God is in the details

My Mirror column:

Satyajit Ray would have turned 97 earlier this week. Looking back at what we might learn from him.

An early scene in Satyajit Ray's marvellous 1966 film Nayak has the bespectacled heroine Aditi Sengupta (Sharmila Tagore) go up to Uttam Kumar – Bengal's reigning matinee idol, whom Ray had cast as his film star hero Arindam Mukherjee – for an autograph. It's for her cousin, she says carefully, leading Arindam to make some backhanded remarks about her not watching Bengali films. “They lack realism,” says Miss Sengupta. “Yes, you're right,” says Arindam, looking up at her. “Heroines with BA degrees must not sing songs of separation.” “And heroes need not be godlike just because they're heroes,” is her sharp comeback.

Returning to her seat, Ray's rationalist heroine spins her argument out. “Have you seen Joy Porajoy?” she asks. “The one where he plays tennis?” responds her train companion eagerly. “Not just plays it: he's a champion. He's a tennis champion, swimming champion, knows how to sing, how to dance, progressive, gets a First Class in his MA, great lover... all at the same time. Is that plausible?”

Miss Sengupta's is a fairly standard critique of Indian popular cinema. But thinking about Satyajit Ray in the week of his 97th birth anniversary (he was born on 2nd May 1921), I caught myself giggling at the thought that in reality, Ray was just the sort of multi-talented figure that his heroine had dismissed as implausible.

Not only did Ray write and direct a lifetime's worth of films that are counted among the classics of world cinema, he was also a prolific and gifted writer of Bengali fiction for both children and adults. For many years, he ran the superb children's magazine Sandesh, a publication originally begun by his grandfather Upendrakishore Raychaudhury in 1913 and then edited for many years by Satyajit's father Sukumar Ray, the stupendously talented author of the nonsense verse and fantasy classics Abol Tabol and Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La. As a young man he had cultivated an interest in Western classical music, and as a filmmaker he displays an unerring grasp of the power of Hindustani classical as well – not as a pedant, but as a craftsman who can tap into the enormous emotional reserves of a particular instrument or raag to create the mood he wants – the shehnai standing in for the human wail in Durga's death scene, or the astounding bucolic perfection of Ravi Shankar's Pather Panchali soundtrack, or the swing between performative excess and melancholy in Jalsaghar, to name just the first three things that come to mind.

His talent as an artist, of course, preceded his filmmaking career – and in many ways, foreshadowed it. Having always had a natural talent for drawing, Ray had already decided – after three not-so-happy years studying science and then economics at Presidency College, Calcutta – that he was going to get a job as a commercial artist. It was only at his mother's urging that the city-bred Anglophone, Hollywood obsessed boy decided first to study art at Vishwabharati University. Ray's two and a half years at Shantiniketan were shaping, providing him access routes not just to what he later described as “the magnificence of Oriental art” — from Ajanta and Ellora murals to Japanese woodcuts — but to the rural Bengal countryside.

These influences were crucial to Ray's first choice of project – Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay's classic Bengali novel which Ray called “something like an encylopaedia of rural life”. In that same statement, Ray also wrote: “While I learnt a lot about the craft of filmmaking from watching Hollywood films of the '40s and '50s, my primary influences when I stared my first film were Jean Renoir and the De Sicas Bicycle Thief & Umberto D. And yet, soon after I started shooting, I realised that the form, rhythm and texture of my film would derive from elements that were deeply rooted in my own culture, which had little to do with the culture of France or Italy.”

A page from the Pather Panchali Sketchbook, showing Ray's sketch of what would be the train sequence

A handwritten version of this statement is reproduced in a remarkable publication brought out by HarperCollins India in 2016, The Pather Panchali Sketchbook, which offers Ray enthusiasts (and anyone interested in the links between cinema and painting) a delightful gift – Ray's immensely detailed storyboards for what would be his first film. The sketchbook – which was donated by Ray to the Cinematheque Francaise – consists of a series of watercolour sketches which almost exactly presage the film in its final form. Looking at a sketch in which the ancient Pishi reaches up to caress Durga's face when she brings her a stolen guava, or Apu and Durga dwarfed by a darkening stormy sky, gives one goosebumps. Ray's plan leaves nothing out, it seems: fades, dissolves, long-shots and closeups, minor scenes and characters including even birds flying in the sky are already there in the painter's eye.

