing that comics as a medium is only as good as the authors doing the storytelling, the members of the Pao Collective demonstrate that the only thing focused on children in kids’ comics is the publishers in search of profits.

Comics Creator as Master Storyteller

Comics as a medium should not be judged by the marketing of particular authors or books.

Instead, they should be evaluated as works within a particular medium or art. In Chapter 3, I demonstrated how comics as a medium in India has come to be defined mainly in terms of or counter to educational comics from the 1970s. While understanding comics as perpetuating folklore is at best exaggerating their role in tradition, and at worst shortsighted, a folkloristic perspective reveals how comics creators can be understood as masters of their chosen medium.

More importantly, approaching comics and graphic novels from folkloristics helps to understand what makes for a good comics narrative in Delhi today. In The Spirit of Folk Art,

Henry Glassie demonstrates how fine art has been placed above folk art because of definitions of art based upon particular medium that have flourished in America and Europe, especially sculpture and painting.iii He argues that a scholarly focus on the more abstract qualities of folk art have led to its being misunderstood as merely instrumental. However, any art, to be considered excellent, should serve its function well; fine art may evoke the senses, but only insofar as that is its primary purpose. Similarly, folk art may fulfill physical needs, but that instrumentality is also part of its sensory presence that opens the mind to greater understanding of the universe and our place in it (Glassie 1989: 85). As already shown, the comics medium, Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 102 too, fulfills multiple purposes simultaneously, just as it draws upon audience members’ familiarity with other visual narratives, folklore, film, literature, and art. As will be further explored in Chapter 6, comics creators tell stories that do much work, be it educating, entertaining, communicating, or revisiting folklore.

In The Spirit of Folk Art, Glassie also emphasizes the importance of approaching any art form from an insider’s view and as an independent tradition to be understood on its own terms.

He argues for art as skill or experience that is deeply situated in the socio-cultural context of particular communities where artists have honed their skills in particular media (Glassie 1989).

In deconstructing the high/low art dichotomy, he also takes apart any aesthetically based divide, such as that between visual and verbal art, by emphasizing skill and context over form or function. Glassie thus argues for the conceptualization of folk art as an ideal, as “a reaction to simplification and error,” that illustrates how the division of art along aesthetic biases falls apart in practice (Glassie 1995: 254). Defining comics has relied in the past upon aesthetically based divisions, albeit those that have structured the medium and how audiences relate to these narratives. However, in order to understand the relationship between the verbal, the visual, and their overlap more generally, comics should be understood according to how well a narrative addresses readers’ and creators’ expectations.

Many creators in Delhi refer to storytelling as they create comics narratives. As a result, they evaluate each other’s work, at least in part, according to their standards for stories and storytellers in general. In particular, Vishwajyoti Ghosh emphasizes the need across media to keep audiences hooked. When asked what for him makes for a good storyteller, in graphic novels or in general, he responded that: “A good story is the story itself, not necessarily the move.

Either the story doesn’t move or it moves you. There is some kind of movement, in you or in the Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 103 story. That’s not the way I want to put it, but I cannot find any other words. The story always has something that keeps you hooked, that makes you move page after page. You want to know what happens.” He expands that a good storyteller is “Someone who takes the audience along and moves with it. If you do not, then you are like the pied piper; you think everyone is following you, but everyone left you far back.” Accordingly, a master storyteller is able to lead audiences persuasively, with one hook or another. They cannot lose their viewers, readers, and otherwise or there will be no one to receive their story and so no point in the telling.

In his work, Orijit Sen has had to deal more explicitly with the difficulties of crafting comics narratives. As an early creator, Sen dealt with expectations that did not favor experimentation or creativity. In particular, he addresses the division of high and low art quite directly. He stated to me that “I think this business of high and low is anyway a meaningless dichotomy. Who decides what is high and low?” Among educators and book publishers, standards for quality relate more to educational value, while, among creators, quality storytelling is more important. He expands on this problem by discussing his piece on 15th century poet

Kabir in terms of his reading of David N. Lorenzen’s Kabir Legends and Ananta-Das’s Kabir

Parachai. “It’s a very interesting space of contestation of fact and fiction because it brings up this issue of just because somebody writes it in some medium, it’s easy to accept versus word of mouth history. As was the mode in those days, people embroidered their stuff. The idea of veracity or accuracy didn’t play an important role. What was required was to respond, to have meaning, to have strength. Like old storytelling, what’s important is that it has to have an impact then and there. It has to make use of the means to communicate more effectively.” Sen relates to

Lorenzen’s emphasis on the impact of narratives in a historical context. Accordingly, an excellent story must have an effect on the audience as they read or encounter it; failing to do so Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 104 means failing to live up to the potential of the narrative, the medium, and the act of storytelling itself.

Sen thus values an approach to stories as important for their purpose or function. As he continues, “So I have played with many different strands, and so that is the point that Lorenzen makes: legends are very important, not because of their innate truth or lack of it, but because of what they tell us about the people who created it. The truth of the story lies not in what it says, but in why it says it. And I like that way of approaching stories.” As Sen breaks down this issue by analyzing the analysis of historical scholarship on Kabir, stories are important for the purposes behind them. The functions reveal a great deal about the creators and context. So, understanding why the members of the Pao Collective have put pen, brush, or mouse to paper or screen should reveal more about what makes for a good comic.

For creator Parismita Singh, the best stories have a more profound motivation than the edutainment of educational comics like ACK. Instead, creators are motivated to do something that Singh calls ‘special.’ Thus, when asked what makes for a good storyteller, she stated: “Very obviously, to begin with, someone who is able to hold your interest and all that. Let’s leave that aside, obviously. I think this is understood. We’re all storytellers; we are all always telling stories. Some are boring and some are even dishonest.” Storytelling itself can be assumed because all people use stories to get through the day or add meaning to their lives. However, an exceptional creator does something more. “You are really able to do something that you really haven’t been able to do in your life, in your normal everyday living.” At its best, then, storytelling thus represents something out of the ordinary, and a special creator abley leads audience members to that ‘unspeakable’ moment.iv Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 105

Based on his time talking with Orijit Sen, creator and researcher Amitabh Kumar emphasizes the importance of place in doing this work. When asked about the importance of storytelling as a lens on comics, Kumar provided an example from his own work. “When I first met Orijit, he lay a lot of stress on actually being in that space, and that grew into a certain sense that resonated with my own practice at that time. For example, I saw this murder happening. I was in this auto, moving on this road, and I see this truck backing up. I see these three kids, and I think maybe this woman fell down and they’re picking her up. But I get closer, and I see that they’re holding a man down, mugging him. And this is happening here. I see the other guy holding the man’s hands, laughing. By the time I pass, I don’t know what the fuck is happening.”

The feeling created in him by the moment of seeing and not understanding the mugging made it important for him to document and create a story based upon the even. He continues, “What?

Nothing happened. What did you see? I chewed on it. I have told this story to all my friends in

Pao. So I went back to that site to record this piece, and to spatially reconstruct that moment.

That’s still an important way that I tell stories. I think there’s a certain ability of the space around me that I want to maintain.” In providing a detailed sense of the landscape, he is able to evoke the experiences and emotions of everyday life and create a certain response in himself and in readers. Kumar is thus able to do something special. As he continues, “I think storytelling as a form, and as a practice, is something that we at least have…For me the focus is not the narrative or the story. Oh it happened. It had to happen. Oh that’s a story waiting to be told, blah-blah. My focus is the affect that the story creates.” A strong sense of place helps Kumar to make his narratives stronger by helping him to provoke a response in readers. It is through contextualization that he and other creators are able to spark emotion in their audiences. Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 106

However, even among the united members of the Pao Collective, their approaches to creativity vary greatly. In a discussion of the place of comics in India, early creator Sarnath

Banerjee explains this problem to me. “As you have seen yourself, the people you’ve met here have very little to do with each other in that their works are very different from each other. Their works are so different from each other.” Banerjee points out the central difficulty of developing this medium from early on: a lack of precedent. Despite the many forms that he and other creators reference, the diversity of their own work makes it hard to find common ground. Yet, in a later conversation on aesthetic biases against comics, he points it out succinctly. “In the art world, you find that people tend to be a little bit suspicious of text and/as image. Because, oh, isn’t art all about feelings and abstraction? And how colors play in your head? If you create, then you can create meanings. My question is what makes you feel that words and images can’t evoke this same kind of multi-plot? Why can’t they evoke the same kind of expressions and feelings?

Because that’s exactly what all of us are trying to do.” As a collective and as peers within

Delhi’s comics scene, all of them are working to affect their readers, from telling a good story to experiencing the profound, or evoking any number of other responses. What makes for masterful storytelling in this case changes from creator to creator but relies on a strong sense of purposeful affection.

A Special Comics Story As already noted, comics as a medium is grounded in the practices of readers and creators.

Furthermore, recognizing authors and artists as masters of the medium reveals the standards for comics narratives. In this case, outside of a strong engagement with readers, storytelling standards depend on the creator. Yet, masterful comics and graphic novels in Delhi today are built upon a clear sense of community. Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 107

Given the broader context of visual and narrative culture, creators tend to bring much the same expectations as readers. As Parismita Singh noted in describing what makes for a good story that combines image and text, “Obviously, you have all of that, like the illustration should be good and it should be able to hold your interest, and so should the text. I mean, at some point, you take that as a given. I think when I go into a comic, I take the same kind of expectations that

I would to a novel or something like that.” Singh, like many readers, judges the quality of comics against more familiar narrative media. However, the medium should also be evaluated according to more specific characteristics. “A really important quality is that I will be able to really linger over images. But sometimes, it’s like you will suddenly remember a phrase from a book, or you are able to hold a certain section or phrase from a book in your mind. It just keeps coming back to you. It’s like the kind of wisdom you would get from a book. And with comics, sometimes the images come back to you, or stories that you can read again and again.” Strong comics narratives thus allow readers to linger over the juxtaposition of image and text, savoring the resulting story.

However, despite such a unique standard, comics tends to be understood according to more familiar ones, even by creators.

Similar to Singh, Vishwajyoti Ghosh focuses on the qualities earlier noted in the discussion of storytelling. However, for Ghosh, there is clearly a greater emphasis on overall design and composition in recognizing good comics narratives. “They are well-drawn, but a good, well-drawn comic can be badly laid out. One is that. And then the story, I think it’s like any film or a book, the first few pages have to hook you. That’s what makes or breaks any narrative. For a good storyteller, half the story is in the first page. Layout might move up or down, and what you would expect in the middle may start in first.” According to Ghosh, by the first page, a reader should have a sense of the overall quality and structure of the longer Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 108 narrative. This ability is part of the entire story, and thus the creator’s engagement with readers.

As he states, “A good comics story engages you, so that you don’t take every page for granted.

The story is well told, so that it pulls you on. You know what the layout will be like, but the story is greater and pulls you through. So, the layout of a great page is part of the story, in terms of the particular rationale for each page being laid out in a different way. Content dictates layout.” As in earlier quotes, Ghosh again places the greatest importance on the story. However, it is through the various elements of the story that creators are able to make readers invested in their work.

“Like in Watchmen, Alan Moore hooks you on from page one. He uses a device, and you want to see and know more. It’s gory, and it’s not my genre at all, but I’m ready to sink or swim with it. It might get out there, but I’m ready to go with it, ready to invest myself in it. That’s a good story. That’s how I read a comic.” A good comic, then, is not just a narrative that works similar to those in other media. Instead, it is one whose creator takes advantage of all elements of the storytelling to craft investment and engage with readers.

Orijit Sen expands on this need to engage with readers by describing the importance of the representation of time and place. He specifically describes comics as stories that, at their best, simultaneously craft a sense of moving through time and provide entry into believable, alternative worlds. “They are different, especially for shorter works which can be quite a bit more experimental. But if you’re talking about longer, full-length things, then for me a good graphic novel is one which has a good story to tell. That is number one. Now what constitutes a good story is of course a different thing, but I feel that it is the passage of time. A story basically captures the passage of time and something that allows us to traverse that passage of time. You know, in an exciting, interesting, way in which we discover new things: that is a good story. A good story is one that moves us through time in an interesting way. And the story creates this Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 109 world which you can inhabit. I think a good graphic novel does that, it will draw me into this alternative world.” In describing what makes for a good graphic novel or comics narrative, Sen incorporates himself into the audience of readers by framing himself as a fan-creator.v In so doing, he notes that the strongest stories in this medium both craft a believable world and a sense of time within it. Readers are drawn in and are easily able to relate to and understand the story.

Although a good graphic novel holds these qualities, this long form of comics remains strongly within the realm of the larger comics medium. In fact, it is the structure undergirding long-form narratives that determines their strength and that demonstrates the fundamentals of the medium. Sen continues, “That applies to graphic novels, in terms of obviously the visual and graphic qualities used to create that world. I think comics also have what [Scott] McCloud says, that comics bring you to fill the gaps between one frame and another. The whole world exists in that gutter. In that sense, comics really do that. They really draw you to imagine the whole world, the rest of the world, by giving you clues.” Sen points to McCloud’s Understanding

Comics in order to highlight what many creators view as an important, if not the defining characteristic, of the comics medium: the gutter. In moving from one panel or image to the next, readers engage in a wide variety of logical jumps related to the story. Each of these transitions relies on an established of the story to help readers through the flow of the narrative.vi Excellent comics, for Sen, Ghosh, and Singh, are those that best use these jumps and other elements of the medium to persuasively tell the story.

In contrast, in describing what makes for a quality comic or graphic novel, Sarnath

Banerjee shares a more complex perspective. Banerjee specifically delineates several important standards, including a clear sense of time and place, idiosyncratic and accurate characterization of people, and a detailed representation of varying language, both person to person and dialect to Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 110 dialect. Yet, in terms of describing definitively good comics narratives, he regards the process as futile at worst. As he has already stated, though, “It’s nice to define. Because in the process of trying to define and failing to do so, comes a lot of answers.” Despite a somewhat pessimistic perspective, Banerjee returns the focus of this investigation to recognizing the common questions and issues that are laid bare in attempting to measure the quality of comics. In particular, these questions help ensure the productiveness of defining an excellent comic, in that creating such a narrative remains a continuing process, one that not only changes from creator to creator, but over time, as authors, artists, and readers change how they read and create comics.

Questioning any one definition of comics, such as those provided earlier, does help to show their overlapping attention to an auteur or artisanal perspective that emphasizes each creator’s skill. Amitabh Kumar relates what he values in others’ works to understanding their individual perspectives of the world. “Like Vishwa’s work, [Delhi Calm (2010)]. I like it so much because it was an indication of his place in the world, and it was an indication—it told me a lot more about Vishwajyoti. I have known him, and we’re friends. We at least used to meet on a fairly regular basis. But the book tells you so much more about the artist. And [Barn Owl’s

Wondrous Capers (2007] tells you more about Sarnath. And that’s what I really enjoy. This is why I see Orijit as being someone that one can really look up to. Because for him, I sense that it is a little bit more than that. It’s a little bit more than him finding his own vision of the world.

There is some genuine love of the form. And for me, I am more important than the form.” For

Kumar, what makes an excellent comics narrative is the sense of another person’s perspective that shines through in their storytelling. This is true despite the fact that, for him as a creator, it is his own ability to communicate that is central. As he relates, “I can do this. And I hope I can do it well enough for people to get what I’m saying. See, a good work of art is something that alters Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 111 the way you see the world, or makes a small shift at your perceptions, or enriches you, or makes you poorer, but it doesn’t leave you unaffected. It’s true that that’s what I hope my practice somehow achieves. That’s what I want to do.” The value of comics for creators like Kumar lies not in the medium itself but in their own ability to express themselves and their understanding of the world through the form. By recognizing the need for visual storytelling in comics to affect readers, creators not only recognize themselves as artisans of the form, but also as community members working towards change.

Transformative Potential In attempting to craft meaningful stories that change how people view the world, creators like those belonging to the Pao Collective draw upon multiple precedents for reading in Indian culture. In particular, earlier, educational comics set an example for the reading of visual narratives as transformative by grounding creator’s work and reader’s imagination in traditional culture. Comics that worked to perpetuate such culture, albeit usually with a Hindu, nationalist bias, constructed readership in a particular way that continues to affect current authors and artists. By building stories around the moment where readers realized their membership in particular identities or cultures, creators like those behind ACK worked with the transformative potential of spiritual experience. Specifically, they took advantage of reading’s ability to act as a kind of performance that creates a liminal space outside of life where one can negotiate lived reality. The process of reading thus provides opportunities for readers to engage with folk culture and ritualistic behavior, potentially for self-actualization.vii Since their work represents a manifestation of broader reading culture and practice, contemporary creators must deal with this precedent set by these earlier storytellers. Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 112

Just as the proverbial Indian grandmother previously used storytelling to make children aware of Hindu narratives and their cultural prevalence, the ACK and other series framed comics as providing an entry point to much broader storytelling traditions and folk culture (McLain

2009). Reading itself creates a potentially transformative experience comparable to that of ritual by requiring readers to engage with texts outside of everyday life. As Mircea Eliade points out,

“[e]ven reading includes a mythological function … because, through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an ‘escape from time’ comparable to the ‘emergence from time’ effected by the myths” (1952:205). Written works allow an escape similar to both myth and ritual’s ability to move an audience outside of ordinary time and into the sacred world. In Victor

Turner’s model of liminal states, the reading experience could be understood as a state of being

‘betwixt and between’ that individuals enter in order to resolve personal crisis and be reincorporated into society. However, as the reading of comics does not always resolve a crisis and is optional for readers, reading may be understood to create a liminoid space for transcendence (Turner 1982). In this sense, unlike a fully liminal experience through ritual, reading does not necessarily transform, but provides the individual with an experience of division and reincorporation as part of play. Comics creators thus draw upon ritual experience through the form itself, as a medium whose reading engages with audiences as potential participants in the transformation of self and society. In drawing upon references to spiritual experience and folk culture to invoke power, folkloric comics enact a reframing of reading as a performance of personal, communal, and national identity.

By framing the telling of stories through comics as a children’s medium, such creators used visual storytelling as a form of play to remediate traditional narratives as politically charged narratives. Gregory Bateson describes play as “[engaging] in an interactive sequence of which Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 113 the unit actions or signals were similar to but not the same as those of combat” (2000: 179).

Accordingly, comics allowed readers and authors to playfully engage in debate about the future of a modern India and the changing roles of local and national forces without the stigma of social unrest. Further, as stories targeted at younger audiences, readers and creators were able to frame even politically charged comics narratives as play. In the process, they engaged in metacommunication, or the “[exchange of] signals which would carry the message ‘this is play’”

(Bateson 2000: 179). In dealing with these multiple levels of abstraction, comics become capable of denoting and evoking fear in different audience members. For example, critics of Amar Chitra

Katha have criticized Pai and its creators for veiling political propaganda as children’s stories.

Comics thus structured the discourse surrounding visual narratives when framed as children’s stories and “[gave] the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand the messages included within the frame” (Bateson, 2000: 188). However, the metacommunicative act of recognizing storytelling in images combined with text as play limited the content of those stories.

As Bateson points out, “[e]very metacommunicative or metalinguistic message defines, either explicitly or implicitly, the set of messages about which it communicates” (2000: 188). As a result, when ACK’s authors framed comics narratives as children’s narratives and thus as play, they engaged in political discourse while limiting the potential for debate.

However, this constraining of political discussion can only be maintained when creators and readers frame comics as not political. In response to this precedent, contemporary creators emphasize the tension between fact and fiction in storytelling, as well as the adult or serious nature of their stories as graphic novels. Despite the disadvantages of calling long-form comics narratives something fundamentally different from shorter ones, this shift in focus pulls stories away from the metacommunicative precedent of the ACK series and other children’s comics that Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 114 focus on educational value. Instead, creators, in framing comics as storytelling, place a greater weight on the works of individual authors and artists. Specifically, they emphasize the ability of each creator to affect his or her audience members through the transformative power of the comics medium, as storytelling that is not as powerful, or as dangerous, as its precedents.

As already shown, comics creators like Parismita Singh relate to folklore as a means to establish a common ground for readers to engage with their visual narratives, and, through them, a reconsideration of their world view. In referring to this concept, this discussion is based upon

Alan Dundes’s conception of worldview as “…the cognitive, existential aspects of the way the world is structured,” in contrast to ethos, which “…refers to the normative and evaluative

(including esthetic and moral judgments) aspects of culture” (1972: 131). When creators evoke the transformative and affecting power of comics, the creators behind Pao Collective thus understand comics as affecting people through storytelling. By working through comics as one medium among many, creators are able to take advantage of a potential for storytelling in general to affect others in an extraordinary way. Specifically, they are able to move beyond aesthetic judgments and question how people fundamentally understand the world in which all people must live.

At the same time, framing comics as another medium for storytelling allows a certain amount of ambiguity that may sustain the play frame, and, with it, greater creativity than available in other media. In earlier comics culture, Amar Chitra Katha re-narrated traditional narratives playfully, engaging with readers’ awareness of the diversity present within folk culture at the same time that authors, artists, and editors, including Anant Pai, framed a political

Hindutva message as fundamentally Indian. For contemporary comics creators and publishers, maintaining the playfulness of comics allows them to craft graphic novels and comics with Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 115 multiple audiences, meanings, functions, and affects. In both cases, the play frame increases the potential power of comics as a liminoid space for readers to experience transformation. By placing stories in a traditional context, ACK’s stories pulled readers into a time before modernity when communities were stronger and humans encountered the divine in daily life. Through this idealistic framing of the past, these and other, similar narratives interacted playfully with India’s history.viii

By defining these narratives as play, authors create the potential for readers to interact in the creative process by contributing their own creativity to imagining what things were once like and how traditional or folk culture should be incorporated into a modern nation. As Bateson demonstrates in his discussion of the necessity of the paradoxes of abstraction, even fantasy and play contain references to reality and kernels of truth (Bateson 2000). Even when read for fun rather than education, comics create a potentially transformative space, where playful interaction and imagining of alternative worlds, like those that Sen emphasizes, increases awareness of how things actually are. By defining excellent comics narratives as playfully engaged with fact and fiction but masterfully executing creators’ perspectives, contemporary creators open the door to socially-engaged storytelling.

Social Responsibility For many creators and scholars, creativity is grounded in the social and cultural context of community. Given Ray Cashman’s definition of community as “a network of people brought into engagement by an idea,” the creative process turns around the ideas with which creators and readers or other audiences engage (2008: 12). Accordingly, masterful storytelling requires engagement with that group and the social issues that are most urgent for them. For contemporary comics creators in Delhi, masterful storytelling is characterized by such social Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 116 responsibility. At the same time, though, creators are also responsible to their process as creators, their continuingly changing repertoires, and to their creative communities. Reaching out to their communities through storytelling thus requires a clearly developed artistic voice, or style.

This need for engagement originates in the creator him or her self. In her account of creative process, Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi dancer and instructor Ananda Shankar Jayant relates how her work with women’s issues came about. She begins by pointing out her role as an artisan within a tradition of dance that both changes over time and is maintained by performers.

As a “serious artiste,” Jayant carries on the tradition by continuing to creatively change the form.

As she states, “In today’s global world, I am a composite of many cultural influences. My memories and life’s experiences need to be reflected in my language—which is dance. My personal, political, and social concerns need to find voice in my dance—for that is the way I speak, the only language I know” (Jayant 2007: 298). Through the dance medium, Jayant is able to speak to other members of her community about the problems and questions that rise to fore of her worldview. Furthermore, the evaluation of dance, like any other artistic tradition/medium, cannot separate this sense of social responsibility from the creative process. As Jayant notes,

“The odd person will no doubt ask, ‘Do we need to see this in art? We have enough of it in the papers. We are not like that…’. The ‘we’ is the urban, upper middle class which believes these things happen only in the slums. I end by quoting Rukmini Devi Arundale, my guru, ‘Culture is neither performance nor entertainment but life, and art is an expression of life’” (Jayant: 306).

Like the members of the Pao Collective, Jayant finds that the evaluation of dance requires a relevance to everyday life. Without that rooted concern for one’s community and social issues facing it, the cultural expression at hand, be it dance or comics, fails to reach out to and transform audience members, much less express something about life. Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 117

In contrast, Vishwajyoti Ghosh delineated especially strong creators as those with a clear voice and style. In particular, he describes a creator’s voice or perspective as their style. “It takes a lifetime to realize what’s your line, you know. When I was in school, one of my teachers used to say that you’ll find one line in a million. Keep drawing lines, and you’ll find one line. It takes a lifetime to get your line. Now think I’m getting my line. When you say style, it also means how you’re telling the story. Style is the whole narrative style. The graphic novel is a style of telling, too. The way you use text, fonts, paper, layouts, drawing—everything is style. Style is the ultimate way that you present your story to the world. It might be the best story in world, but if your style falls through, you’re done. Style is the way that you take it from your head and bring it to the reader.” For Ghosh, then, an excellent storyteller is one with a command of their own style, or fashion of representing something from life. Yet, as Jayant points out, that stylistic strength requires an engagement with social context and community.

As a result, creators like those in the Pao Collective bring their own experiences of social issues into the creative process and into developing the style of their storytelling. In particular,

Amitabh Kumar does this work by carrying a relatively high quality camera phone where ever he goes in order to help capture images and details about places and moments in his experiences of the world. By incorporating a sense of real life that comes from such documentation, Kumar focuses on his own relationship with events, issues, or society writ large. “As someone tells stories or makes comics, my primary agenda is to explore my relationship or my non-relationship with the world around me. And that’s what I’m doing. And that’s what all forms of storytelling or traditions are doing. Be it folk or be it scifi-fantasy.” Creativity for Kumar is thus not just about expressing one’s perspective to affect readers, but doing so with a critical understanding of social relationships. Since, as he has already stated, he is most invested in expressing his own Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 118 worldview in creating comics, Kumar has honed his creative process to support reflection upon his own place in the world and his own political concerns. He specifically enjoys doing and reading work that analyzes political systems. For example, he described the purpose of the

Helmet-man comic to me. “It’s trying to invest, to have a very consciously superhero or vigilante sort of a gaze. Do you know about the Batla House encounter and the Delhi bombings? It was around that. I wanted to have a reading of the political system. So that’s what it is operating under, that’s what most vigilante comics are operating under. That’s the stuff that I enjoy.” By constantly grounding his work in his own day-to-day experiences, Kumar has been able to maintain social relevance, albeit mainly with people like himself. He is able to craft compelling stories that suit his individual style by focusing on particular social issues that interest him.

Early creator Sarnath Banerjee maintains connections to larger communities by telling stories based on actual people and experiences that he has had. In particular, in order to remain relevant to and accurately portray lived reality in particular communities, Banerjee works to keep his stories new and ‘fresh.’ “I don’t repeat stories. I only tell fresh stories. Sort of like good, fresh tofu. There are some stories you repeat, like my tobacco secessionist story. So, sometimes we think that okay, we don’t want to repeat some stories; we want to write a book. And then you make your first mistake. That’s your artistic intention, if immortality is one of those things which everybody wants, I guess. Something which is printed in ink on paper legitimizes you somehow.

But somewhere down the line, we try to make it sort of bigger than it is. And why do we—I am trying to answer your question, but it seems like there’s no justification for writing these two stories [Corridor and Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers]. Except that maybe that story can help somebody else too. Somebody in a similar situation.” For Banerjee, the artful motivation of expressing one’s individual perspective is suspicious, and potentially indicative of a desire for Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 119 notoriety rather than social relevance. In particular, it can feel pointless, as those stories that are published are relatively guaranteed to lose their ‘fresh’-ness. However, publishing stories in book form provides an opportunity to reach a wider swathe of people and thus help them deal with issues experienced by him and related in his stories. As Banerjee points out, their stories in print may help others in similar situations or dealing with the same social problems faced in their imagined communities.

However, putting stories in print may actually create additional social problems. As, storytellers, their repertoire of narratives is not entirely original but grounded in lived experience and likely shared among other tellers. As Parismita Singh pointed out to me, taking stories out of that context involves certain, unequal social relationships. “How do you work out this question of power relations? When I take a story from somebody in a village, in the sense that I have heard this story from her, and then I take it, and then I use it. Then, there’s a very fine line between just stealing, but how do you work that out? At the same time, though, maybe that’s what creators do. Because, I mean, you are selling the book, and you are making money from it.

So all of that does come in.” Since creators like Singh rely on publication for their livelihoods, the use of others’ stories or inspiration drawn from them is not a neutral act, especially when highlighting certain issues or injustices. They can address underlying power structures, though, by giving credit where credit is due. “Even having a note at the end just giving all the stories that you’ve taken. I mean that’s what I’m going to do with my present book. At the same time, you won’t give away too much, then. But it’s good because after my first book, I’ve really had time to think about all this, for the second one. I think even if it’s purely self-indulgent, like a couple of pages at the back just detailing material, where you found what.” Providing recognition for others who have been part of a story’s creation is more socially responsible. Singh thus works to Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 120 define her style as engaging yet responsible both to people in her own life and to the communities that she addresses.

In terms of Delhi’s comics scene, the most important figure for socially responsible storytelling is clearly Orijit Sen. In his River of Stories, Sen raised the bar for visual storytelling by crafting a socially critical narrative of the Narmada River Project. Through his later work, he has continued to set a high standard for community-sensitive creativity. In describing his work on Trash, Sen notes the importance of detailed spaces in capturing the spiritedness of actual street children. He described how he uses photographs and sketches from the actual space to craft a sense of that social space. Sen emphasizes the importance of crafting a clear and vivid sense of life in Chennai, and specific locations, including the street bus stop where the main character, like many other children, spends the night after running away from his family. Sen visited the haunts of street children because, as he states it, “I wanted to catch their spirit, how they lived hard lives but had fun.” In so doing, he became focused on crafting a clear sense of time as well.

In an illustration of the bus stop, he uses several photographs of the many he took for reference to craft a sense of time passing from the bus arriving and filling to leaving (Image 4-3).

