South Asian Review

ISSN: 0275-9527 (Print) 2573-9476 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsoa20

South Asia in Graphic Narratives

Kavita Daiya

To cite this article: Kavita Daiya (2018) South Asia in Graphic Narratives, South Asian Review,
39:1-2, 3-10, DOI: 10.1080/02759527.2018.1514131

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2018.1514131

Published online: 02 Jan 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 315

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rsoa20
SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW
2018, VOL. 39, NOS. 1-2, 3–10
https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2018.1514131

EDITORIAL

South Asia in Graphic Narratives

From the rapid rise in literary production as well as academic scholarship, it is unmistak-
ably clear that the graphic narrative has arrived. Much to the chagrin of some of its crea-
tors, it is even considered an art form. This special issue responds to the extraordinary
new energy in the production and consumption of graphic narratives in the contemporary
moment, with a focus on works that are from and about South Asian experience. In
doing so, this issue fills an important gap in two areas: the first is the by-now well-formed
field of comics studies, which tends to revolve around Euro-American graphic narratives;
the second, the field of postcolonial and South Asian literary studies, which has, erstwhile,
largely focused on literary fiction, poetry, and drama. It is my hope that this number
intervenes in, and contributes to, both these areas, and that it will, in the process, offer a
starting point from which we might consider anew the relationship not only between
graphic narratives and literary cultures, but also the cultural life of graphic narratives in/
about South Asia and its diaspora.1
The term “graphic narratives,” as may be expected, is a contested one: critics and prac-
titioners even disagree about whether it is a genre or a medium (Martin 2011). It is used
to refer to a wide range of representations, which includes forms like comics, manga, the
graphic novel, and, as the practitioner and theorist Will Eisner describes it, “sequential
art” (Eisner 1985). For instance, Hillary Chute defines comics “as a hybrid word-and-
image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality
spatially. Comics moves forward in time through the space of the page, through its pro-
gressive counterpoint of presence and absence: packed panels (also called frames) alternat-
ing with gutters (empty space).” Hence, Chute observes, comics is a unique form:
“[H]ighly textured in its narrative scaffolding, comics doesn’t blend the visual and the ver-
bal, or use one simply to illustrate the other, but is rather prone to present the two non-
synchronously” (Chute 2008).2 Relatedly, W.J.T. Mitchell argues that comics are better
understood as a transmedium: “From the standpoint of comics as philosophy, in the
framework of media theory, and of the being or ontology of comics, comics is a transme-
dium, moving across all boundaries of performance, representation, reproduction, and
inscription to find new audiences, new subjects, and new forms of expression.” Thus, for
Mitchell, “[c]omics is transmediatic because it is translatable and transitional, mutating
before our eyes into unexpected new forms. The comics artist draws and walks a line of
style that is grounded in his or her predecessors, but ventures out over an abyss of possi-
bility.” Finally, Mitchell argues, comics’ intimate link to other histories of graphic repre-
sentation also renders it a transmedium: “[I]t opens audiences onto a deep history that
goes back before mass media, perhaps even before writing and drawing, to the fundamen-
tal moment of the mark, the graphic sign. Comics is transmediatic in its openness to mul-
tiple alternative frameworks in terms of style, form, structure, material support and
technical platform” (Mitchell 2014).
Long neglected as a low-brow form of art, critics widely agree that it was works like
Art Speigelman’s Maus (1980–1991) and Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993–1995) that inaugu-
rated a serious reconsideration of the aesthetics and politics of comics in the Euro-
4 K. DAIYA