Not many filmmakers can duplicate Ray's graphic technique of working – simply because not many filmmakers are also painters. Nor do most have a musical and literary talent to match their visual imagination. We cannot all be godlike. But as I pored over the Sketchbook, it seemed utterly clear that what we can all learn from Ray is an attention to detail. As the world hurtles ever more towards the grand gesture, instructing us not to get “bogged down by the details”, being able to observe Ray's mind at work is an inspiration: because the fragments he is laying out are really pieces of a grand jigsaw, whose final form he already sees – in his mind's eye.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6th May 2018.

Graphic Designs

While Germany might be a late starter as a comics nation, India has much to learn from it. (My piece in last week's BL_Ink, drawing on a recent trip to Germany organised by the German Book Office, New Delhi.)

One of the primary aims of the Delhi-based German Book Office (GBO) is to explore different aspects of book publishing in India and find ways of developing them further. A few years ago, for instance, their focus on children’s book publishing led to the establishment of an annual programme called Jumpstart, whose fifth instalment is due to unfold in Delhi and Bangalore at the end of this month. In general, most Indian publishers and editors do not have sufficient opportunities to meet their international counterparts and see how things happen in other markets. As a joint venture between the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Foreign Office, Berlin, the GBO is well-placed to facilitate such contact. With this in mind, it organises an annual editors’ trip to Germany, centred on a different genre each year.

This year, the trip focused on graphic books and young adult (YA) writing, enabling editors from five Indian publishing houses — Penguin Random House, Rupa, Roli, Vani and National Book Trust — to meet representatives of German publishers such as Mosaik, Oetinger, Carlsen, Reprodukt, Carl Hanser, Suhrkamp, S Fischer and Büchergilde.

As presentations and conversations unfolded, it became apparent just how varied and mature German publishing is in these genres, both of which are still nascent in India. German YA fiction, for instance, ranges from tender coming-of-age narratives that take on board issues of race, disability and sexual identity to disturbing, even erotically charged (though not explicit), murder mysteries.

The comic/graphic book scene is even richer. There are independent publishers such as Mosaik, which nurtures the legacy of Abrafaxe, a very popular series that began in East Germany in the 1950s, and Reprodukt, which specialises in graphic novels. There are also larger houses such as Carlsen, which began a Manga imprint in 2000 and also publishes some of the most acclaimed graphic artists, including Isabel Kreitz and Reinhard Kleist.

Considering this range and excellence, it came as a surprise that within the Euro-American universe, Germany is considered a late starter as a comics nation. Andreas Platthaus of the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung argues that the reason for this was, ironically, the historical popularity of picture stories in Germany: humorous illustrated periodicals became popular in the 19th century, and the strength of that tradition made Germans dismissive of American-style comics, even as they spread through Europe in the early 20th century.

Then came the Nazis, who famously ridiculed comics, making it near-impossible for publishers to promote them. Even after 1945, with American occupation, comics did not really take off in Germany (unlike, say, in Japan).

Thus many Germans started out reading comics from Belgium, France and Italy, and their classics such as Asterix and Tintin remain hugely popular. A visit to X-tra Boox, an excellent little comic bookshop in Frankfurt, revealed the German market’s continuing openness to other cultures, with a top floor filled with Manga in translation and a basement devoted to American superheroes.

It was after German reunification in 1990 that the first generation of avant-garde German graphic artists emerged. Anke Feuchtenberger and others became university professors, helping groom a second wave.

“Now we’re into the third wave and the fourth wave,” said Sebastian Oehler of Reprodukt. “At the end of the ’90s, there was a big discussion on whether comics were art. And now the discussion is, are comics literature?” More graphic artists now address ‘serious’ subjects — like Ulli Lust’s Flying Foxes on World War II, or Nicolas Mahler, who has produced graphic versions of Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters and The Do-gooders.