In the process of creating River, Trash!, and other stories, Sen directly addresses the concern for social responsibility voiced by the other members of the Pao Collective. He frames his stories as essentially filtered through his own perspective but based on real people, events, and problems. In part, Sen does this work through a unique visual style that identifies the work and the perspective as his own.ix Stylistically, he is known as a master draftsman, but he uses his crisp and attentive line work to transform readers into socially aware members of their communities. Sen also uses layers of narrative to make it clear that each character or person has their own understanding of the story and of the world as a whole. In River, a journalist’s voice Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 121 frames the story of misplaced adivasi tribes, while Trash! Relies on photographs to highlight the actual bias of the story. In the process, he acknowledges his own place as an outsider with the ability to represent communities facing injustice, but emphasizes the need for readers to become more aware of their experiences. Sen thus balances his social and stylistic obligations by grounding the latter in social relevance.

Sen’s commitment to accurately and vividly representing street children’s lives in society as like any other in many ways demonstrates the strong social commitment emphasized by the creators at the core of the Pao Collective. In addition, he often performs in-depth fieldwork and research , revealing a new and important standard for contemporary long-form comics: being there.

Masters of the Comics Form As demonstrated in this chapter, contemporary long-form comics narratives in Delhi do many things simultaneously. Through them, creators illustrate their own understandings of the world, providing a clear sense of their own, individual worldview. They also create an affect in readers, crafting a transformative potential in their stories that allows for each individual to find their own particular meaning in the telling. Finally, artists and authors are able to live up to personal and social obligations by blending style and content in representation of lived experience and related social problems. The members of the Pao Collective, however, are remarkable because they succeed in doing in so much of this work while telling excellent stories in the comics medium.

In The Hotel at the End of the World, Parismita Singh tells the stories of five different people at one inn located somewhere in Northeastern India. The story rotates around the experiences of one young girl and her mother, but, in the process, she shows that everyone has a story to tell. She questions the nature of narrative and the divide between fact and fiction through Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 122 this framing of Hotel’s multiple narratives within the larger one of all the characters staying at the family’s inn. In particular, at several points in the story, the veracity of a character’s tale is questioned, but in each case, it does not matter; the point is to communicate with each other and bond through stories. In one example, the reader sees Pema, the main girl’s mother, at the center of a tankha-like framing of the landscape in which she lives. The composition of the page, such that the landscape is fractured, mirrors Pema’s inability to choose between her family and the man she loves (Image 4-4). It also mirrors her fractured mind in the story’s present of the hotel, as she is shown to be irritable at best and aggressively antisocial at worst, based on the memories she narrates.

At the same time, her visual style relates to her readers by drawing on common images and visual references like the tankha frame. As already noted, Singh draws on Tibetan styles of depicting mountains and clouds, but she also references Japanese visual styles in the drawing of a peaceful scene that the soldier encounters in his story later on (Images 3-3 and 3-4). However, these references allow her to draw more complex images that require more work from readers to understand, as in the depiction of the large bridge to China much earlier in the book (Image 4-5).

The lines in this image are much more chaotic, though the overall composition references the image of the Japanese bridge in that, again, the reader is presented with a splash page where the narrator is placed below a larger image. In this case, however, the overall style of depiction implies a sense of awe and fear combined, which makes sense in terms of the then-narrator’s plight of being enslaved to build it. In all of these ways, Singh takes advantage of the comics medium to bring image and story together with the fluid motion of her crisply drawn lines.

Throughout his works, Sarnath Banerjee shows that individual lives are both interesting and hold a great deal of meaning, if one bothers to look at them closely through story. In Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 123 particular, in Corridor, Banerjee illustrates how each character or person is the center of their own universe while simultaneously taking part in the stories of others. The overarching narrative is structured in a similar way to Singh’s Hotel in that there is one larger story, about a young man named Brighu living in an urban setting, and then multiple other narratives within it about characters with whom he interacts. Brighu, as narrator, describes the experiences of several other characters as encountered through a book vendor with whom he is friends. From one young man’s sexually explicit adventures, to another’s experiences with surfing, and Brighu’s girlfriend’s side of their relationship, the book as a whole is able to capture a sense of their lives in process.

Banerjee is able to capture this sense of lives being lived through a close attention to characterization and the evenly balancing the rhythm of the story so that each receives enough time within the overall story. For each character, then, there is a moment where they are allowed to take up the whole page, showing both an important development in their character and that their story is important (Image 4-6). Although Banerjee often uses that moment to bring a humorous thread or ongoing joke to its punch line, even then, he pushes characters into the spotlight. That compositional moment is mirrored in Corridor’s conclusion, where Banerjee portrays Brighu as a comics creator himself. Brighu is shown drawing images of the many characters in Corridor, explaining their fates after the story has ended. However, as storyteller,

Brighu pauses at the image of his now ex-girlfriend, and in this way, Banerjee suggests that this story, of Brighu and his lover, is not over (Image 4-7). Banerjee relies upon his own skill with pacing and characterization to help him craft excellent stories. He is thus able to use not only what is present on the page to tell his stories effectively, but to push the reader to imagine what happens when the book closes. Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 124

In Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm, readers are pushed to question the nature of established facts, particularly the history of post-independence India. Ghosh accomplishes this through his formal inventiveness and through strong characterization much like that in Corridor.

The story focuses on the lives of three friends, who are each artists with activist tendencies. At first, the reader is treated to an exaggerated version of historic events, such that 1975 Delhi feels closer to a dystopian future. However, by focusing on the main characters’ experiences, especially their attempt to start a performance art based group of artists and teachers, Ghosh is able to show that history is in the little moments, as well as the big ones (Image 4-8). In fact, it is through those smaller vignettes, rather than the interludes that draw a larger picture of events surrounding the main narrative, that he is able to make the story compelling.

Furthermore, by using the same images of many of the historical figures in the book to show their presence or to communicate the messages they craft in various media, he shows how they become a caricature of themselves (Image 4-9). In particular, Ghosh relies on splash pages or irregular combinations of image and text that feel less like comics and more like posters or political propaganda in order to accomplish this tone. He thus seems to argue that it is the history of the little moments that is more important because so much of history’s larger narrative is easily manipulated by those in power. Ghosh also highlights the experiences of day-to-day life as the site of some of the worst crimes and greatest victories in this story. Formally, Ghosh also draws on traditional art forms, especially kalighat, in order to question how we know history; indeed, the story of Delhi Calm brings together form and narrative to such an extent that it feels like the masterpiece of one creator’s career. However, as demonstrated in the rest of his work,

Vishwajyoti Ghosh still has plenty of stories and skill to continue his work into the future. Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 125

In Raj Comics for the Hard-Headed, Amitabh Kumar references the wide array of Raj

Comics series via photographs and direct descriptions of characters’ evolution. His intention is to plunge readers into the world of Raj Comics, and, in so doing, expose them to their assumptions about the comics medium. Kumar samples artwork from the comics themselves, but situates them in the landscape of his own making. This landscape is realistic, but incredibly gritty, such that the lines used to portray depth and space are emphatically energetic (Image 4-10). Although their energy distracts from the story’s realism, it does add to the sense that real life and the world of superhero comics are not so far distant. In particular, the chaotic quality of Kumar’s depiction realizes the infinite complexity of real life compared to the genre of superhero comics, while then explaining the importance of both worlds.

Although Kumar points out the conflict between Raj Comics’ superheroes and lived reality, he also points to their significance through an interlacing of narrative and page structure.

Specifically, when superhero Nagraj is shown attempting to assimilate the main character, only identified as Helmet-man, into the world of Raj Comics, the reader understands that choice as one between an idealized realm and the readers’ reality. At the same time, both characters are drawn in different styles; while Nagraj is collages from a Raj Comic book, Helmet-man shares the energy of his home landscape. His refusal to enter Nagraj’s world, and to instead make himself a hero in the real world, mirrors this difference in style (Image 4-11). Through these various moves, Kumar is able to make the reader recognize themselves in the ever-watchful but never active Helmetman, as someone who recognizes injustice but too often becomes subsumed in the confusion of everyday routines and squabbles. In the process, they are able to recognize the value of Raj and other superhero comics as a source of inspiration in an unjust system. Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 126

Orijit Sen’s paramount graphic novel, The River of Stories, is not only important for the precedent it set, but for the remarkable skill and craft involved in doing so. Several creators expressed astonishment at the depth and quality of his work, and he himself notes that he used different tools and different styles of art, namely a rougher pencil style and a clearer ink one, to show the mythological and the actual realms in River (Image 4-12). Such stylistic choices demonstrate his skill in the medium of comics, as he shifts his media and even page layout in order to call upon reader associations with folk culture or myths of creation. Similarly, he uses the imaged nature of the medium to portray nonhuman perspectives as being in the same world as human communities, and even understandable, in the case of the environment.

Throughout River, Sen has focused on the landscape as an active participant in human lives and stories in order to criticize development and its tendency to silence alternative histories or voices. On the final page, Sen shows the representative of development, namely the developer in charge of kicking villagers off their own land, and that of the villagers, namely Malgu-gayan, a god-like figure under the mahua tree of storytelling (Image 4-13). In this scene, the landscape’s role is even more important, as it shifts from the broad sense of place that readers have seen throughout the book, and closes around the developer and Malgu-gayan. Through verbal sparring, it becomes clear that the developer has not thought about the consequences of his actions or even his arguments, and his loss is clear because the last shot is the face of this god of stories. Should the river be dammed, everyone will suffer, but no one so badly as the developer, who, according to Malgu-gayan, will never be satisfied by anything.

Sen is able to craft his story around his social responsibility to communities facing injustice, which is important especially after spending time living there. Throughout, he has blurred fact and fiction in style and content in order to show that both are part of lived Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 127 experience. However, here, Sen takes advantage of the tensions within the comics medium to emphasize that the loss of villagers’ communities is a loss for everyone. He is thus able to blend style, narrative structure, page layout, and the many other qualities of this visual narrative in comics in order to communicate a deeply contextualized retelling of one community’s experience of injustice.

At their best then, stories told as graphic novels in Delhi today focus both on the experiences of people living in particular communities, as situated in particular times and places, and on doing so through the particularly strong skills of individual creators. As already pointed out by Banerjee, the result, from Singh’s landscapes to Banerjee’s often magical realism,

Ghosh’s historical fiction, Kumar’s social commentary, and Sen’s incredibly attentive storytelling, is a diverse array of works and authors, such that each one shapes the entire scene for long-form comics. However, as demonstrated by bringing these five core members of the Pao

Collective into conversation, this is not something unique to the comics or graphic novel form.

Rather, this focus upon engaging with readers through comics as potentially transformative and socially conscious storytelling represents an effort to balance the difficulties of publishing in a growing industry. These creators’ work must build upon the foundation of earlier comics that tended to manipulate readers and, at the very least, not run counter to marketing that emphasizes their extraordinary quality as graphic novels. At the same time, their creative actions must provide a space for expressing their understanding of the world. Understanding their role as that of artisans and storytellers allows creators to flexibly negotiate these multiple purposes and tensions within the form. In these ways, creators like those behind the Pao Collective work to shape the practices of reading and creating comics narratives in Delhi and India today.

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Stories with the Spice of Life

By focusing on how creators evaluate their own and others’ work within the comics form, this chapter has worked to reveal what makes for a good comics narrative or graphic novel in Delhi today. Along the way, a matrix of qualities has risen to the fore, including the many details of strong storytelling, representing a creator’s unique perspective, harnessing the transformative power of visual narrative, and maintaining a connection to lived experience. However, any set of standards for excellence remains relatively implicit, particularly for creators who are themselves consumers of their medium. As Sarnath Banerjee explains in discussing the role of analysis for creators, “Hopefully, there are still books that are written, comics books too, that immerse you enough that you don’t really bother with the engineering of them. You don’t have a spoon full of it and think, oh, there’s some cumin in it, and let’s see, some cinnamon, and yeah, some fenugreek as well. You’re not analyzing it. You’re surrendering to that mouthful, and munching away without much consideration of it. Yet in a second bite, you might figure out that, oh, that extra bit in the cinnamon. I don’t think it’s particularly different from any other art or artists.

Comic book art is no exception to that.” As a practice, comics requires certain actions on the part of artists and authors, most importantly that they fulfill readers and other creators’ expectations for what the medium should be. For any art though, truly excellent stories are those which, as

Singh states, “express the un-expressable” without making it overly obvious that they are doing so. By expressing something unique about lived experience, they instead affect readers’ sense of the world seamlessly, allowing audience members to linger in their stories long enough to find the meaning that they seek.

When Orijit Sen crafted India’s first graphic novel in 1994, he was disheartened because he could not reach out to a very large audience with River of Stories. However, over the years, he Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 129 has been encouraged as “River inspired a whole group of new authors, who have created the rise in graphic novels.” While he, like most of the comics creators in Delhi’s comics scene, recognize that the term ‘graphic novel’ is almost entirely a marketing one, Sen does highlight its usefulness in bringing together creators who want to work with long-form comics. “Graphic novel is a good term to distinguish these stories from all other types of Indian comics. Though when I talk about comics, I am not talking about Indian comics for the entire country, in all their forms.” Sen is himself regarded as a tradition bearer of sorts, or more accurately as the source for the current river of graphic novels. Yet, this master of the comics medium is unable to define any kind of

Indian tradition.

Instead, Sen highlights the excitement of the diversity within the current rise of graphic novels and boom in comics culture. Accordingly, “The rise of graphic novels is positive and exciting, because we’re free to give shape to the form. When Delhi Calm was released, certain people thought it was part of a genre of historical fiction, but the graphic novel scene is so young that every book that comes out is a genre in itself.” Each creator who publishes a long-form comics narrative is able to transform what is considered an excellent graphic novel in this context. As a result, Sen notes that the level of experimenting is quite high, ranging from fairly

Western styles of comics to works that incorporate folk art traditions and others working to invent unique visual narrative hybrids. As Sen states, “We don’t have the weight of expectation of what a comic should be.” As a result, creators are free to renegotiate what counts as a graphic novel with each one that is released, barring the constraints of the production and editing process.

As comics authors and artists themselves, the Pao Collective longs for and likely requires support from other creators as a comics community. Furthermore, if one can understand a Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 130 medium through the mastery and skill of individual creators, then the members of Pao are certainly motivated to bring various creators together. Yet, in so doing, creators tend to engage directly with contemporary, especially local, social issues as part of building community. By conceiving of storytelling as engagement with society through representations based on local, lived reality, the creators behind Pao have set out to craft a comics community. When asked about the space for comics in India and Delhi, Kumar responded that “Culturally, I mean we’ve had a long tradition of illustrated manuscripts and illustrated texts, etc. I don’t know if there is a space, which is what gave birth to Pao. The need and desire for a space is what personally is a motivation or a mission: to serve a space like that, in collaboration with other comics artists. That way, we can all come and meet together. It is from that meeting together that any cultural or any specific space will emerge.” In discussing the space for comics, Kumar reveals the motivation for the Pao Collective as, at least in part, to craft a space for creators alone. Comics needs to be defined as a medium in order to define that communal space; yet this chapter demonstrates that this is a process, one that changes over time and from person to person.

Whereas, in the past, creators may have been able to work together in other roles, particularly as researchers for NGO’s, as artists, collaborators, friends, and critics, the member of

Pao work to unite each other as a community of artisans.x As Kumar further explains, “I’m extremely keen to create a space with Pao, to create a comic book house with Pao, create a publishing house that Pao creatively controls. I really hope, and I think all of us are working towards, Pao having a huge stake in the Indian comic book culture. But I think lots of us are busy doing our own gigs. We have spoken about the fact that we do want a center, a physical space, where we have an archive, we have a reading room, we have a studio. This has always been part of the plan, where we have institutional bondings and we go do workshops across the country.” Chapter 4: Masters of Comics Creation 131

He thus describes how the Pao Collective is deeply invested in bringing the comics medium into social relevance in multiple ways. As a result of these motives and methods, though, comics creators quickly shift from telling stories as a way of building community to building stories around existing communities. In the process of constructing such communities, though, they rely on common reading practices and texts to which diverse audiences can relate, with storytelling and folk culture being central among them.

i For more on each of these latter creators, see Chapters 5, 6, and 7, respectively. ii Again, comics scholar Roger Sabin (2001) details the changing expectations and standards for the changing medium of comics in the United States and Britain. Similarly, Julia Round (2010) points to some of the changes that occurred in the 1990s, while Charles Hatfield (2005) delineates the long-lasting influence of the underground movement in American comics and alternative comics, more generally. iii Anthropologist Franz Boas notes that the joy of art arises from a reaction to form; the only difference between primitive or low art and modern or fine art is the greater number of manifestations of the latter. See Boas, Franz, Primitive Art. New York: Dover Publications, 1955. ivSee Chapter 7 for the discussion of the liminal and liminoid. v See Chapter 7 for more discussion of how creators rhetorically situate themselves in this hybrid identity. viSee “Chapter 4: Bridging the Gap,” In Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: A definitive course from concept to comic in 15 lessons, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden: pp. 36-49 (New York: First Second, 2008). vii See the discussion of crafting socially active comics in Chapter 7. viii For example, the Vivalok Comics story “Faith of a European” details how a British official worked with a local deity to ensure the local royal family would give birth to a son in order to perpetuate their control over the area in the face of British colonialism. Sankunni, Kottarattil, Rukmini Sekhar, and Subir Roy. Aithihyamala, the Garland of Legends: Selected Legends from Kerala in Comics. New Delhi: Viveka Foundation, 2002. ix See the discussion of Orijit Sen’s individual style in Chapter6. x As Amitabh Kumar pointed out in a conversation with me, “There are many physical spaces that support comics. Sarai [Programme, part of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, where Kumar works with the Media Lab there] being one of them. We do have a fellowship program that is supportive of comic book practice. Sarnath Banerjee is one of our fellows. Parismita Singh is one our fellows. Vishwajyoti Ghosh is one of our fellows. Samit Basu is one of our fellows. And we have supported their projects. In fact, Sarnath’s first book was supported by Sarai.” Each of them has worked with NGOs on public projects, and, indeed, Kumar began his own research as a project for Sarai CSDS on contemporary media in India. Ch. 5: Appealing to Folk Culture

In Delhi, readers, creators, vendors, fans, and others not only connect comics to earlier visual narratives in India, but also to comics from an international context, especially Art Spiegelman’s

Maus, Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, and Joe Sacco’s Palestine. Scholars have mainly engaged this connection by situating the analysis of specific case studies, especially of Amar Chitra

Katha (ACK), within a broader cultural context. In their analyses of ACK’s role in Indian culture, particularly as a medium for nationalist discourse, Karline McLain, Nandini Chandra, and Deepa

Srinivas each focus on these comics narratives as developing into a uniquely Indian form out of

Western comics. However, the appeal to traditional, folk, or even nationalist, Hindu culture does not inherently transform the comics medium. As demonstrated in the previous chapters, several creators recognize that India’s comic books and graphic novels grew out of international comics culture. Creators also take part in that culture, from reading non-Indian works to participating in conferences and other arts-related events or programs. Accordingly, accounting for their perspectives reveals not only that Indian creators overcome a vulgar reputation by focusing on craftsmanship, but also that they appeal to folk culture in order to tell particular stories. Creators choose to make such references when mediating storytelling in order to reach certain goals, fundamental among them, uniting communities by overcoming language, culture, and other barriers.

As noted in previous chapters, existing scholarship has focused on Indian comics in the

1970s and 80s as cultural narratives grounded within a larger Hindu nationalism, with a particular focus on the Amar Chitra Katha series. Yet, with the shift from national to regional modes of production in the late 1980s onwards, creators were able to craft longer narratives.

Following Sen’s publication of River of Stories in 1994, the graphic novel became a form Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 131 available to creators, though few artists or authors took up Indian sequential art in a longer form.

However, in 2004, Sarnath Banerjee published Corridor, which weaves together the idiosyncratic stories of several people who visit a particular book shop in Delhi in order to express the fragmentation of urban life. In creating Corridor, Banerjee opened the door for graphic novels and longer narratives by creating a space for comics in the book publishing world of India. As most comics artists in Delhi will tell you, while Sen created the first graphic novel,

Banerjee’s Corridors made it possible to have a comics shelf in book shops. A series of other longer comics stories, from Amruta Patil’s Kari, which was India’s third graphic novel, to

Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s more recent Delhi Calm, have continued to expand the possibilities of the comics medium in India beyond the child-focused nationalism of Amar Chitra Katha. These new voices and styles have helped to lay the foundation for a comics industry that is more than vulgar comics, more than children’s tales, and more than a co-opted Western medium.

Following Sen and Banerjee’s example, within this diversity of voices, topics, and artistic styles, many contemporary creators in India’s comics culture tend to appeal to traditional culture, even as they base much of their work in their own experiences within international comics culture, including Nicholas Wild’s Kabul Disco and other recent imports to India’s book publishing scene. In The River of Stories, Sen even frames his tale as a story being told by a deity of stories, as a continuation of a tribal creation myth of the village where the story is set. Later authors like Ghosh and Parismita Singh even incorporate the actual methods of different folk storytelling traditions. More importantly, though, and drawing on Sen and Banerjee’s appeal to traditional communities and storytelling, respectively, creators have used storytelling and folk culture to imagine a community and a future for India’s still struggling comics culture. Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 132

In this chapter, I work to situate comics creators within the context of folk and comics cultures. In order to understand the importance and value of this appeal for Delhi’s comics culture, I begin by contextualizing Indian creators within folk traditions of visual creativity and storytelling. By showing how comics creators draw upon this folk context to invoke the power of spiritual experience, though, I demonstrate that spiritual narratives provide a precedent for visual communication. I then consider how creators frame these narratives as a continuation of a broader narrative tradition in appealing to folk culture. In so doing, I show that the localization of comics does not inherently transform the comics medium into a uniquely Indian one, as it is always determined by the creativity and community of members. I use the example of Banerjee’s own disillusionment with this art to show how, though oral performance of stories cannot be duplicated through visual storytelling, the comics medium is able to uniquely address contemporary issues and affected communities.

Sarnath Banerjee

Banerjee represents an important figure in comics cultures in India and Delhi, as the author and artist of the second graphic novel, and as the primary force behind the creation of an actual shelf for comics in book stores (Image 5-1). Banerjee was able to push for the establishment of a space for comics because of his personal connections and passion for doing so, as well as ardent marketing of his own work as a graphic novel. More recently, Banerjee has been an advocate for a more critical engagement with the comics medium. As a member of the Pao Collective,

Banerjee spoke in an interview with Jason Overdorf in 2010, “It's on the fringe of art and the fringe of literature, which is great. Who wants to be in art, and who wants to be in literature? The time has come for the graphic novel to be looked into from outside the parameters of literature Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 133 and outside the parameters of art.” As demonstrated by this quote, through a critical analysis of formal elements, Banerjee has pushed for recognizing comics as an art independent from other media. In pioneering the graphic novel form in India in the early 2000s, he has built a repertoire of comics narratives that are centered around storytelling and capturing a sense of everyday life.

Banerjee accomplishes this through a simple and often conversational storytelling style.

While reading his work, one often feels as if the narrator is with them, telling tales of things they themselves have experienced or heard from others. Banerjee constructs his stories through a clear and careful sense of dialogue that then determines the visual layout and overall structure. For instance, in an excerpt from Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, the conversation on the top left panel occurs behind the obstacles of other people, giving a sense of overhearing a lived, actual dialogue (Image 5-2). The speaker’s words then help to structure the page itself, such that the final panel is more open yet still holding the man’s sentence as central. Throughout his work, though, he represents people in a similar way as figures one would encounter in everyday life.

More specifically, he establishes this tone with characters who are in one way or another recognizable, from lanky bodies to massive noses, large glasses, and other elements that stand out. This cartoonish representation of characters who are engaged in very realistic, albeit often humorous, events helps Banerjee to tell quick and seemingly simple stories that address the complex nature of human experience.

Over time, he has also become a representative for dissatisfaction with the medium and the surrounding community. In our conversations, he noted several times that he was no longer as interested in comics art as he had once been. He has become dissatisfied with his own inventiveness within the form, having established a certain voice and style, one that he defines as

‘cheating,’ from using photographs for backgrounds that he would prefer not to draw to Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 134 recording actual conversations in order to model authentic dialogue. Although Banerjee feels that his own process and stories do not live up to others in his field, his three graphic novels,

Corridor, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, and The Harappa Files, have set an important precedent (Images 5-3, 5-4, and 5-5). This is because, as a creator, he is deeply engaged with challenging the formal elements of comics as a medium for storytelling.

Yet, for Banerjee, his graphic novels represent mere iterations of his repertoire and love for storytelling. This stems from his recent projects on the formal aspects of the combination of text and image. In these works, which people encounter in gallery spaces, he crafts art where images function as texts. Across the many media with which he creates, Banerjee constantly emphasizes the fantastic functionality of stories in people’s everyday lives. From earning a discount from a shop keeper, to charming friends and family, and even making a living, storytelling for Banerjee represents the foundation of the creative arts. Furthermore, storytelling has an even greater importance in daily life, since “[t]he cumulative richness of one’s life is held by stories, not by buildings or bank vaults.” The friendships, familial bonds, and other relationships in life hold a greater value than any quantifiable possession.

Banerjee thus relies upon the concept of storytelling and its association with folk culture to appeal to the value of community and transcend language, class, and other barriers.

Throughout this chapter, Sarnath Banerjee thus guides the investigation of whether storytelling and other aspects of folk culture provide a solution to the practical problems of crafting visual narratives that engage with a vast diversity of readerships. In the process, Banerjee’s example demonstrates how creators adapt the comics medium to their storytelling in order to most effectively evoke daily life in their own and other communities.

Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 135

What is Folk Culture?

In framing comics as part of established storytelling traditions, creators fundamentally engage with their audiences as members of a common culture. Many contemporary creators build their repertoires from a basis in folklore and traditional stories. In particular, many creators begin with or at some point retell the epics Ramayana and Mahabharatha about Prince Rama of Ayodha and his battle with Ravana for his bride Sita and about Arjuna and Krishna in the battle, respectively. As they have been translated into multiple media over time, these epics provide a model for translating centuries of visual culture in a contemporary story. Similar to many storytelling performances, these two epics were often told in episodes and thus lend themselves to the comics form. More importantly, their variations provide a pre-existing repertoire upon which creators can build their own creativity. Furthermore, creators are able to reach a broader audience because of a wide, previous familiarity with these narratives, as their regional variants remain quite popular. Accordingly, beginning authors are able to build a receptive audience through such an appeal, while more established publishers rely on these appeals to amass larger audiences and vastly increase publishing numbers. Traditional narratives thus represent the foundations for many creators, as a means to provide a sense of continuation with Indian culture in general and adapt the comics form into a specifically localized medium.

As already explained in discussing a definition of and standards for comics narratives in this context, excellent comics entail different things for different people. Similarly, understandings of folk culture vary from creator to creator though most point to oral storytelling, folk art, and the culture of everyday life. For most creators that I interviewed, though, the folk arts and storytelling provide the first, and perhaps most important, precedent for contemporary visual narratives. Although these artists tend to assume a middle class, educated background for Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 136 their readers, the narratives they create have generally drawn upon folk arts and culture. Yet, authors and artists of comics narratives must work against an association between their career and high culture or condescension. As Sarnath Banerjee describes this problem, “The whole idea is to basically be a writer but try to be a civilian. That’s the trick. Don’t make it such a precious activity, that I write.” For Banerjee and other comics creators in Delhi, the craft of writing or working with images may prevent them from being able to relate to their audiences, simply by association with high culture. They are able to overcome this and other divisions by appealing to the common grounds of day-to-day experience, storytelling, and folk culture more broadly. In so doing, creators are able to craft unpretentious stories to which audiences are easily able to relate.

To begin with, the reading experience itself tends to take on the qualities of folkloric storytelling performances, particularly the many versions of the epics Ramayana and

Mahabharata. Similar to contemporary comics, older stelae, engravings, and other temple images depicted a series of scenes to tell these stories, providing key moments but allowing viewers to fill in the moments and actions in between (Michell, 2000). Statuary and religious art depicted particular figures in very specific poses both for the sacred meaning of those positions and as a reference to the narratives surrounding those figures. For instance, when the deity

Ganesha appears without one tusk, this may refer to a number of stories, from the transcription of the Mahabharata to battles with other deities (Shearer, 1993). Thus, without one central text in

Hinduism, images often took their place, providing a touchstone for viewers to reconstruct common narratives and folklore through the recognition of particular moments within a frozen scene or figure.i Creators are thus able to appeal to spiritual experience as well as traditional storytelling. Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 137

In general, Indian comics creators engage with audiences in much the same way as creators of traditional visual narratives, often because this re-framing of narratives draws upon spiritual experience. Not only are comics narratives structured in a similarly episodic form, with multiple references to stories outside the purview of a single issue, but they also engage with the ritual act of darsan. In the Hindu concept of darsan, one finds the roots of visual communication as encountering the divine, as “the act of seeing and being seen by the gods” (Eck 1998). In encountering the divine through ritual, believers encounter the ritual object or figure imbued with power, such as images of Shiva or Vishnu that are dressed, bathed, and fed on a daily basis as part of worship (puja). However, darsan also includes the encounter with divine images on a daily basis, such as god posters from calendars or other secular contexts. With no central, Hindu text, these religious images become visual texts that not only present divine realities, but also tell the stories that undergird belief (Glassie 2002). People are thus able to move through the secular world of their daily lives while simultaneously engaging with the sacred realm of darsan and remembering the stories to which such images refer (Shukla 2008). As scholars like McLain have demonstrated, early comics artists in India base their visual narratives upon this spiritual mode of engagement and traditions of storytelling that combined image and text. Today, creators draw upon narrative tendencies in visual culture to establish the comics medium as one grounded in previous narrative and artistic traditions.

