Lines from the Margins: Gond Artists Engage with McCloud

Abstract

Studies on Indian comics have burgeoned by productively engaging with comics and scholarship from the Global North. Within this, however, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is commonly restricted to comics from the Global North, making critical voices from the Global South indistinct. Our paper attends to this gap by studying two Indian comics, Babasaheb Ambedkar (2021) and Bhimayana (2011), side by side. While both the comics are based on Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a crusader against the Hindu caste system, they follow disparate visualization. Babasaheb has a clean grid-gutter approach to represent its action-oriented, exciting story. Bhimayana, on the other hand, is drawn by Pardhan Gond artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam. Borrowing the metaphors from their ecosystem, the Vyams divide the page into panels using Digna, a border style used in Gond floor art. To identify character traits, they draw animal-imposed human bodies and bird- and scorpion-tail-shaped speech balloons, which are close to what Randy Duncan calls "hermeneutic images." In our essay, we show that through training in floor and wall art painting and commitment to the Gond way of living, the Vyams envisaged comic tools' utility differently and, in the process, expanded the definitions that McCloud provides.