The trip also provided occasion for the participating Indian editors to discuss the challenges they face. The German comic reader, while exposed to international comics, reads German books avidly. But one of the problems in India, said Ameya Nagarajan of Penguin Random House, is that Indian readers who actually buy graphic novels prefer to buy wellknown Western names, rather than risking money on Indian newbies. And this, as Nagarajan points out, is that small proportion of readers who are visually literate.

Regional runs

The costs of good-quality graphic publishing are also a real hurdle, especially for smaller publishers. “We are bringing out our first graphic book series on Param Vir Chakra bravery award-winners,” said Neelam Narula of Roli Books. “We had published a non-fiction book on the subject earlier, but the author wanted to reach out to a younger age group, 12-18 years. The first two books are doing well. But to sell these 32-page books at ₹100 each, we had to keep our costs down and increase our print runs.”

The situation is even tougher when it comes to publishing in the regional languages. “Visual culture is the next big thing, but it is still not the choice of the masses,” said Aditi Maheshwari of the Hindi publishing major Vani Prakashan. “We’re trying to create a body of work through translation. But we have to create a buzz for each book.” Vani has just released one of the first graphic books in Hindi, in collaboration with the Japan Foundation.

Neerav Sandhya ka Sheher, Sakura ke Desh is the Hindi translation of an award-winning Manga calledTown of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, on what happened in Hiroshima after the atomic explosion. Also in the pipeline is a Hindi translation of Persepolis.

What about original graphic books in Hindi and other regional languages? “The Vani Foundation has just instituted four ₹20,000 fellowships for writers and illustrators of children’s books,” says Maheshwari. “Selected fellows will get to attend masterclasses at Jumpstart 2014, receive mentoring from Gulzar and Paro Anand, and get a three-book contract with Vani.” It’s going to be a long haul, but it looks like the visual book is here to stay.

(Trisha Gupta is a writer and critic based in Delhi)

Post Facto: Too graphic for grown-ups? Thoughts on pictures in books

A spread from the book 'Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit' by Amrita Das. Tara Books, 2013.

