Kumar 1

Lalit Kumar

Caste Inequalities and Its Representation in Indian Graphic Novels

INTRODUCTION

Caste studies in India and around the world has seen much-justified attention ever since it

roughly began as an academic discourse, voicing over a plea for equality and respectable status

as basic as it gets. Though the uprisings in caste-conflicts have always been on a rise in the

Indian subcontinent, it also started to meet with heavy criticism and upright confrontation at the

beginning of the twentieth century. To put a distinct beginning to the whole discourse of caste

studies in India, the stemming of it all can be traced back to a single man’s bold hypothesis,

elegant argumentation and the felicity of expression in English. Bhimrao Ambedkar was the first

person to ever draw attention on electoral reforms. He pointed out that the Untouchables are

distinct from the caste Hindus in everyday social life, and thus need to constitute a separate

element politically as well. Ambedkar wrote in an oral testimony that to give Untouchables an

opening ‘special provision shall have to be made for their adequate representation.’ In recent

decades, however, the said discourse has blended with other important forms of representation:

the ones that started on a similar note of voicing out social inequalities within the given socio-

political contexts.

Graphic novels have seen a rise on the same notes, especially as a piece of counter-territory

literature. The most distinct roots of the graphic narrative genre can be roughly traced back

to manga comics. In Japan, during WWII, a tradition begins which dealt with the portrayal of

serious concerns like the impacts of war on people’s psyche, not to mention the socio-economic

degradation1. The origin lying in a charged socio-political scenario makes the genre political by
 Kumar

its very nature. It doesn’t only seem to question but also challenges the regime and its

authoritarian policies. Having mentioned this, it seems safe to say that the attention and critical

acclaim that this generic representation has garnered doesn’t go undermine in the current

academic respectability.

In this paper, I wish to delve into the conjoining forces of what Dalit literature speaks of and a

graphical representation of the same. The objective of this paper is to explore the dialectical

relationship between the semantic and the visual content. This relationship can also be seen as a

combination of low and high art. Graphic novels or representation with the Dalit picture in mind

has the whole idea of showcasing, in a visual form, the violence that is inflicted upon the lower

castes to this very day. And it is not too tough to contest that the violence still goes unnoticed, it

still seems like a thing of the past for the progressive. But the major objective of graphic

representation gives an edge to the story it is delineating. My point is to bring out the viability

and various nuances of graphical representation vis-à-vis a discourse, as charged as the question

of Dalit, in India.

In the woke of digital media, where visuals and texts flash in front of the viewer’s eyes one after

another, generating attention merely through texts remains very much limited to academic

discipline. Thus it also delimits the reach of the voice which concerns with one or the other issue.

With the popularity of the graphic novels and the serious social issues that it has started to

undertake, a larger ambit of readers is getting provisioned. This medium of graphical

representation captures multiple temporalities and realities within a single given framework. My

argument doesn’t undermine the textual capability but is rather inclined towards how the visual

representation is witnessing a paradigm shift altogether. To support my contention in these

regards, I wish to undertake Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability (2011), a very seminal

 Kumar

text, which discusses the biographical elements from Ambedkar’s life and his struggles and puts

them in a contemporary account embedded with fictional elements from writer’s figment of the

imagination. The equation of non-Dalit writers putting in arguments for the lower castes adds up

to the layering of scrutiny. The novel employs the traditional art form known as the Pardhan

Gond art and improvises it into an open style representation which stretches across the pages.

Further, I also wish to bring out the new modes that such a representation offers about the power

politics along racial and caste contours.

To put it short, the mainstay of this paper revolves around the possible requirement of this

relatively newer ‘visual-verbal literacy’, as Pramod K Nayar uses the term, which could respond

to the immediate needs of the present milieu.2 To trace the history of this creative genre, its rise

on the global platform, the cues that Indian writers and expressionists took from it, the agency of

Dalit or non-Dalit writers, and the current positioning of Graphic literature when placed

alongside the grave issues of Caste studies will be the key issues to be discussed in this paper.

