Aesthetics, Gender, and Canon in Anti-Caste Graphic Narratives, A Gardener in the Wasteland and Bhimayana

Abstract

This essay considers graphic narratives about the lives of Dalit leaders 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 (2011) to examine the aesthetics of publishing, gender, and canon from an anti-caste perspective. I argue that while maintaining the focus on the Dalit leaders, these works offer innovative ways to interrogate the issue of representation that has been central to the Dalit imagination. I examine questions such as how Dalit women are perceived, integrated, and represented in this structurally layered reinvention and how these graphic narratives reappraise the role of upper-caste participants in the anti-caste struggle. I investigate how this medium rises to the challenge of apprehending the issue of authenticity and representation in Dalit literature by problematizing the very notion of authentic representation to posit that the anti-caste struggle must be the work of everyone, not just Dalits. I use the term “anti-caste literature” to define these graphic narratives in an attempt to understand the impact of these works on the semantics of both anti-caste and Dalit literary canon.