Comics artists begin with the association between reading objects as texts and spiritual experience. As instances of Robert Plant Armstrong’s ‘works of affecting presence,’ these visual narratives hold the power to structure communities’ and individuals’ perspectives through the transformative power of encountering the divine embodied in art. According to Armstrong, an artwork gains the power to affect presence by taking on the qualities of both subject and object in Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 138 that it remains fundamentally an inanimate object and yet is capable of affecting emotion and action (Armstrong, 1981). The experience of darsan in encountering an image, which itself refers to multiple narratives surrounding the one moment depicted, establishes the invocatory power of a work of art. Armstrong defines invocation as a mode of granting affecting presence, where the divine is manifest only when invoked through the opening of the image to presence through offerings or ritual (1981). This mode of affecting presence is critical to Indian aesthetic and spiritual life, as an image of a deity in a ritual setting has been invoked into presence and thus holds a greater power than a secular image. When encountered in one’s daily, public life, through advertisements, posters, calendars, and comics, images of deities only refer to the invoked presence and are not as powerful or consequently as dangerous. These images, from storyboards to picture scrolls, provide both a precedent and a source of power for comics creators in India. Armstrong defines another mode of affecting presence: the power of virtuosity. This mode of affecting presence relies upon the work’s presence in reference to larger contexts, such as the quality of the art itself or the reputation of its maker (Armstrong 1981). Creators of comics draw on this power when using an artistic style, narratives, or themes drawn from more famous creators, as when Vishwajyoti Ghosh memorializes the death of Anant Pai in “And Then Came

Uncle Pai,” or even when artist Tapas Guha and writer Subhadra Sen Gupta retell Satyajit Ray’s

Feluda mysteries in comics. However, as Armstrong recognizes, these powers easily overlap, and Indian comics artists have relied upon this intertwined relationship between the different powers of presence.

The most obvious way in which creators appeal to these powers is through retelling narrative epics, but the style of the artwork may also reference folk art styles, from evoking particular traditions to crafting images in a particular way. For instance, in The River of Stories, Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 139

Orijit Sen evokes folk art when representing the creation of the world in tribal mythology (Image

5-6). In particular, he shows this beginning moment not in the relatively realistic style of the rest of the narrative, but in simpler, iconic images. He also represents mythological sequences in pencil throughout the story, as he describes, in order to demarcate the current and mytho- historical time periods for readers. In this way, Sen even provides cues for readers to refer back to their existing knowledge of storytelling and mythology in traditional Indian culture. In contrast, publishing companies have tended to make such references more explicit. Amar Chitra

Katha serve as the best example of this, as their mission statement and introductions to various stories consistently refer to the traditional and folkloric qualities of the company’s publications.

More recently, though, publishers like Tara Books, who publish mainly children’s illustrated books, and Navayana Press have demonstrated that such explicitly references need not be without grace. Navayana’s Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability, in particular, shows how creators of traditional art, in this case Gond painters Durgabai and Subhash Vyam, can work with publishers and writers to craft new iterations of comics that combine traditional sensibilities and reading practices with contemporary, social issues. The hybrid narrative of Bhimayana unfolds the story of lower caste minority leader Ambedkar with Gond art laid out in sequence, but in such a way that it requires familiarity with sequentiality in Gond art as well as comics (Image 5-

7). Thus, comics creators, like the Vyams, rely upon references to folk reading practices in order to craft a relevant and uniquely Indian comics form.

Through reference to previous works of invocation, including Hindu religious images, narratives, and spiritual experience of them, contemporary comics authors and artists thus invoke the uniqueness of visual narratives and thus their virtuosic power. The first, prominent example is the graphic novel Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India, written by architect and social Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 140 commentator Gautam Bhatia in collaboration with Jaipur-based artists Shankar Lal Bhopa and

Ghansham and Birju Lal, who work in the style of 17th century Rajasthani miniatures (Raj 2010).

Although a monumental project, which originally measured 600 pages in its portrayal of Bihar’s seedy underbelly, critics pointed to the overemphasis on text and distancing of the art from the tradition with which the authors were comfortable (Singh 2010). The later work of S. Anand,

Srividya Natarajan, and Durgabai and Subhash Vyam in Bhimayana would attain much greater success in portraying the life of Dalit minority leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.

Other authors would follow in the footsteps of Anand, Natarajan, and the Vyams, with both Sita’s Ramayana and I See the Promised Land: A Life of Martin Luther King Jr. released in

2011. Sita’s Ramayana did quite well critically in the hands of Samhita Arni and patua scroll painter Moyna Chitrakar. In addition, Arthur Flowers, Manu Chitrakar and Guglielmo Rossi’s work on I See the Promised Land has been well received by educators and librarians, although comics creators have pointed to an imbalance similar to that found in Lie (Hodgson 2012; Ghosh

2011). The authors of each of these works, though, in reworking the graphic novel form through a traditional art form, craft their credibility as storytellers and frame their work as innovative, yet familiar. This ability to act as affecting works of art relies upon references to works empowered through the invocation mode, in particular images empowered through the darsan experience.

Creators of comics narratives thus refer to particular histories or common backgrounds in order to invoke the power traditionally held by works of affecting presence, especially those empowered through spirituality and invocation. Yet, through its combination of image and text, comics as a medium holds the power to reference a broad range of creators, narratives, and storytelling traditions. Banerjee, in particular, approaches folk culture as the day-to-day practices and community with and through which people live and find meaning. In so doing, creators like Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 141

Banerjee and the Pao Collective draw on folk culture as a kind of “…uncommodified, aesthetic, small-group communicative interaction” (Sawin 2002: 30). For storytellers, taking this practical approach is not only necessary because they are making the stories, but also because doing so makes it easier to craft compelling, relatable, and appealing stories for readers who live with day-to-day culture. Yet, in this case, it is the historic precedent for Indian comics that has, to some extent, limited creators in how they have framed their work.

The Indian Comics Tradition

Creators themselves often engage with the creation of comics through the experience of darsan and previous works of affecting presence. In Karline Mclain’s India’s Immortal Comic Books, the authors of Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) describe how they actually referred to religious images when designing artwork and depicting particular stories. From the layout of cover images to the positioning of figures on a page, these authors carried over the aesthetic experience of sacred images (Mclain 2009). For example, McLain describes how many of ACK’s artists positioned deities with their faces toward the reader because they recognized the virtuosic power of comics as based in references to sacred images. However, she notes that one artist described how he could not position deities facing the reader because of the danger of darsan, where looking in the eye of the sacred figure can lead to misfortune or being overpowered by the divine (McLain

2009). For all of these authors, comics creation becomes a process of translation where once separate, albeit related, folk or religious narratives and works of affecting presence come together in the image-text of the comics medium. The representation of religious or other sacred figures continues to require respect for images not simply as a carryover of tradition, but as a reference to or embodiment of presence. ‘Seeing and being seen’ thus provides the basis not just Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 142 for Hindu visual arts and spiritual life, but for comics artists who create visual communication for both religious and secular purposes.

In referring to this common precedent for visual storytelling, creators draw upon the folk media and cultures historically associated with popular image-texts. Although they work within an essentially commodified medium, creators can and have referred back to folk media and traditional forms of passing on knowledge in order to reframe their stories as essentially local and relevant to India. Further, and especially for contemporary creators focused on social problems or responsibility, this reference to folk culture as a resource and an index of meaning has infused comics with folklore’s ability to simultaneously work within and question larger, social structures (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). As noted in previous chapters, whereas ACK and

Anant Pai generally used this traditional quality to argue for specific variants of tales or attitudes towards individual figures within Hinduism, contemporary creators have focused upon particular stories and even the communities in which they are grounded.

For these authors and artists, then, the appeal to folk culture through comics can open up mass audiences that other media would not reach. In this way, comics could serve to perpetuate local knowledge and ways of life in a modern, globalizing India. However, the translation to mass media is not without complications. In becoming comic books, the narratives upon which much of Amar Chitra Katha and other companies’ work is based first become commodified. As

Karline McLain demonstrates from accounts of interviews both with Anant Pai and with other artists and authors, telling a story in comics requires creators to limit the content. McLain describes how Pai and ACK’s editors worked toward the inclusion of details from as many versions of each story as possible, often seeking out particularly rare or infamous variants to ensure reader approval. As already noted, in constructing historical issues and dealing with more Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 143 controversial topics, such as the representation of Muslims, women, and other minorities, ACK tended to reify Hindutva nationalism. Further, as scholar Sudipta Kaviraj notes, many critics have focused on the power of “‘…the simple act of telling and not telling…to gerrymander events—not by directly falsifying them, but by the most unanswerable of [the author’s] narrative weapons, his right of closure’” (Kaviraj qtd. in McLain, 2009:139). Whereas the historical and cultural reality of these stories does not allow for a distinct conclusion, each comics narrative itself requires the story to finish in order to satisfy readers. For example, the ACK version of the warrior-king Shivaji’s heroic battles and eventual establishment of a kingdom independent of

Mughal rule cut short his life by several years in order to craft a ‘true story’ (McLain, 2009:139).

The need for each story’s closure that enables mass circulation, especially as textual units within the larger ACK series, thus limits each story to 24 pages or less. However, this sense of closure and placement within a longer series of similarly traditional and definitively Indian stories creates a sense of canonical continuity. In contrast to the diversity of stories prevalent in folk culture, mass mediation requires this single, defining narrative that is representative of the story in its most accurate and conclusive version.

Although comics as commodities may have limited the possibility for diverse storytelling traditions in the past, creators in Delhi today work to incorporate multiple perspectives into their work. While Orijit Sen’s River places an outsider’s point of view alongside a mythological one, with variants of creation myths bumping heads with the myth of development, Sarnath Banerjee works to incorporate elements of traditional storytelling. Banerjee even incorporates the speech patterns and qualities of overheard conversations in order to more accurately represent the voices of others (Image 5-8). In fact, in contrast to McLain and other scholars, many who study the comics medium have pointed out the form’s unique ability to represent multiple voices or Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 144 perspectives. Through an analysis of the graphic novel as a Bakhtinian evolution of the novel,

Jeff Williams points out the multivocal power of comics narratives, wherein multiple characters with relatively authentic and diverse voices speak together to structure the narrative as a whole

(2000). In addition, Charles Hatfield describes how comics communicate the multiple modes of text and image, as well as superficial and temporal structures. The art form that results is capable of placing multiple perspectives into conversation because of its hybrid nature, such that multivocality is a possibility, especially in the case of autobiographical narratives (Hatfield

2005). To simplify comics as inherently incapable of representing multiple perspectives simultaneously is to both ignore narrative precedent within international comics culture and to define comics as limited by propagandistic tendencies. Defining comics instead as practice or a way of encountering narratives shows how creators in Delhi have reworked the comics medium in this context. .

Many creators have attempted to reintroduce the diversity of narratives in Indian culture by shifting comics back into an interactive mode of mediation. Unlike the experience of reading, the performance of storytelling creates a space for audience feedback and even depends on audience members to support the storyteller. Unlike than an experience of intertextuality through reading, where each text refers to multiple others, live storytelling creates the opportunity for dialogue where individuals engage with one another, potentially building the narrative communally.ii Several comics companies, including Vivalok Comics and World Comics India, have advocated a return to a similar, more interactive mode of storytelling within the comics medium. In particular, Vivalok has argued that comics, folklore, and social justice are already intertwined in Indian culture because through comics “[d]elving deep into the wisdom of Indian folklore, young readers can better understand the multiplicity of h an experience. [Comics] help Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 145 them question a monolithic view of our historical and cultural past” (Vivalok, 2002). For companies like Vivalok, readers are not participating in the construction of stories, but in the re- imagining of India as a nation made up of diverse communities.

These companies draw on folk culture to highlight the potential power of comics readership to criticize the hegemonic moves present in comics and other narratives as they read them, and thus to appreciate the diversity of voices present in the true diversity of comics and folk narratives. Meanwhile, authors like Banerjee highlight the performative quality of narratives in oral storytelling, where audience members often have a large role in authorizing, revising, and even interrupting the telling. Despite the limitations of the medium, in that readers rarely expect to meet much less co-create stories with authors, Banerjee highlighted in our conversations that his own work at least is based upon his personal experiences and desire to share them with others. While comics in India can inherit folk culture’s ability to simultaneously participate in and question hegemony, creators play a large role in determining if and how these visual narratives do such work. In the composition of comics, then, creators balance the history of comics and the present of their own storytelling alongside the potential hegemonic and subversive qualities of referencing folk culture.

Why Folk Culture?

Creators determine how to frame their work and thus limit, to some extent, the kinds of references readers can make when encountering their stories. However, this decision is more often a practical one, based on the context for the act of crafting visual narratives. Within his work as an artist and writer, Banerjee views the appeal to folk culture as a practical solution to an abstract problem, one of reaching a diverse and potentially divided audience. However, that same Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 146 diversity that creators often attempt to evoke or highlight causes them difficulties within Indian culture.

In particular, creators face the problem of communicating across the boundaries between communities, whether based on language, culture, class, or other divisions. By referring to aspects of folk culture with which several audience communities are familiar, Banerjee and others are able to overcome those divisions in order to circulate their stories. In one of our discussions, he pointed out the ‘whole oral tradition’ of India in that “There is a whole culture of people relating, like in chai shops, whether it’s a cricket match, eating a burger for the first time.

People exaggerate, and are sarcastic and creative. Everything is told beautifully in a calibrated way, with diffuseness, with thunder, with lightning.” This day-to-day oral culture provides a grounding for storytelling since everyone is familiar with narrative in these contexts, and the experience of telling and receiving narratives provides a means for overcoming difference.

In particular, Banerjee felt that this context, what he calls ‘raw speech,’ was his primary influence as a creator, since this is where the best stories are told. Banerjee describes how he is at heart an oral performer and even relies upon this conception of storytelling as oral in his comics narratives because “If someone is explaining a restaurant. If [my friend] Tokosan is telling about the famous Japanese fish market, it makes you want to eat and jumps psychological barriers. It’s so much nicer when someone tells you, when someone weaves it for you. It’s a tapestry.” The tapestry of storytelling that oral performance allows is able to overcome divisions between individuals and potentially even communities by bringing audiences together. Similarly, references to everyday storytelling, and even to traditional culture, help Banerjee and other creators to overcome psychological and other barriers. Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 147

This ability to overcome division is part of attempting to represent day-to-day reality that is grounded in a particular context. In order to provide what Banerjee calls ‘an authentic voice,’ he must somehow color the story and dialogue within it with the perspectives and voices of the characters themselves. In one of our conversations, I asked him, “What kind of problems come up within storytelling in comics and graphic novels in India? Are there common problems that authors deal with?” He responded that, “One of the problems that I had was how to give an authentic sense of the language without needing to write in the vernacular. And I don’t know how other authors do this because I don’t think it’s typically graphic novel or comic book authors have this. Other writers, words. Only writers probably have this problem. The thing is that the comic book is more dialogue-intensive, which means that it’s dependent a little more on how people talk. So you have to get that sense of the vernacular.” As a medium, comics relies upon dialogue in word bubbles and other forms to help to integrate image and text. From basic narrative pacing to allowing multiple voices to speak simultaneously, this medium is dependent upon dialogue for a greater extent of the narrative within comics. Banerjee points out the need for a way to image the cultural and even linguistic context for his stories within the constraints of a dialogue-intensive structure.

He finds a solution in the addition of aspects of folk speech. As he described in our discussion of his artistic process, dialogue is an important component of comics narratives because so much of the story may rely upon the conversation between characters, from content to pacing and even the entire story structure. In order to deal with this problem, Banerjee uses audio recordings of various people talking, recordings taken while his audio recorder was hidden in order to gain a more ‘authentic’ sense of language patterns, tone, and generally of the person he wishes to represent. He describes this translation problem, “Like for example, if my characters Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 148 are fundamentally Hindi-speaking, or Tamil-speaking, or Bengali. How do I recreate that authentic voice, without resorting to using their language?” Avoiding the use of particular languages for particular characters may seem to take away from the story, as Banerjee translates each of his characters into English for his graphic novels. However, his goal is not to reach only those able to speak any single one or particular group of languages, but instead to reach a broad audience of people interested in storytelling and in the characters that he represents.

The language spoken in the narrative itself only matters insofar as it helps to construct a wider audience of readers than storytelling alone could reach. For example, in an image from

Barn Owl, Banerjee shows a wide variety of people with whom the central character speaks; he is able to build their personalities based on a quick exchange of words through facial expressions, word use, and the tone of their responses (Image 5-8). Each one, from

“Kabariti…Kabariti…na” to “How much did you say the book is worth?” concisely establishes the characters as people in the story. Furthermore, throughout The Harappa Files, which is a series of shorter stories, Banerjee uses expressions, use of slang and other words, phrasing, tone, and overall comportment to do the often difficult work of character-building. At the same time, though, he is able to speak to common experiences through this characterization by drawing on the way people use language in their everyday lives. The appeal to folk culture thus helps comics creators like Banerjee to overcome differences among readers, and in representing life in their communities.

As will be discussed in the following section on storytelling, Banerjee is particularly interested in how storytellers weave meaning from the different parts of their chosen medium.

Such an interest has led Banerjee to become concerned with the formal aspects of comics and to question whether the combination of image and text does something unique. However, Banerjee Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 149 recognizes that the medium does not arise from a vacuum, nor is Indian comics merely derivative of international comics narratives. While a few creators claim that Indian graphic novels have no tradition, he views the folk context of culture as the broader foundation of visual culture and narratives.iii He thus notes that, “Well, the easiest and the most obvious answer to [whether comics have a tradition in India] would be ACK and these children’s comics which have been around. Now, let’s not get into that, because it’s foundational myth and mythology and just sort of they have been there so saying that Indians don’t have a comic book tradition would be wrong because India had these Amar Chitra Kathas.” Beyond merely recognizing the work of the ACK series, which Banerjee notes was important because many learned history from them, he points out the importance of traditional telling. He argues that, “So, if you want to expand the meaning of comics, then yes, we do have—there is a tradition of visual storytelling. But we might not have it in the most obvious way.” If one allows that traditional culture may hold the precedent for the visual narratives of the form, then there does exist a strong precedent for comics art in

India. From this broader context, Banerjee appeals to folk culture, especially traditions of storytelling.

Banerjee points out examples in order to demonstrate the common qualities of traditional storytelling and contemporary comics narratives. He describes how bhopa storytellers tell stories by passing an oil lamp from one icon to the next in order to weave a story from the separate images. “These storytellers have a carpet full of icons. Like a man fornicating, a man eating, a woman riding a horse. They have all these little icons and a camel-leather carpet. And in the middle of the desert, they move from one place to another place as storytellers do. The man and his wife, who are carrying this camel leather carpet, and they would unfurl the carpet in the middle of a village and the wife would light an oil lamp. It’s completely dark. He would move it Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 150 from one icon to another. And this moving from one icon to another, the movement is very random. There’s no sequence to it. It depends on the winds and the teller. And the man would play a single string violin and weave a story around this sort of around this movement of icons.

So would you not call that comics? Would you not call that what we try to do?” Banerjee is thus able to construct a history of Indian comics by basing the medium within traditional storytelling that similarly connects images together creatively. He thus defines the medium as a way to

“…sort of link images in an imaginative way, an arrangement in an imaginative way with the text.” In the process, however, he expands the medium to include a myriad of storytelling forms, including, most importantly, a wide variety of folk art forms that craft visual narratives in different ways. In so doing, Banerjee works to redefine comics as one storytelling medium among many, albeit one that may be interlinked by a particular way of telling, as in the visual narratives of comics, or by particular reasons, from day-to-day life to the more formal goals of widely published authors.

By appealing to folk speech and traditional storytelling, Banerjee works to unite his readers as members of a common, diverse community. Accordingly, the appeal to folk culture helps creators like Banerjee to craft connections in their own lives as well, connecting daily life to memory and larger systems of meaning, something that I will discuss alongside community and creativity in Chapter 6. A conversation with Banerjee reveals that a creator, even one who is suspicious of the comics form, references folk culture to overcome difficulty and craft stories that help others find meaning in their lives. Yet, in explicitly appealing to storytelling as representative of day-to-day life or folk culture as a whole, Banerjee frames his own narratives and comics as a continuation of a broader narrative tradition.

Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 151

Finding Meaning

Understanding Delhi’s comics and graphic novels from the perspective of creators, rather than educators, scholars, or even publishers, reveals how and why graphic novels are created. As storytelling , comics narratives become a tool for engaging with and negotiating lived reality grounded in a broader cultural context. In focusing on their role as storytellers, then, creators like

Banerjee are able to evoke the deep contextualization of oral narratives. As a result, they can engage with the creation of narratives as artisans with an interest in particular communities, rather than as merely agents of their own self interest.

Furthermore, understanding contemporary graphic novels and comics narratives as descendants of traditional storytelling imbues them with greater social power. In his scholarship on storytelling as oral communication, Richard Bauman uses contextual and ethnographic analysis to demonstrate how storytelling works as a performance. He begins by conceptualizing performance “…as a mode of communication, a way of speaking, the essence of which resides in the assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative skill, highlighting the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content”

(Bauman 1986:3). By understanding performance as a form of communication, Bauman is able to recognize the deeply situated nature of oral storytelling. He thus understands oral performance as “…rooted in culturally defined scenes or events – bounded segments of the flow of behavior and experience that constitute meaningful context for action, interpretation, and evaluation”

(1986:3). Storytelling is grounded in the narrative event, where creators and audience members interact to together negotiate meaning through storytelling. Accordingly, Bauman argues for verbal art as a mode of communication that is doubly grounded in narratives as they are told and the narrated events they describe. “…narrative is constitutive of social life in the act of Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 152 storytelling” (Bauman 1986:113). Storytellers negotiate what makes up that social life through their craft. Comics narratives like those of Sarnath Banerjee thus help creators and readers alike to deal with their daily life and imbue their experiences with meaning.

Banerjee points out the importance of stories in maintaining relationships within communities. He draws attention to his childhood, when he was first introduced to storytelling and its importance within his family. He describes how, with his Grandpa and Grandma, “you were being cradled by stories. Just by being born, you extended the story.” Throughout our discussion of comics and storytelling in Indian culture, Banerjee returned to stories of his own family and friends, because, as he stated multiple times, “Stories are a very functional thing.”

Stories help people maintain relationships and get through their daily lives. They help us to relate to others, meet people, communicate, and to remember our friends and family, even after they’re gone. Fundamentally, in Banerjee’s view, “Stories keep our relationships alive.” Banerjee’s perspective highlights a broader tendency in Delhi’s comics culture to view storytelling as a practical tool for maintaining and negotiating community, as well as one’s experience of it.

Accordingly, Banerjee points out how stories do more than merely maintain relationships, as they help people deal with lived reality more generally. When I asked him about the importance of storytelling to daily life, particularly in giving life meaning, he responded by focusing on the psychological functions of storytelling. “It quells anxiety, I think, stories. Yeah, even stories that make you anxious, are stories that are meant to, say oh well, that’s a story, no need to be anxious. As society becomes more anxious, the need for stories is going to become more and more, because people would want counseling a little bit. Stories essentially counsel people. They tell people that things are all right.” In focusing on how stories provide calm within a more and more anxious world, Banerjee points out that hearing or reading stories enables Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 153 people to recognize the longer narrative of one’s own life. For him, “Storytelling locates you in your existential universe, which any other forms of activities don’t usually.” The storytelling that has become central to Banerjee and many other creators’ understanding comics in Indian culture thus relies on the ability of narrative to cause readers to recognize the flow of time in their own lives as well as the narratives they consume. As discussed in the previous chapter, the performative quality of such experiences gives them a transformative potential, through which audience members may change themselves and their understanding of the world.

Yet, Banerjee also notes that stories that attempt to provide a defining narrative are not interesting to him because they do not fulfill the practical needs of audiences. “Stories also elucidate answers, but I’m not interested in those kinds of stories. But I would say that stories even stop us from becoming insane. It’s like the day to day antioxidant inside of you.” Rather than focus on the ability of stories to answer questions comprehensively, as is often the goal of educational or historical comics produced as children’s literature, Banerjee turns to stories as naturally calming. Yet, even within the discussion of stories as helping people to deal with larger social anxieties, Banerjee returned to the practical implications of this significance. He states,

“Stories can of course, as in my case, get us a discount, get us sex, get us one square meal, get us a drink faster than the rest, get us an appointment. Stories can make us charming. Stories can make us wicked, stories can put our children to sleep, they can wake them up.” He thus points out the many powers of storytelling, rather than emphasizing any specific one as definitive. By approaching visual storytelling from a functional perspective related to peoples’ everyday lives,

Banerjee is able to draw out the potency of creating stories. Rather than lingering on the drawbacks or potential dangers of storytelling, creators like Banerjee choose to focus on their relation to peoples’ lives and their ability to communicate effectively through narrative. These Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 154 graphic novelists, artists, and authors turn the focus of comics storytelling to helping readers, many of whom are creators themselves, deal with life and finding meaning in everyday experiences.

By focusing on the practical usefulness of stories in achieving simpler goals than the broad, sweeping, educational goals of previous publishers, contemporary graphic novelists in

Delhi push for the crafting of meaning for people. Accordingly, creators like Sarnath Banerjee highlight the connections between stories and the webs of meaning with which people interact on a daily basis. Banerjee himself describes a well-told story in any medium as being defined by something ineffable; “Now, a perfectly told story is the one which leaves that residue without any kind of material. So like a disembodied feeling of having listened to a fantastic piece of music, you have the memory.” More than the artifact of the narrative itself, in this case the physical comic book or novel, it is the story’s ability to weave together individual and communal experience that makes it successful. Banerjee reiterates, “I think, for me, a perfect oral story is its lightness, number one, its ability to kind of draw in the network of memories, that you are collectively part of something much larger than yourself.” Storytelling means engaging with the contexts of day-to-day reality and incorporating the individual experience, which is grounded by memory, into the larger one.

Whereas, for earlier publishers, such an experience was often defined by education, entertainment, or profitability, contemporary graphic novelists ground their stories in local communities and the practical usefulness of stories within that context. Thus, Banerjee concludes that “I got laid because of telling stories. Storytelling has fantastic purposes in my life. Much more than like 20,000 copies of books. It’s much more important to me right now that the story does something for you.” For creators like Banerjee, the ability of the author to make a living Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 155 from his or her work is not as important as reaching out to other people. Banerjee himself admits that he is privileged in this respect, since, though he does not always have reliable employment or a standard job, he is able to get along without. Storytelling thus represents more than merely a means to overcome division among reading audiences, but a practical application of meaning- making that grafts individual experiences onto communities.

Such an application is important to contemporary Delhi because its massive size as a mega-city tends to alienate its inhabitants, whether it be due to the difficulty of navigating much of the city’s layout or for other reasons. As Banerjee notes, storytelling helps him and others to make the city their own by integrating their experiences into a larger whole of people living side by side in the city of Delhi. “What I’m trying to say is you have to figure out a way to like the city and in order to like the city, you have to read these cities and these tale around the city, these tales which affirm your existence, which calibrate and recalibrate the city.” Because people are living in Delhi, they must find a way to live meaningfully in the city. Storytelling and reception allow individuals to recognize meaning within their own experiences of the constantly changing landscape of contemporary Delhi.

For Banerjee and many others, Delhi has become the capital for so many storytelling media because living within the Indian capital requires constant ‘recalibration’ of one’s experiences. As he states, “Delhi offers such amazing beauty—there was the Delhi which I grew up in where the only night life I grew up with was outside Safdarjung Hospital because that was the only place where you would find any lights. So the stories are there to recalibrate the city, to imbue it with affection, good or bad, complex bits of affection. That’s exactly what Delhi people are doing.” Creating comics in Delhi thus represents a particularly apt example for contemporary storytelling, as individuals constantly renegotiate their place within the larger whole city. In this Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 156 way, people find beauty where an outsider might see ugliness, and they find meaning in day-today experiences that might otherwise feel hollow.

However, Banerjee points out that such power is true of storytelling in general, not merely of storytelling in the comics medium. Although Delhi represents a particularly powerful example of how stories help people find meaning where they might otherwise find only alienation, comics creation in Delhi is not unique in that respect. As he described to me, “For me, telling is much more important than drawing, painting, sculpting, this thing, these things are all mediums and facets of how you tell a story.” Instead, it is the oral performance of storytelling that Banerjee personally values above all else. He contrasts the urgency of oral storytelling with other forms that he views as tending toward missing the point of storytelling. “When you are writing, you are using skills, and you want to write beautifully…When you’re drawing, you’re trying to draw beautifully…But when it comes to stories, stories are best told, like anything else.

Like a fish is best steamed.” For Banerjee, comics is not unique but merely one medium among many. Accordingly the appeal to folk culture does not make the comics medium in India a special one, but, rather, helps creators to find and relate meaning for human existence in this visual narrative form.

Why Comics?

Sarnath Banerjee’s personal journey with the comics form demonstrates the larger point that the medium in India entails stories crafted by authors and artists to address the particular context of their own communities, stories, and culture. Still, as a comics storyteller, Banerjee views himself as a failure. He describes how “I mean, I’ve said all these things about writing, drawing several times, making photographs, usual process. These are all unimportant, uninteresting and actually Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 157 at the end of the day, really of no consequence to anyone. The larger thing I want to tell you is that, having done all that, I have still failed as a writer. Because I am not a writer. I am a raconteur. And I have tried to racont through my comics. And every day is a failure for me.

Because there is no form more sophisticated than a story being told.” Fundamentally, Banerjee’s graphic novels and comics cannot succeed in telling a story in any more complex form than an actual, lived experience of a story being orally performed, at least from his perspective. This is because he views storytelling as an exchange grounded in folk culture and the experience of day- to-day life. Without those contexts, storytelling becomes less powerful than it might be, no matter how well suited to a particular narrative a form might be.

