Name: Srinjona Koleh

Class: CL/UG/III

Roll-001800201069

Course: 5.4B Literature and Other Arts.

Professor: Epsita Halder

Date: 20th January 2021

 The visual depiction of the life of the ‘other’ in the graphic novels ‘Bhimayana’ and ‘Palestine’ by
focussing on the position of the narrator.

The term graphic novel is contentious. It is usually taken to mean a long comic narrative for a mature audience, with serious
literary themes and sophisticated artwork. There is a premonition, mask or precursor in graphic novels. A comic or graphic
novel has no autonomy of text and no autonomy of the image and the images are never an illustration of the literary text, the
illustration itself is a text. The images are complement and they have their own narrative. The visual section and the textual
section are mutually constitutive. The images are explanatory itself and they tell a story. Literary text and the graphic text are
connected with no pre-given supremacy but the proportion of visual depiction is supreme kind of form to tell the story.
Image or illustrations can bring in newer interpretation to the dialogues and creates central meaning to the text.

Between 1991 and 1992, Joe Sacco, an American cartoonist and journalist spent two months in Palestine and Israel. It was
the waning days of the first intifada, when Palestinians rose up against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip and were met by a military response. Over a thousand people died, the majority of them were Palestinians, while
images of Palestinian boys and men throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers abounded. Sacco was later
explained, “furious at” the American news media, which he thought mischaracterized and misrepresented the reality of the
situation and the power imbalances between the two countries. “There are two ways in which Palestinians are portrayed—as
terrorist and as victim,” he told an interviewer for Al Jazeera. “There may be truth in certain situations for both descriptions,
but Palestinians are also people going to school, who have families, have lives, invite you into their home, and think about
their food.” He wanted to see what was happening for himself and hear from Palestinians in the occupied territories directly.
On his trip, Sacco spent time in Palestinians’ homes, where he shared meals and interviewed them about their lives. He
turned his notes into a series of comic books published between 1993 and 1995. They weren’t commercially successful, but
they were a rarity in the American media: Unflinchingly honest about the Palestinian plight, they depicted an open,
hospitable people describing the horrific yet quotidian nature of their suffering. The following year, Fantagraphics released
Palestine as a non-fiction graphic novel in two volumes, which was written and drawn by Joe Sacco. Sacco said that he
showed himself as a recording tool, as a journalist who would be manipulating to know the truth, at the same time who
would be succumb himself to see the condition of the local inhabitants. He presented a paradoxical situation to show that
there can be nothing of the historical truth, or one journalistic truth, truth is always multi-faceted, multi-attempted and isn’t
pre-given.

Figure 1 Figure 2

As seen in figure 1, the beginning of the novel, a fictionalised self of Joe Sacco can be seen. He can be seen as person
observing the city from an upper height. His journey starts with Cairo and so his first chapter. As shown in figure 2,
tremendous contraction of human action is seen in one frame. Sacco gave a sense of over population in Cairo. These are all
reflection of mental attributes of the narrator. The textual part shown within rectangular strips in figure 2 is representing
visual chaos and is depicting various lives with whom Sacco came in touch with or have had interacted with. For example
there is a man called Shreef who is a muslim by his religious identity and he is in love with a woman who lives in Prague
with her husband and children. Shreef believes that his love with make the woman leave her children and husband and will
finally come to him. To make the visual more realistic and accurate as one see in real life, Joe Sacco painted the mouth of the
person keeping perspective in mind with a comic exaggeration as observed in figure 3. Sacco's thick dark lines in Palestine
carry a feeling of discomfort for the reader. The discomfort is felt everywhere in Palestine because of war, military rule and
political unrest. The illustrations are the only ways authors can express these feelings to the reader and have the reader feel
throughout the novel. Throughout the novel Joe Sacco exposed political injustice of Israel and how Palestinians are living as
a second order citizen in their own land.
 .

Figure 3

During Joe Sacco’s visit to the valley of Kidron, Jerusalem he met with Palestinian kids who asked him if he is Jewish or not
and asked for money (Figure 4). The kids grown up as bad and are marginalised, their tender generation has been lost, Sacco
stands at a distance, he is not a nice person, he wants to show that he is not outside, he is exposing all the hegemonic
interiorisation, he is not claiming himself to be ideal person or a political person, he tries very hard to portray the picture of
suffering that the arab muslims are going through. They as a marginalised community and oppressed community have a will
to express themselves outside the world. Through the graphic novel Joe Sacco is writing a chronicle about the dominant
aggressive military history of Palestine and how Palestinians are striking back. Sacco never used ‘Jew’ for Israel and
‘Muslim’ for Palestine, he kept his text as a submissive one. The readers are reading the thought process of the narrator that
is the mind and analysis of Joe Sacco and what he wants to depict and make the readers understand.

