When the truth is graphic
March 14, 2010
By Anindita Ghose in Mint Lounge, saturday, 13th march 2010
For an Indian artist, a trip to Pakistan on a “reporting visa” is likely to make for interesting anecdotes. For Vishwajyoti Ghosh, the anecdotes were so bizarre that he felt compelled to chronicle them.
His short graphic narrative, Lahore Reporting, documents his exchanges with Intelligence officers in Lahore, including one in which he is lectured on child-rearing. This is Ghosh’s contribution to the upcoming Pao anthology that he and his peers from the Delhi-based graphic artists’ ensemble, The Pao Collective, are set to publish later this year.While Lahore Reporting is a light-hearted diary of personal experiences, Ghosh has attempted more journalistic reportage in Unmasks Corruption, released in November by Ctrl.Alt.Shift, a UK-based initiative that seeks to politicize a new generation of activists using assorted multimedia projects. His six-page piece on the Indian cellphone theft cartel appears alongside other takes on corruption by British comics’ stalwarts such as Pat Mills and Bryan Talbot. This June, HarperCollins India will release his debut graphic novel Delhi Calm which, set in the mid-1970s, focuses on an important chapter in Indian political history. Sardonic strokes wrapped in dirty brown watercolours tell the story of three young activists caught in a crossfire between ideology and survival.
Like him, other Indian graphic artists are increasingly marrying graphic art with non-fiction narratives. River of Stories by Orijit Sen (Kalpavriksh, 1994) set an early precedent. Sen’s book brought alive documentary episodes from the Narmada dam controversy at a time when graphic non-fiction was still making its bones worldwide. He also illustrated the award-winning young adult graphic book Trash! (Tara, 1999), based on the real-life experiences of street children in Chennai.
Eight years later, there was Kashmir Pending (Phantomville, 2007). The second book by the publishing house floated by graphic novelists Anindya Roy and Sarnath Banerjee, it is a poignant take on Islamic militancy. But despite powerful visuals, it failed to marry text and image in keeping with the standards that had been established globally.
The current tide of non-fiction swooping over the Indian graphic vista can be best credited to the buoyant reception of Nicolas Wild’s Kabul Disco. Weaving Afghanistan’s turbulent political history with an outsider’s quirky observations, the book is a serrated satire on the expatriate experience in a war-ravaged region. In a big leap of faith, HarperCollins India bought the rights of this 2007 French book and translated it into English for the Indian market. It was released three months ago and the effort seems to have paid off. V.K. Karthika, chief editor of HarperCollins India, now rattles off several forthcoming titles in the same genre. A sequel, Kabul Disco 2: How I Didn’t become an Opium Addict in Afghanistan, which is already out in Europe, is on the cards. There’s also a graphic travelogue on Nepal that is slated to release in early 2011. Karthika believes that reportage is the most accessible sub-genre within the vocabulary of the graphic novel, using both words and visuals to translate unknown realities.Independent publishers are riding this wave too. The Chennai-based Blaft has joined the graphic arena with the fantasy fiction Moonward by Appupen. Kaveri Lalchand, director of the publishing house, says they’ve received several manuscript submissions of graphic non-fiction over the last few months, a few of which they are interested in pursuing.
Non-fiction narratives take a lot of research and time to produce. Since the genre doesn’t have a market cachet yet, several projects are supported by funding institutions. Two recent releases: Our Toxic World (Sage) and Tinker.Solder.Tap were funded by the NGO Toxics Link and Sarai at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (New Delhi), respectively. Our Toxic World, by Aniruddha Sen Gupta and Priya Kuriyan, is a guide to hazardous substances using characters of a fictional family. Tinker.Solder.Tap is a take-off on five years of research conducted at Sarai. The book, a joint effort by researcher Bhagwati Prasad and artist Amitabh Kumar, animates studies on the evolution of media technology and media piracy in India.
Kumar claims inspiration from the legendary Maltese-American comics artist Joe Sacco, who is known for meticulously documenting the areas he draws and then rendering them to the last detail. The cross-hatching style Kumar has used in the book emerged after he saw a special edition of Sacco’s Palestine.
