'A Story Is A Gesture'

The first graphic novelist of the country, Sarnath Banerjee is rather perverse to the idea of being known as one. He prefers a comic writer tag than any other labels, and thinks the term “graphic novel” was conveniently devised by publishers to shelf books like his.

Sarnath was speaking at a session on graphic novel at the Kovalam Literary Festival at Kanakakunnu Palace.

His first book, Corridor, was much acclaimed for its witty take on life in the streets of Delhi, the protagonist being a second-hand book seller. His works show a dark sense of humour and satire on urban life. For him, it’s his love of telling stories that comes first rather than beautiful wording or illustrations.

“I am deliriously happy living in Delhi. I record experiences, use imagination and scavenge for stories,” he said. “All I want is to tell a story, and not look for publishing houses or edifying my works.”

Full report here Yentha 

Strip search

Now that comics are called graphic novels, grown-ups can openly go to the better bookshops and buy them

My childhood had little room for comic books, and my weak grasp of Phantom and Tarzan has been exposed more than once. But a new series of comic books emerged in the 1970s, respectable enough for the most strait-laced households. They were the Amar Chitra Kathas, stories from Indian history and mythology. We first saw them when they were sold to raise funds for the Hindu Temple of North America in New York. The price was $10, steep, but in an unquestionably good cause.

Our first one was Savitri. The cover showed the beauteous Savitri seated under a tree with Satyavan's head in her lap, watching Yama approach. We read that book over and over, and if I saw it today I would read it again. We bought only a dozen titles, but through diligent borrowing we read well over 100. Living as we did so far from our grandmother, without the Amar Chitra Kathas, we simply would not have inherited the stories that were due to us.

I still find comics irresistible. Every morning I check what Beetle Bailey is doing before I read the headlines, for laughs and also for a four-panel window into life. When I want to know what's really going on in the United States, Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury gives me the big picture more reliably than any editorial. When I want to understand children, Calvin and Hobbes enlightens me. Everything I need to know about business is in Dilbert.

Full report here Hindu

Reading pictures

Graphic novels are a new avatar of the ancient illustrated dramas, says one publisher. They are now a promising genre in India, too.

In an era in which the spectre of e-readers haunts the publishing industry, one genre of books has done surprisingly well: the graphic novel. Even in the shadow of the recession, these picture-filled story books, many of them printed in full colour on expensive paper, have been so popular that K D Singh of The Bookshop in Delhi’s posh Jorbagh has devoted one entire shelf to them. He shows me the inventory of titles on his computer. It runs for pages and pages.

For many readers of serious literature, the very name of this genre is confusing. If something involves pictures and speech bubbles, surely it must be called a comic? And if a thing is called a comic, surely it cannot, by definition, be worthy of sober literary attention? Yet in recent years, some of the most successful graphic novels have been both serious and literary: Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman is set in World War II Germany. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is the autobiographical tale of one little girl growing up in Iran around the time of the Islamic Revolution. Epileptic by “David B” (David Beauchard) is the searing autobiographical account of a young man growing up in the shadow of his elder brother’s epilepsy. All three received ecstatic reviews and awards from the literary establishment.

Full report here Business Standard

Reading comics can be aardvark

Now, there aren’t too many comics that can claim to be parodies, especially of themselves

One of the longest running serious graphic novel series—as opposed to those of the superhero variety, though some of those are serious too—was Dave Sim’s Cerebus, which ran between 1977 and 2004.

The comics, collected in so-called phone book versions and independently published, are hard to come by—I have seen none in India and my copies were bought on Amazon many years ago—and while they are truly high-literature, the reason for their appearance in this column is a minor tale in itself.

I had originally planned to write this edition on the Hindi editions of Tintin—I have mixed feelings about these. One of the reasons I don’t particularly like the Hindi version of Tintin (disclaimer: I can read Hindi but it isn’t my favourite language and I have never ever read a work of fiction in Hindi unless you can count the Adventures of Prakash the Satrangi Peacock, a book I am currently reading out to my son so as to improve his Hindi) is because I think the effort to translate some of the things that I think untranslatable makes these comics look like parodies of themselves. Again, there are reasons I like the Tintin-in-Hindi books, but more on this in a later edition.

Full report here Mint

A steady graph

Artist Vishwajyoti Ghosh has always been interested in comics. So when he visited Lahore on a ‘reporting visa’, a journey filled with intriguing interactions with locals, and rendezvous with Pakistani intelligence and the police, Ghosh decided that the anecdotes needed to be related not just in words but also graphically. That’s when Lahore Reporting was born.