The Rise of Graphic Novels in India

There has been a very recent addition to the realist fiction category, which has already been

termed as ‘Bharati Fantasy’. The addition is that of the graphic novels, to existing categories

such as urban satires, ethnographic regional novels, and other popular forms of Indian fiction in

English. This broader category overlooks findings concerning identity and Indianness and also

India’s post-millennial society’s interest in portraying and projecting ideas of India through its

historical underpinning, epic narratives and cultural figures.

Now addressing graphic novels and its rise, in particular, there is a need to mention the genre as

a form giving rise to a whole new kind of visual-verbal literacy. Marianne Hirsch, a
 Kumar

commentator of graphic memoirs, claims that these newer forms of visual-verbal literacy are

what we all need today. In the Indian context, however, the graphic novels are mostly

responsible for satirizing contemporary issues in the country or contentious problems: caste

conflicts being the foremost to be represented.

Graphic narration can be seen as the label which is an intricate blend of the visual components

through graphical representation and telling of a story through textual constituents. The graphic

narrative uses these visual and verbal texts to address serious themes and issues. The approach,

however, includes thematic complexities and also has the potential to tread on the political edges

too. Pramod K. Nayar writes in his introduction to The Indian Graphic Novel that the Indian

graphic narrative is,” increasingly central to the canon of Indian Writing in English (IWE).2 He

further contends that a newer narrative would demand a whole new type of literacy and newer

frames to interpret.

The major dynamic shift in the urban scenarios post-independence to the very recent decades has

seen rising in a new urban social imagination and understanding. The graphic narrative is another

milestone when it comes to offering an alternate reading of history, of cultural and hitherto taboo

subjects. Even though the fact cannot be contested that a sophisticated production, and relatively

idiosyncratic way of representing some serious issue, the graphic narrative still cater to the small

percentile of urban readers, but this fact doesn’t weigh too much when it comes to the critical

and academic importance of graphical ways of representation and what they represent.

Through the graphic narrative, a critical representation on historical events like independence

and partition, social issues like child abuse (Hush), violence on women (Drawing the Line), the

caste system in India (Bhimayana, A Gardener in the Wasteland), has been worked upon. The

first in the line of these can be The River of Stories, published 1994, by Orijit Sen.3 The
 Kumar

immediate attention to a genre, new to the reading public and academia of the country, can be

credited to the additional dimension it brings to the narration. Such events and narration as listed

above have the visual way of storytelling as well. The satirization on Indian cultural practices

and traditional customs offers even more crude representation with the advantage of graphically

telling a story.

Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability and the Man Himself

John Berger in his foreword to the book points out how to tell stories and narrate struggles that

had been their history but have lost many ways of being represented. Faced with this challenge

where panopticon of narration ‘the whole of history and every horizon of life’ is brought down

merely to the pursuit of profit.4 Bhimayana can be explained as a text which ‘interweave

historical events with contemporary incidents, infusing fresh energy into the graphic idiom’.

Bhimayana portrays the all-encompassing caste system through the life story of Bhimrao

Ambedkar and focuses primarily on the humiliations he had gone through only on the account of

him being born in a Dalit community. The text is a prime example of how the real incidents from

Ambedkar’s life and general recollections from the past are infused with and reworked along

with a modern contemporary setting. This urban sensibility of readers is a projection of

economic liberalization and the discontent people feel against it. This blending becomes

necessary to show how the perpetuation of caste violence is continued despite the economic

welfare that the lower castes have been experiencing in a modern India. To talk of Ambedkar’s

life is not just to talk of one man’s stature and the undying spirit of fighting against the age-old,

highly normalized and inhumane caste violence. He also serves as the prime case example of

how for even an untouchable, attaining the best of education and knowledge would make him no
 Kumar

better a tonga driver belonging to caste Hindu (referring to Ambedkar’s travelling to Goregaon

incident, as also portrayed in Bhimayana).