American literary world. Yet, little accounted for is the fact that Orijit Sen, in India, was
creating River of Stories (1994) in the same moment – offering one of the first graphic
narratives published in India. A work that resonated with the critical political aesthetic of
the books by Spiegelman and Sacco, River of Stories depicts the environmental disaster
wrought by the World Bank-funded Narmada Dam project in western India, as well as
the activist struggles around that infrastructure project. Indeed, as Sen told Platform in
2014, his work in River of Stories built on the research skills of a journalist, and he states
that his investigations into the Narmada Dam occurred “several years before Joe Sacco’s
Palestine planted the first seeds of journalism through graphic novels” (Sen n.d.).
The graphic narrative’s status as a transmedium – and its ability to reconceive the
strategies of other forms like journalism, the memoir, visual art, and fiction – has urged
critics to reconceptualize the form’s discursive possibilities. However, much like the omis-
sion of Sen’s River of Stories from the West-facing reconsideration of the form in the
1990s, the subsequent scholarship has remained largely focused on Euro-American
graphic narratives. In this context, a substantial body of scholarship illuminates and
debates the discursive and aesthetic life of comics and graphic narratives. While Robert
Petersen, Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and others map the transnational history of the emer-
gence of graphic narratives and comics (Petersen 2011; Stein and Thon 2013; Baetens and
Frey 2014), scholars like Hillary Chute, Patrick Jagoda, W.J.T. Mitchell, Scott McCloud,
Ramzi Fawaz, and others have invited us to reconsider the technological transformations,
gendered critique, and sexual politics of American comics and graphic narratives (Chute
2010, 2016; Chute et al. 2014; McCloud 1993, 2000; Fawaz 2016). Together, these critics
have compelled us to theorize anew the medium of comics, especially in its role as a
popular mode of cultural production, consumption, documentation, and critique.
However, the predominantly Euro-American focus of this field suggests the need for fur-
ther interventions that would illuminate the transnational life of graphic narratives, and
the intersections of aesthetic experimentation, political documentation, technology, eco-
logical critique, and more in South Asia and its global diasporas.
What would it mean then, to revisit, in this way, the discursive history of the graphic
narrative, from a non-Euro-American-centric perspective? This special issue participates
in the “worlding” of the conventional historicization of the graphic narrative; it does so
by tending to the local and regional particularities of its mediation in South Asia (Cheah
2016).3 To address the relationship between popular South Asian comics and the South
Asian graphic narrative then, as so many of the essays in this special issue do, is a step
toward “provincializing” the Euro-America-centric orientation of received histories of
contemporary graphic narratives (Daiya 2005).4 In this endeavor, this collection extends
the work of scholars like Monica Chiu, whose edited volume Drawing New Color Lines:
Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives takes as its object transnational Asia.
This volume studies the reading and distribution practices of Asian American comics in
an international context. For Chiu, Asian American comics, as they circulate around the
world, function as “ethnic stories”: they display an “ethnographic imperative,” and they
perform the weighty labor of “cultural documentation” in the array of representations
they present (Chiu 2014).
Chiu’s edited volume highlights the importance of bringing to graphic narratives the
same scrutiny that scholarship has afforded to literary fiction from South Asia and South
Asian America. In recent years, many South Asian and South Asian American scholars
have well-charted the changing landscape of South Asian writing, as well as the prolific
publication of new fiction that straddles the boundaries of high art and popular fiction.
In South Asia, comics have a parallel and interesting history, traversing multiple public
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 5

