Traumatic Moments: Retrospective ‘Seeing’ of Violation, Rupture, and Injury in Three Post-millennial Indian Graphic Narratives

Abstract

This chapter examines visual moments from three Indian graphic narratives, each anchored in or inspired by real historical and political events: the Emergency (Delhi Calm), the Partition of India (This Side, That Side) and the Nirbhaya New Delhi gang rape case of 2012 (Drawing the Line). All three were published post-millennium by Indian publishing houses and each graphic narrative retrospectively explores various experiences of trauma. This analysis of a series of visual moments from these three Indian graphic narratives aims to illuminate the form’s propensity for expressing acts of remembering alongside the multilayered and often complex aspects of trauma narratives. The chapter also considers the significance of this recent turn to the use of the graphic narrative form within the Indian post-millennial scene to depict stories of trauma and societal rupture. The chapter argues that this (re)telling of challenging or taboo aspects of culture and society is especially significant in an Indian context, where traditional, established visual representations of India and ‘Indianness’ have until now been mostly celebratory and uncritical of such issues.