However, as one of the many media available to artists and authors like Sarnath Banerjee, comics does have certain unique qualities and abilities. As many scholars have demonstrated, the combination of word and image leads to the creation of a hybrid medium, one that is capable of expressing more than literature or art might individually. Banerjee himself has argued that comics is a uniquely powerful medium that is capable of telling stories in a way quite different from either of these fine art forms. Even with a strong appreciation for the medium, though, he still emphasizes the importance of telling stories by pointing out that comics are one of many ways of telling. He notes that “What we do is in any mode or practice, we take a very established form and use it to tell stories.” In the case of Indian visual culture and Banerjee himself, comics became the appropriate medium for the stories that he and others wished to tell. These narratives did and still hold urgency for creators, whether due to a general search for meaning, a social engagement like that in Sen’s work, or due to a communal engagement like that in much of

Banerjee’s. Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 158

When asked about the place of comics in India, Banerjee emphasized the multiple roles for such visual narratives. He begins by returning to how text and image have historically fit together, noting that “Indian folk forms have always used images to tell stories, whether it’s harvest or other fundamental myths.” From scrolls to Kalankaris, Korans, or bhopa storytellers moving oil lamps over icons, folk forms provide a strong precedent for the comics medium because they are comfortable with the mixing of literature and art. A strict separation between image and text ignores the importance of hybrid narrative forms given the increasing difficulty in representing day-to-day life. Banerjee points out that a greater complexity in the narrative forms that creators choose is important because of the complexity of Indian society itself. He states that

“I feel you need comics because the complexity is so high. Just words or images isn’t enough.

You can use gestures in conversation, and if you don’t, then slap them. Comics sort of slaps them.” For Banerjee and other creators, comics provides a means to slap audience members by bringing stories of everyday reality to readers in a compelling format. The comics medium thus provides a structure through which creators can use the appeal to folk culture to unite people around their storytelling in a way that non-performative narratives might not otherwise allow.

When I asked Banerjee why he had chosen comics and how that particular medium helped him to find meaning, he recognized that comics narratives allowed him to do more through his storytelling than he might otherwise achieve. He points out that some stories could and should be ‘effectively told’ through the comics form; “There are particular stories that require rhythm and pacing and require a theatrical stage, some kind of a drama, some kind of a emotion, evoke a certain kind of emotion and atmosphere. If left in the right hands, left to the right craftsperson, a comic book can achieve the kind of narrative that might be extremely difficult for others.” For Banerjee, comics as a medium is exceptional only in terms of the skills Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 159 of the individual creators in working within the form. For him, there is no power inherent to comics on the whole, but the excellence and strength of these narratives derives from the focus of those crafting comics narrative.

Furthermore, he describes the difficulties of this intense, creative process as a potential impediment to working within the medium. As he describes his own experiences in creating comics, “I also felt that whole Judeo-Christian thing of you know contemplating on a subject, drawing it and redrawing it, and creating a meditative relationship with that work. Pages after pages, you’re like dwelling into a subject, working away. Nothing really comes easy with comic books.” Storytelling in comics is not easy and that difficulty may, in part, feed his creativity.

Furthermore, this contemplation requires the employment of multiple skill sets, including page design, writing, editing, and working with images. The combination of these creative processes may lead to an overarching, comprehensive narrative, but it also results, in Banerjee’s view, in a relatively small, if focused, piece. “And you’re using those skills and banging on, again and again, and working really hard to achieve something really little. Like making pomegranate juice. You put like 5 pomegranates in, you get just like that much juice. While people around you are just churning out novels.” In contrast to novels and other longer works which are, as Banerjee notes, “sort of carbon rich entities,” comic books and graphic novels in India tend to be short, slim, and light. Yet, as the individual members of the Pao Collective each attested when I spoke with them, their goals as creators override these difficulties.

At the same time, the complexity of the narratives, both from their content, form, and overlap, gives these stories a more multivalent quality. Comics creators thus engage in an intense, detailed, and often longer creative process in order to attain a “certain levity” of storytelling. As Banerjee describes, this focus upon providing a mere sense of lived experience Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 160 represents “the confidence of comics,” as well as of creators in the medium. Authors and artists are able to craft an understanding of the broader context for stories in telling them by incorporating multiple frames of reference, whether popular culture, philosophy, or even contemporary social problems. This sort of intertextuality both serves creators’ goal of compelling or excellent storytelling and help readers through the narratives themselves by presenting familiar reading practices, narratives, or references.

The Localization of Comics Storytelling

Despite his own inability to find fulfillment through the comics form, Banerjee recognizes that comics creators, like any storytellers, are constantly adapting and reinventing the medium , their styles, and repertoires. As an artist, Banerjee has traveled across the world, from attending

Goldsmiths College at the University in London for his degree Image and Communication to visiting Italy and other countries for comics and other arts related programs. When I asked him about these travels, he focused on how he gained perspective from witnessing other comics cultures. “What we had here was the idiom, not the form. What happened in different parts of the world, particularly France, was different sorts of techniques—whatever happened abroad was formalistic, not content. Techniques, not in a cold blooded way, in some sort of—what I mean, a part of contemporary art is very formalistic.” In contrast to those of other visual cultures, Indian narratives were defined by the ‘idiom’ of content, rather than the formalist interest in comics that

Banerjee sees in European cultures. Creators in India thus face unique problems compared to comics artists and authors in other parts of the world.

Traveling to other countries and experiencing day-to-day life there helped Banerjee understand the differences between the kinds of stories told in different places. However, he was Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 161 also able to recognize the commonalities between Indian and other comics cultures. He states, “I just like comic books, if people just get influenced by only their craft then it’s just like, it’s not like fundamentally that much fun. But the whole idea is basically to get interested in other forms, other forms of knowledge, which is what we’re particularly striving, by working with other forms of specialization. So I feel that, when you are too much in India, when you become too successful in what you do, your learning gets stunted.” Just as Banerjee himself became dissatisfied with his comics stories because he was no longer challenging himself, he feels that comics artists in India in particular work to incorporate other forms of knowledge in order to continuously reinvent the form. Thus, the current appeal to folk culture helps creators to remain creative in the face of potential redundance, particularly when artists take up folk art traditions to mediate the comics medium itself.

At the same time, encountering these alternative comics cultures, particularly in the context of the potentially overwhelming context of globalization, may lead to a reactionary response. In this case, Banerjee points out that attempting to put Indian comics into conversation with other cultures may in fact lead to provincialism and the favoring of stories that focus only on India. “You can become provincial, by purely denying the possibility of it. So travel is humbling, because you’re seeing the best not just of one, but of Iranian art, Arabian art—that’s how it is.” Focusing too much on the local can lead to a lack of contextualization within international comics culture, which leads to Indian creators becoming ignorant of other important graphic novels and comics creators. Recognizing these other cultures is important because artists like Banerjee are able to learn from other traditions of masterful storytelling. Doing so allows creators to recognize their place in a longer tradition of graphic storytelling within the sequential art form called comics. Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 162

Within this longer tradition of composing visual narratives, creators are tending more and more to focus on the local context or community. Banerjee notes that Indian and other comics creators are shifting toward insider perspectives in order to compose more compelling narratives that deal with current social issues. When I asked, “Are there any stories that define what you think of as important stories right now?” he centered his response on his own experiences resulting from his encounters with other comics cultures. “I think my stories are becoming more and more local. My understanding of the universe is becoming more and more local. I’m becoming a quintessential insider. The more and more I travel, the more and more I have been everywhere, the more I feel uncomfortable with universal or epic.” Banerjee’s perspective reflects a larger turn inwards to focus on communities within India and the problems that they have and are facing.

He notes that, in the past, storytellers worked hard to be incorporated into foreign markets in order to succeed financially by gaining foreign readerships. However, doing so forced them to write in a certain way, catering to international audiences by focusing on stories that Indian readers would find unfamiliar. Although they recognize the context of international comics culture, contemporary creators are working against such an approach in taking a local stance and crafting stories directly related to the local context. This also reflects a concern for social responsibility and a greater reliance on fieldwork in communities to be represented.

However, in the process of shifting toward local topics and deeply contextualizing narratives in local communities, comics creators are perceived as crafting stories from a cosmopolitan perspective. Some critics, particularly in India, have argued that this perspective tends to alienate the readers who are actively targeted by creators, in turning away from local perspectives of themselves in order to artfully incorporate those communities into an Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 163 international cosmopolitanism. As Banerjee describes, though, this tone is incidental to localization of storytelling; “But we are not trying to achieve cosmopolitan. It just tries to talk exactly in its normal way, it’s just that by virtue of the subject himself being cosmopolitan, the voice is cosmopolitan. It’s not that it’s trying to be one. And I think that is a kind of genuine cosmopolitan.” For Banerjee, focusing on stories that incorporate local, national, and international influences represents the most authentic form of cosmopolitanism.

In this medium, such a view works to incorporate the diversity of perspectives encapsulated within larger communities in order to engage with day-to-day experiences. As a result, Banerjee notes that creators are more and more interested in insiders’ perspectives because of the ability of such points of view to overcome the divisions of class, language, and local vs. national communities. He notes in his own work that he is more and more often constructing stories around common experiences rather than particular places, as an insiders’ perspective, for him, naturally leads to an increased interest in those commonalities. The appeal to folk culture thus leads first to localization of narratives and creators’ grounding their work in being physically present in communities; then, as creators recognize common experiences between communities, such an appeal leads to a greater awareness of what brings people together, namely the commonalities of human life on Earth.

As Banerjee notes, the appeal to folk culture is often grounded in the appeal to insiders’ perspectives. Creators attempt to gain that point of view of members of a community in order to represent familiar topics, issues, or communities in a unique and engaging way. Thus, Banerjee describes the importance of observing and listening to writing in a mature way, particularly in working toward such an emic perspective. “I feel that to be a good writer, you have to be a little dumb. Be an observer, listener, whatever.” This down-to-earth quality in a creator allows them to Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 164 maintain an insider’s perspective and distance themselves from the egotism that he sees as troubling much of current creative writing in India. He states that, “So, in order to keep that insider’s voice, I have to – you have to be –dumb is like the highest word I can think of, but it’s just, you have to be really down to earth. So you can’t be clever.” Creation becomes more self- conscious, and, as a result, creators like Singh, Sen, and others rely more and more on fieldwork.

Even younger creators just starting out increasingly ground their work first in fieldwork and research in order to accurately represent communities, social problems, and even artistic styles or traditions.

For instance, Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura have performed fieldwork throughout

India on traditional visual storytelling in order to aid them in crafting contemporary comics narratives. In gaining insight on how traditional storytellers relate to audiences and craft narratives, Sabhaney and Emura are able to gain a greater understanding both of their own skills as storytellers and of what visual culture and community could look like. This research also supports them in preparing to move the comics medium in India forward by focusing more so on shorter but more regularly released comics stories through their Captain Bijli Comics.iv Like

Sabhaney, Emura, and Banerjee, many contemporary creators behind graphic novels and longer comics in Delhi are less concerned with developing their reputation and more concerned with developing their authorial voice as one grounded in reality.

Telling Stories about Human Experience

In this context, comics becomes a means of reaching out to unite people around a common interest in storytelling and community. Yet, Sarnath Banerjee does not see a future for his own storytelling in the comics medium. He points out that this results, in large part, from his own Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 165 disillusionment with the form. When he began crafting comics narratives, he did so because of the uniqueness and creativity of even thinking to craft long-form comics narratives. As he was one of the very few practitioners at the time, his work was inherently new and interesting. “Every page I did felt like a minor invention, as if was charting out a new territory, a new method of telling a story.” The inventiveness of Indian comics art made his own work more challenging and more exciting. Yet, in the past few years, he has noted his increasing dissatisfaction with the form. “But what has happened, in a few years, the medium has become easier for us, for me. I can set out to do pretty much what I want to do. And we match our level, which is above average. Which is my level. But lately I’ve stopped surprising myself. I don’t do something and say, whoa.” As he has become increasingly comfortable with telling stories through these visual narratives, Banerjee has become increasingly restless. Instead of continuing his graphic novel work, he plans to move toward a close analysis of the relationship between image and text.

Accordingly, he has pursued this work through more fine art venues, putting on shows in galleries where he tells stories through single images.

Through appeals to folk culture, comics creators are able to help readers engage with their stories by pushing them to draw upon their previous reading experiences in encountering comics and other visual narratives. Specifically, reading a comic book or graphic novel in India draws upon the broader visual culture, such that audiences may be reminded of gaining information through movie posters, patua scrolls, Gond art, god posters, and even religious statuary, or murtis. Since the practices of reading images share much in common, the act of reading a comic is not entirely foreign. Further, the inclusion of elements of traditional storytelling help to cue readers to structural similarities, as when the Vyams utilize traditional

Gond composition and style to tell the story of the Dalit leader in Bhimayana. At the same time, Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 166 in drawing upon the coherence and simultaneity of narratives across these media, as when different narratives refer to the same story or an epic like the Ramayana, creators are able to add to a larger diversity of narratives. The similarity in characters, story, structure, and style allows creators to craft narratives that are simultaneously familiar and inventive in understanding what it means to be human. Creators are thus able to continue their own creative work, while perpetuating the larger traditions of comics and visual storytelling, even if only referentially.

In part, this use of earlier reading practices derives from common subjects, topics, and goals in telling stories in the first place. In the case of larger publishers like Amar Chitra Katha, the goal of entertaining while educating and appealing to a mass audience certainly has a lot in common with itinerant storytellers. For folk artisans like the patuas of Bengal, being able to tell stories with a broad appeal was necessary in order to make a living (Korom). Similarly, the creators’ reliance upon storytelling, especially among those independent of a larger publishing company, relates back to the reliance of folk artists and authors upon their creations. Thus, creators must depend upon the relevance and appeal of the narratives they craft for at least part of their livelihood. More importantly, this popularity derives from their ability to engage with the here and now of peoples’ daily lives. Even Amar Chitra Katha, with its nationalist bent, worked to incorporate alternative perspectives in order to reach out to the members of its diverse and large readership. Yet, like folk artisans today and in the past, individual creators, as well as fans, rely upon comics for making sense of their day-to-day lives. This sequential art of tensions can thus be recognized as an art of connections poised, in the hands of skilled masters, to illustrate the wide array of human experience and to build communities upon that illustration.

i Again, see discussion of this point in Henry Glassie’s work and in Alastair Shearer’s The Hindu Vision: Forms of the Formless (Glassie 1997, 2002; Shearer 1993). ii See contextual studies of storytelling as verbal art, such as Richard Bauman’s Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative (1986). Chapter 5: Appealing to Folk Culture 167

iii In “An Art Without a Tradition: A Survey of Indian Comics”, Bharath Murthy argues that telling stories in India has no strong tradition, an argument which has created some controversy with other authors and artists (2009). iv Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura first met via Amitabh Kumar, their fellow collaborator on Radio Mirchi’s On Air: Radio Programming for Dummies, a handbook for operating a leading national radio station in India. Sabhaney already had experience from her work on “The Goldmine,” produced through national organization Apne Aap to educate urban readers about prostitution in Bihar. More recently, they have collaborated on several short stories, including “Chilika,” based on the Mahabharata, published in Pao: The Anthology of Comics Volume 1 (2012), and one published as a small graphic novel, Mice Will Be Mice (2012), about a mouse who becomes larger than life. They look forward to publishing stories more regularly and helping to establish a community of creators and readers in Delhi and India more broadly through their publishing company, Captain Bijli Comics. Chapter 6: Crafting Community Within India’s comics culture, the creation of narratives has become more regional in the last two decades, and this shift has led to the rise of graphic novels, with Delhi as the center of production. For many creators, comics in India represents its own medium independent from art or literature and draws on international comics culture and folk culture simultaneously. However, the appeal to folk culture often represents a utilitarian use of traditional storytelling to appeal to broader audiences. This appeal gives creators the ability to relate to people’s everyday lives and to negotiate the relationship between local, national and global communities. The localization of their narratives, though, extends to the creative process itself. Thus, many creators have grounded their process in traditional forms of storytelling that combine images with text or performance.

By framing their own work as a continuation or fresh interpretation of folk narrative art, creators not only make their stories more appealing to wider audiences, but also craft communities. For many, drawing on traditional storytelling helps them to find inspiration for innovation within the comics medium. In The River of Stories, Sen frames his novel as a continuation of a tribal creation myth of the village where the story is set (Image 6-1). This allows him to simultaneously introduce and incorporate the reader into traditional worldview in order to craft a persuasive criticism of urban understandings of development. Later authors have incorporated folk art styles and even the actual methods of different storytelling traditions in order to make their work more dynamic.i As demonstrated in the previous chapter, Sarnath

Banerjee integrates folk speech and storytelling techniques into his graphic novels in order to craft socially engaged visual communication. More importantly, though, and drawing on the appeal to folk culture, aligning graphic novels with traditional storytelling reframes comics art itself as a medium independent of literature or fine art. As noted previously, comics in India Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 169 combines elements of these and other art forms, but the medium also draws upon the oral, performative, and folk arts that established art tends to avoid. Given these foundations, creators work to establish as an independent medium in order to shape a space for a creative community separate from book publishing or art scenes in Delhi.

In this chapter, I analyze how contemporary artists and authors turn comics’ potentially isolating focus on individual work into a creative, communal process.ii As the author and artist of

India’s first graphic novel and the model for many creators, Orijit Sen provides an important creative precedent. From mentoring younger authors to encouraging sustained interest in the medium, Sen plays a central role as a master of long-form comics narratives in India. As a result,

I begin by providing an in-depth account of Sen’s creative process as the benchmark for Delhi’s comics culture. More importantly, understanding one creator in isolation provides insight into how collectives like Pao work together, especially given a relatively isolating creative process.

As demonstrated in the previous chapter, creators appeal to folk culture in order to highlight the social importance of storytelling. In the process, though, they also transform their sometimes isolating work into an opportunity for interaction with creators, readers, publishers, and other members of a larger Indian comics community. Within Delhi’s comics community, creators and readers define strong narratives by deep contextualization within local communities, such that creators take on research and even ethnographic fieldwork in the name of storytelling. I thus argue that Delhi’s comics culture is defined by contextualization of stories within both traditional storytelling and local communities, rather than any inherent, aesthetic or narrative quality of the work.

Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 170

Orijit Sen

Comics creators in Delhi have a variety of creative processes. While some use an electronic pen and pad to mediate their storytelling through Photoshop, others rely on thumbnail drawings, multiple sketches, and even large maps of the story, with mock-ups of each page. Within this variety, I will focus upon one of the masters of India’s comics culture, namely Orijit Sen, with whom I worked most closely over my four months of research (Image 6-2). His process is important because so many creators have entered comics art through meetings, interviews, and friendship with Sen. As he states, “With Sarnath [Banerjee], I met him when he was making films. He used to be a film-maker. And I was in the backroom of People Tree, working on River of Stories when Sarnath [got interested and] decided to make his own…Amruta [Patil] was a student of art, and I did a workshop at her school, and she came to me with her work.” In mentoring creators like Banerjee and Patil, Sen helped to add to the diversity of voices in Indian comics culture. Furthermore, he helped to establish certain creative standards that continue to structure the medium.

Before comics, Sen trained as a graphic designer at the National Institute of Design and has worked on exhibition and museum design projects throughout India, the United Kingdom, and Russia. Two years after River’s publication in 1994, Sen participated in a comic book workshop in Manipur where he worked with others to identify material for health guides on taking care of people with AIDS and HIV. He then did illustration work for India Magazine that focused on real-life stories as comic strips. Sen has also done a set of short comics for the

National Council for Educational Research and Training that became part of select textbooks.

Currently, he is working on a graphic novel on the poet Kabir. Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 171

Throughout these various stories, he has maintained some of the strongest draftsmanship in Indian comics culture. From images of the mother goddess in River to images of aliens in

“The Plasmoids” story in Pao: The Anthology, his lines are crisp and attentive to his subjects.

His composition, too, has helped to establish an innovative approach to visual narrative design in

Indian comics. As in “The Plasmoids,” Sen emphasizes the flow of time and the movement of characters in space in his work. Readers are always aware of the space through which characters move; at the same time, Sen crafts interesting page designs by highlighting certain important moments in the narrative, as when the woman on the first page of “The Night of the

Munochwha” is portrayed in a moment of terror that is larger than other characters (Image 6-3).

Her size and placement simultaneously emphasize the importance of that moment to the story and foreshadow the melodramatic nature of the media’s response to the events portrayed. Each of these examples of his personal style show that he has a deep respect for the comics form and yet works to innovate his design work and storytelling in order to craft compelling stories.

Throughout the narration of his creative process, Sen emphasizes the deep contextualization of each story element in a specific place. Each step requires a deep understanding of context. This allows the creator to craft a story that lives up to Sen’s standard for a good story. For him, “A story basically captures the passage of time, and something that allows us to traverse that passage of time. You know, in an exciting, interesting way in which we discover new things. That is a good story, a good story moves us through time in an interesting way. And of course, the story in terms of how well it creates this world which you can inhabit.”

This deep sense of place has become an important standard for creators in Delhi. Such a framework gives them the ability to argue for comics as a medium for storytelling that pushes readers to see the world in which they live in a different way. Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 172

Documenting Sen’s creative process demonstrates the importance of this detailed contextualization in Delhi’s comics community. As Sen narrates, “So even if the world that it shows me is very brief, even if that glimpse is very brief, that doesn’t matter. As long as that brief glimpse is an authentic one. It’s a world that is believable upon itself, a self-self-standing world. I think that is a successful graphic novel.” This contextualization allows for the creation of a believable world that not only illustrates contemporary social problems, but also, through its differences, highlights the urgency for social awareness and even build community.

Understanding how he enacts his draftsmanship will thus start to raise the curtain on how creators create alone, together, and in the context of a larger community.

The Process of Visual Storytelling

In order to live up to his own standards for a good story, Sen begins with sketching and drawing from real life. He describes drawing from life as “...a way of engaging with a particular space that defines the story itself.” He values the time spent sketching and gaining a strong sense of the community and landscape where a story is set. “Plot is only one part of storytelling, but the sense of life is the story itself.” Sen’s creative process entails a reliance upon immersion within the lived reality of a place. By drawing from his experiences in a particular time and place, as in his second project on people living with AIDS in Manipur, he is able to craft stories that meaningfully engage with social problems while constructing a compelling and realistic world.

Thus, more than anything, “Storytelling is about creating another, alternative world.” The first step in doing this through the comics medium is to sketch spaces well and regularly enough to understand how best to represent a “sense of life” through sequential images. Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 173

Accordingly, Sen begins with thumbnail sketches, or small images that lay out the entire comics page on a small scale. This allows creators to save materials and space, while simultaneously developing the narrative flow and relationship between image, text, characters, spaces, the movement of time within the story, and so on. As Sen states, “So what I do most of the time, I start sketching these little. I’ll show you my sketchbook. I start making really tiny-tiny thumbnail sketches of the story. Because I feel like, in the beginning, that I need this really bird’s eye view of the whole thing. So I can layout forty, fifty frames onto one sheet of those really tiny things. So then on 4 or 5 sheets, I have the whole thing.” These thumbnail sketches allow creators like Sen to gain a sense of the story as a whole before every aspect has been finalized. In the process, they are able to revise, make adjustments on the page, and generally get a sense of how the entire piece will work, particularly in a visual sense.

It is at this point that Sen begins crafting the textual and visual relationship within the entire visual narrative. For him, in contrast to other comics creators, this process is essentially based upon images. “First, it’s basically a visual story to me. I’m thinking of it as a sequence of images, and then I start writing out what I’ve drawn. But that’s how the text part starts to form.”

The small images of thumbnail sketches allow him to craft the relationship between the two, central elements of the comics medium quickly and without wasting resources. After this foundational relationship has been fleshed out, he, like many other comics creators, is able to move on to the blocking out of the story (Image 6-4). “So when I have this really basic draft of the two things, then I go on to larger pages, where I block. I will know that I’ve got these ten frames in which this particular thing happens. And I plan the pages. Okay, I need four pages for these ten frames, but I want this particular frame to come just before you turn the page. I block in bits like that for the whole thing. But that’s done on actual scale, and now I do it on the Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 174 computer. I used to do it on sheets of paper.” Although technology changes how these steps are done, the blocking out of the story remains important because creators are able to pace the flow of time and meaning within the visual narrative. Measuring the flow of the story determines how quickly events happen, and, in turn, whether a story creates a ‘sense of life’ that relates to readers’ lived experiences.

Although the arrival of more easily accessible technology has made creating comics narratives easier, especially the electronic pen and pad that Sen uses in conjunction with

Photoshop, the process remains much the same (Image 6-5). As Sen noted in our discussion,

“…with the computer, blocking out your story becomes easier because you can move things around much easier. You can enlarge the views; you can do all of that.” Using the computer to craft and manipulate images has made it generally easier to start a comic, from changing sketches to correcting mistakes. The process of blocking, in particular, becomes easier as one maintains the ability to change the balance of text and image for much longer than in a purely physical creative process. The laying out of speech bubbles has become especially easier for Sen, as he is able to shift their placement, size, and contents throughout the creative process. “One thing about making comics which was always troublesome was how to deal with stuff like speech bubbles for example, planning the speech bubbles. Unless I have the final text, how do I figure out how much text, how much space to use and all that. So I would do all that rough.

That’s why I used to do it full scale, back when I was doing the blocking. Even when I was doing it on paper, I would do it on actual scale.” The fundamental change with technology is the ability to maintain full scale at all times, rather than relying upon small scale images at the start, in order to conserve time and resources (Image 6-6). Now, with Photoshop and an electronic pen and pad, Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 175

Sen and other creators are able to draft the entire story at the same scale and thus continually manipulate the relationship between text and image.

As noted above, the text bubble is central to this relationship because of its visual manifestation of textual information. In order to place the words of characters within a story, they are encapsulated by and organized within bubbles or similarly shaped forms. Sen describes the importance of blocking out their placement within the story as the result of their being “a very integral part of the composition of every frame” (Image 6-7). The amount and importance of text determines the size of the bubble, while its relationship to the continuing narrative determines its placement within the page and panel. Text bubbles thus “…dictate the composition of the frame [so that] you have to really pay. Speech bubbles require a lot of attention, to me. I really treat them with respect and trepidation because they have caused me quite a lot of grief. Especially because the dialogue has a direct relation to the action in the image. So you have to plan it together. It’s an integral part of your visual plan; it’s not like you draw it and later you add the speech bubbles in.” Text and image develop simultaneously and in a direct relationship to one another because they are mutually constituent of the narrative.

However, as I demonstrated in Chapter 5, images play the important role of referencing previous visual storytelling traditions within Delhi’s comics culture. For Sen, the visual movement of the story remains slightly more important than text as he continues his creative process, and, accordingly, he tends to minimize speech bubbles and dialogue.

Parts of the Whole

Although Sen describes his creative process as a series of steps, he acknowledges that much of this creativity happens simultaneously. While blocking out the story and the relationship between Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 176 text and image in crafting a ‘sense of life’ within the story, he works to develop characters based upon their most important moments. “But that’s also simultaneously when I develop my characters. I don’t separately sit and do the characters and things like that. When I’m introducing an important character, I’ve already conceived of how the character gets introduced in the story.”

Rather than doing character sketches separately from crafting the panels, pages, and overall flow of the narrative, Sen drafts each individual as they take part in the story.

He focuses on the context that defines the character most clearly, be that a particular place, situation, conversation, or moment in time. Within that moment, he is able to define the character’s role in the story. “Then I choose a frame where that character is most prominently revealed. That usually happens in the first two or three frames after the character is introduced.

So I choose one of those and I draw that character really well in that one frame, the way I want him to appear. So that way I am designing the character on location, within the context of the story. I’m not taking him or her. I’m not assigning them to a blank space, and creating the character in an imaginary context.” Characters are thus designed and created in the midst of multiple other steps in the storytelling process, rather than separately from them. For Sen, these creative steps happen simultaneously because each element interacts with the others and thus needs to be crafted in a direct relationship, as with the balance of image and text.

In addition to the quality of the story itself, context, for Sen, defines the characters. By situating characters within very clear and specific contexts, they take on a greater meaning to the flow of time that dictates whether or not a given graphic novel or comics story succeeds in crafting a ‘sense of life.’ While representing characters in their defining moments, he explained to me that “I am actually creating the character set in the story, at that point when he or she is integral to the story. So to me that is important because he or she needs to fit into the whole Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 177 story. So, we do almost see the character on location, on site, on the spot as I develop [the story].

So that’s why I sort of develop the character within the story itself.” In order to craft a story that is grounded in a detailed context, creators have to craft characters as well who are grounded by context. Sen thus defines the people who populate his visual narratives by their importance to the narrative. He begins by drawing the definitive image of each person as they appear at the moment in the story-world where they shine the brightest. Throughout the rest of any given story, that moment guides his continued drawing and understanding of characters. As he states,

“I choose one place and I draw them really well. After that, any time I draw the character, I am referring to that first detailed drawing. Of course, every time, I have to then look at the normal sort of view so that when I draw the side view, I have a sense of that one view which is usually a three-fourths or a front view that has all the details in it. Then I have to interpret that into the different things. So at this stage, the story gets fleshed out almost frame by frame, but also the characters get fuller.” It is in the process of fleshing out each element of the story that the visual narrative of a graphic novel or comic book itself gains coherence. Along the way, each element is crafted according to context, so that the final product may successfully relate to the reality of life in contemporary Indian communities.

Throughout, Sen emphasizes the importance of adapting the creative process to each, individual story and the community or context within which they occur. Yet the most important aspect of finishing a comics narrative, from sketching a living community to laying out a draft and balancing the visual and textual elements, is the line itself. “I’d say the final [step] is when I start drawing the detailed story. Again, I don’t follow a sequence because by now I have the whole story drawn out. I just take anything which I feel a lot about, which I am excited about, or which I think is going to be a challenge. I take that bit and I start doing the final line drawing. To Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 178 me, the line is very important. I have to get the line exactly right. In fact, that’s ninety percent of the job to me.” He thus emphasizes the importance of the lines that visually describe and define each story element. The story itself is not the organizing structure for the narrative as a whole, at least for Sen. This is because of the importance of the lines in emphasizing those aspects of the story that are most important to readers, who are navigating the alternative world that a creator has constructed.

In crafting a world, the line returns readers to the detailed context that grounds Sen as storyteller, his stories, and his creative process. By drawing readers to those elements that are clearly identified and fully developed in line and narrative, creators move the story forward and in the direction of the story. Within a larger world, readers could easily be taken off course, either through an unrelated detail that merely provides greater context or through the storyteller’s own lack of direction. Sen ensures that his readers encounter neither problem. He says that “[The line] is rendering and fleshing out the space, and [it] helps the eye to follow things better.