spheres in the colonial and postcolonial period (Murthy 2009). From comics appearing in
colonial publications like Oudh Punch to the postcolonial publishing of the Amar Chitra
Katha series, and more recent graphic novels published across South Asia and abroad,
graphic narratives constitute a rich archive, forcing an examination of history, culture,
identity, place, pleasure, and community in South Asia. For instance, in her book The
Classic Popular, Nandini Chandra has well illuminated the historically changing evolution
of the Amar Chita Katha comics series, which ran from 1967 to 2007. She unveils the dia-
lectical relationship between the aesthetics of the series and the cultural politics of Hindu
nationalism in India (Chandra 2008; McLain 2009; Babb and Wadley 1998).
Chandra’s scholarship points out that the comics tradition in India engages the topics
and debates typically seen as the territory of literature. Yet, like their counterparts in the
Euro-American context, graphic narratives have only recently attained cultural legitimacy
as a serious art form. For instance, Sen noted that, in the 1990s, the announcement of his
intent to make River of Stories a graphic narrative, often drew skepticism, at best, from
the subjects of his research: “They’d think I was trying to make cartoons or poke fun at
the movement. Some were a little suspicious of my motives (Sen n.d.). Yet, the example
of Sen and subsequent graphic storytellers has changed public attitudes toward the form.
As in Euro-American public spheres, South Asia has, thus, witnessed an infusion of new
energy around the publication and consumption of graphic narratives. From intrepid,
new publishing houses like Blaft and Yoda Press that produce graphic narratives in mul-
tiple languages, to the new creations born of the intersection of technology, new media,
and comics like Priya’s Shakti (2014), the world of graphic narrative production, circula-
tion, and consumption has exploded. This new archive both expands and challenges the
focus on literary fiction that has, thus far, dominated literary studies.
Reflective of these new energies, this special number focuses, in good measure, on the
long-form graphic narrative, although it also considers comics like the Amar Chitra
Katha, Marvel’s comic book series Ms. Marvel, and the interactive online comic Priya’s
Shakti. It extends the pathbreaking analyses of South Asian comics and graphic narratives
by Nandini Chandra, Pramod Nayar, Karline McLain, Emma Dawson Varughese, and
others, which has wonderfully illuminated the rich history and complex aesthetics of
graphic narratives (Chandra 2008; Nayar 2016; McLain 2009; Varughese 2017). It also
builds upon the work of Varughese and Rajinder Dudrah who recently curated a unique
set of essays addressing the South Asian graphic novel in conversation with other visual
cultures and practices (Varughese and Rajinder 2016).
The contributors gathered here open up new conversations about aesthetic hybridity
and experimentation in the graphic representation of ecological violence, social justice,
nationalism, gender-based violence, and displacement. Unlike the popular Amar Chitra
Katha series, what is notable about the contemporary graphic narrative of South Asia and
South Asian America is its critical edge: gender-based violence, forced migration, multi-
national corporations, military violence, caste oppression, ethno-racial discrimination, and
water wars fissure social experience in this archive, populated by the creations of Amruta
Patil, Malik Sajad, Sarnath Banerjee, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Appupen, Srividya Natarajan,
Aparajita Ninan, Durgabai Vyam, Shubham Vyam, Srividya Natarajan, S. Anand, Ram
Devineni, Lina Srivastava, Sana Amanat, and others. Linking Bangladesh, India, and
South Asian America, these essays traverse heterogeneous geographies, even as they bear
witness to the frayed fabric of life in the postcolonial states of India and Bangladesh, as
well as post-9/11 America. In different ways, they map how South Asian graphic narra-
tives “put the body on the page,” (Chute 2010) while documenting and criticizing the
6 K. DAIYA

diverse forms of violence – ecological, political, sexual, and national – experienced by

gender and ethno-racial minorities in the modern nation.
Mainly, three themes emerge as foci across the essays in this issue. First, several essays
draw upon feminist perspectives to tease out how graphic narratives interrogate gender-
based violence and reinvent dominant discourses about gender and sexuality. Second,
many of the essays are committed to an eco-critical challenge to environmental degrad-
ation and its intertwined social dispossessions enacted by capital and the state. To this
end, the remarkable energy, in these essays, that devolves upon Malik Sajad’s graphic
memoir Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015) reflects the urgent geopolitical state of crisis
that is the Kashmir conflict in South Asia. Third, several essays highlight the subaltern
experiences of those displaced internally in South Asia across its state, regional, caste and
national boundaries – as refugees as well as economic migrants. An investment in explor-
ing the spatial and temporal, culturally hybrid aesthetics of the image-text encounter
threads through these rich analyses. Additionally, another unique dimension of this col-
lection is that its contributors are scholars located around the world – in Bangladesh,
India, Malaysia, Germany, Canada, and the United States – thus representing a truly
transnational community.
It is beyond the scope of any special issue to be comprehensive; this one is no excep-
tion. Many works, styles, and linguistic traditions of graphic narratives of South Asia
remain unexamined, especially on cultural production from Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Further, the Anglophone graphic narrative dominates this dialogue. Nonetheless, the
unique group of scholars that gathers here generates new debates which, I hope, will
extend to other geographies and works, both in this journal and in the academy in gen-
eral. Ultimately, my hope is that they will become points of departure for a deeper dia-
lectical analysis of the relation between aesthetics and politics in South Asian
graphic narratives.
Allow me to offer a glimpse of the rich and varied archive of this issue. It opens with
Nandini Chandra’s essay, that offers a unique historical comparison, by juxtaposing the
diverse aesthetics of the mass popular Amar Chitra Katha series (which reigned over
comics culture in post-independence India until the turn of the century), with two Indian
graphic narratives: Sajad’s Munnu and Durgabai Vyam, Subhash Vyam, Srividya
Natarajan, and S. Anand’s Bhimayana: Incidents in the Life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
(2011). Chandra argues that while Amar Chitra Katha’s mythological tales can be read as
critical secular biographies, the project of political critique in both Munnu and
Bhimayana subordinates their aesthetic intervention.
Several of the following essays interrogate representation and the many facets of
belonging – gendered, national, ethnic, religious, and beyond – in recent graphic narra-
tives. Lopa Basu’s essay examines the exiled Jewish subject Abravanel in Sarnath
Banerjee’s The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007). It unveils Banerjee’s critique of colo-
nial as well as postcolonial middle-class Indian masculinity. Basu traces the critique of
female objectification in this novel, arguing that the constant figure of the
“unaccommodated” religious and ethnic minority figure in the narrative troubles old and
new narratives of nationalism in India and its diaspora. Amit Baishya’s essay analyzes the
representation of Kashmiris as hanguls (endangered Kashmiri deer) and members of the
Indian army in Kashmir as “humans” in Munnu. Baishya argues that the memoir’s visual
representation of triangulated relations between stray dogs, hanguls, and humans in a
zone of emergency gestures to new modes of interspecies affiliation hitherto unimagined
in South Asian cultural production.
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 7

