The Fear of Iconoclasm: Genre and Medium Transformations from Comics to Graphic Novels in Amar Chitra Katha, Bhimayana, and Munnu

Abstract

The Indian graphic novel tells stories through indigenous or mythographic prisms. This implies frequently departing from the comic medium’s typical grid structure of regular panels interrupted by gutter space. The comic medium’s linear and sequential narrative is often identified by graphic novel theorists with an ‘Enlightenment’ logic inadequate to a vernacular reality. At the same time, in so far as it is about the life narrative of an iconoclastic individual, the graphic narrative cannot entirely avoid speaking the language of a rational and sovereign subject. I argue that the combination of an individual’s iconoclastic trajectory, along with the desire to iconize that very trajectory through a mythic or indigenous idiom, leads to conflicts between decisions made at the level of form and those made at the level of subject matter. This is further complicated by the comic medium’s penchant for dialectical reversals. While it is possible to read Amar Chitra Katha’s mythological tales as critical secular biographies, the graphic narratives Bhimayana and Munnu are so driven by illustration in the form of metaphors, puns and allegories that their visual component loses its narrative traction, becoming in many ways merely decorative and artistic.