There’s less conscious decoding that the eye has to do. The eye gets things really fast. The information comes in an organized and efficient way. I draw a Banaras street, for example. If it’s a line drawing, I’ll tend to look at it a bit longer because it requires more effort of me to connect it all together. And to look at all the details that are all hidden in the lines. But, when it’s rendered, I see it more as one world. And then I can draw out the details that I want from that.”

In this way, strong line-work not only fleshes out the visual elements of a story, giving them clarity and detail not provided in pencil sketches, but it also crafts a sense of another world.

Within each comics panel, the landscape could continue outside of the reader’s view, leading to other stories or greater detail in elements already known. Sen is able to control the amount of Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 179 detail provided to readers for any one character, place, or otherwise by focusing their attention upon specific points or elements in the story.

Accordingly, Sen describes how he emphasizes those elements that are central to any one given story. He specifically provides greater detail for “key elements” while others remain more ambiguous, “abstract,” or “impressionistic.” The emphasis upon certain elements over others communicates their importance to the flow of time in the story and helps readers to navigate the world that he has constructed. Sen provides the example of The River of Stories: “Like, when I was doing River of Stories, getting an authentic sense of the landscape was very important. The story is about the landscape. I did a lot of drawing in the valley and everything, and it’s all there in the final story.” Sen describes how he filled sketchbooks with drawings and detail in preparation for representing the Narmada River Valley in graphic novel format. This detail translated into lush and intricate drawings of the valley’s ecology, even when such landscapes are not as central to the story as the human or divine beings interacting there. By emphasizing this kind of detail in the landscape at all points in River, Sen reiterates many of the same points that are made explicit in the graphic novel’s main narrative: the natural world is alive and threatened by development. Nature cannot take a back seat not only because Sen wants to draw readers’ attention to these details in order to drive the story forward, but also because his story is concerned with showing the entanglement of human communities and these natural landscapes.

His concern with detailed contextualization thus helps him attain his goals while also relating more strongly to members of communities who live or lived in this place, as they recognize the landscape of the Narmada River Valley.

At the same time, Sen takes advantage of multiple media in representing the many perspectives with which he engages in the story of River. He incorporates several creation myths Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 180 for the Valley into the stories of a journalist advocating on behalf of adivasi communities and stories of community members (Images 6-8). The inclusion of these variants helps him to highlight the richness of the tribal cultures that are threatened by development in order to argue against popular representations of them as poor, dirty, and even primitive. He stated to me that “I mean there are the sections with the story of the multiple stories of the creation of the Narmada

Valley. Those bits are done with pencil shading, grey tones. But the rest of the story is just pen and ink outline with some hatching, but not too much. Some places, there can be more of it, but mostly it was not so much of differentiation through shading. It was mostly black and white line, and with some amount of masks black to offset.” As previously noted in Chapter 4, within River,

Sen uses pencil to take emphasis off any one story of the creation of the Narmada Valley and thus highlight the diversity of potential creations (Image 4-12). Instead, he emphasizes the importance of the multiple characters involved in advocating for justice for communities displaced by the Narmada River Dam Project, through strong line-work alongside detailed contextualization.

The alternating clear lines and unclear pencil thus allow Sen to craft a socially conscious narrative that directs readers toward injustice, as well as action that they should take. While the diversity of mythological perspectives remain in pencil, the communities currently living there and dealing with displacement and disenfranchisement are portrayed more solidly, with clear lines. He draws attention to them, rather than the mythological stories that would normally be emphasized in representations of traditional, adivasi culture. A deep sense of place and worldview are important for Sen, but it is how one uses those methods to push a story forward while maintaining a ‘sense of life’ that matters most. This emphasis and method for crafting comics narratives has become important for Delhi’s comics creators because of Orijit Sen’s place Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 181 at the beginning of the graphic novel form in India. Many creators mimic his process, especially when they are just entering comics culture. For each story, a firm grounding in the community where the story takes place provides the foundation for storytelling. Detail in sketches, layout, and final actualization all feed back into this central concern with providing a clear sense of place, and though that ‘sense of life,’ a sense of an alternate world. This alternate world crafts a space for creators to engage with a broad range of social issues that people live with on a regular basis. In so doing, they use a detailed and balanced approach to the comics medium in order to best illustrate the complex entanglement of peoples, places, and issues that each form a part of injustice.

Throughout his creative career, Sen has found that this adaptation of image and text to one’s goals is central to storytelling in comics. Whatever story one may be telling, it is the act of revealing only particular aspects of an alternative world that structures a narrative and its success with audiences. He states that “What are those particular things that you end up showing in order to make the person visualize that space in their heads is the question. And I think that’s where the craft of comic-making lies.” A comics creator must choose which elements of the story, whether they be characters, text, dialogue, landscape, images, or the style in which they are illustrated, will craft the story being told most clearly. Yet, the process is a combination of these choices and of the individual creator. As Sen notes, “the act of drawing is the excavation of my memory and my life.” The creator is involved in the narrative as more than a mere narrator or even as a passive author; they have incorporated their own experiences through entering the communities where they site stories. As many other masters of the comics medium have noted, storytelling requires both a detailed understanding of the world being represented and the inclusion of aspects of one’s own experiences. Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 182

Sen noted that he has changed greatly from his beginnings with the comics form. First, in crafting his own first comic, he rushed too quickly into telling a story that he didn’t even know, much less understand its pacing. “You know the first time I tried to make my own comics was when I was like eleven or twelve. I wanted to make my own Tintin-like comic. And I started drawing it the way I would read it, which is from page one or rather from the cover. So I first made the cover. I had no idea where it was going, but I made the cover. So that gave me an idea of the story. Then I went to the title page. And then I started on the first page. Needless to say, I don’t think it got beyond the first page, because there just wasn’t enough to put behind it. And after I had drawn five frames, I realized that I did not know where the story was going to go, what was going to happen next, and I could not think of what that should be. So, to me, that journey starts out of utter ignorance like that. The first couple of huge mistakes you make, you learn a lot. So that, by the third one, you are already much smarter than you are with the first one.” The evolution of a comics creator starts from ignorance, but with a willingness to make mistakes and learn from them. Through those lessons learned, creators like Sen are able to gain an understanding of how to construct narratives that accurately and compellingly portray alternate worlds, and through them, our own.

Within India’s comics culture, a need for a clear connection to the communities and lives represented has led to an emphasis on context. However, as Sen himself notes, creativity requires adaptation to each story and even to changes within each particular creator. In speaking about

River, he specifically stated that his work has changed in the intervening years, and will likely continue to change: “So that was whatever, fifteen years ago. Now what I’m doing is kind of different. So I suppose that I could always do something else.” Although, following Sen’s example, many of Delhi’s comics creators have focused upon great detail in crafting a ‘sense of Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 183 life’ in an alternate world, these stories also help them to find meaning in their own lives.

Accordingly, the creation of comics has led to the formation of a community in Delhi concerned with finding meaning for themselves and others through visual storytelling, much as it has elsewhere.

The Individual in Creativity

The individual creative process of composing a comics narrative often requires creators like Sen to isolate themselves. This is because of the two-sided nature of comics creation, which allows for greater independence than other media while also cutting off ties to other creators because much of the above steps occur in studios or other private spaces. As Sen notes, “Though I have to say that one of the big draws of making comic books is this sense of you and yourself. If you make a film, you may have an idea, but then you have to get money, locations, men, studio, etc.

But to make a comic, you just need a piece of paper, and a pencil, and yourself. To me, that remains one of the most powerful draws of comic.” Comics authors and artists thus have a greater independence compared to creators of other media, as they rely mainly upon themselves throughout their creative process. Although there are some examples in India of more laterally integrated production processes for comics, as in the corporate model of Raj Comics and earlier comics publishers, most contemporary creators have grown into this form of creativity.

However, at the same time, they have built communities around the creation and consumption of comics, often through the appeal to folk culture discussed in Chapter 5.

Despite the socially active nature of the Pao Collective and much of Delhi’s comics culture, most artists and authors are able to pursue the art because of a relatively high social status. In particular, the importance of technology, primarily computers and design programs like Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 184

Photoshop, makes it difficult not only for beginning artists to enter the fold, but also for creators to reach outside of their own communities. Due to the relative ease and cheapness of desktop publishing, creators may get stalled at the computer or focus on creating narratives that more easily flow to their colleagues and friends. Furthermore, the comics creation process, as reliant upon both computers and the individual creative process, tends to isolate artists and authors, both from each other and their communities. However, in the context of establishing an Indian comics tradition and such inward-focused technology, these artists have worked to adapt the relatively isolating creative process of comics art to building local, creative communities.

Despite addressing an audience of fellow artists and upper class comics fans, which tends to overlap in Delhi and India more generally, the comics creation process tends to be lonesome due to a focus on individual excellence and work in private spaces. Although Orijit Sen often works alongside co-workers in the People Tree design studio in Hauz Khas Village, few creators can afford to rent a studio of their own, and, when they do, rarely have such company. Most of the creators with whom I spoke discussed their creative process as occurring within the confines of home, although some drawing done for research could lead them to escape the indoors.

For instance, Amruta Patil uses a relatively representative comics creation process, beginning with the mapping out of plotlines. For a retelling of the Mahabharatha that she has been working on for a few years, she has several notebooks of plans, sketches, and designs. She begins with the general, rough layout of every single page of the novel to be made. As she notes, the amount of detail for this project is not normal, but is instead an adaptation of her process because she wants to be sure to capture each moment in this historically important and culturally sensitive story. After laying out the general narrative flow, she sketches and designs key moments or characters, drawing thumbnails and more detailed images to make sure she can get Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 185 each image clear in her own mind. After that, she makes multiple story-drafts before even beginning the final project, the latter being a very long process of crafting and revising each page, drawing on and changing the original design as she sketches and paints. Beyond that, she will have to scan or photograph her work in order to create a digital version of the story that can be proofed and prepared for manuscript format. This entire process is focused upon the individual working in his or her own studio, and most artists are only able to gain feedback from others by inviting them to see their works in progress or by participating in a show of same work.

More importantly, comics culture in India does not have the structural integrity of

American and other comics art traditions. As described by Mark Pustz in Comics Culture, the development of comics shops in the United States provided the foundation for the development of comics communities, including both creators and fans. Through these communities, both fans and creators are able to interact with people who are similarly invested in this particular medium, receiving feedback and affirmation from their fellow community members. Further, American comics culture has developed the convention as another level of community interaction, whereby representatives from various communities, both fan and creator, may interact with one another in celebration of comics art. Although the comics convention is becoming increasingly important in

India, with the first year of the Delhi and Mumbai Comic Cons, and smaller conventions near both cities, these events only began in 2010. This structural support for fans and creators allows even individuals who cannot succeed in corporate comics the ability to adapt their storytelling to their own, local communities and contexts. Comics culture, accordingly, supports itself. Without such support structures in Delhi, creators may become isolated from one another, get caught up in their individual deadlines and lives, and be unable to participate in conversations about the comics medium to which they are committed as storytellers. Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 186

Unlike other comics cultures, such as those in Japan and Europe, Indian comics culture has not developed alternatives to this store and convention based structure, such as studios organized around particular masters of the form. This is likely because there are so few masters of the medium to teach creators en masse, as almost no comics creators in India can depend upon their work for a career. Still, a few important creators from the early days of Indian comics culture have started their own schools, chief among them Pran, the author behind Chacha

Chaudhuri. The absence of a supportive infrastructure, however, on top of the isolating tendency of production technology, tends to isolate individual creators. Yet, contemporary graphic novels work quite hard to work against such tendencies, fundamentally by organizing artists’ collectives like the Pao Collective, but also in multiple other ways.

Technology and Community

Although much of comics creation has historically been somewhat isolating, folk or traditional art methods do not necessarily bring incorporation or maintenance of community. This is because the technology they must by necessity use potentially separates creators from the local and folk communities to which they work to connect. Fundamentally, the increasing presence of advanced technology creates dissonance between these folkloric ties and technology that only the relatively wealthy are able to access. For instance, Orijit Sen uses a digital pad and pen, in addition to a personal computer, Photoshop, and other design technology. As noted above, although he created his first few works entirely by hand, often with the aid of collage, photocopiers, and other technology, the pad and pen allows him to most easily and accurately mediate his stories digitally. In contrast, he turns a critical eye to urban culture in many of his narratives, often for over-dependence upon technology and development. Yet, he takes Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 187 advantage of this technology, which he requires in his work with the People Tree Collective, more than he depends entirely upon it.

In fact, these technologies accompany the need to establish the comics medium within

Indian visual culture. They afford advantages that crafting stories by hand cannot, namely the ability to reach a broad audience, do so cheaply, and to bring creators together. Digital media allow creators like Sen to reach broader audiences because they can circulate their stories without any actual, physical book. This allows readers who are less able to afford the relatively expensive graphic novels to still read his stories, alongside international audiences who have no other access and readers who simply cannot afford space for books. Also, with fewer volumes printed, authors are able to circulate their stories more cheaply, albeit at the cost of their own livelihoods. Yet, when the goal is to reach larger audiences, whether to question social injustice or find an audience with whom to share stories, the value tends to be more important than the costs. Finally, by making their stories more available online, they are able to reach out more easily to their fellow creators and, more importantly, to potential readers and creators, who may not have been able to encounter their narratives otherwise. Despite the inward tendency of such technology, these are necessary to include more creators and make the creative process easier and cheaper, thus allowing for a stronger creative community.

By grounding their storytelling in folklore and traditional art forms, comics creators in

Delhi have found a way to balance their use of technology and appeal to wider audiences with socially conscious storytelling through a focus upon everyday experience. The appeal to folk culture allows for a focus upon particular communities and contexts, which draws in members of those communities as well as comics fans and creators. By telling stories about day-to-day life, Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 188 creators simultaneously craft community and counterbalance the tendency for their own storytelling to mainly relate to other creators.

Orijit Sen, in particular, advocates the importance of landscape and the specificity of place in telling stories that are socially conscious. In describing how one becomes a mature artist, he notes that he has changed as a reader of comics. He states that “As a reader, I look at comics differently than photos because authors play with readers’ [perception of] pace in the story.

[They may] want the reader to linger for a while. They build clues and use details to present surprise and give signals of story elements. When I conceptualize a story, I visualize spaces with a lot of detail.” In describing his creative process, Sen notes that he spends most of his preparation time researching the communities in which they are situated and in experiencing the physical and cultural settings for the story. When composing River of Stories, for instance, Sen spent time among the tribal groups he was depicting, and he used the stories they told him to help structure the story that he told his own audience (Image 6-8). Furthermore, as already noted, in crafting images for the educational graphic novel, Trash!: On Ragpicker Children and

Recycling, which tells the story of trash-pickers in urban India, Sen focused upon the actual places where characters would have lived their lives in order to portray an imagined life as an accurate representation of the experiences of actual people. For Sen and many others, then, the narrative that is the product of creativity relies upon the situation of the creator within the multiple contexts around which lived experience happens.

In order to craft comics narratives that are socially conscious while using relatively expensive technology, creators like Sen focus upon situating themselves within the communities they hope to represent. This is especially true when the stories they are crafting engage directly with social injustice or increasing social awareness. Creators cannot hope to provide a deeply Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 189 contextualized visual narrative without immersing themselves within local communities and the issues that people within them face. The amount of detail that Sen, for one, emphasizes has required him to spend significant time performing what a social scientist would consider to be fieldwork: observing public spaces, recognizing how communities support and sustain each other, and speaking with people about their experiences. Other creators have followed suit, with

Parismita Singh doing work in Assam and Vishwajyoti Ghosh performing research among street children in order to create comics that communicate effectively about health issues. As a result, the potential technological divide between comics creators and their subjects in Delhi tends to be offset by the creators themselves, who work to engage as much as possible with the communities they hope to represent. Crafting narratives that are deeply committed to particular places and peoples would not otherwise be possible, nor would storytelling help creators to address social issues or craft compelling narratives about lived reality in Delhi today. Even beyond this immersion, though, creators work to sustain their own comics community in a variety of ways.

Delhi’s Comics Community Within Delhi’s comics culture, creators meet up with one another in numerous ways and places.

Arts-related events like gallery openings, book releases and comics workshops provide a context where they are able to meet and discuss their craft, while meetings with collectives like Pao occur on a much rarer basis. In my four months working with the authors and artists involved with the Pao Collective, all five members met up only once, while those members in charge of the editorial work for the then-in-development Pao Collection met more regularly. In addition, just before my arrival in August 2010, the members of Pao, Singh, Ghosh, Sen, Banerjee, and

Kumar, collaborated on a gallery exhibition, culminating with a group authored work. Such Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 190 gallery events happen somewhat regularly, but collaboration happens much less often, especially on a face-to-face basis.

Still, more informal events are quite regular, from seasonal baithaks, where friends and colleagues come together to share food and talent, to smaller shared meals, meetings between friends, and even random encounters in the same social spaces. The Yodakin bookstore in Hauz

Khas Village, in particular, was a common meeting place for many creators because of its welcoming atmosphere, placement within the small and friendly artist’s enclave, wide array of independent books and music, and because of the many hard-to-find graphic novels and comics available there.iii For comics creators, as for most people living in large cities, staying in touch was often a struggle, and meeting regularly was quite difficult, especially given the hectic-ness of constantly changing deadlines and schedules. Despite the many opportunities for coming together, creators in Delhi’s comics community were only rarely able to do so to discuss their craft, much less work through their creative process together.

The role of comics within society, or at least creators’ perceptions of those roles, plays an important part in structuring a rather isolating creative process. I rely upon Sarnath Banerjee’s discussion of these roles, something he elucidated in attempting to describe comics place within society as a whole. He delineates two basic purposes for storytelling through comics, although he tends to broaden such roles to storytelling in general. He begins by describing the need to provide dissenting voices, something that simultaneously requires one to recognize social structures as necessary. “So probably one of the roles is to question the status quo. But then again, I’ll contradict myself by saying that another role is to keep the status quo. To whom? To see that it does not get hijacked by big cinema or others. To make sure it’s kept small, reasonably.” As Banerjee sees it, creators of comics narratives should criticize society at the Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 191 same time they recognize the importance of community on a smaller scale. This role equates quite clearly with the overall push for a focus on local contexts and folk culture within graphic novels and comics culture in Delhi. Yet, in performing this role, creators as storytellers are working independently to craft critical yet supportive stories.

Similarly, Banerjee outlines the second important role for comics narratives in society.

He describes how creators should not simply tell stories, but work to either inventively retell or otherwise creatively invent within their chosen form. Thus, graphic novelists and comics creators cannot simply recreate the same stories that have been told before, but must uniquely adapt them to the contemporary context. He states, “The other role would be to tell stories, even if it’s a retelling of a story, but to figure out [how to] be inventive, to figure out new ways of pushing, unless you self-consciously have realized how to follow a certain tradition of telling stories…But if you call yourself a maker, a constructor of stories, the invention of stories is important. New ways of telling stories are very important.” In order to do storytelling, one must add to a chosen tradition by taking part in invention. Creativity is essential, although Banerjee does note that some tellers work with established traditions of storytelling.iv Even then, though, Banerjee notes that a creator must incorporate creativity in order to participate in storytelling.

This dual role is important to Banerjee because of what he views as a broader societal tendency to work towards group consensus. He notes that, “So questioning thought is one of my big prides as a writer. That’s my role as a writer. The rest of society is always trying to find consensus.” If society as a whole works towards agreement, it is up to storytellers to individually craft creative stories that question the way things are. In arguing for this function for storytelling and for storytellers, though, Banerjee demonstrates a tendency within comics culture in Delhi of holding up individual creativity rather than the larger tradition as deserving of accolades. Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 192

Accordingly, when discussing their colleagues, Banerjee and others focus on the specific strengths and talents of each individual. Banerjee thus discusses how much he appreciates his fellow comics creators: “Among my colleagues, also, there are a lot of people who have a very strong personality. All of which I like. Different people have different personalities. Vishwa does fantastic water color in his work, and he mixes things very well. Orijit has a fantastic concept of space. He’s a fantastic draftsman, with a very strong sense of spatial design and composition.

He’s very innovative, and at the same time extremely well-trained, classically well-trained. He’s a strange combination of madness and control.” He continues, describing how each creator is particularly good at something and how he or she adds to the tradition of visual storytelling by honing that skill to excellence. However, the process of honing this skill becomes somewhat isolating given the processes involved in comics creation. Still, in working to creatively represent the diversity of experiences in Delhi today, each creator helps to strengthen the comics tradition in India today.

Orijit Sen finds a different role for creators in contemporary comics culture in Delhi. He focuses on how each creator, through their individual creativity, adds to the fledgling Indian comics art form. While comics narratives in this context are not inherently unique, each creator crafts a unique interpretation of the form and provides a closer connection to different communities, interests, and issues. Similarly, Banerjee concludes that it is the differences within

Delhi’s comics culture that actually helps the people involved to come together as a community.

“The Delhi school of graphic novels is extremely divergent, extremely different from each other.

They’re extremely independent.” Because of their differences, creators in Delhi are able to come together and help each other work through the often isolating steps of crafting stories in comics.

Fundamentally, they admire one another’s work and find inspiration from each other’s stories. Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 193

They also find times to work alongside each other and opportunities to collaborate on gallery installations, storytelling projects, and collections of stories like those that the Pao Collective has been coordinating. In this context, the appeal to storytelling or other traditional narratives provide cornerstones around which creators can come together, if not to craft stories, then at least to be inspired by each other’s work and balance the isolating tendencies of the creative process.

Finding a Way to Thrive

Contemporary comics artists reach out to their communities, using experience and interaction to balance the isolating experience of designing, drawing, and creating in comics. At the same time, the appeal to folk culture allows them to escape their own class status by immersing themselves within the culture that they hope to represent. The incorporation of folk art methods and structures thus provides a way for creators to make sense of their own experiences by placing them in close relation both to their fellow creators and to other communities. Creating comics in

Delhi today thus means strategically engaging with international comics culture and traditional storytelling in order to both continue expressing one’s creativity through the medium and craft compelling stories.

While Sen, as the creator of the country’s first graphic novel, established the value of storytelling, the need for relevance to various communities and peoples’ everyday lives has perpetuated this focus. The core members of the Pao Collective, in particular, have successfully adapted this art form to their own voices, to their own stories, and to their own experiences of the world. The medium has come to life in their hands and continues to expand, incorporating new authors, styles, and stories every day. Indian comics are not just Amar Chitra Katha (ACK).

Further, in the context of ACK and other comics’ homogenization of lived experience into a Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 194

Hindutva worldview, the appeal to folk culture creates the possibility for alternative perspectives.

From new readings of history like Delhi Calm to alternative perspectives on development like

River of Stories, and a general reevaluation of intangible culture, India’s comics creators base their work in traditional storytelling to both create their own community and imagine themselves as part of a larger network of communities.

The appeal to lived experience and folk culture then leads to the creation of communities or collectives around a common interest in counterbalancing isolating forces like new technology. The folk become the model for imagining a future for India that allows for the diversity and vibrancy of everyday experience. This is especially true for the Pao Collective, who regularly meet to discuss storytelling and socially conscious creativity in comics art. The group began when Amitabh Kumar began research on visual narratives in Delhi and then together the strongest figures of the graphic novel scene in Delhi: Sen, Ghosh, Singh, and Banerjee. The Pao

Collective now works to distribute comics, support one another and other artists, and to put forth a conceptualization of comics as an independent medium. Their mission is not just to create a strong and unique comics culture in India, but to craft a comics community founded upon some of the values of folk culture. As a group, they demonstrate that local communities and everyday life, as referenced through folk culture, lies at the center of India’s comics culture, not merely as a reference point but as a model of what communities and creativity should be like.

Furthermore, the seeming dissonance of so many comics creators doing such different things can actually be a good thing. As Sen points out, it is only through the accumulation of so many different styles of telling and of stories themselves that Indian comics art will come into its own. Each of their individual skills or specializations help to broaden what it means to tell stories in long form comics in India. Each of the creators with whom I spoke was infinitely proud of Chapter 6: Creativity and Community 195 their peers and the power of the narratives being crafted in the comics medium in Delhi.

Although there was some concern for the future of the comics art form, they each expressed certain positivity for the current blossoming of stories, with the number of graphic novels increasing each year and the amount of attention each one receives similarly increasing. Through each of them, Delhi’s comics community finds a way to thrive.

i See earlier discussion of the recent boom in folk art and comics hybrid forms in Chapter 5. ii I spoke with Sen about his creative process and comics culture in the studio for the People Tree fair trade store located in Hauz Khas Village in Fall 2010. iii Yoda Press Publisher and Yodakin Book Store Proprietor, Arpita Das, is the person responsible for this charming venue and the community surrounding it. From regular events where authors spoke to presentations on issues related to books and reading, including a presentation by Bharath Murthy in September 2010, Das ensures a lively community in her book shop. After my departure in 2010, Yodakin even gained a reading area in the loft above the cozy space where books, including many graphic novels, are available on display and for purchase. Das was also kind enough to speak with me about the book publishing scene in Delhi and about her personal experiences with comics culture. iv In particular, he cites the members of Dastangoi, a group who retells several hundred year old Islamic stories through the use of language and expressive hand gestures. Chapter 7: Illustrating Social Justice

In 2011, Navayana Press in Delhi released the much-anticipated graphic narrative Bhimayana:

Experiences of Untouchability. This volume, which details the life of Dalit ethnic minority group leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, combines the visual sensibilities of Gond folk art with the grammar of the sequential art of comics (Vyam, Anand, and Natarajan 2010). In crafting this graphic novel, S. Anand, editor of Navayana, Srividya Natarajan, and the painter couple,

Durgabai and Subhash Vyam, have created an evocative, political narrative that quickly rose to the top of book lists, including one of CNN International’s top 5 political comic books (Calvi

2011). In the process, they draw on a tradition in Indian comics culture, particular among Delhi artists, of using sequential narrative to raise awareness of social issues.

This work carries on a tradition begun by Orijit Sen with his and India’s first graphic novel, The River of Stories (1994), which illustrates the displacement of tribal communities by the Narmada River Dam Project. As demonstrated so far, Sen and the members of the Pao

Collective have collaborated in arguing for comics as an independent medium through graphic novels and comics collections that generally work to increase social awareness. Many of their stories either touch upon or directly address the social problems that are part of various communities’ everyday life. In the above example, Bhimayana explicitly relies upon a perspective derived from folk culture and an awareness of the historical injustices related to caste to increase audience awareness of injustice. In the process, this work brings up the question of how and why creators address social problems.

As previously demonstrated, creators approach comics as storytelling in order to move beyond pre-existing notions of the medium, as one for children, humor, or educational stories, and to move toward incorporating productive precedents.i In particular, Vishwajyoti Ghosh Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 198 points to everyday conversations and storytelling as a precedent for how interaction is a part of the making of narratives. “It’s all participating and talking, day to day, depicting life on a daily, chore kind of routine basis. Those stories are much more insightful than creating a larger overview of life.” Ghosh thus points to daily moments of storytelling as a worthwhile source of inspiration, much as Banerjee did in the previous chapter. For both, the experiences of everyday life are an interesting part of their own experiences and an essential part of storytelling in India.

As a part of everyday life, though, storytelling also provides an important precedent for visual narratives that cross media, both traditional and contemporary.

Just as the patua storytellers in West Bengal have traditionally retold both religious and secular narratives through painted narrative scrolls, contemporary artists use comics as yet another venue for the re-narration and negotiation of everyday experience through Indian image culture (Korom 2006). In attempting to move beyond mere consumption, creators like Anand,

Natarajan, and the Vyams demonstrate the importance of stories that work across multiple media and allow readers to enter the story-world at any point in the larger narrative (Jenkins 2006). For example, after discontinuing the printing of new comics in 1991, the famous and widely distributed comics series Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) has now moved to the Internet and other media. ACK Media, which took over the series after India Book House, has translated their comics into cartoons, computer backgrounds, posters, and stories and games available on cellular phones. In this case, the intertextual quality of visual reading practices has incorporated transmediatized narratives, particularly comics, into pre-existing modes of interactivity. In appealing to these previous models of literacy, authors were able to maintain relevance to daily life and, increasingly, local, social issues. Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 199

Appeals to folk culture thus allow creators like Sarnath Banerjee to argue for comics as a medium like any other that does not rely on other art forms for credibility but draws on readers’ experience with those other media. In order to fulfill the transformative and social potential of their storytelling, creators often rely on reader awareness of other media. In addressing social problems, then, they can appeal to educational works, scholarship, and activism, in addition to other media and forms of visual storytelling. In the process of doing so, creators not only illustrate social problems through compelling stories, but also reveal the closely interconnected nature of communities of readers and creators.

In this chapter, I explore how comics creators in Delhi craft storytelling that is socially responsible, especially to the particular communities of which they are a part. In so doing, it is necessary to discuss the various strengths of the comics form as the power to support creativity, educate readers, to unite or divide those same audiences, and, finally, to tell stories in a way that allows creators to address social problems. Investigating these various powers reveals how comics as a medium has provided a tradition for creators, as well as a means to reach out to their communities and attempt to instigate conversations about injustice. Accordingly, I conclude with a discussion of the precedent for socially active comics in Delhi and the ways in which creators like the members of the Pao Collective build upon that tradition of socially responsible visual storytelling.

Vishwajyoti Ghosh

As the example of Bhimayana demonstrates, working through ideas of social justice and globalization in storytelling has enabled creators of graphic novels in Indian comics to raise awareness about social issues. Two important examples of drawing upon the intertextual models Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 200 of folk culture and storytelling to sustain communities’ connections to those cultural roots are

Vivalok Comics (VC) and World Comics India (WCI). These publishers have focused on the potential for comics as educational tools used to combat social injustice. In addition, Orijit Sen’s work provides an important precedent for more recent work by speaking across comics, education, and activism. However, Vishwajyoti Ghosh provides the strongest example for speaking to social issues because he does so directly in his work with design firm, Inverted

Commas (Image 7-1)

As the creator of India’s first longer comics narrative, Orijit Sen told the story of the effects of the damming of the Narmada River for urban water needs on village communities.