The graphic narrative’s creative play with natural and man-made environments – and
a concern with the consequences for the present and future – continues in the following
contributions to this issue. Pramod Nayar’s essay argues that Appupen’s The Snake and
the Lotus (2018) is a dystopic work that instantiates a posthuman Gothic. In this wordless
narrative, a focus on environment, urban degradation, and sexual violence invents an eco-
critical Gothic, whose critical posthuman ecology contains coexistence and mutual
dependence. Preeti Singh studies the representation of the Indian Emergency (1975–1977)
in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s graphic novel Delhi Calm (2010). Singh argues that Ghosh’s multi-
modal narrative – and its engagement with various forms of mass media like the radio,
print, advertisements, propaganda posters, and more – offers a new representation of
time and history, as well as of urban democracy as constituted by the cultural forms of
that time.
Sreyoshi Sarkar analyzes how Munnu, as a graphic memoir, employs the narrative
form of the kuntslerroman, in conjunction with other aesthetic strategies, in order to re-
narrate the lived experiences of Kashmiris. This not only challenges dominant media rhet-
orics about Kashmir, but also, as Sarkar shows, invites us to recognize the urgent need
for social and ecological justice in the valley. Anuja Madan argues that Sarnath Banerjee
critiques popular rhetorics about national economic progress in India in his graphic nar-
rative All Quiet in Vikaspuri (2015) by depicting its costs: ecological crises and the
destruction of local communities. Madan notes both, the marginality of women in this
narrative, even as she maps how Banerjee illuminates that the root causes of the water cri-
sis in Delhi are the resource imperialism of its elite and middle classes, and the privatiza-
tion of a public good.
Sukanya Gupta’s essay situates the theory of the graphic novel in conversation with
Indian writing in English. Engaging this with an ecocritical approach, Gupta argues that
Sarnath Banerjee blends the cli-fi genre with the medium of the graphic novel to illustrate
the “slow violence,” to use Rob Nixon’s term, that is perpetrated on nature in the name
of vikas or progress in All Quiet in Vikaspuri (2015). She also maps the narrative’s criti-
cism of mainstream news media outlets that elide environmental violence. Andrew Ng’s
essay examines the representation of postcolonial violence in Munnu through a psycho-
analytic framework. Ng considers how violence, especially the kind whose effect is uncon-
scious, is represented in comic art using techniques and strategies specific to the genre.
This, he argues, invites a moral response to the Kashmir conflict.
Many of the essays in this issue also explore the complex, transmediatic nature of
graphic narratives – particularly how this form directs readers to specific contexts and
issues. Ira Sarma offers a broad overview of how Indian graphic novelists deploy visual
intertextualities and mixed media, in ways that engage Indian and non-Indian visual cul-
tural utterances. Drawing upon examples from works by Appupen, Vishwajyoti Ghosh,
Amruta Patil, and Sarnath Banerjee, Sarma argues that the Indian graphic novel requires,
to a much higher degree than its “Western” counterparts, a “glocal” reader who can navi-
gate local, national, and global cultural spaces.
Ruma Sinha’s essay analyzes anti-caste graphic narratives about the lives of Dalit lead-
ers Jyotirao Phule and Dr. B. R. Ambedkar as portrayed in Srividya Natarajan and
Aparajita Ninan’s A Gardener in the Wasteland (2011) and Durgabai Vyam, Shubham
Vyam, Srividya Natarajan, and S. Anand’s Bhimayana. She argues that these aesthetically
experimental works offer innovative ways to interrogate the issue of representation that
has been central to the Dalit imagination, even as they trouble the representation of Dalit
women in the anti-caste struggle.
8 K. DAIYA