Pardhan Gond art was introduced and popularized in the mid-1900s by Jangarh Singh Shyam. In

the later days of the form’s practice, it was extensively used for illustrations in children’s books.

The narrative, in its grandiose Pardhan Gond art, initiates with an argument between two urban

youths discussing the intricacies of caste reservation in the country. The two youth figure is

bifurcated with one another figure in between them, with its arms and legs branching out towards

the two youth figure. This branching out in either direction shows the common mass’ discourse

about the reservation system based on caste and addresses the confusion of non-Dalit readers

who doesn’t have much awareness about the binaries of the caste system and its intricacies.

One of the major constituent elements is the graphical representation itself. It serves as the

mainstay of the whole argument vis-à-vis atrocities against Dalit, an Indian version of apartheid.

This incident is followed by the real reporting of the then-popular Khairlanji incident, where

some members of one Bhotmange family were killed in the broad daylight. The graphic book is a

compendium of artistic devices such as imagery, symbolism, parallelism, metaphor, irony, and

real news reportage. The heavy mention of real news with real data contends the fictional tropes,

strongly trying to make the genre as one. That the atrocities are present to this very day is a

contention that is achieved through the juxtaposition of the past and the present, and real and

fictional. This also raises the concerns about how humans belonging to the Dalit community are

still looked upon as sub-humans, even worse than the beasts.

“They have brushes for the buffalo

And shears for the Goat

They won’t trim a Mahar's hair

 Kumar

They would rather cut his throat.”5

There is also a visible absence of a sequential framework as the story comes back to the two

arguing youth time and again, and then harks back into the life of the hero of the novel. The lack

of any chronological arrangement is another literary trope employed by the illustrators to

emphasize the expansive horizon of Dalit experiences and their atrocities in real-time. The listing

of chapters is crucial too. The three central chapters in the book are titled, ‘Water’, ‘Shelter’ and

‘Travel’. The incidents are picked up majorly from autobiographical accounts of Ambedkar,

written at different times. One such source that the creators of Bhimayana pick up from

is Waiting for Visa written around 1935-36. The three chapters enlisted here talks and also try to

showcase the impunity with which inhuman violence is practiced along the contours not only

amongst the Hindu religion but along the traversing lines of other religions too. While the

chapter about the famous water incident shows the treatment of untouchables in the village

community Ambedkar hailed from, the chapters titled ‘Shelter’ and ‘Travel’ delineate the similar

treatment he received from people belonging to Parsi and Muslim ethnicities, respectively.

Another biographical element includes the long-drawn struggle of Mahad Satyagraha, where

Ambedkar lead around 3,000 Dalits in a peaceful march to the Chavadar tank to drink water. The

event was popularly termed as the ‘Declaration of Independence’ by the Dalit community. His

conversion into Buddhism in his later life to give a sense of completeness of the story of his life.

There is more multi-layered symbolism that becomes a quintessential part of the narrative. For

instance, in the section titled ‘Travel’, the statue of Buddha in the water body can be seen as

anticipating the physical reclaiming of water by the Dalits. Furthermore, it is also an indication

of the acceptance of Buddhism by Ambedkar and the mass conversion that followed thereafter.
 Kumar

Also included in the narration are incidents around the Gandhi-Ambedkar confrontation at the

round table conference held in 1931-32, his demand for a separate electorate for the

untouchables, Ambedkar chairing the drafting committee for the constitution. The text represents

the clash in the ideologies of the two men; ‘the doctor and the saint’, as also discussed deeply by

Arundhati Roy. The clash between the two is mentioned elaborately. It tells on how Gandhi

wanted a free India and went on to term lower castes as Harijans or the children of God, while

still trying to retain their occupation and indeed celebrating that. On the other hand, the suited

Ambedkar wishes and fights for equality for all.

The Idiosyncratic Representation: Merits of Bhimayana as Dalit Literature

What distinguishes this work from other conventional graphic styles is the choice of an open

representation of the characters rather than the ones contained within the square boxes. The

creators accept resorting to an open space representation thus to allow more air for their

characters to breathe, “We would like to mount our work in open spaces and not force the

characters into boxes, only to stifle them.” For the creators, to provide such open spaces to Dalit

characters at the forefront of violence against them is a ‘defining moment’.