Later authors, particularly Sarnath Bannerjee, would continue to develop the longer graphic storytelling form. More recently, Vishwajyoti Ghosh has continued Sen’s critical voice through

Delhi Calm, a graphic novel about the Emergency of 1975, and his work with Inverted Commas, a design firm dedicated to using comics to give voice to those who have none (Image 7-2). Sen, too, has continued to craft socially engaged comics, from the HIV/AIDS homecare guide that he helped develop in Manipur in 1996 to various shorter narratives since. However, Ghosh is important because he has directly engaged with social issues both through his graphic novels and comics, and through his work as the Creative Director of Inverted Commas.

Despite his broad repertoire, Ghosh is first and foremost a cartoonist, with several, regular cartoon strips published in major newspapers. Further, in addition to Delhi Calm, Ghosh has published the collection of postcards, Times New Roman & Countrymen, which collages various print media to make socially critical images of Indian culture. He has authored multiple short comics stories, including 2011’s RSVP, which criticizes contemporary arts culture in Delhi through more direct references to the traditional, kali-ghat painting style that has influenced his Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 201 work. These shorter pieces have been published in MINT and other magazines, as well as several anthologies. Throughout his work, Ghosh demonstrates an interest in social issues and in criticizing injustice in society.

One of the major ways that Ghosh engages with social problems in his comics work is through his personal storytelling style. The focus of his narratives tends to be on individual characters and how they confront the historical and social context for their lives. In so doing, these characters tend to take up most of the frames and even the space in his comics pages. This focus leads him to address the tension between people living their lives and the symbols that are imminently present for them. In one moment from Delhi Calm, Ghosh represents this tension by placing the symbols of political leaders side-by-side with the central characters of the story who are debating how to take political action and whether any real difference can be made (Image 7-

3). In the upper right of that page, Ghosh illustrates the division between one character and his hope to reach out to others by cutting the panel up, separating him from his hope. At the same time, his suggestion that he and the other characters “Stir up the masses, share our stories…” crosses that divide, showing that the tension between reality and ideal may potentially be healed in taking such actions.

In part, this relies on preexisting artistic traditions, especially kalighat painting. This precedent likely also plays a role in Ghosh’s tendency, like Sen, to compose full or splash page moments where a single character or event becomes the focus for an entire page (Image 7-4).

These pages recall kalighat paintings in their structure, but also point to the changing functions of visual narratives in Indian culture. In fact, the splash pages of corrupt political figures further serve to remind the reader of the role of narratives in defining history, especially in the case of

Delhi Calm. Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 202

Throughout other narratives, Ghosh employs a similar style that incorporates a questioning attitude to narrative into the structure of his storytelling. Accordingly, his tone lends itself well to his narrative work of elucidating social problems and starting conversations about them. Such a critical perspective also guides this chapter in analyzing how comics as storytelling can be made to address social injustice. In the process, it becomes clear that comics as storytelling stills holds the dangers of the Amar Chitra Katha series to inculcate cultural values in framing life in a certain way. Yet, Ghosh and the members of the Pao Collective are able to counter this danger through a reliance on lived experience and the communities for and with whom they create. By joining comics to storytelling, creators in Delhi are able to transform their work by adapting to their readers lives. As a result, they often feel a need to address the social issues that people, often silently, live with. This chapter examines how authors and artists work to address social injustice by imbuing their readers with a strong sense of their power, not just as consumers of texts or even textual poachers, but as members, citizens, and potentially activists in their own communities.

Storytelling for Communities

As demonstrated in Chapter 4, creators rely upon readers’ awareness of and shared approach to certain kinds of texts, namely comics and visual reading practices, as the foundation for community and culture. In this context, then, Indian creators have connected comics narratives to a shared visual culture with their readers based upon previous models of being a reader or audience member. This relates to Henry Jenkins’ notion of convergence culture as “an ongoing process or series of intersections between different media systems, not a fixed relationship” in terms of “technological, industrial, culture, and social changes in the ways media circulates Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 203 without culture” (Jenkins 2006: 282). Due to the diversity of languages and cultures in India, creators rely upon shared reading techniques, often in addition to actual involvement or membership in reading communities. Creators rely upon the overlaps between communities, media, and cultural groups and knowledge in order to relate to their readers.

For readers, this requires a casual attitude toward the mixing and matching of any given narrative and the media, story, folk art, or other aspects of cultural background that are referenced in its telling. Jenkins terms this kind of practice textual poaching, “…the borrowing and inflecting [of] raw materials of mass media to make meaning and articulate what is un- voiced” (1992: 23). In articulating the implied meanings, readers are able to craft their own network of meanings and even of community. Similarly, Jenkins notes that each fan culture holds the power to re-narrate the texts that define themselves through the ability to reframe meanings within the broader, multi-textual context (1992).As already noted, the members of the

Pao Collective tend to include their work within the larger frame of storytelling; in so doing, they are able to reframe their work as an artisanal act of production, rather than a commodified one determined by industrial forces.

Through a grounding in everyday life and shared culture, comics creators as fans themselves have carried the practice of poaching over from traditional, oral storytelling. For traditional storytellers, the multiplicity of interconnected stories and tale variants allowed for adaptation to different audiences, events, and even communities. As a form of communication, changing repertoires or simply details within stories supported the teller’s ability to adapt to the needs of each performance and its audience, increasing the likelihood and productive potential of interaction.ii Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 204

Greater interaction and even fieldwork is part of the overall shift toward storytelling for many comics creators. When asked what is unique or interesting about India’s textual and visual culture, Vishwajyoti Ghosh responded that “I think all of Indian visual culture is a narrative culture. Across regions, people have used indigenous styles to tell a story, whether it’s painting, dance, religious depictions. They are eventually telling you a story, whether miniatures, patachitra scroll paintings with their narrators, or bahari paintings or tribals with realistic figures.” Just as, when asked how to evaluate a comics narrative or storyteller, Ghosh emphasized the importance of story, he again places the greatest weight on stories. Even in daily life, storytelling is central. “Daily life with a man under a tree collecting local beer, a woman at the fields doing straw and chickens, someone spraying a field, they all document, they all create story. Whether a king in a miniature with courtesans. The entire Indian paradigm is storytelling.”

For Ghosh and creators who focus on storytelling, comics represents one manifestation of a practice of linking scene to scene or idea to idea in a narrative structure, through which people communicate, find meaning in life, and connect others to that meaning. In the process, they are able to justify comics as yet another medium for that practice.

By focusing on stories rather than the particular medium, creators like Ghosh are able to move beyond differences between particular artistic traditions and focus on a shared body of intertextual knowledge. Readers can then use that shared knowledge and preexisting understanding of story flow or structure to fill in the gaps between different scenes, or even different versions of the same story.iii Through references to existing stories or traditions of image-making, creators are able to directly engage with would-be passive listeners. For many contemporary authors and artists, they do this work by appealing to everyday life for their readers. As a result, readers’ lived experience becomes not just relateable or interesting, but a Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 205 means to create a community. Ghosh pointed out that, “A lot of storytelling involves folklore tendencies, to get into stories in a more once-upon-a-time mode. It’s a seductive trap, but not in a negative way. It makes the story more intensive and participatory.” Framing comics as storytelling makes it more approachable for readers, who are used to adapting and reacting to stories as part of their workaday lives.

In revealing the connections between comics creation and traditional storytelling, he points out that a folkloric style of telling is useful. Specifically, it causes people reading one’s work to consider the comics narrative as active participants themselves in deciphering its meaning. Comics creators like Ghosh thus work to engage with audiences in a way that recalls traditional and even sacred storytelling and image-text relationships.

The Power to Support Creativity

For many comics creators outside of the Pao Collective, though, social issues are not always central. Instead, creating a comics mainstream industry modeled on those of the United States,

Japan, or France is the goal. They tend to feel that, in constructing a vibrant industry, creators will be able to reach out to comics fans who already exist and thus perpetuate a culture that will support their creativity. Much of this attitude in India results from the predominance of international media conglomerates and their publishing of comics series based out of Delhi or other major cities. At the same time, these companies, their creators, and fans are also drawing on the model set by Anant Pai and the ACK series, which similarly focused on a corporate model of creativity and on developing a national readership for comics.

The Pao Collective also relies on awareness of international comics culture; indeed, their familiarity with independent comics in other cultures undergirds their efforts to create comics Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 206 through an auteur or artisanal model of production. Similarly, each of the members of Pao pointed to international figures in comics as some of their favorite authors and sources of inspiration. Vishwajyoti Ghosh notes some of this enthusiasm for the international context for comics, pointing out that “In Delhi, French new wave comics artists have been a huge influence.

I met a few in Paris and checked out their work. So the French comics scene is an influence.

Unlike mainstream comics, French and Belgian comics have innovation. It’s not the Marvel

Comics model. Still, Belgian comics are all commercial and French comics are all artsy and new wave. The commercial industry is still getting into the nonmainstream comics globally…[but]

India has moved ahead of that step because mainstream publishers did nonmainstream comics first, like Penguin. The nonmainstream is still catching up.” In India, with publishing starting with the graphic novel form and creators who are both writers and artists, the independent publishing world has yet to catch up to larger book publishers, while there is no large-scale, mainstream comics industry. As a result, catching up to other country’s models has been a primary concern for many on the Indian comics scene in recent years.

Most importantly, Virgin Comics was founded in 2005 by British media mogul Richard

Branson as an extension of the multinational Virgin Group, alongside best-selling self-help writer Deepak Chopra, his son Gotham Chopra, filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, and other entrepreneurs (Thielman 2008). The goal was to create comics based on narratives from Asian culture as a means to develop profitable film, television, video game, and other projects, with the help of various celebrity collaborators, from Nicolas Cage to Grant Morrison (Brady 2008).iv

Fans and business types alike proclaimed their excitement in various online articles, but by 2008,

Virgin had closed their New York office and rebooted several titles due to poor publication numbers. Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 207

At that point, the Chopras and Kapur performed a management buyout and remade

Virgin as Liquid Comics, with a plan to move the company headquarters to Los Angeles and focus on digital publishing (Bhushan 2008). Yet, the goal remained the same: “Liquid is a digital entertainment company focused on creating cinematic and mythic graphic novel stories with filmmakers and creators, and storytellers. The company…uses the medium of digital graphic novel publishing to develop properties for theatrical, live-action films, animation, and videogames” (Liquid 2012). While Virgin/Liquid has been one of the more widely circulated comics companies in recent years, the company itself is oriented around comics only as a means to making films and other, seemingly more profitable, narratives. Accordingly, unlike the Pao

Collective, the intention was more to celebrate the work of an individual company producing comics in Asia than to connect communities or even establish an Indian comics industry.

However, Liquid provides an important precedent for international collaboration between creators and for the potential future of a comics industry in Indian culture. In particular, Liquid provided a precedent for other publishers with a desire to tap into the growing popularity of comics internationally. For instance, Campfire Comics was founded in 2008 “…to entertain and educate young minds by creating unique illustrated books…” (Campfire 2012). In the process of pursuing these goals, though, Campfire has based much of their work on Western literature, employed both local and internationally-based creators, and focused entirely on the graphic novel over other, more regularly distributed comics forms. Although the creation of all content is done by a team of in-house artists and authors in India, neither creators nor a strong grounding in

Indian culture are essential to their mission (Reid 2011). Accordingly, they have been criticized for failing to support the comics community in India, by simultaneously outsourcing jobs to Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 208 international creators and pushing for an understanding of comics as a form of literature that is targeted at children.

Mainstream style comics need not be so distant from Banerjee and others’ work in establishing the importance of context and creators. Thus, in August 2011, Level 10

Entertainment was started out of Mumbai as a comic book publishing company for teen and adult audiences, with the flagship Comic JUMP. This monthly collection of comics was clearly and strongly situated in Indian culture. As one of the founders, Shreyas Srinivas states, “‘Level

10 Comics is a comic publishing company focused on creating world-class, indigenous comic book content’” (Adusumilli 2011). For Srinivas and the founders of Comic JUMP, this meant working to publish the best possible graphic storytelling from Indian creators.v

At the same time, Comix.India’s Bharath Murthy has led a focus on the creation of a space for young and old comics creators to come together and have their work published side by side. The 5 volumes that Comix.India has published on demand have attempted to do just this through an independent, black and white comics anthology inspired by Japanese comics culture.

Each creator lives in India, often in Mumbai, and the intention is less to profit from the anthology than to establish a comics industry or, at the very least, community, where creators can come together and exchange their work.

By and large, most creators with whom I spoke felt that Indian comcs was just growing into its own in 2010 and would hopefully be centered in the future around storytelling and local communities more than pre-existing models for comics production or a mainstream publishing industry. Through the efforts of the Pao Collective, other creators, and even some publishing companies, comics culture in India has built upon rather than repeat the history of comics dominated by Amar Chitra Katha. As Ghosh points out, “India is in its nascent stage. The Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 209 euphoria will go down. People will look for content, not for childlike romance. Look at the art; it’s going down already.” In the process of focusing more on mastering the form and building community, they are able to broaden the horizons of storytelling in the form, such that socially engaged narratives become possible.

A Tradition of Individual Invention

Still, appealing to folk culture can be dangerous without connections to creative and other communities. In particular, for Ghosh, the long traditions of folk art or traditional storytelling may overwhelm a creator’s voice and individual style. He thus worries that, “As the very famous playwright, G.P. Panday said, ‘There’s something very seductive about folk art.’ That’s exactly the problem for those of us using these styles: whatever, patachitra, Mughal painting, Gond.

Because these styles have been so strong, and they are so immersed, and they are so placed in our collective memory. They can overwhelm the narrative.” Even as the shared knowledge and familiarity of folk culture makes stories more approachable and readers more engage-able, the weight of tradition has the potential to distract from the telling.

As many folklorists have pointed out, the individual taking on a relationship with a tradition must balance individual invention or creativity with the much larger continuity of the tradition. Otherwise, the act of creativity would be impossible, and the tradition itself could not grow through it. Ghosh is especially concerned because creators often lack experience with the traditions they take on. As he explains, “An English-reading, middle-class crowd has seen folk art in a museum, or in a coffee table book, or in an exotic postcard. Our interaction with these artists has been nil, absolutely nil. Even if it has not, it is because we have been in a NGO, because we have been working for a cause or something. So it’s coming from a position of Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 210 strength and power.” Without experience with the tradition at hand or at least a friendship with a creator in that tradition, an artist will not be able to approach creativity on the same level.

Instead, he or she will remain an outsider, without a clear sense of how to use the medium or craft community through it.

Yet, it is just this concern about yielding to class barriers or even maintaining social injustice that leads to a greater concern with social obligation. Historically, this issue results in large part from the overall marketing of Indian works to Western markets. Vishwajyoti Ghosh noted in one of our conversations that “The problem is that what created the market for these books in India is the Western market. So folk art really sells.” While distance between reader and creator becomes greater, local or regional art takes on a novel quality, much as comics as a medium has taken on a similar quality through the popularity of the graphic novel. Not only do such works feel unique and potentially even ‘fresh,’ but they also appeal to many creators and

Indian readers who argue for a unique, Indian comics tradition.vi

Such a perspective, though, tends to be grounded in an overemphasis on the image and a romanticization of folk art. Ghosh describes this problem: “It’s so seductive that one tends to forget the reasons for creating art…There’s a romanticism around folk art, where authors think that folk art will just work. They think it will work very well with modern subjects because it’s kitschy. But it depends on what the narrative is.” In order to sincerely tell good stories, creators thus must maintain social connections and their obligations, both to reaching the goals of each story-telling and to their readers.

As emphasized by Orijit Sen in the discussion of creative process in Chapter 6, every part of a good story should work together to tell it. Elements should not be added without contributing to the whole, and, as Ghosh points out, style cannot be chosen at random. “The Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 211 reader can’t get over being very fixated with the exotic in visual literature, rather than getting through it with the story. That’s the problem. It’s the story that should turn the page, and not the drawing alone.” When stories are based on an uninformed appeal to folk culture or art, references no longer contribute to the telling of the story. They distract from the narrative at hand and pull the audience’s attention to the captivating nature of an unfamiliar image-making tradition. Instead of approaching such choices carelessly, creators need to focus on their own artistic style, particularly, as Ghosh pointed out, style and story are one and the same. In order to participate in any tradition, whether folk or comics, an individual creator needs to maintain a clear sense of his or her personal creativity. In the case of comics in India, this becomes an especially salient point when working to address social problems, given a historical tendency for stories with an agenda to be limited by political bias.

The Power to Educate and Inculcate

As demonstrated in Chapter 2, for much of the history of Indian comics, creators have been forced into an educational framework when addressing real life and social problems. Due to a systemic division of entertainment and education, this kind of narratives have focused on the use-value of comics in pushing children to encounter historical and otherwise educational content in a fun format. The most significant precedent for comics on social awareness remains the Amar Chitra Katha series. Anant Pai in particular was able to accomplish a great deal through his work with ACK. Vishwajyoti Ghosh states that “You might have a problem with the drawings, the representation of Amar Chitra Katha, but you cannot say they are devoid of tradition.” Even though much recent criticism has pointed out the damage of these comics, they remain one of the strongest examples for engaging storytelling with a message. Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 212

Above all, Anant Pai was able to argue for comics as a social narrative, art form. He focused this argument on the intentionality of creating educational comics narratives; he noted that comics should be produced “with the child in mind” (1995:111). The audience is an essential part of writing, drawing, or otherwise creating stories in this medium. The problem with Pai’s approach, however, is his focusing on one particular audience as defining and limiting the comics medium in India. As he notes, “In any case, chitra katha can be most profitably utilized to inculcate reading habits among children” (Pai 1995:112). In so doing, though, Pai frames

Indian comics as not comics at all, but rather as chitra katha, or picture stories.

While helpful in the case of the Amar Chitra Katha series, such an approach ignores the actual history and possibilities for the form by limiting it to a children’s medium. Furthermore,

Pai turns the comics medium upon its almost sinister ability to ‘inculcate cultural values,’ particularly when he writes that “[Chitra kathas] could be an extremely interesting way of introducing children to the world of words” (1995:110). Pai focuses entirely on a strong and attention-grabbing power to educate, ignoring the medium’s ability to communicate, to illustrate, and to tell multiple versions of a story simultaneously.vii However, his intention is to show how

Amar Chitra Katha exceeds all others as a comics series. Pai thus concludes, “[T]he fact remains that such a massive publishing programme as that undertaken in the Amar Chitra Katha series on historical titles is unparalleled and it must be remembered, much of this was achieved in spite of the prejudices against comics” (1995:114). His rhetoric clearly shows his intention to argue for

ACK’s comics as doubly exceptional, as both chitra kathas and as surpassing other series at the time. The model for Amar Chitra Katha, however, seems less one for social engagement or the building up of comics culture, and more one for the promotion of educational comics in India. Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 213

As a model for social responsibility or community, Pai persistently shows disrespect for other publishers or alternative models of comics creation. In historicizing the comics medium in

India in the aforementioned piece, he skips over much of the history that came before ACK, as the series represents the unique chitra kathas. Pai also notes that those who have attempted to imitate ACK’s success have consistently failed, again demonstrating the uniqueness of his particular approach. Furthermore, comics producers with alternative models, despite any kind of success, cannot live up to Uncle Pai and his company. Accordingly, he notes that the major publisher Diamond Comics, as a representative of newer publishers with a focus on adventure stories, “even their publishers have admitted, are nowhere near Amar Chitra Katha in quality or content” (Pai: 109). However, he does draw out their contribution as introducing certain commercial practices, namely flooding the market with 10 titles a month, aggressive salesmanship, and innovative promotions.

In response to this history, though, Pai concludes that a comics code authority should be instilled in India to eliminate the stumbling block to educational comics. Unlike contemporary creators who are interested in adapting the comics medium to lived experience, Pai and ACK were dedicated to educational stories for a national readership of youth. Yet, as is now clear in the case of previous comics codes, particularly in the United States and Britain, such a model of censorship would likely stifle India’s comics culture and merely feed into existing biases for the foreseeable future.viii Though grounded in ACK’s stories, contemporary creators are much more interested in relating to communities and in promoting comics as a versatile medium capable of addressing multiple audiences and topics, even social injustice.

Overcoming Difference Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 214

As Amar Chitra Katha became accepted by educational scholars, teachers, and school systems, non-governmental organizations and many others were inspired by their work. Even Orijit Sen notes that educational comics were a significant development for comics in India. He points out that, although Belgian comics master Hergé’s Tintin series was one of the most important comics in India, “…once people became aware of comics’ techniques, they realized they could use the same language to understand [social problems like] female infanticide.” Once it became clear that the medium was more than any one model of creativity, a variety of groups stepped forward to take advantage of its versatility as communication.

ACK and other educational comics thus often served as the proverbial gateway drug for many comics fans and creators. Upon sharing ACK issues with their friends, many readers broadened their experiences of comics and soon found themselves avid fans of the medium. As

Ghosh describes his own first experiences with comics, “In childhood, I was in classes when comics in India arrived. For one rupee, 75 pesa, everyone could read comics. My mother is

Bengali, so my first comic was a Rabindranath Tagore comic book biography. It was the start to my journey. I moved on with Mandrake and Phantom. Tintin came much later in my life.” The educational comics came first for many creators like Ghosh, and they stuck around for the very reason that other kinds of comics were censored or removed by adults. Ghosh tells of his own experiences with such a bias against the medium. “[Comics] were banned because people feared that kids would lose their reading ability and passion. So you read it under the table. If you got caught, it was never returned. But it was the euphoria of being a rebel, of reading a comic, of watching pictures.” As Ghosh notes, comics is a powerful medium both because they are new, and became the combination of image, text, and their overlap is especially suited to drawing readers into stories. Furthermore, unlike text books and even literature, the act of reading comics Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 215 was rebellious during the period when ACK rose to prominence because they were perceived as a medium for pulp storytelling. These narratives were thus perceived as less authoritative than educational works, and, as a result of their ability to draw readers in, comics were increasingly recognized as capable of communicating effectively, especially with younger readers.

Members of the Pao Collective draw on this reputation for comics as a medium that is enjoyable and not limited by the constraints of more official media, like art or literature. In particular, creators are able to make talking about social problems feel fun. In his case, Ghosh works with raising awareness of sexually transmitted diseases among street kids using comics.

Their similarity to popular, visual narratives makes it easier for his targeted readers to engage with them, through common reading practices, and, in the process, education feels less like schoolwork and more like participating in a story being told. It is thus easier to communicate through storytelling, so long as the stories engage with the children’s experiences. Accordingly, with his design house, Inverted Commas, Ghosh has created comics for street boys in four cities in India, and, during the creative process, received input from them. As he describes this process,

“After interviews with them, their lifestyle, their media habits, their stories, we did more drawings, created narratives. We showed it to them. They said, ‘No, I don’t like the boy. Change him. He’s not as good-looking as me.” Such feedback is important in solidifying the relationship between Ghosh and his readers, so that these comics make sense to them and increase their awareness of social problems. For a story to resonate, the problem has to feel like it’s a part of his audience’s everyday life.

The ability to communicate about social problems through visual storytelling depends upon this connection, one that creators form in a variety of ways. Like any story, one of the most important elements is credible and relate-able characters that are also interesting. As Ghosh Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 216 stated to me, “Whether it’s not to go beating my wife, or, you know, building a sanitary latrine at home, getting safe drinking water, potable drinking water, storing water well, cutting fruits and vegetables, whatever it is. I mean, it should be accepted. And that is the role of the character; it has to get into your home.” In order to craft such realistic and compelling characters, creators have to relate to Sen’s aforementioned quality of ‘a sense of life’ in the narrative, and more importantly, in the characters who move through it. Without the anchor of credible characters, readers may lose interest or be offended by the way that their community is represented.

Creators draw on the connections between visual, especially folk culture in India and the comics medium to forge similar connections between social injustice and those most affected by them. They use a visual language that echoes other forms, compositions related to more familiar ones, or characters based on their own, lived experiences. By relating to communities on their own terms, it is easier to start conversations that might otherwise seem one-sided. In the process, as in Ghosh’s work on the issue of HIV/AIDS, creators are able to provide a means of redress and sometimes a voice for those communities. “So, we did a lot of rounds and then we came up with these narratives, which were basically meant for communication on HIV/AIDS. Because they have no point of redress. Women have. Children have. Families have. But these boys, who are urchins, and delinquents, and relatives, they have nothing, nowhere to go. So we did these pieces for them.” By addressing and involving a group who has not been recognized by the larger public as particularly at risk, Ghosh and Inverted Commas are able to ‘speak in their own language’ and educate these boys in order to avoid risking infection in the first place. Comics thus has the potential not just to educated young reader, but to inform them about social problems and provide a space for those who are not valued by society. Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 217

However, such a commitment requires reaching across social, especially class, differences between creators, fans, and members of communities affected by social injustice who may identify as either or both. For many creators, though, the intertextual approach to comics provides a potential resolution for the problem of crafting stories across social divides. Most creators admit that they write in English in order to target English-speaking members of the upper and middle classes who can afford to pay for graphic novels, whose paper and ink quality often requires an expensive cover price. Although many authors turn to translation to reach a wider audience, most rely upon the sales of English-language copies. Yet the visual element of the comics art form and desktop publishing both have the potential to allow a greater reach, albeit if narratives are able to reach lower class and other audiences in the first place. As Ghosh notes in discussing the place of comics in India: “Because of literacy rates, all our – our aversion to read, all our so-called pace, or lack of time to read, makes it an interesting space to use comics for a lot of other issues where serious issues need to be told, yet in the most interesting manner.”

Creators turn to other media and means of reaching wider swathes of the population, from newspaper cartoon supplements to comics for street kids and lowering cover prices with inferior printing. Creators are thus able to address complex social issues alongside peoples’ everyday life, drawing connections in a visual and familiar way that a broad audience of readers can understand and relate to.

The Power to Unite and Divide

From ACK’s use of regional variants on folk tales and histories, to Tinkle’s publication of fan submissions, folk culture has provided a foundation for many comics publishers in the past. Yet, the Pao Collective offers a different model of incorporation that values social relevance and even Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 218 obligation over profit margins. The goal is less to sell comics and more to be a member of communities.

In particular, creators like Ghosh have incorporated references to folk culture in both form and content in order to unite readers. Such appeals to preexisting practices and their traditions reveal a larger assumption of the importance of the intricacies of everyday life.

Accordingly, in terms of storytelling, he states that “Everything involves and is influenced by everything else. If a bus conductor talks about getting goons out of his bus, he’s thinking that he’s like a Hindi film hero. He’s borrowing that narrative.” He points out the work people do every day as textual poachers to make sense of their own actions and lives.

Ghosh then notes the importance of referencing that complex interlacing of peoples’ wide variety of experiences. He continues, “I tried to do [show people thinking of film narratives] in

Delhi Calm, when [the main character] becomes Amitabh Bacchan. That’s directly influenced by the way men tell stories.” Ghosh thus reveals the reason for an appeal to everyday life: to capture, in Orijit Sen’s words, ‘a sense of life.’ In other cases, he references particular artistic traditions, as in the case of stylized eyes in his work that remind viewers of the kalighat folk painting style. In “RSVP,” he even explicitly plays upon this reference, telling the story of an artist attempting to find funding for storytelling performances in Delhi in a style inspired by kalighat (Image 7-5).ix References to multiple narrative reading practices and to peoples’ lived experiences simultaneously draw readers in and make content more relate-able.

Valuing that complexity and relatedness to peoples’ experiences can cause trouble for creators though, if done hastily. In particular, certain choices can fracture the relationship between audience members and creators. As Ghosh pointed out early in this chapter, for him, storytelling is largely a matter of style, both in terms of how one relates to lived reality and in Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 219 terms of overall quality. He expands by pointing out Bhimayana as a particularly clear example of when style and execution have the potential to conflict. In particular, at the start of the project,

S. Anand and Srividya Natarajan pushed the Vyams to tell their story in a style that did not relate to the subject of Ambedkar’s background or to the artists’ creative backgrounds. Ghosh states,

“They were doing the making of the Ambedkar comic, and how the creators went to tribal artists, asking if they wanted to do it in manga style. But they put their foot down, and refused to learn from manga. But they would teach the world their own style and create a unique story.” The

Gond painters were pressed to apply a completely different artistic tradition that conflicted with their artistic training and even the story at hand. Agreeing to these terms would have meant turning away from their personal connections to the story to be told and the community to be addressed, as well as their own backgrounds.

In this case, the initial choice to create a manga-style story was likely based on marketing rather than the creators’ abilities or belonging to a particular tradition. Yet, as artists, they could not slip into a different art style on the whim of an editor, collaborator, or even the market.

Ghosh continues, “Culture is so huge, that you don’t need to borrow from any other style and create kitsch. One can always learn from different styles, but eventually, it’s your own style that will pull you through.” In this case, Ghosh demonstrates the artisanal attitude that he and the Pao

Collective express and support. This approach to creativity requires a respect for individual style and authorial voice in the form of the creator’s choosing. In his own work, Ghosh demonstrates how creators can pull together different artistic styles for individual stories, albeit only with a clear intention to tell excellent, relate-able stories.

Reaching Out Through Story Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 220

Accordingly, Ghosh, the Pao Collective, and other creators have served as a model for new creators by approaching comics production through an artisanal model of creativity. Soon after

Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor in 2004, a new generation of creators would come of age, steeped in the previous decades of comics but with a stronger sense of the importance of creativity and experimentation. In part, this emphasis on independent authorship is a result of a tendency in publishing not only to focus on profits but also to associate comics with children for profit’s sake. As Kumar argues, “But [the notion that comics is for children] is also the problem in India in this upward wave that we are a part of right now, when there’s heavy money being spent.