While discussing graphic non-fiction, the boundaries between journalistic reportage and a subjective impression are important. Ghosh believes this fluidity between fact and fiction is the very charm of the graphic format. Several American and French graphic works will have notes such as: “All speeches attributed to public figures are authentic.” Or they will delineate parts that are the author’s viewpoint with different design styles. Wild uses some of these tools in Kabul Disco but doesn’t feel compelled to constantly make a case for authenticity. “We should dissociate two things, the facts and the way of telling them. All the events in Kabul Disco did happen for real, but I took some freedom with the way of telling them,” he says, placing his book somewhere between new-wave journalism and personal diary.
In books such as Palestine (2001) and Safe Area Goražde (2000), Sacco, the universal favourite among graphic artists, has produced extraordinary examples of what is becoming known as “graphic reportage” or “comics journalism”. There are rumours that he might soon be working on a project on the Maoists in India.
Tinker.Solder.Tap: By Bhagwati Prasad and Amitabh Kumar, Sarai-CSDS, 84 pages, Rs100.
While no work on graphic non-fiction in India touches Sacco’s calibre yet, Kabul Disco and Lahore Reporting are close to autobiographical graphic travelogues of the kind made famous by Guy Delisle, a French-Canadian illustrator who produced similar accounts of his stays in Pyongyang and Shenzhen. Several comics practitioners in India, however, have strong objections to Delisle’s brand of Orientalism, making the case for domestic output even stronger. Sarnath Banerjee finds Delisle’s Pyongyang almost condescending. “How (Delisle) dutifully performs his role as an evangelist of Western concepts of individual freedom and expects the world to follow. He leaves a trail of clichés, a grand Eurocentric vision of the ‘great Other’,” says Banerjee, for whom Pyongyang is beautifully drawn, but lacking in insight, a work by a modern-day Herodotus.Sharad Sharma of World Comics India agrees. To temper this outsider-insider divide, Sharma conducts workshops to empower villagers and far-flung tribes with the skills to tell their own stories. In January, Sharma edited and released a 15-chapter anthology on development called Whose Development? in English and Vikaskalhe Vipreet Buddhi in Hindi. The stories range from a tale of a fisherman from Assam to the deleterious effects of tourism in Goa. Two other anthologies are under way and will expand their scope to include stories from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal. This idea of grass-roots comics already has currency in Scandinavia and the UK, regions from where World Comics India gets its funding.
For those who wish to attempt graphic non-fiction, there’s training at hand. Sharma is now giving the final touches to comics journalism courses for universities in Kashmir and Assam. The National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad has also started a project to encourage non-fiction graphic narratives. Sekhar Mukherjee, head of the department of animation at NID, is all set to launch a magazine on alternative comics and animation, to be published twice a year.
With educational institutions gearing up for this new wave, it appears that the surf might be coming ashore. This, despite the fact that graphic novels are a minuscule part of the Indian publishing market. And while the works don’t spell magic or leave scars, the lines are definitely getting bolder.
India’s comics boom: The Pao Collective
March 13, 2010
NEW DELHI, India — Fifteen years ago, when artist Orijit Sen produced India’s first graphic novel — a story about the Narmada valley dam protest movement — he was only able to print the book with the help of government funding, and distribution meant carrying copies of the book to stores and trying to explain why it didn’t belong in the children’s section.
“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.”
The scene is different now.
Amid a boom in publishing and contemporary art, India’s comic book scene is undergoing a renaissance of its own. Once known only for the beloved Amar Chitra Katha series, which focused on Hindu mythology, today India’s comic book industry includes homegrown superhero sagas, modernized versions of classic myths and even postmodern tales of urban angst.
[For another side of India's booming comic industry — porn — see this profile of the Indian creators of Savita Bhabhi, India's first bona fide porn star].
Courting the global audience, self-help guru Deepak Chopra and Oscar winner Shekhar Kapur have teamed up to develop a library of India-inspired heroes for Liquid Comics, from which several potential Hollywood film projects have emerged. And domestically, upstarts like the Kolkata-based Kriyetic Comics and the Google group Project C are moving in on the territory of longtime leader Raj Comics. This is fomenting a much-needed revolution in a kids-only oriented industry that has become excessively formulaic over the past two decades.