Additional lines of differences from common style work in the graphic narrative lie in the fact

that Bhimayana doesn’t offer any ‘cinematic establishment shots, close-ups, extreme close-ups

(with surprised eyes and furrowed brows), perspective, lights and shadows, aerial view, low

angles’ and so on. Rather the merit lies in the full-page rendition of the narration. These full-page

renditions, however, contain multiple gutters, and these gutters became a crucial stage for the

whole depiction of the struggles. These divisions in the form of gutters are also used as roads, for

vehicles, and as boundaries for parks and ponds. The narration is also populated with the caste
 Kumar

Hindu people holding sticks in their hand and hence suggesting who holds the baton of violence.

While the upper caste people are shown as the wild beasts, the predators are shown as the mass

belonging to those of the lower castes.

The speech and thought bubbles, which are an important part of any graphic characterization, are

thoughtfully worked upon as well. There are distinct ways which can be marked out regarding

the speech bubbles. The first one is that of a bird and is used for characters with soft speech;

majorly the victims of caste oppression, other one is that of a Scorpion’s tail and is employed for

the one who perpetrates the violence and caste discrimination, the third one is more like a

thought bubble. It’s the one with the eyes and hints that the character is only thinking out loud

and not speaking. The latter is used for the caste victims too, to show the inability of these

characters concerning voicing out their concerns against fear for their very lives. There is also a

blank dialogue bubble which is a depiction of the growing awareness of the common non-Dalit

populace. The merit is achieved over the course of the book as the urban caste-biased boy, who

hails from Southern part of the country, says that ‘caste is no issue’ in the starting. But the

dialogues of the two youths through the course of the novel gives him some sense of the caste

discrimination, learning which he says that ‘caste doesn’t seem to go away’.

Pardhan Gond art is highly moulded to signify human emotions and feelings of despair. There

are scattered images of body parts, mostly hands, suggesting the social order which is also based

on the division. It is important to mention here how the caste system in Hinduism treats the

four varnas as four different parts of the body; while the Brahmins occupy the head, the lower

castes are given the status of the foot.

 Kumar

One another case study on these same contours can be about Gardner in The Wasteland with

artworks by Aparijita Ninan and Srividya Natrajan’s narration. This graphic narration, much

similar to Bhimayana, revives and builds on a ground-breaking 19th-century

work, Gulamgiri written by Jotiba Phule. Gulamgiri is an on-point attack on Brahmin orthodoxy,

where Phule addresses the exploitation of lower castes (Sudras and Atisudras). Being a visionary

for his time, he also calls out for upliftment of the lower castes by education and consciousness

of their predicament resulting out of the codified violence as preached by Hinduism.

Ninan’s and Natrajan’s work revitalize the struggle and a call for equality, through a passage of

time, for a whole new reading public with modern consciousness. The narration is not merely a

peephole to see caste struggles, but what it achieves is the portrayal of the very real viciousness,

caste tyranny, violence and injustice which is very much happening to this day. Gardner in The

Wasteland is an outright confirmation of Phule’s radical humanism and about his rational instinct

of a revolutionary against the discrimination that the organized religion and its upper-caste

bearer perpetrate on them. This narration also features Savitribai Phule much early in the

narration where she is shown advocating education for the untouchable girls against the

background of hysterical protest by Caste Hindus. Ninan’s and Natrajan’s creative blending of a

revolutionary piece of literature from the past and contemporary newspaper cuttings about the

incident which still reads like the same is all about bridging the solidarity against a common

social evil.