What I mean by saying that people take comic-making as a very safe thing to do, is that they’re still targeting children. So they’re illustrating classics. They’re illustrating traditional narratives and folktales and stuff. The school for being edgy or perverse or anything but correct is completely taken away.” Kumar points out a tendency to be ‘safe,’ or perhaps more obviously, to draw too much upon the precedent for mainstream comics culture in India, rather than working towards innovation or excellent storytelling. In the face of a history often rooted in children’s stories and media conglomerates, an model of creativity that values the skills of creators counters this association by portraying them as artisan-like specialists who should be valued for their mastery of the medium (Smith 2012).x

In doing so, creators must reconcile the overlap between participation in and consumption of comics culture. Although consumption of ACK’s nationalist narratives assumed and enacted conservative Hindu culture, questioning these images led readers to engage with and deride this nationalist bias and the relationship between texts and readers (McLain 2009). As fans themselves and with an awareness of common reading practices, creators have carried over Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 221 a performative model of reading from traditional storytelling that relied on multiple versions of stories.

To that end, Cornel Sandvoss describes a model of fan practice as performance, where individuals perform their relationship with larger systems through their consumption and production of particular fan texts. Sandvoss’ model describes how these practices “…provide the symbolic ground on which individuals recognize themselves in the signs and symbols of fan objects as they may previously have done predominantly within the territorial locus of their everyday life” (2005:158). The evocation of everyday life becomes even more powerful when recognized as a means to ground comics texts, their readers, and creators. In particular, when attempting to address social issues, creators can draw on the precedent of lived experience and the performance of social obligation or activism. In the case of Indian comics, creators can be understood as using the raw materials of comics and their own common visual and narrative culture to create a compelling medium.

Since crafting a compelling story, as demonstrated in Chapter 4, requires a basis in everyday life and local communities, this ‘psychological process’ of creating one’s self and community requires that it be a work in progress. Creativity, then, must reflect change. However, as Sandvoss points out, a basis in preexisting practices may lead to a grounding of individual and communal identity in a mere reflection of what came before. In particular, he focuses on individual process in his discussion of fandom as Heimat, or home-like,

[t]he particular emotional quality of fan texts in offering familiarity and security arises out of a reading of the object of fandom in which the fan’s horizon of expectations is met and blanks are self-reflectively filled by the fan. Hence, engagement with the object of fandom constitutes an interaction with fan’s own vision of self, rather than any new form of experience (Sandvoss 2005:158-159).”

Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 222

Textual poaching can lead to a kind of solipsism, something reflected in the many imitations of the Amar Chitra Katha series and other nations’ comics cultures.xi In this case, visual narratives from the past provide a model for interactive and intertextual reception that can affirm rather than question the cultural context for fan texts, especially the relationship between individual and community. Addressing social obligation, then, can become lost or misinterpreted as fulfilling individual needs alone.

The main way this can happen for fan-creators is in the inefficiencies of the production process and the intricacies of personal style. Every member of the Pao Collective points out that crafting narratives in comics is not easy, but that it is simultaneously worth it, whether because of the form’s unique abilities or because they feel an ownership for it. When asked whether there is something uniquely appealing about creating in the comics form, Ghosh began by describing this problem. “They are a lot of work. That’s a problem. It’s a bitch. I don’t think it’s the fun part. If you have got to tell a story, you have got to tell a story. I’m drawing the pictures because the narrative demands it, and it is part of the narrative that I am trying to do.” Creators like

Ghosh choose this medium because the narrative in their mind demands it, as well as the standards they share with the community of creators with whom they share connections and networks. By reminding themselves of their obligation to the story and, through it, to the community of creators, readers, and those portrayed, the creators of the Pao Collective are able to overcome the inward turn of making and consuming narratives.

Instead, creators like Ghosh emphasize the importance of excellence in the story and even of the medium over the individual creator as artisan. Ghosh thus notes a sense of creative ownership for the form inspired by enjoyment. He stated to me that “Of course one is having fun, that’s why one is doing it, but it’s beyond that for a graphic novelist. If you’re doing it, it’s to tell Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 223 a story in that style, in the drawing, in that medium, in those clear words, through that character, everything. A whole lot of things come together. You don’t do it just because it’s fun but because you want to tell a story in a particular way using that particular medium.” Ghosh outlines the problems of creating comics and notes that making comic books and graphic novels is not about simply about the fun of creating and reading comics, although creators do enjoy their work. Instead, he explains that it takes a great deal of time and commitment to create excellent stories in a given context. In this case, the stories of the Pao collective work toward ‘a sense of life’ like that described by Sen in order to build representations of lived experience. As a result, creators incorporate the social issues encountered there.

The Power to Tell Stories Responsibly

Even before the Pao Collective, though, several Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and socially-oriented publishers took up comics as a vibrant medium for communicating about issues of injustice. They specifically tailored comics narratives to appeal to less literate communities through the combination of image and text. From the Vivalok Comics series, which developed out of the Viveka Foundation, to World Comics India, a subsidiary of Swedish World Comics

International, these publishers oriented their comics toward activism and heightening social awareness.

Vivalok, in particular, pushed for the combination of social justice, comics, and folklore by highlighting the overlap of these three fields in contemporary Indian culture. They published anthologies from approximately 2002 to 2004 with stories specific to particular regions of India, from The Sundarbans to Madhya Pradesh as a means to make readers aware of the cultural diversity within India. Meanwhile, World Comics India (WCI) has focused more upon the use of the comics medium by local people to heighten awareness of problems within their own Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 224 communities. Thus, rather than publishing their own comics, WCI holds seminars throughout

India where people, usually of lower classes, can learn to tell stories through a series of images, with a focus on social issues. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, NGOs have been able to take advantage of the comics medium for its ability to reach and unite readers in communicating and educating about social problems.

Primarily, these NGOs have build upon the structures for comics aimed at raising social awareness that were developed by Anant Pai and the Amar Chitra Katha series. Through recognition of fan criticism and the ability to re-narrate common texts, Pai and ACK established the importance of fan audiences in the production of comics. For instance, after publishing the first issue on Krishna, Pai received a large backlash because he had not included several miraculous moments in the Krishna story. As an author himself, Pai had cut these moments because they contradicted his personal belief in the secular presence of Hindu deities, whose miraculous feats would distance them from daily life in India. However, an influx of reader feedback eventually caused him to revise the story some years later, as he recognized the importance of relating to readers (Desai 2003). Pai realized the power that he would have to draw upon as many variants of each narrative’s basis in order to satisfy as many readers as possible. Thus, later ACK comics include details from multiple versions of each story, including ancient texts, devotional art work, movies, TV shows, and even other comics (McLain 2009).

This reaction also set a precedent for audience involvement in comics culture; ACK and

Anant Pai had thus established a fan culture that yearned for different stories, especially the representation of local historical and religions figures.xii As multiple authors have noted, Pai deemed many religious and public figures or stories ill-suited to the ACK series, an act that alienated many audience members who otherwise identified with their stories. Yet, Pai and other Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 225 editors’ receptiveness made it necessary for creators to relate more directly to their readers at the same time that leaving out stories led other creators to either join the company to change it or to create their own.

In particular, Vivalok Comics and World Culture India has attempted to use comics mediations of folktales as efforts towards social justice. Rather than silencing local diversity and storytelling, Vivalok Comics has attempted to put creative power in the hands of local experts and artists. Further, these comics attempt to represent the many other stories circulating in India, especially those not recognized by official discourse, as in that of ACK. Vivalok comics in particular is dedicated to educating youth on the diversity of cultures within the seemingly monolithic India and voicing local perspectives that would otherwise be silenced. As stated in their Mission Statement, “[d]elving deep into the wisdom of Indian folklore, the young readers can better understand the multiplicity of human experience. [Comics] help them question a monolithic view of our historical and cultural past” (Vivalok 2009: 6). By questioning nationalist histories of India, Vivalok hopes to provide a stronger sense of the relationship between the multiple local communities within that larger national context. Vivalok’s comics both support more engaged and critical readers and push that readership to become more active in the relationship between local and national communities.

Similarly, NGOs like World Comics India have established programs to help impoverished or otherwise silenced communities find a voice through creating their own comics.

As demonstrated by Voices from the Field, a collection of comic strips created by local community members in several areas of India, WCI provides the opportunity for individuals to create comics attuned to local problems and thus find a voice to call for social justice (2004).xiii

Again, similar to Vivalok, WCI’s comics focus upon local iterations rather than blurring many Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 226 variants into one, monolithic narrative that presumably encompasses all difference. Unlike

Vivalok, though, World Comics India puts the creative knowledge, tools, skills, and power in the hands of members of local communities throughout India. Although the quality of these stories may be mixed, participants seem to gain a clear, if basic, understanding of how to use the medium to communicate about social problems, with single page stories on alcoholism, domestic abuse, and other topics.

Individual creators like Ghosh have also worked to address social problems, albeit mainly by communicating knowledge that would otherwise remain privileged information. This includes the obvious and important example of Orijit Sen’s work in various communities as part of government initiatives related to health and environmental problems. In addition, Parismita

Singh and collaborative team Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura, among others, have performed fieldwork and research as a basis for their comics narratives as a means to connect with other people and, in the latter case, with visual storytellers in traditional media. In the process, creators find inspiration but remain responsible to the communities they represent or creators whose experiences on which they draw.

However, Ghosh’s perspective is important because he, like Sen, has created comics that specifically work to help communities increase awareness of and address pressing issues. He views the difference between the work of individual creators and NGOs like World Comics India as one of intent. As Ghosh states, “World Comics teaches people to make their own comics.

Now, there are two aspects to developmental comics. One is learning storytelling and one is teaching the art itself. We [at Inverted Commas] do is we do very small workshops on teaching people how to make their own comics so that eventually they can articulate their own politics.

Right. But what we also do is use these comics to articulate peoples’ politics, but also our own Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 227 politics. I mean, we will talk about their narratives. But we will also tell them forward points, like your blood needs to be tested, which is no less important. World Comics just teaches you how to make comics. At the end of the three days, you know how to make comics. Now, whether that leads to change or not - is not the issue.” For Ghosh, in his work as Creative Director of

Inverted Commas, the agenda simply reaches farther than that of NGOs like World Comics

India. The goal is not just to collaborate in making comics, but to communicate about the problems at hand. Unlike WCI, Ghosh stresses the need to educate people about the injustices or problems they face so that they can begin to build a clear enough understanding to deal with them.

In addressing social issues, the members of the Pao Collective build upon the precedent of earlier NGO publishers, but appeal to critical and culturally aware readers in their visual narratives. From the perspective of individual creators like Ghosh, merely putting the tools of creation in peoples’ hands is thus not enough and will not inherently address social injustice, nor will telling local versions of traditional or popular narratives. Accordingly, in his 2010 long form comic, Delhi Calm, Vishwajyoti Ghosh pushes readers to question the reliability of history and the corruption of politics in illustrating a different version of historical events. Similarly, Sen’s stories in general give or appear alongside suggestions for actions that readers should take with their awareness and knowledge of social problems. These examples show how Sen, Ghosh, and other contemporary creators call on readers to take action by becoming more informed and aware of injustice. This approach builds upon an understanding of readers and creators as active participants in constructing a community and a future. The Pao Collective is thus remarkable for its dedication to community, particularly in performing fieldwork and receiving feedback directly from communities to be engaged or represented. Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 228

Socially Active Comics

Within this context, the combination of visual and narrative creates multiple and complex opportunities for engaging with social injustice. Specifically, by framing comics as storytelling and drawing on lived experiences, creators are able to, if not required to, address issues for communities in their narratives. Storytelling then becomes a means not only to create an emotional response in readers based upon a ‘sense of life,’ but also to instigate discussions of injustice and ways to address such problems. In the process, creators work to transform readers’ worldview and understanding of community and the problems at hand.

For many creators, comics as a medium does offer certain advantages, especially when taking on issues they personally care about or are affected by. Vishwajyoti Ghosh prefers to tell stories in this medium because of its greater flexibility as a hybrid of image and text. He describes this as a matter of making life easier for someone who is not the best writer or artist, but someone who does well with both combined. “Comics is a great marriage of skill in writing and drawing. It makes life easier, especially if you are not a great artist or writer. Comics gives you leeway to have fun with both, and the language of it gets created somewhere in the middle. I prefer a hybrid medium where you can do both.” He thus greatly appreciates the fundamental nature of the form that allows for the integration of multiple media and even literacies.xiv

Yet, Ghosh is critical of the current turn towards graphic novels in Indian comics culture.

He is especially doubtful of the sense of awe that many critics and authors feel for long-form comics narratives. “I think the new found naïve awe of the term ‘graphic novel’ will subside.

People will understand that it’s a genre [of comics] and nothing beyond that. For instance, I had a piece for a magazine that was two pages, and the term is graphic novel.” He describes this Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 229 over-enthusiasm as a “euphoria of sexiness” that clearly has problems, most importantly that the line between graphic novel and other subsets of comics narratives is nowhere clearly drawn.

Ghosh values comics as a medium of storytelling that is uniquely situated to his goals and skills as a storyteller.

Accordingly, the blending of media or literacies allows creators like Ghosh to do more with stories that are suited to the form. Instead of drawing a sharp difference between the comics’ genres or forms, Ghosh returns to the medium’s flexibility. In his view, comics is the overall field of storytelling, whereas a graphic novel is merely one particular type. “Many fellow graphic novelists say that there is no difference. But I still like to see a difference. Content makes graphic novels different. Comics is still mainstream-oriented content. The graphic novel is derivative of that working grammar but with different content. Maus is a graphic novel, but a manga is a comic. It’s a genre within comics, like the difference between a film and cinema, between literature and pulp. The grammar is the same, the working discipline is the same.”

Between the various genres, the form and structure of comics remains the same, such that more serious stories, like those that address social problems, are possible in any one of them. Ghosh thus draws the difference by highlighting comics inclusiveness as a medium, incorporating not just American comics, but also comics in other countries like Japan and stories that do not look like Western comic books or graphic novels. Within the medium, Ghosh delineates the social power of comics as being the ability to start conversations about problems or other issues in particular communities.

By filtering the power of the comics medium through an understanding of comics as storytelling, Ghosh is able to highlight the ability of these narratives to raise social awareness. In particular, with his design firm, Inverted Commas, he has worked on developmental comics Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 230 addressing many issues through the creation of dialogues within communities coping with injustice. The key quality for comics to become involved in social issues is to initiate dialogues about them across a variety of reading communities. Ghosh thus describes how stories lead to education through discussion through the example of visual narratives on cards that Inverted

Commas uses to help instigate difficult conversations. As he states, “We do a lot of these cards for women’s self-help groups, where we talk about domestic violence, both within the family and the community. Through these big picture narratives. They do not give it to every individual, but they do it in clusters, where someone steps up and reads out, then shows the pictures. They start a discussion around that narrative. Through that discussion, they get into a broader discussion.

So there again, we are using comics. So, comics as a medium of education is here to stay. And is going to be staying for a very long while because our literacy rates are not going anywhere really.” Rather than casting aside the educational comics heritage of ACK, Ghosh turns it into a catalyst for conversations through which communities are able to do much more. Instead of being given comics on specific topics as definitive narratives, he and Inverted Commas are able to use stories to help communities increase awareness of and address injustice. This ability to enter and facilitate communities is part of what Ghosh himself believes makes the medium so relevant today.

In addition to being a discussion-starter, comics as visual narratives are also perceived as cool and less formidable than other media. In this case, comics reputation as a popular, even vulgar, art opens up audiences and enables the medium to take on the hefty work of social issues without also taking on the overly serious connotations of other socially active media. Thus,

Vishwajyoti Ghosh continues, “Comics makes it a bit cooler for these people to acknowledge that, okay, there’s a problem and I need to know about it, or I need to read about it.” By Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 231 illustrating contemporary social problems in a medium associated with entertainment and children’s educational literature, Ghosh and other creators are more easily able to raise awareness of them. The comics medium thus provides an opportunity not only because of its ability to start discussion but also because it makes it cool to learn about social issues like

HIV/AIDS and environmental pollution. This ‘coolness’ results from the greater appeal of a visual form, which can speak across classes via references to the common viewing practices of folk culture.

Yet the more powerful element of the comics medium that pushes for social awareness in this context lies in the dedication of individual creators who adapt their work to particular communities, the people who live there, and the issues that they face every day. Accordingly, various members of the Pao Collective and other creators, both in New Delhi and elsewhere, take on fieldwork to enrich their creativity. While larger publishing companies, NGOs, and individual creators work to engage with actual members of their readerships, it is creators who value a grounding in living communities and their narratives over any emphasis on individual skill or specific works as exceptional. Such commitment demonstrates how creators like the members of the Pao Collective use the raw materials of the comics medium and their individual and cultural backgrounds to create socially relevant and visually compelling narratives.

Building Just Communities

In the process of crafting comics that address social problems, creators rely upon intertextual knowledge of folk and visual culture. Basing storytelling in such foundations allows creators to address social issues in an appealing medium and to relate to fans’ and other community members’ daily lives. Furthermore, creators are able to craft these visual narratives into a form of Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 232 public discourse that catalyzes community discussion and awareness of social problems. Such efforts demonstrate that the community is a work in progress. Comics creators and their work in

India hold the power to maintain peoples’ awareness of and, thus, involvement in this process. It is the creative commitment of individual creators to particular communities and social problems, as well as their tailoring of narratives to both, though, that grounds this involvement.

When asked about his future, comics master Vishwajyoti Ghosh was uncertain. “I don’t know what the future is for me. I’m working on a nonfiction piece right now, so let’s see where it goes from here. I still can’t say that this is the kind of graphic novel that I would like to do.

Because I keep changing my style each time. I used photo collages for my piece in [When

Kulbushan Met Stockli]. For Delhi Calm here I did watercolors. This one I did in black and white. Tomorrow I’ll do something else.” He points out his confusion when readers or other creators highlight one or another element of his work as representative of his style. This is because, as an artist, his style is never fully resolved but always changing and growing.

Ghosh is thus still in quest of his own authorial voice, and the graphic novel seems like the logical form of the comics medium in which to seek it. As he continues, “It’s a confusing compliment when people say that they know something is my style. I’m still looking for it, though readers seem to have found it for me. I could never figure it out. There is a particular line that I would like to see for now, but ask me in eight years.” It is this deep understanding of creativity that helps Ghosh to craft such compelling narratives while also confronting social problems. Through an understanding of creating long-form comics as storytelling, he and the rest of the Pao Collective are able to focus on their work as artisans capable of asking questions of communities and of themselves. Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 233

When asked about the future of comics in India, Ghosh was simultaneously negative and positive. He begins by pointing out that the boom in graphic novels already seems to be dissipating. “The euphoria has gone. Most reviews are on content or art, but it’s going to balance out. That’s what I’m saying. This is only going to get tougher for artists and writers to push the medium a bit more, as the medium gets more and more established. Within those five years it has had, India has done very well in comics. The reasons are many: people are constantly at it, the exposure is more, the number of times I can download a Joe Sacco is up. So let’s see where it goes from here. It should only improve, and sooner or later it will. It already has moved into the literary space, at least in India. We now have awards where graphic novels are accepted for nominations.” Based on the success of comics integration into the literary world in an international context, Ghosh sees the future for the entire medium in the literary world.xv Despite the other contexts for the work of comics creators like the Pao Collective, book publishers continue to be the main route to publication for authors and artists. However, creators like Ghosh pursue comics in a variety of story genres and forms, from graphic novels to political cartoons, short comics, and even the public narratives of Inverted Commas.

This chapter has revealed that graphic novels like Bhimayana: Experiences of

Untouchability draws upon the precedents that each of the members of the Pao Collective, among many others, have set for comics and graphic novels that engage with social issues. Yet, for Orijit Sen, in particular, storytelling requires more than the desire or will to address a particular social problem or history of injustice. Instead, and as he himself learned through his project on HIV/AIDS in Manipur, “storytelling is about creating another, alternative world.” The details of a landscape, characters, issues, and a narrative that relates to fans’ daily lives provide Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 234 the foundation. It is the connection that follows that helps creators and readers nourish awareness of, if not resolve, social injustice.

Sen ends River of Stories with a meeting between a representative of development and the bard who sings the song of creation, Malgu Gayan, under the Mahua tree. There, the former attempts to persuade the latter to come and ‘enjoy the fruits of development’ that the nation has sowed (Sen 1994). Yet, the bard responds through a riddle of sorts, out-witting the wealthier man to help the reader recognize that the benefits of development lie in the eye of the beholder; rather than suffering through national progress just to be content, the bard would rather stay as he is, contented with day-to-day life in a rural landscape. In this alternative world, the representative of tribal worldview puts that of the urban lifestyle to shame by demonstrating the ignorance of place and people necessary to destroy communities in order to make resources available to other ones. For the comics creators of the Pao Collective and much of the larger Delhi community, creating such an alternative world remains paramount in order to highlight social problems and point out the potential for readers to change their mind and, quite possibly, their world. Telling stories grounded in and for communities by representing a world that feels real because it is based on our own, via creators and others’ experiences remains most important. It is the comics creator who serves as mediator, through reliance upon a variety of experiences, knowledge of issues, and, fundamentally, creativity.

i See Chapter 2 for the history of comics in India and Chapter 3 for a definition of comics as a medium. ii See contextual studies of storytelling, specifically Richard Bauman, Story, Performance and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). iii This relationship between author and audience recalls Henry Jenkins’ notion of additive comprehension, which involves “the expansion of interpretive possibility that occurs when fictional franchises are extended across multiple texts and media” (2006:123). iv To that end, Virgin recruited a who’s who of celebrity collaborators, including Guy Ritchie, John Woo, Hugh Jackman, Edward Burns, Nicolas Cage, porn star Jenna Jameson, and Western comics creators, including Mike Carey, Garth Ennis, and Grant Morrison. Chapter 7: Crafting Social Awareness 235

v This is a striking commitment, given many creators’ concerns over the increasing difficulties of profitably publishing print media even in India, where there are less and less routes for direct, physical sales. vi This debate is most obvious in the work of comics creator Bharath Murthy, who questions whether there is any comics tradition in India at all. Although Murthy tends to come down on the negative side, most creators with whom I spoke disagreed outright. Ghosh himself questioned such a move, stating “How can he say we don’t have a tradition? It’s just that we haven’t used it for a while.” vii See the discussion of multivocality in Chapter 5. viii See Roger Sabin vivid description of the Comics Code in the United States (2001). ix Sen also uses different styles of representation for mythic and realistic moments in River of Stories, pencil for the former and ink for the latter, as well as recognizable, folk styles and mythic figures of various gods therein (1994). x However, this focus on the mastery of comics creators can also be used to market certain creators work as better than others, and, particularly the case of British and American comics, has biased writers with an established readership for their prose. Thus, The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman and a parade of some truly fantastic artists and designers is generally marketed as the work of Gaiman as an auteur, and Matthew Smith approaches Alan Moore as a master of the comics medium, rather than a master in collaboration with others (Smith 2012). As a result of this tendency, scholars like Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (2007), have pointed to the need to carefully examine appeals to the theory of auteurism. xi For instance, United States comics culture has involved a wide variety of superhero comics, many of which rely on, if not directly imitate, earlier characters and storylines. Discussion of superhero narratives reflects these issues, particularly those that discuss superhero narratives as requiring episodic and repetitive storylines. McLain points to these problems in the Introduction of India’s Immortal Comic Books (2009). xii Several stories in ACK’s repertoire of comics have been harshly criticized by its readership, particularly due to the representation of women as generally subservient to men and of non-Hindus as often animal-like and incapable of human intelligence (McLain, 2009). xiii Although not all of the strips featured in this collection deal specifically with social problems, such as poverty and environmental degradation, most call for some kind of action, even simply for individuals to stop smoking and thus harming those around them through second-hand smoke. xiv For a discussion of the different literacies involved in reading graphic novels in India, both literary and ocular, see Pramod K. Nayar’s “Towards a Postcolonial Critical Literacy: Bhimayana and the Indian Graphic Novel” (2012). xv The rise of the graphic novel form has led to the incorporation of long-form comics as graphic novels into literary circles, mainly through more complex narratives, characterization, and the work of comics scholars and enthusiasts (See, in particular, the work of literary scholars like Charles Hatfield). Perhaps the moment where comics was most clearly recognized as literature was when Art Spiegelman received the Pulitzer Prize in Letters for Maus; alongside Frank Miller and Klaus Janson’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1987), Maus is often considered one of the first works marketed as a ‘graphic novel’ (Weiner 2003). Chapter 8: Conclusion

Since my time in Delhi in the autumn of 2010, much has changed, and much has stayed the same. Most notably, the Pao Collective recently published the much anticipated Pao: The

Anthology of Comics Volume 1 (Image 8-1). Multiple reviewers quickly highlighted the anthology for its incorporation of multiple styles and authors, with a few critics pointing to the collection as a sign that India’s comics culture was coming into its own. However, as one reviewer argued, the Pao anthology represents more a statement by the collective’s members than by any larger group of creators. Pratik Kanjilal thus notes that,

“In 2009, I first heard that an anthology of Indian comics was being brewed up. The Pao Collective was morphing from a secret society of comic mad scientists to a mainstream mentoring group, a crucible of cooperative creation in this long-neglected and highly collaborative narrative form. At that time, Pao was focused on the most difficult problem in independent publishing — how to remain free while seeking mainstream audiences. The riot of visual styles, narrative techniques and subjects in this anthology is tangible proof of Pao’s independence.” (2012)

Kanjilal reminds us of Pao’s early commitment for arguing comics as independent of other media and their push for an alternative culture of comics production. In this context, Pao: The

Anthology represents an important leap in terms of growth since the creators were able to demonstrate some of the many possible approaches to comics that do not resemble mainstream comics in countries with more established communities.

In addition, over ten long-form comics, or graphic novels, have been released from 2011-

12. Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability details the story of dalit minority leader Bhimrao

Ramji Ambedkar, as adapted through the collaboration of Navayana Press editor S. Anand, writer Srividya Natarajan, and Gond folk painters Durgabai and Subhash Vyam. In I See the

Promised Land, Arthur Flowers, a blues musician and teacher, Guglielmo Rossi, a graphic Chapter 8: Conclusion 237 designer, and artist Manu Chitrakar translate the story of American civil rights leader Martin

Luther King Jr. through the patua scroll painting tradition. Samhita Arni and patua scroll painter

Moyna Chitrakar collaborated on the creation of another book, Sita’s Ramayana, which tells the story of this traditional epic through the eyes of Ram’s wife. In the process, they are able to focus on women’s issues, particularly a woman’s view of war and conflict from Sita’s point of view at the center of the fight between Rama and Ravana. The innovative creators Vidyun Sabhaney and

Shohei Emura collaborated on Mice Will Be Mice, which tells the humorous story of a mouse who grows to massive proportions, while Sabhaney also published a story in Blaft Publications

The Obliterary Journal, alongside stories by Orijit Sen, Amitabh Kumar, Bharath Murthy, and

Amruta Patil. Meanwhile, Kumar continued to design and create public murals, while also collaborating again with Bhagwati Prasad on the design of Sarai’s recently released The Water

Cookbook. The editors of Comix.India have released their fifth volume, and finally, Pao’s own

Sarnath Banerjee released his third book, The Harappa Files, which showcases a series of short stories that are connected in representing issues related to contemporary, urban life in India. In the last weeks of 2012, though, both Appupen’s sophomore work, Legends of Halahala, which builds on his previous Moonward, and the first volume of Amruta Patil’s retelling of the

Mahabharatha, Adi Parva, will be released, as well.

The continued development of this long-form comics scene, while dominated by adaptations of folk art traditions to the comics form, has brought new creators to the fold and helped to broaden the horizons of comics narratives in Delhi and India in general. Such a focus suits both the nascent nature of the long form narrative in this context and the goals of the community’s various members. In particular, the larger context of India’s comics culture here Chapter 8: Conclusion 238 shows a concern that seems identical to Pao’s own: establishing a community within which novice and master creators can work and learn together to craft excellent comics stories.

The Insights of the Pao Collective

As fans of comics and their creators, the members of the Pao Collective are each invested in creating good comics in part so that others will also create good comics, that they too can each read and admire. However, in the process of crafting masterful stories, these creators are themselves transformed. Although some work very explicitly to increase social awareness, like

Sen and Ghosh, and others work to more create a response in readers, like Kumar and Banerjee, the process of telling in this medium affects how they each encounter stories. Creating comics narratives holds transformative potential not only for readers, but for authors and artists as well.

In Chapter 4, analysis of the standards for excellent comics narratives in Delhi today revealed that reading comics has the potential to transform one’s worldview or help people live their lives. However, as Parismita Singh points out, that same potential may cause creators to become hyper-aware of mistakes or even stylistic choices in others’ work. When asked how she reads comics or narrative art as a creator, she stated that “Sometimes I wonder if, once you become a practitioner as opposed to just a reader, then every single book you read, in some way, you’re sort of pitting yourself against it. So sometimes you can get incredibly envious of someone doing a particular story or image, because you think, oh my god.” Singh thus worries that, as a creator, she sets up a standard in her mind against which she measures each comics story she encounters. In particular, she notes the difficulties of getting “this sort of editorial thing in the back of your head,” which may distract from the narrative at hand. As a result, it becomes more difficult to engage with each story as creators become mired in an analytical state of mind. Chapter 8: Conclusion 239

In addition, in order to manage her reading time so that she can read as much as possible, Singh tends to rush through stories, with the idea that she will return to a narrative. “For instance, sometimes I finish the book really fast, just so I’ll be able to [read it at all], especially when the narrative is very fast-paced or something. Then, I tell myself that I’ll come back to it and read it a couple of times.” This leads to an additional distraction from absorbing the unique qualities and meanings of any given narrative. As a result, it becomes a rare pleasure to be able to read through a whole comic book or graphic novel, much less without actively thinking about composition, style, layout, or any other critical position about the form.