Figure 4

The graphic novel ‘Bhimayana: Experiences Of Untouchability’, published by Navayana in 2011 covers few incidents from
the life of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar; through seminal symbolisms drawn in the Pardhan Gond art style, Bhimayana makes the
readers encounter the brutal realities of lives of millions of people across the country, relevant even today. Created by artists
Durgabai Vyam, Subhash Vyam and writers Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand, the “catchy” medium of graphic novels serves
the purpose of Bhimayana by helping it penetrate mainstream media which, as an understatement, tends to ignore caste-bias.
By showing, rather than mainly telling, Bhimayana confronts people who refuse to listen.
 Figure 5

The choice of using ‘tribal art’ in ‘Bhimayana’ is particularly interesting as Ambedkar’s own views on the tribal community
was certainly not the most progressive; as he calls them “savages” in his ‘Annihilation of Caste’ and makes the argument
that Hinduism has ‘failed’ because it couldn’t convert them into ‘good’ people. The modern politics around these two
“reserved” categories is also very different. It wouldn’t be too much of a leap to guess that the creators of ‘Bhimayana’ were
willing to oppose Ambedkar’s own biases. While he is an ‘icon’ in the story, he is not to be ‘put on the pedestal’.

The book opens with the incident where young Bhim is denied water at school because he is an untouchable and his teacher
calls him a ‘nuisance’ because he cannot wait till the bell rings (Figure 6). A few pages later, readers will find two news
stories from 2008: ‘Dalit killed for digging own well’ and ‘Water wars: Dalit woman torched’. As the narrative progresses,
the point is driven home: more than a hundred years after Ambedkar was denied water in school, the ugly reality of atrocities
against Dalits persists in 21st century India, and is either ignored or consigned to the inside pages of newspapers.

Figure 6

On book 2 (Shelter), Ambedkar, who is left without shelter in Baroda, is sitting in a park and thinking. In this scene, his face
becomes the frame for the illustration and the garden with children playing is within it. Even the speech bubbles have
character. There is a bird-shaped ‘bubble’ which appears “only for characters whose speech is soft, the lovable characters,
the victims of caste — men and women who speak like birds.” The ‘thought bubble’ has eyes since “thinking happens with
the mind’s eye.” Then there are bubbles which carry “a sting” — so it’s only natural that they should look like a scorpion’s
tail.

Figure 7
But there’s more to the art than mere aesthetics. In the world created by the Vyams, there are eyes everywhere: on rail tracks,
clocks, in water, and, of course, on speech bubbles. Creatures other than humans — snakes, cows, birds, fishes — are present
in almost every frame. At times, the animate and inanimate — a bus with the face of a human, a fort that’s depicted as a lion
— meld together. The lions and crocodiles represent the anger of the oppressive Brahmins whereas fishes and elephants
represent the thirst of the Dalits. The result is a colourful graphic narrative where the art carries a subtle message even as the
words tell the story

Figure 8

The acknowledgement that Ambedkar was not the “worst off” intends to highlight what this ‘worse’ is that we are not
considering yet. If Bhim was denied the basic need of shelter, food and “as elemental a feeling as thirst” in ‘Bhimayana’ (Pg.
45), what is this “worse”? Interwoven with the narrative of ‘Bhimayana’ are multiple newspaper reports from fairly recent
‘past’ for readers in 2020 wherein there seems to lie our answer: “Yet another Dalit woman gangraped and killed in UP’s
Balarampur” (October 1, 2020); “17-year-old Dalit youth not allowed to enter temple, shot dead by upper caste men for
arguing” (June 9, 2020); “Indian Dalit man killed for eating in front of upper-caste men” (May 19, 2019). If not violence,
then outright denial: “Dalit student denied admission in Tamil Nadu government school” (October 30, 2020); “workers
‘denied drinking water, access to toilets for being Dalit’” (August 22, 2020); “25 Dalit Families Forced To Stay Out Of
Shelter Homes During Fani In Odisha” (May 14, 2019). The authors, however, made the narrative current by including
recent news stories of Dalits being beaten, murdered and raped.

Figure 9

Bhimayana is a story that has not ended yet. It leaves the reader with a question: if Dalits continue to face discrimination as
Ambedkar did, what will it take to produce a leader of his stature today?

These days graphic novels are becoming more common for authors to tell or depict their stories. Literary and visual arts are
beginning to combine their media's social and political issues and share the cultural experiences seen in the societies in
which they live in , as we see in Bhimayana. The form of graphic novel is chosen to exercise not just because it is fun,
creative and new but because the combination of picture and texts gives something that other forms of writing do not have.
Graphic novels do not just incorporate words; they combine text and images to discuss social and political issues and deliver
this information to the reader in the quickest way possible, as we see in Joe Sacco’s Palestine which is a delivery of
journalism via graphic novel.