Ghosh is one among many who are turning to graphic novels to tell a story, a format fast gaining popularity among avid readers. A spokesperson from the Oxford Bookstores informs us that over the last four years, there has been an increase in the number of graphic novel titles, and the market for them has also grown by about 15-20 per cent. Lipika Bhushan, marketing head, HarperCollins Publishers India Ltd, says, “There is a consistency in the number of titles in this category being published by us and we do see a rise in the number of copies that sell year after year. There has been a growing interest in this category and we get a lot of enquiries from young students.”

The most popular Indian graphic novels are Corridor and The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers by Sarnath Banerjee, Kari by Amruta Patil, Kashmir Pending by Naseer Ahmed and The Hotel at the End of the World by Parismita Singh.

India, on a miniature scale

Architect Gautam Bhatia has used Rajasthani miniature paintings to illustrate his just-released graphic novel Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India. Excerpts from an exclusive interview:

Flip through the pages of Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India and you’ll see hundreds of colourful drawings. But this graphic novel, written by architect-author Gautam Bhatia and drawn by miniaturists from Rajasthan, is a relentlessly dark and hard-hitting work that lampoons the unsavoury aspects of contemporary Indian life, including the class divide and the apathy of politicians. Bhatia discusses the book in an interview:

In addition to being an architect, you’re an acerbic social commenter and a prolific writer. How do you find the time to juggle these disciplines?
Writing for me was an activity that grew out of architecture. Seeing how some clients had strange fetishes and dreams – demanding baroque villas and Venetian mansions in south Delhi’s Greater Kailash, for example – it was much easier to write about architecture than build it!

Time is always available. Buildings go on forever, people run out of money during construction, or projects don’t get approved because the building agency has not received the bribe. Anyway, most of my writing is a reflection on the visible state of things. It can be done at bus stops and railway stations.


Tell us about the genesis of Lie. Did you conceptualise and write the narrative first, and subsequently work with the artists?
Lie was initially an unwieldy 600-page book called An Indian Story. It was written for the project Desh Ki Awaaz, an arts collaboration between traditional, popular and graphic artists. I was the odd man architect in the group. This bigger story weaved together elements and themes from contemporary life, including politics, film, religion, cricket and family life.

By using subjects to which everyone could relate, the idea was to explore the moral and social dilemmas that dominate Indian life – corruption, dowry, dysfunctional families, gender inequality, caste prejudice, communalism and other areas of conflict. Real and fictitious characters – ministers, movie stars, bureaucrats, underworld dons, migrant workers, child labourers, government teachers, cricket players, business executives and a range of other personalities – moved in and out of the story. Lie was the shortened version of An Indian Story.

Full interview here Hindu

REVIEW: Lie

REVIEW

Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India
Gautam Bhatia
Tranquebar
Rs. 395
Pp 401
ISBN: 9380283739
Paperback

Blurb
The graphic novel looks at issues, personalities, people and ideas that project the popularly-held view of the country. Its characters interact with each other in a way that gives vent to a range of popular and suppressed prejudices-desires, taboos and age-old injustices - that dog the life of every Indian. A sardonic look at the current state of affairs in the country, using a traditional form of expression, Lie has been drawn by miniaturists from Rajasthan.

Through a glass, very darkly Hindu
From the palette of sombre colours used in the illustrations to the black humour running all through, Gautam Bhatia's graphic novel Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India is, at every level, a very dark piece of work.

A broad picture-book narrative that is part-soap opera and part-family melodrama, the self-proclaimed critic and satirist explores every nook and cranny of society, laying bare the flaws with brutal honesty. Thus, Bhola the protagonist, flawed in every conceivable manner morally, takes to politics and the apathy, corruption and wily mechanism of the bureaucracy is revealed in a manner that is as entertaining as it is disturbing.

At the other end of the spectrum is the impoverished and ideology-driven farmer Alibaba who chooses to walk the Gandhian path of uprightness and justice. Mid-spectrum is the sex-worker turned prime minister, Rekha.
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True copy Timeout Mumbai
More than a decade ago, architect Gautam Bhatia skewered the icing-cake aesthetic favoured by India’s nouveau riches in his brilliant Punjabi Baroque, which cast a jaundiced eye over the home designs of the newly affluent. His latest book, Lie, is a graphic novel drawn in collaboration with three Rajasthani miniature artists. The visuals are colourful, but the narrative is a darkly humourous sketch of Indian life. In an email interview with Naresh Fernandes, Bhatia said India evokes laughter as a form of relief, “like people who laugh in a perilous roller coaster ride when they are at their most fearful”. 