Nidhi Shrivastava examines the critique of India’s rape culture in Ram Devineni, Lina
Srivastava, and Dan Goldman’s Priya’s Shakti – India’s first augmented reality comic
book geared towards teenagers. Shrivastava analyzes how Priya’s Shakti responds to the
2012 rape of Jyoti Singh in Delhi by representing a fictional young woman, Priya, as a
rape survivor. She shows how Priya’s Shakti mobilizes new technologies of production
and dissemination to challenge rape culture; the graphic narrative does so, she argues, by
effectively drawing upon the aesthetic representations of Hindu mythological characters in
the Amar Chitra Katha comics.
Mahruba Mowtushi’s essay revolves around the graphic mediation of urban experience
in Dhaka. Analyzing graphic narratives, comic books, and street art, Mowtushi compares
three distinct graphic texts – the comic book series called Mujib (2018), Maria Litwa’s
pictographic expos
e of the Biharis in “Welcome to the Geneva Camp” (2013), and a series
of street art known as the “Subodh series’” (2015) – uncovering a forgotten Dhaka popu-
lated by subaltern subjects surviving migration, poverty, war, and displacement.
Umme al-Wazedi turns to Pakistani-American experience in post 9/11 United States,
as represented in the Ms. Marvel series and its protagonist Kamala Khan. Al-Wazedi ana-
lyzes how the superhero series disrupts racial and gender stereotypes by making a
Muslim-American girl – Kamala Khan, from New Jersey – a superhero. Simultaneously,
she argues, the series offers a feminist critique of the experiences of gender and racial dis-
crimination in middle-class America.
The graphic archive of this special issue suggests that the contemporary South Asian
graphic narrative is rooted in the project of socio-political and ecological critique. And
that, as such, it offers new perspectives on gendered experience, transnational displace-
ment, environmental violence, and ethno-racial conflict. Together, these essays – in their
transnational arc and their heterogeneous approaches – invite us to reconsider and reima-
gine the representation of South Asian and South Asian American history, through the
medium of graphic narratives. They illuminate how the creative, transmediatic encounter
in the graphic narrative offers us new understandings of the past, while outlining new
approaches to the violence that saturates the power relations of our postcolonial (but not
post-imperial) present in South Asia and its diasporas.

Notes
1. I thank the visionary editor of South Asian Review, Dr. Pradyumna Chauhan, for
enabling this new dialogue on South Asian and South Asian American graphic narratives.
I also thank the peer-reviewers who generously contributed to its making, and Patrick
Henry, for his expert editing assistance at several stages of the process.
2. See also, Chute and Jagoda (2014). As they observe,
Comics is a form with a peculiar syntax; among its most basic elements are panels
(also called frames), gutters, speech balloons, text boxes. How the gutter, the space
in between panels, divides and proliferates time is at the heart of how comics
works … . It is a medium that builds and organizes the space of the page by
assembling a series of moments – thus turning, as Spiegelman has often
commented, time into space … . Crucially, the gutter spaces of comics are, in a
sense, unregulated spaces, interstices that are components of meaning for the reader
to fill in (or choose to ignore). For this reason, comics … is a form that gestures at
robust readerly involvement; it actively solicits through its constitutive grammar the
participant’s role in generating meaning. Further, comics pages do not function as
directively as some other forms of media; the correct direction of reading is often
unclear, and deliberately so.
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 9

3. Here, I draw upon Pheng Cheah’s conceptualization of ‘worlding.’

4. In particular, I draw upon my argument that in the contemporary moment, the
postcolonial critic’s responsibility lies in provincializing America. See also chapter 5 in
Daiya (2008).