The Question of Agency: Non-Dalit Writers Portraying Dalit Experiences

When one writes of some true-to-life predicaments of highly marginalized groups say like Dalits

in India, in otherwise seemingly, socially and economically flourishing societies the question of
 Kumar

author’s agency is of prime importance. Graphic narratives, which is still limited in the reader's

consciousness, deserves an additional enquiry into this since their targeted audience is mostly

the urban youth whose mind gets buzzed only when there is something all new to encounter. To

what extent does a non-Dalit writer can submit to the array of causes of Dalit literature has been

a popular debate in the literary circles, both about Dalit studies and of literature, in general. The

arguments, more or less, are settled by asserting that a non-Dalit writer can only write with the

power of imagination and observed reality. In the case of Bhimayana as well, we notice that the

representation is merely a representation and doesn’t qualify as the work which seems to agitate

its reader, about the issues it is speaking of. The narration is build up and portrayed in a manner

which is more on the presenting side, and not speaking on fighting for the rights contour, majorly

because it is not their real-life struggle to speak of.

The authors, thus, those who do not possess the agency, write merely out of imagination and

their sensory or visual experiences of a life which remains outside the ambit of their existence.

Such narrations are products of blending. The blending is of, on one side, socio-political brutality

exerted upon and lived in real-time by a community. Both the community and the brutality still

exist and thrive, something that Bhimayana also successfully show. As for the second

constituent, there is the representation of the same by an author, who doesn’t speak from the very

agency of writing out such vulnerable existence of humans groups, living amongst socials.

Conclusion

To conclude the question of graphic narration vis-à-vis representation of Dalit struggle, it would

be of foremost importance to bring light upon the very psyche of visual narration and the

possibilities it offers. The narration no only speaks of reality but also showcases it. The latter is
 Kumar

an effort to put the struggles into a picture; an additional layer of voicing out what actually takes

place and yet goes unnoticed. The genre as a combination of low and high art, which serves as

the major contradiction and also generates critical literacy.

When reading images and print text, a reader is allowed some freedom of interpretation. When

reading images and print text, a reader is allowed some freedom of interpretation. This idea can

be labelled as a transaction or a “two-way process involving a reader and a text” The reader-

response theory, as propounded by Louise Rosenblatt, extend into the realms of graphic novels

as well.6 As for a graphic novel, both text and images is providing ample information to keep the

story going forward and thus the oscillation process between the print text and the images might

become more complex. There is a well-defined space for text potential where a unique meaning

is created between each reader and the text. For a better understanding, readers need to pay

attention to their reactions as contributions to the story.

The narrative strategy of placing the character – as both in Bhimayana and Gardener of The

Wasteland - in and out of its historical framework has a ‘meta-textual’ understanding. The Indian

graphic narrative, as a microcosm of a global concerning the representation of marginalized

stories, still contains only the foundational texts written for equal rights, human understanding

and a plea to end suffering. ‘Graphic’ is one potent dimension which highlights and maps the

injustices and oppression explicitly. It provides the exploration of the intersection between the

collective histories, marginalized struggles and life stories that are still relevant to us as readers

and thinkers today.

References

1. Sean, Tulien Comic, Graphic novels and Mangas Rowman & Littlefield, 2017
 Kumar

2. Nayar, Pramod K. The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique. Routledge,
2017.
3. Sen, Orijit, and Amita Baviskar. The River of Stories. Kalpavriksh, 1994.
4. Berger, John. “Foreword.” Bhimayana: Incidents in the Life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar,
by Durgabai Vyam et al., Navayana, 2018.
5. “Water.” Bhimayana: Incidents in the Life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, by Durgabai
Vyam et al., Navayana, 2018.
6. Rosenblatt, L. M. (1982). The literary transaction: Evocation and response. Theory into
Practice, 21, 268–277.

Works Cited

1. Vyam, Durgabai, et al. Bhimayana: Incidents in the Life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.
Navayana, 2018.
2. Natarajan, Srividya, et al. A Gardener in the Wasteland: Jotiba Phule's Fight for Liberty.
Navayana Publishing, 2016.
3. Nayar, Pramod K. The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique. Routledge, 2017.
4. Ambedkar, B. R. Waiting for a Visa: Reminiscences. Dravidar Kazhagam, 2008.