At the same time, these critical thoughts are incredibly important for comics creators. As

Vishwajyoti Ghosh describes his own storytelling, being able to stop and reflect upon the structure or other elements of a work in progress is especially important. He points out that

“There are times when I have not known the story because it’s something that I have worked in my head. But in Delhi Calm and in “The Lost Ticket,” I began with the first image, and then, once I knew the first image, I started delving in deeper. But there are things that I’m working on, that I don’t have a clue what the story is. I know the particular image, style, etc. that I want to use.” In those cases where he is not quite decided where the story will go or what the narrative arc will be, Ghosh turns to style, or that particular way of storytelling that best expresses one’s worldview. He continues, “I don’t like using the same style; every story is a different style. The style comes with its own layout. For my kalighat comic, I might borrow or steal from those kind of layouts. Also, the style depicts or leads you to begin or take a story, with a long shot, looking at the city, creating mood. I always ask a friend who makes films, what’s the first shot. They often know about it, that this is the first shot. Then you know what the film is about.” The style thus directs the structure of the entire narrative, such that, once that stylistic approach is known, Chapter 8: Conclusion 240 the images and moments within start to become clear. Ghosh puts particular weight upon the first shot, as grounded in his and friends’ experiences with film, but he also points out the importance of considering how the overall composition, design, and other elements pull the story forward.

That function is paramount, and reflecting upon how each aspect of creation fulfills that purpose is extremely helpful.

Similarly, Orijit Sen points out the need for temperance in the application of analysis, but values the practical uses of reflection. For Sen, moments where he, as a creator, becomes confused about how to move the story forward or continue creating are the moments where a critical perspective is key. As he stated to me, “I have found that analysis can be practically used if I am a little bit confused about how to go forward, or if there’s something unresolved. Then being able to step back and analyze what is exactly working or not working and why it’s not moving ahead [is helpful]. If you have that ability, you’re likely to come up with a better path.

So analysis has its place. But to me, that’s not part of the actual creating. Of course, we go back and forth: create and assess, create and assess. It’s a back and forth.” Although analysis can be useful, it should always be subordinate to the creative process at hand. By oscillating between creativity and analysis, creators like Sen are able to consider their decisions as they craft the design, narrative, characterization, and other elements of a story. In our conversations, he described how, as a long-time comic book geek, he devours comics, graphic novels, and otherwise. While, in the past, he tended to rush through stories, Sen points out that, as a creator, he tends to read slower, with more intervals, in order to take time with each story. While particularly good or bad storytelling will stick out in reading, as in the racism in Hergé’s early depictions of Africans and Soviets, “That does not take away from the fact that they are really good stories.” Like Singh, Orijit Sen tends to go back over stories in order to engage with them Chapter 8: Conclusion 241 in terms of composition and other analytical observations. Yet, at the same time, as he has gotten older, there has been less and less time to read. Sen thus shares in the same concerns that Ghosh and Singh express, while pointing out the importance of always moving back and forth between critical and creative thinking.

However, there are things that do not change in becoming a comics creator. For many creators, the first reading of a comic is consistently important to one’s understanding and experience of narrative. Amitabh Kumar points out some of the ways that the way he reads stories in this medium has changed, but emphasizes that first impression as one aspect that stays the same. In particular, Kumar notes that there is overall a building up of layers of meaning and of work within one’s own creative process. “The more I make comics, or the more my own process continues as a visual artist or whatever, the process of reading comics changes. Not the way you read a comic. But the entire process gets multilayered, denser, or longer. As I said last time, you don’t read a comic just once. You read it again, again, again.” Even within this building up of layers, the first reading continues to be important because it defines one’s experience of the story. It also determines how often a creator returns to that work or the work of those individuals who crafted it. As Kumar continued, “Part of my training of how to write down comics and understanding of how I negotiate the form was a very strained, medicalist reading, and shots and angles. But the first reading of comics is the first reading. It’s the way I’ve always read comics.” As creators like Kumar note how others tell stories in more detail, they also notice those elements in their own style. However, whether they return to a particular work or creator depends on that first reading and their impression of the quality of the alternative world that is represented. Although analysis has practical value in the creation process, reading becomes more Chapter 8: Conclusion 242 critical as authors and artists have less and less time to read others’ work, less patience with stories that do not help them in their work, and as they grow older and solidify their own style.

Masters of any art form, though, face similar issues as they gain more experience. Early creator Sarnath Banerjee highlights the importance of remembering that comics is one medium among many others, all of which should be understood as the creations of skilled artisans. In responding to the question of how his own reading of comics has changed as a creator, he asks,

“How does a creator of any particular form read his or her form, as a creator? It’s the same for novelists, filmmakers, and others.” Instead of focusing on the practical application of reflecting on his own work while reading that of others, Banerjee argues that it is a sign of strong storytelling that one’s readers are unable to think about the structuring of the stories themselves.

Indeed, he compares storytelling to cooking a fine dish, in that one considers aspects of the creative process but such considerations should not overwhelm the flavor of the story. As previously pointed out in helping to conclude Chapter 4, “Hopefully, there are still books that are written, comics books too, that immerse you enough that you don’t really bother with the engineering of them.” The construction of the story, if obvious to readers, should instead complement the overall telling, such that it deepens readers’ experience, rather than distracting from it. Accordingly, the first reading of a comics narrative is important, for creators, fans, and other audience members, because it determines the overall success in sustaining that depth of engagement.

In becoming creators, the members of the Pao Collective have changed how they approach the reading and understanding of others’ comics narratives. Rather than necessarily having a more critical eye for comics and graphic novels, these artists and authors have gained a greater appreciation of balancing creativity and analysis. Similarly, they have gained a deeper Chapter 8: Conclusion 243 sense of what makes for an excellent comics story as a telling that must be read multiple times in order to gain a clear sense of the work as a whole. In cultivating these kinds of knowledge, the members of the Pao collective have also nurtured an appreciation for the community of comics creators, as it is primarily through the creativity, support, and insight of others that the seeds of such wisdom are sown. Gaining or losing members of their community is important, and, as

Singh in particular has already pointed out in Chapter 3, the future depends on maintaining the publication and nurturing of new voices in comics.

Counting Our Losses

While 2011-12 has witnessed the continuing growth of Delhi and India’s comics culture, these last few years have not been without its losses. Two of the most preeminent figures in the world of comics in India passed away. While preparing to attend the then-future first Comic Con

India in February 2011, Anant Pai, the founder of Amar Chitra Katha, fell and then passed away due to a heart attack on the 24th of that month. Many creators in this comics scene responded by reflecting on the importance of the Amar Chitra Katha series and Pai’s influence on Indian comics culture. Among the members of the Pao Collective, Vishwajyoti Ghosh published a piece on his blog re-using images from ACK’s comics on the topic of his own experiences with these stories. A year later, at the second annual Comic Con India, ACK launched a comic book about their founder. “‘Anant Pai was a father figure for comic book lovers in India,’ says Reena Puri, editor of Amar Chitra Katha. ‘His fans at Comic Con really missed him last year when they found out that he wouldn’t be able to attend. Launching his biography at this forum is thus the perfect way to pay him tribute’” (“The Life of Uncle Pai” 2012). With Pai’s long-time collaborator Dilip Kadam illustrating the story, the comic was developed over six months and Chapter 8: Conclusion 244 thirty-two pages. Despite his passing, ACK lives on both as a comics publisher, albeit only on rare occasions, and as a media group.

In the same year, another important figure in India’s comics culture passed away. Mario

Miranda was born in 1926 and became an Indian artist, cartoonist, and illustrator with no formal education in art. He started cartooning with the Times of India in the 1950s, but moved on to other newspapers, including The Economic Times, and later, illustration and fine art. Miranda became famous for his works in The Illustrated Weekly of India, though it was not until the

United States Information Services invited him to travel to America that he was able to both promote his work and meet with other creators. Following that, he would hold solo exhibitions around the world, and win multiple awards, including the All India Cartoonist’s Association’s lifetime achievement award. On December 11th in 2011, Miranda died asleep and at home in his bed in Loutolim, Goa (Mario Miranda Website 2011). In a piece for Indian Express, comics creator Amruta Patil expresses the importance of Miranda for her personally and for other artists and authors. She writes that “Early sketchbooks from my Goa College of Art days are deeply derivative of Mario’s crosshatching style; his lively crowd scenes with lovingly detailed crows, cats, tiled roofs, roving-eye gents, sturdy matrons, and polka-dot belles. We cut our teeth on

Mario” (Patil 2011). Miranda’s precedent was an important one, as his gestural and evocative style easily portrayed daily life in Goa and deftly managed storytelling. Patil notes that his influence is, in its way, timeless: “While visual references gravitated in other directions over the years, Mario’s work has been an undeniable influence in my choosing graphic storytelling as a form of expression” (2011). As one of the leading cartoonists in India’s comics culture, Miranda was a significant influence and an important precedent for contemporary creators like Patil and the Pao Collective. Chapter 8: Conclusion 245

While they represent two divergent strands within the scene, one the mainstream religious comics of ACK, the other a tradition of cartooning in India, both Anant Pai and Mario

Miranda were important figures in establishing comics as an independent medium. Yet, their deaths come at a time when other creators have begun to step up and show a view of broader horizons for the comics medium in Delhi and in India more generally. By focusing on the perspectives of one group of such creators, this work has tried to frame some of those horizons so that others, both in and outside the community of the Pao Collective, can appreciate their skill and storytelling.

Pull Back the Curtain

By relying upon the views and voices of comics creators in Delhi, my work pushes for greater incorporation of artists’ voices in critical studies of their work. Although the study of folklore emphasizes emic or insider perspectives, many studies and analyses of comics and graphic novels have tended instead to focus on texts. The reasons for doing so have varied widely, from the more reasonable point that doing so was not necessary for a particular work to ignoring creators’ viewpoints because they are difficult to get or would disagree with a given author’s conclusions. The result is that creators like those in the Pao Collective can become frustrated with uninformed scholarship that discounts their perspectives as unnecessary or not worth a researcher’s trouble.

By demonstrating how creators in Delhi frame themselves as storytelling artisans of the comics medium who are always influenced by the communities surrounding them, this work has tried to show the impossibility of doing this kind of research without considering creators’ perspectives. Furthermore, the voices of Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee, Amitabh Kumar, Parismita Chapter 8: Conclusion 246

Singh, and Vishwajyoti Ghosh have shown how creators craft excellent stories, build communities, and deepen their understandings of storytelling in this medium. In the process, they provide a helpful model for scholars and creators of comics throughout the world, namely that of critical and creative people oscillating between creativity and analysis in their work. Most importantly, though the Pao Collective provides a unique perspective of the comics form, pulling back the curtain on the kitchen where they mix image and text to make stories that express what it means to be alive, human and members of particular communities in India today. Images 266

Image 1-1

Illustration for “Guiding God Through Darya Ganj,” depicting Robert and Aline Kominsky Crumb riding a bicycle rickshaw in India, by Orijit Sen. From Pao Collective Blog, August 29 2012, https://paocollective.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/guiding-god-through-daryaganj/ Images 267

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Splash page and frontispiece from The River of Stories by Orijit Sen, published by Kalpavriksha in New Delhi, 1994. Images 268

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The Pao Collective, from left to right: Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Orijit Sen, Parismita Singh, Amitabh Kumar, and Sarnath Banerjee. Photo by the author, taken December 2 2010 in Hauz Khas Village, Delhi. Images 269

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Photograph of a mural by Amitabh Kumar painted in the Sarai Center for the Study of Developing Societies Media Lab. Photograph by the author.

Images 270

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Pages 77 and 78 of Amitabh Kumar and Bhagwati Prasad’s Tinker.Solder.Tap, (Delhi, The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2009).

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The cover of Raj Comics for the Hard-Headed, by Amitabh Kumar, (Delhi: Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2008). Images 272

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The cover of The Hotel at the End of the World, by Parismita Singh, (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009).

Images 273

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An exquisitely rendered landscape from Hotel at the End of the World by Parismita Singh (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009) p.48.

Images 274

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An image from the soldier’s story with Japanese influences, from Hotel at the End of the World by Parismita Singh, (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009) p.85.

Images 275

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Image from Parismita Singh’s newspaper strip, in the Siruvar Malar, which is the supplement book of the Dina Malar News Paper in Tamil Nadu.

Images 276

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Image from The Hotel at the End of the World, by Parismita Singh, (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009) p.66.

Images 277

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Image from The Hotel at the End of the World, by Parismita Singh, (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009) p.43.

Images 278

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The bus scene in Trash: On Ragpicker Children and Recycling, Orijit Sen, Gita Wolf, and Anushka Ravishankar, (Chennai: Tara Publishing, 1999).

Images 279

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Image of the narrator’s fractured perspective, from The Hotel at the End of the World, by Parismita Singh, (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009) p.41.

Images 280

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Image from The Hotel at the End of the World, by Parismita Singh, (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009) p.19.

Images 281

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Brighu’s revealing moment, where he is shown to be a collector of random objects. From Corridor: A Graphic Novel, by Sarnath Banerjee, (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2004).

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Brighu as artist at the end of Corridor: A Graphic Novel, by Sarnath Banerjee, (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2004).

Images 283

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Page from Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm showing the main characters bringing their group and their band into a town, (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2010) p. 77.

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Page showing the various ways that he illustrates the political context for the novel, from Delhi Calm, by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2010) p. 77.

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Image showing the gritty texture of Amitabh Kumar’s drawn landscapes in the world of Helmet- man. From Raj Comics for the Hard-Headed, (Delhi: Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2008) p.3.

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Image showing the main character turning down the offer to join the world of Raj, in response to both Nagraj and Doga. From Raj Comics for the Hard-Headed, (Delhi: Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2008) p.18.

Images 287

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Orijit Sen illustrates the mythic moments in The River of Stories through the use of pencil, in contrast to both the ink of narration and of events set in contemporary times, (New Delhi: Kalpavriksha, 1994) p.10.

Images 288

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In the last two pages of The River of Stories, Sen shows the representatives of development and local communities finally meet, (New Delhi: Kalpavriksha, 1994).

Images 289

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Sarnath Banerjee, photograph courtesy of the creator.

Images 290

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Image from The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, by Sarnath Banerjee, (New Delhi, Penguin India, 2007) p. 205.

Images 291

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Cover of Corridor: A Graphic Novel, by Sarnath Banerjee, (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2004)

Images 292

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Cover of The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, by Sarnath Banerjee, (New Delhi, Penguin India, 2007).

Images 293

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Cover of The Harappa Files, by Sarnath Banerjee, (New Delhi, Penguin India, 2012).

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In The River of Stories, Orijit Sen uses artwork reminiscent of folk art in illustrating the myth of creation, (New Delhi: Kalpavriksha, 1994) p.12.

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Image 5-7

Image from Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability: Incidents in the Life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, by Durgabai and Subhash Vyam, S. Anand, & Srividya Natarajan (Delhi:Navayana Press, 2010).

Images 296

Image 5-8

Image from Sarnath Banerjee’s Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, where he shows the wide variety of characters with whom the main one speaks in search of a particular book, (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2007).

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An image from near the beginning of The River of Stories, by Orijit Sen, (New Delhi: Kalpavriksha, 1994) p.9.

Images 298

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Comics creator Orijit Sen, photography by the author.

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Page 1 of “The Night of the Muhnochwa,” by Orijit Sen, from The Pao Collective Blog, June 27 2012. http://paocollective.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/the-night-of-the-muhnochwa/ Images 300

Image 6-4:

In this photograph taken by the author while Orijit Sen worked on one of his multiple contributions to the forthcoming Pao: The Anthology of Comics (“The Plasmoids” written by Samit Basu, Penguin India 2012) in 2010, Sen has laid out the story in its entire 8 pages through Photoshop. Rather than blocking the story out by hand and on paper, he and many other authors have moved to doing so digitally.

Images 301

Image 6-5:

Although Sen initially relied entirely upon pencils, paper, and pen and ink, he has taken up a digital pen and pad because of the many advantages afforded by them. As a result, many beginning creators noted their desire for a similar pen and pad, although cost prevented most from purchasing one.

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Image 6-6

In this image, taken during the same session during which Sen worked on “The Plasmoids,” the author demonstrates that it is constantly possible to shift his art to full scale through Photoshop. As a result, he is able to move between larger strokes and smaller details.

Images 303

Image 6-6:

In this image from The River of Stories (Delhi: Kalpavriksha, 1994: p.45), Sen demonstrates the importance of spatial arrangement when composing an image where a great deal of dialogue occurs. Without a clear sense of the order of each comment, the story could easily get lost in the potential chaos of words.

Images 304

Image 6-7

Throughout River, and especially through the perspective of the journalist performing interviews, Sen is able to represent the tribal experience through the voice of specific characters telling their stories, as in this example from early in the book (Delhi: Kalpavriksha,1994: p.14).

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Self-portrait of the artist by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, from Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Thought Balloon, https://vishwajyoti.wordpress.com

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Cover of Delhi Calm, by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2010).

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Image from Delhi Calm, by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2010) p. 234.

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Splash page from Delhi Calm, by V. Ghosh, (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2010) p. 125.

Images 309

Image 7-5

Cover image for “RSVP.” In Pao: The Comics Anthology Volume 1. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2012.

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Cover by Orijit Sen for Pao: The Anthology of Comics Volume 1, (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2012). Bibliography:

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______. “The Yellow House.” In When Kulbushan Met Stockli: A Comics Collaboration Between India and Switzerland. New Delhi: Harper Collins Publishers India and The India Today Group, 2009: 24-35.

______. “Remembering Nandlal.” The Pao Collective Blog, March 11 2010. http://paocollective.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/remembering-nandlal/

______. “Sarson Dub Series.” The Pao Collective Blog, March 27 2010. http://paocollective.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/sarson-dub-series-by-orijit-sen/

______. “Visioncarnation.” In Comix.India: Volume One: Random Selection, edited by Bharath Murthy. Bangalore: Pothi.com, 2010.

______. “Emerald Apsara.” In The Obliterary Journal, edited by Rakesh Khanna and Rashmi Ruth Devadasan. Chennai: Blaft Publications, 2012.

______. “The Night of the Muhnochwa.” The Pao Collective Blog, June 27 2012. http://paocollective.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/the-night-of-the-muhnochwa/

______. “Scenes from the Zone: a Visual Essay.” The Pao Collective Blog, July 9 2012. http://paocollective.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/scenes-from-the-zone-by-orijit-2/

______. “Feast of the Fire Gods.” The Pao Collective Blog, July 28 2012. http://paocollective.wordpress.com/2012/07/28/feast-of-the-fire-gods-by-orijit-2/

______. “A Place in Punjab: a series of details from my mural at the Virasat-e-Khalsa Museum.” The Pao Collective Blog, July 28 2012. http://paocollective.wordpress.com/2012/07/28/a-place-in-punjab/

______. “Carnama.” The Pao Collective, August 28 2012. http://paocollective.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/carnama/

______. “Guiding God through Daryaganj.” Pao Collective Blog, August 29 2012. https://paocollective.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/guiding-god-through-daryaganj/

Sharma, Komal and Supriya Nair. “Playing by the Book: Interviews with Rosalyn D’Mello of Zubaan, Deepthi Talwar of Westland Ltd., and Arpita Das of Yoda Press.” Live Mint, January 5 2012. http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/jk6wNE6MHyBaLH6DsCg1fM/Playing-by-the- book.html

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Sharma, Sharad and Rohini Singh, Ed. Voices from the Field. Delhi: World Comics India, 2004.

______and Leif Packalen. Grassroots Comics: a development communication tool. Helsinki: Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, 2004.

Sharma, Vishad. “Blaft Fills Us In On The Obliterary Journal.” NH7, February 10, 2012. Accessed February 16, 2012. http://nh7.in/indiecision/2012/02/10/blaft-fills-us-in-on-the- obliterary-journal/

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Shrestha, Preena. “At the End of the World: a review of Parismita Singh’s Hotel at the End of the World.” Ekantipur.com, February 11 2012. http://www.ekantipur.com/2012/02/11/oped/at-the-end-of-the-world/348744.html

Shukla, Pravina. The Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

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Singh, Arune. “The New Frontier: Gotham Chopra Talks Virgin Comics.” Comic Book Resources, January 8 2006. http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=6176

______. “Eastern Philosophy: Deepak Chopra Talks Virgin Comics.” Comic Book Resources, January 12 2006. http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=6188

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______. “Great Repeat Value: a review of Pao: The Comics Anthology Volume 1.” The Hindu, November 3 2012. http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/great-repeat- value/article4057903.ece

Singh, Parismita. “Like Cleopatra.” In Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence, edited by Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sen Gupta, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Awadhendra Sharan, and Geert Lovink: pp. 243-52. Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2006.

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Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Jeremy J. Stoll

Folklore Institute 4312 Decatur St. Indiana University Denver, CO 80211 504 North Fess Street (734) 755 4791 Bloomington, IN 47408 [email protected] Telephone: (812) 855 1027 Fax: (812) 855 4008 Education Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana (2005–present) 2012 PhD in Folklore, minor in Communication and Culture Dissertation: “Follow the River of Stories: Comics, Folk Culture, and Social Justice in Delhi” Diss. Committee: Pravina Shukla (Chair), Henry Glassie, Michael Dylan Foster, Susan Seizer

2008 MA in Folklore Thesis: “Through the Page Darkly: Japanese Comics and Vernacular Religion” Thesis Committee: Henry Glassie (Chair), Jason Jackson, Roger Janelli

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan (2000-2005) 2005 Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and of Fine Arts in Textiles, with minors in Environment and Anthropology.

Publications Articles “Rama for Beginners: Bridging Indian Folk and Comics Cultures”. Folklore Forum: IU/OSU Conference 2010 Issue. Fall 2011. http://folkloreforum.net/2011/11/25/rama-for- beginners-bridging-indian-folk-and-comics-cultures/ “A Domestic Schizophrenia: Gender and Political Cartoons in the Middle East.” International Journal of Comic Art. Ed. John Lent. Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2010): p302-322. “Sanctity and Sanity: Exploring Ecopsychology.” Creating a Sustainable Future: Living in Harmony with the Earth. Eds. Peter B. Kaufman et al. USA: Sci Tech Publishing LLC, 2002: pp. 405-410. Reviews Review of Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan. Imagetext. Forthcoming. Review of Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability by S. Anand. Journal of Folklore Research. November 28, 2012. http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=1290 Review of Osamu Tezuka: God of Comics by Natsu Onoda Power. Folklore Forum. October 28, 2011. http://folkloreforum.net/2011/10/28/power-natsu-onoda-god-of- comics-osamu-tezuka-and-the-creation-of-post-world-war-ii-manga/ J. Stoll Curriculum Vitae 2

Review of Komiks: Comic Art in Russia by Jose Alaniz. Journal of Folklore Research. June 23, 2011. http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=1091 Review of India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes by Karline McLain. Journal of Folklore Research. April 6, 2010. http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=849 Review of Village of Painters: Narrative Scrolls from West Bengal by Frank J. Korom. Journal of Folklore Research. February 16, 2009. http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=393 Comics “You’re Welcome.” Empty Pockets II: a collection of stories produced by the students of P. Gloeckner’s narrative art course at the University of Michigan. Ed. Phoebe Gloeckner. (Ann Arbor, MI: The Wooden Book Press, 2006). “Tabula Selenographica.” Empty Pockets: a collection of stories produced by the students of P. Gloeckner’s narrative art course at the University of Michigan. Ed. Phoebe Gloeckner. (Ann Arbor, MI: The Wooden Book Press, 2005).

Fieldwork India: New Delhi August – December 2010 Interviewed 20 authors, artists, editors, and scholars in Delhi’s comics community about creative processes, contemporary comics narratives, and the future of the comic art form in India. Observed and documented the creative processes of several creators, with a focus on the Pao Collective and Orijit Sen, the creator of India’s first graphic novel.

Competitive Awards, Grants, and Honors Modern South Asia Workshop Presenter and Participant, South Asian Studies and the MacMillan Center, Yale University, New Haven: 2012. Caroline and Erwin Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon Fellowship, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: 2011. India Studies Program Dissertation Travel Grant, IU, Bloomington: 2010. Foreign Language and Area Studies Summer Fellowship in Hindi, Center for the Study of Global Change, Indiana University, Bloomington: 2009. East Asian Studies Center Travel Grant, Indiana University, Bloomington: 2008, 2009. University Honors, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: Fall 2000, Winter and Fall 2001, Winter 2004, and Winter 2005. James B. Angell Scholar Fall Semester, University Honors Winter Semester, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: 2002. Michigan Competitive Scholarship (MEAP): 2000-04.

J. Stoll Curriculum Vitae 3

Teaching Courses Taught Comics Take Over the World: Comics as Practice and Analysis, Indiana University, Bloomington. Introduction to Public Speaking, Indiana University Bloomington. Other Teaching, Invited Lectures, and Workshops “Tradition and Invention in Contemporary Textiles,” invited lecture. Introduction to Folklore, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Indianapolis, IN: Summer 2008. “Folklore and Comics Culture,” invited lecture. Introduction to American Folklore, Indiana University. Bloomington, IN: Summer 2012.

Academic Positions Instructor, Collins Living-Learning Center, Indiana University, Spring 2012. Assistant Researcher, Traditional Arts Indiana, Indiana University, Summer 2011. Interviewer, All My Sons Play Teaching Guide, Cardinal Stage Company & Indiana University English Department, Bloomington, IN, Summer 2011. Associate Instructor, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University, Fall 2006-Spring 2007, Fall 2007, Fall 2008-Spring 2009, Fall 2009 Graduate Writing Tutor, Writing Tutorial Services, Indiana University, Bloomington, Fall 2005 – Summer 2012.

Conference Presentations

“Comics as Craft: Storytelling in Popular Culture.” Chair, Drawn Together: Images of Folk and Popular Culture. American Folklore Society Annual Meeting, 2012. Bloomington, Indiana. “Making a Manga Mahabharata in India.” MIX 2012: Comics Symposium. Columbus College of Art and Design. Columbus, Ohio. “Creating Comics and Community with Orijit Sen.” Popular Culture Association Annual Meeting, 2012. Boston, Massachusetts. “Crafting Activism in India’s Comics Culture.” Modern South Asia Workshop, 2012. McMillan Center at Yale University. New Haven, Connecticut. “Social and Academic Responsibility Discussion Forum.” Forum Co-Planner and Presenter. Re-Framing and Un-Mapping Conference, 2012. Indiana University and Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio. “A Tradition of Comics in New Delhi” Michigan State University Comics Forum, 2012. East Lansing, Michigan. “Storytelling Trees in India’s Comics Culture.” Chair, Planting Mythology: Supernatural Plants in Folk Narrative and Art. American Folklore Society Annual Meeting, 2011. Bloomington, Indiana.

J. Stoll Curriculum Vitae 4

“Creating Community in New Delhi’s Comics Culture.” Mediating Culture Conference, 2011. Indiana University and Ohio State University. Bloomington, Indiana. “The River of Stories: Environmental Justice and Comics in India.” Graduate student panel on Environmental Justice, Spring 2010. Bloomington, Indiana. “The Fans and the Folk in India’s Comics Culture.” India Studies Graduate Student Conference, 2010. Bloomington, Indiana. “Rama for Beginners.” Culture and Contact Conference Spring, 2010. Indiana University and Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio. “The Evolution of Activist Comics in India.” Popular Culture Association Annual Meeting, 2010. St. Louis, Missouri. “Dissent in the Naming of Nonhuman Animals.” American Folklore Society Annual Meeting, 2009. Boise, Idaho. “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Folklore: Activist Comics of India.” Public and Private Conference, 2009. Indiana University and Ohio State University. Bloomington, Indiana. “Through the Page Darkly: Japanese Comic Art and Vernacular Religion. American Folklore Society Annual Meeting, 2008. Louisville, Kentucky. “A Careful Balance: Manga, Doujinshi, and the American Encounter.” American Folklore Society Annual Meeting, 2007. Quebec City, Quebec. “The Body Monstrous in Japanese Comics: a Tradition of Horror.” Pushing Boundaries Conference, 2006. Indiana University. Bloomington, IN.

Professional Experience Event Planning Coordinator, Folklore Student Association, Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2011-12. Co-Editor, Recipes from the Field, Trickster Press, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2011. Assistant Organizer and Volunteer, American Folklore Society Annual Meeting, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2011. Book Review Editor, Folklore Forum, Trickster Press, Indiana Univ., Bloomington, 2011-12. Committee member, Indiana University and Ohio State University Conference Planning Committee, Folklore Student Associations, IU Bloomington, 2009-12. Assistant Editor, Trickster Press, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2007-12. Committee member, Work-in-Progress Lecture Series, Folklore and Ethnomusicology Student Associations, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2008-09. Graduate Student Mentor, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2008-09. Co-organizer, Pushing Boundaries Conference, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2006-07.

J. Stoll Curriculum Vitae 5

Participant, Learning from Nature: Certification Program in Permaculture, Paoli, Indiana, Summer 2007. Assistant Researcher and Designer, I Live Here (2008) and coming graphic novel on murders in Ciudad-Juarez, Mexico, Professor and Graphic Novelist Phoebe Gloeckner, Summer 2005. Editorial Assistant and Intermediary for Design Department, University of Michigan Press, U of M, Ann Arbor, 2004-2005.

Community Service Participant & Volunteer, the Coalition for Creative Solutions at the UM Art School, with Food Gatherer’s Community Kitchen, Community Farm (CBA), and Tantre Organic Farm, 2004-05. Core Member, Environmental Justice Group, University of Michigan, 2002-04. Volunteer, Hands on the Planet Day of Service: 2003, 04, 05. Core Member, Students Organized for Labor Equality, University of Michigan, 2000-01.

Professional Affiliations American Folklore Society American Anthropological Association Popular Culture Association

Teaching Interests Media and Cultural Studies Comics and Graphic Literature Media, Storytelling, and Community in Asia Narratives and Social Change Folklore and Expressive Culture

Research Interests Comics and Social Justice in India Media Production and Reception Storytelling and Community Material and Visual Culture Narrative and the Environment in Public Culture

J. Stoll Curriculum Vitae 6

Languages and Other Skills

■Certified Practitioner of Permaculture ■Comics creator, published in anthologies and zines ■Textile Artist, specializing in knitting, needle felting, weaving, and screen-printing

Computer Skills Language Skills ■Microsoft Office ■French, intermediate to advanced speaking, writing, reading ■Photoshop, Illustrator ■Hindi, intermediate to advanced speaking, writing, reading ■Dreamweaver ■Japanese, basic speaking