Notes on Contributor
Kavita Daiya is the Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and
Associate Professor of English at George Washington University. She has written numerous
articles on gender and sexuality, South Asian literature, Bollywood film, Asian American litera-
ture, South African literature, and transnational cinema, and the book Violent Belongings:
Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India (Philadelphia: Temple UP, [2008]
2011; New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2013). She serves as Associate Editor (Book Reviews) for the
South Asian Review. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Mellon
Foundation, the NEH, and others. Her articles and reviews have appeared in edited volumes,
and journals like PMLA, Genders, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, American Book Review,
Journal of Asian Studies, among others. Dr Daiya is a specialist of postcolonial and Asian
American Studies, with expertise in Global Feminisms, Critical Race Theory, and Migration
and Conflict Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is also
Affiliated Faculty in the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, the Sustainability Program, and the
Global Women’s Institute at GWU.

References
Babb, Lawrence A., and Susan S. Wadley, eds. 1998. Media and the Transformation of Religion in South
Asia. Delhi: Motlal Banarsidass.
Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. 2014. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Chandra, Nandini, 2008. The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha, 1967-2007. New Delhi: Yoda Press.
Cheah, Pheng, 2016. What is a World? On a Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Chiu, Monica, ed. 2014. Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Chute, Hillary, 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narratives and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Chute, Hillary, 2016. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Chute, Hillary, Patrick Jagoda, Hillary Chute, and Patrick Jagoda. 2014. “Introduction: Comics and
Media.” “Comics and Media.” Critical Inquiry 40 (3): 1–10. doi:10.1086/677316.
Chute, Hillary. 2008, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” PMLA 123 (2): 452–465. doi:
10.1632/pmla.2008.123.2.452.
Daiya, Kavita. 2005. “Provincializing America: Engaging Postcolonial Critique and Asian American
Studies in a Transnational Mode.” South Asian Review 26 (2): 265–275. doi:10.1080/
02759527.2005.11932412.
Daiya, Kavita. 2008. Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India.
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Reprint, New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2013.
Eisner, Will. 1985. Comics and Sequential Art. New York: Poorhouse Press.
Fawaz, Ramzi. 2016. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics.
New York: New York University Press.
Martin, Elaine. 2011. “Graphic Novels or Novel Graphics? The History of an Iconoclastic Genre.” The
Comparatist 35: 170–181. doi:10.1353/com.2011.0015.
McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton: Tundra.
McCloud, Scott. 2000. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Reinventing an Art
Form. New York: William Morrow.
10 K. DAIYA

McLain, Karline. 2009. India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press.
Mitchell, W.J.T. Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda. 2014. Afterword. “Comics and Media.” Critical Inquiry
40 (3): 255–265. doi:10.1086/677376.
Murthy, Barath. 2009. “An Art without a Tradition: A Survey of Indian Comics.” Marg Magazine 61 (2):
1–38.
Nayar, Pramod K. 2016. The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History, and Critique. New York: Routledge.
Petersen, Robert. 2011. Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narratives. Santa
Barbara: Praeger.
Sen, Orijit. n.d. “Throwback Thursday: Orijit Sen.” Interview by Platform. http://www.platform-mag.com/
design/throwbackthursday-orijit-sen.html
Stein, Daniel and Jan-No€el Thon, 2013. From Comics to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and
History of Graphic Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Varughese, Emma Dawson. 2017. Visuality and Identity in Post-Millennial Indian Graphic Narratives.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Varughese, Emma Dawson, and Rajinder Dudrah. 2016. “Popular Visuality in South Asia.” South Asian
Popular Culture 14: 1–2. doi: 10.1080/14746689.2016.1261431.

Kavita Daiya
George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
kdaiya@gmail.com

ß 2018 South Asian Literary Association