“In the earlier part of the decade, in India, comics were still perceived as ‘kids products,’ whereas in the last five years a new generation of world-class Indian creators have begun expanding the boundaries of the medium and transforming its perception within India as a viable foundation to create compelling stories that are not defined by age or genre, just like other visual storytelling mediums such as film and television,” said Sharad Devarajan, co-founder and CEO of Liquid Comics.
The latest buzz is literary. Following in the footsteps of genre-pioneer Art Spiegelman (Maus) and recent sensation Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), a new group of Indian comic book artists who call themselves “the Pao Collective” are fighting to make the Indian graphic novel a publishing phenomenon to rival so-called “Indian writing in English” — a virtual factory for Booker Prize winners.
“We are like the older guys who are somewhat known, who have been doing this for awhile, so publishers will listen to us,” said Sen. “We want to use our influence there to help bring out young people and their work.”
The Pao Collective joined forces about a year ago, inspired by painter and comic book scholar Amitabh Kumar, who was researching Indian popular culture at the Delhi-based Sarai Media Lab. Recognizing that the commercial houses were evolving on a studio model that to some degree stifled creativity, Kumar approached the country’s small set of successful graphic novelists to form a group that could nurture young artists, promote the comic book medium, and further blur the lines between art, literature, and the comic book.
“We decided that we needed some kind of platform, or some kind of organized setup, that can promote comic book culture in India and bring out various different kinds of stories to look at the visual narrative device in the Indian context,” said Kumar.
Along with Kumar, the Pao (or “bread”) Collective comprises Sarnath Banerjee, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Orijit Sen and Parismita Singh — each of whom has emerged as a pioneer of the Indian literary graphic novel. Sen, whose 1994 “River of Stories” was a compelling comic about a young activist confronting the tragedy of the Narmada Dam Project, is often credited with introducing the graphic novel in India.
The winner of a $33,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, Banerjee in 2004 produced the first graphic novel, Corridor, to attract the attention of India’s literary publishing industry — as well as the country’s first graphic best seller. Ghosh has produced a number of works for international anthologies, and last year Singh’s “The Hotel at the End of the World” reignited the interest of India’s literati.
“Art 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,” said Sen.
The Pao Collective has embarked on an ambitious plan to promote interest in the Indian graphic novel by mentoring new artists, publishing compelling work and bringing the comic book form into spaces traditionally reserved for art and theater.
Already Pao is making a splash in the country’s literary and art circles by writing reviews of graphic novels for daily newspapers like the Times of India, presenting its work at dramatic readings or “storytelling sessions” in cultural venues, and exhibiting comic book pages in art galleries. The launch of a Pao Collective blog featuring online editions of the members’ work is imminent. And down the road, Pao plans comic book workshops across the country, which the members hope will inspire similar organizations in other cities and towns, and eventually a comic book convention.
“It’s on the fringe of art and the fringe of literature, which is great,” said Banerjee. “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 and outside the parameters of art.”
To start that process, Pao will soon bring out an anthology of new and veteran Indian comic book artists in conjunction with a major international publishing house. Though all the material has not yet been selected, the depth and variety of the work that has been chosen so far sounds promising.
In one story, for instance, a young Indian writer has collaborated with a Japanese expatriate to produce a sort of spoof of the epic Mahabharata — in Japan’s much-admired “manga” style. In another, a medical doctor has collaborated with a graphic artist on a non-fiction comic, almost like an academic study, on the meat-eating habits of northern India. And in a third, a filmmaker has collaborated with a illustrator/animator on a gothic story set in 18th century Lucknow that obliquely addresses conflicts between women’s self-realization and the bounds of tradition.
“It’s fantastic to see these types of stories being told,” said Devarajan. “It further enhances the opportunity for Indian audiences to reassess what they perceived as a comic book and start taking the medium seriously.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct that Banerjee did not receive a MacArthur “genius grant.” He received a grant to produce comic books on reproductive health issues.
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