Lie is an angry book. What motivated it?
I live with this fear that I’ll wake up one morning and India would be gone. Just vanished! As if in the middle of the night someone just removed it from the map, and I’m waking up in Europe or America where everything is ordinary and normal. India is great rallying point, a dark smudge of a place that keeps people like me afloat, provides all the hate and love, and fear and prejudice, and despair and joy that makes life worth living. Everyday provides such an intense dose of ugliness, such noisy cries of despair, or moments of such real pleasure that you are left reeling. India is the motivation. Anger is also a strong motivational force in a farce. It makes you see things as so bleak and desperate that the only recourse is laughter.
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True lies. The great India story Financial Express
Good ultimately triumphs over evil. But what if it doesn’t, or has co-opted the majority along the way? In an age where the virtues of positive thinking and ignoring any signs to the contrary are almost the only option, here is an alternate view. Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India is as bleak as they come. It’s a parable of a land that has lost its way, of its citizens who are trapped in a system with escape routes cut off.

Lie is also different. To start with, it is a graphic novel, a genre in which dark is usually associated with forces of the night with superhuman powers rather than politically loaded tales of cynicism or despair. Its graphic artistes are not some young dudes doing their cool stuff, but three traditional miniaturists from Rajasthan—Shankar Lal Bhopa, Birju Lal and Ghansham. “They were the only ones who agreed to illustrate what we wanted instead of the usual images they do,” says Gautam Bhatia. The miniature form was chosen, explains Bhatia, as it can cram considerable amounts of information in small spaces and what is unsaid in words could come through as “there is no space for silence in the visual medium”. The book, in fact, started by being part of a larger project called Desh Ki Awaz and the plan was for a 600-page An Indian Story but was finally whittled down the present 180 pages. The book went through several stages as each illustration had to be discussed, not an easy project. The result is a traditional looking vividly coloured manuscript with the colours of Rajasthan seeping in.
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The ketchup man

As a student at IIM Ahmedabad, Chetan Bhagat founded a magazine, Tomato Ketchup. Even at IIM-A, not the most literary of places, Tomato... was reportedly considered lowbrow and died a premature death. Bhagat’s subsequent literary forays have seen more popular success but continue to be considered lowbrow.

But Bhagat need not fret. The novel genre itself was considered lowbrow and commercial during its early days. As Daniel Defoe, often considered the first novelist, said, “Writing itself has become a very considerable branch of the English commerce. The booksellers are the master manufacturers, or employers. The several authors, copiers, sub-writers and other operators with Pen and Ink are the workmen employed by the said manufacturer.” Ian Watt, author of the classic The Rise of the Novel, says Defoe’s style was considered to be ‘easy, copious and unpremeditated’ in contrast to the ‘verbal grace, complication of structure...’ of the prevalent literary culture.

Watt argues that while the early novels may not have been masterfully crafted, they were revolutionary in their movement away from Classical Idealism towards a greater empathy for individual imperfection. They also understood the needs of the rapidly rising, newly literate, industrial revolution-created bourgeoisie. These two seminal course changes, in structure and audience, by the early novelists laid much of the foundation for the development of modern literature.

Full article here Outlook

Graphic novel, miniature style

Filled with rich visual imagery in miniature art style, Bihar is a tale of rise, fall and redemption in architect-writer Gautam Bhatia's new graphic novel, Lie: A Traditional Tale of Modern India.

'If good politics is about governance, how can a minister inaugurate a speedbreaker when people do not have enough food? Or a conference on drought degenerate into a debate over wines among the delegates?' Bhatia told IANS in an informal chat, explaining the context of the book. 'We live a pack of lies in our daily lives,' said the self-depreciating architect, who is 'now busy designing two ugly buildings in the capital'.

Bhatia conceived the illustrations, which have been executed by miniaturists Shankar Lal Bhopa, Birju Lal and Ghansham, modelled on 17th and 18th century Rajasthani miniature paintings. 'I wanted the figures on a flat two-dimensional plane where everyone looked very strong and bold. It is part of the Indian miniature tradition. I had to learn to work with the style in which the colours appeared shorter. It was difficult,' Bhatia said.

He is known for his funny and satirical stories woven around architecture. His latest book developed from a graphic art project on contemporary Indian social realities, Desh Ki Awaaz, supported by the Ford Foundation, two years ago. 

Full report here Sify