	ave you ever thought about what it means that we think picture books are for children? Clearly, it's not that we think pictures are for children: visual art in other forms, whether paintings or movies, is seen as perfectly grown-up. But somehow, when pictures enter a book, they become, in the eyes of most people who consider themselves "real" readers, a form of dumbing-down. One reason for this sort of thinking is obvious. If books are meant to be about text, then anything that detracts from the serious business of words is an illegitimate interloper, that›s managed to sneak in without the permission of the Book Guards. As the kid who never quite got why anyone should want to read comics when they could read real  books, I get that thought. And certainly, I agree that we respond differently to narrative when the only pictures we have access to are the ones in our heads. Images might hook you faster, but they also change the rhythm of your reading. Some people might only look at the pictures. Some look at the pictures first, and then go back to read the text. Some — like me — might race through the text (and wonder at there being less of it) before realising that sometimes, pictures demand a slowing-down — quite different from the swept-up feeling that can characterise a good story. But if placing images alongside changes our experience of text, why is that necessarily a bad thing? Who decided that books have to be about text, anyway? And that art must only hang on a wall? I started thinking these thoughts because of three stunning publications that came out recently from Tara Books, the Chennai-based independent publisher. All three are drawn by Indian folk artists, all women. In Drawing from the City, the Ahmedabad-based Teju Behan tells, in beautiful black and white pen-drawings, the tale of how she and her late husband Ganesh Bhai Jogi went from the village to the city, and how they became artists. In Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit (2013), the Mithila-style folk painter Amrita Das draws — and draws us into — meditations on her life, the life of a girl she sees on a train, the lives of women in India. The third book is Sultana's Dream, Rokheya Sakhawat Hussain's famous 1905-fable about a world where peace-loving women rule over men, is illustrated by the Gond artist Durga Bai. The text in these books is spare and simple, but it talks about serious things. The images, though, are what one lingers over. Like the albums in which the Mughal aristocracy housed their miniature paintings, this is art between the covers. { And certainly, I agree that we respond differently to narrative when the only pictures we have access to are the ones in our heads. Images might hook you faster, but they also change the rhythm of your reading.
	started to think about these things again on a recent trip to Germany, where six Indian editors and I had been sent to meet German publishers of graphic novels, young adult and children's books. Some entered these genres for somewhat instrumental reasons. Carl Hanser Verlag — publishers of Sophie's World — said their children's list first emerged because they wanted to stop their authors from taking their manuscripts for kids to other publishers. Similarly, the venerable Suhrkamp, known for publishing theory and literary heavyweights, started its graphic novel list partly as a way of keeping all versions of their great books. So they started with celebrated Austrian artist Mahler doing a graphic version of Thomas Bernhardt's novel Alte Meister (Great Masters), and a graphic interpretation of Robert Musil's mid-century novel The Man Without Qualities. But last year, they stopped playing safe like that: they brought out the graphic autobiography of Volker Reiche, veteran of the German comics scene. Also, publishing Mahler's Musil was a radical thing to do — turning Musil's dense, thousand-page classic into a fairly slender set of pages, with barely six sentences to a page, could easily be seen as sacrilege. And really, one part of me agrees vociferously: how can reading Mahler be the same as reading Musil? Other German publishers we met come from the opposite side. They have not, shall we say, had to readjust their reading glasses to see the pictures. Some of these are, like Mosaik, comic publishers first and foremost, their adventurous Abrafaxe threesome dating back to the East German 1950s. Others, like Reprodukt, are part of the coming of age of the German graphic novel. Their recent Kinderland, about a seventh grader before the Berlin Wall fell, has won awards and critical acclaim from the "serious" quarters of the press. But it was at our last meeting, with the Frankfurt publishers Edition Buchergilde, that I saw the most imaginative responses to the text/image debate. Buchergilde has long published illustrated titles for adults, and they're unafraid to tap into our most childlike forms of wonder: I saw a truly remarkable edition of Patricia Highsmith's dark thriller, The Talented Mr. Ripley, with 3-D illustrations that need accompanying 3-D glasses. More recently, Buchergilde published Arthur Schnitzler's classic  Traumnovelle (Dream Novel, the origin of the film Eyes Wide Shut)in a graphic version. What's great is that Jakob Hinrichs' graphic version is an adaptation, and says so — but Buchergilde pleases everyone — and both aspects of everyone — by publishing the full original text as an appendix to the graphic novel. If the Tara books I spoke of appeal to the thoughtful side of children, Buchergilde appeals to the playful desires of adults. And yet you could reverse that assumption about pictures just as easily: Hinrich's images can be pretty disturbing. Anyway, don't we all need both? Published in the Sunday Guardian.

OUT OF THE BODY: On Devdutt Pattanaik's Sita

My piece on Devdutt Pattanaik's latest book, for Mint Lounge.

Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana joins an increasing tribe of books of Indian epics retold. Devdutt Pattanaik, the author of many books on Indian myth (Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata; Myth=Mithya: A Handbook of Hindu Mythology; The Pregnant King), here seems to be making a contribution to two growing sub-genres: the graphic book, and the retelling through women’s eyes. But unlike Amruta Patil's brilliant, jewel-like Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean, or the striking images of Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar's Sita’s Ramayana, Pattanaik doesn’t seem invested in the visual. And while ostensibly structured around Sita’s life, it is stuffed with too much else to feel consistently like her story: Hanuman often seems more of a presence.

Pattanaik does offer more detail about women’s worlds than most versions of the Ramayan: the child Sita entering the kitchen, or Sita and her sisters as newly-arrived brides in Ayodhya spending “all day and all night listening to tales of the sons told by their adoring mothers”. He tries to bring relationships between women to the fore: Anasuya welcoming Sita into womanhood with a garland, a garment and a pot of cream—symbols of shringara (adornment), or Mandodari barring Ravana’s way, taunting him to wait for Sita to come to him willingly. “Only Sita understood what Mandodari had done; she had protected her own station in the palace while ensuring another woman’s freedom”.

Sita—An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayan: Penguin, 328 pages, Rs499

Pattanaik stresses the remarkable fact that has puzzled readers and writers for centuries—that Ravana, having taken the hapless Sita from her forest hut, does not force himself upon her. Unlike Greek and Roman mythology, in which it is unremarkable for Zeus/Jupiter to rape Leda, Europa, and several others, Ravana woos Sita with stories and gifts and songs. He becomes, in other words, the most persistent lover. But Sita is unmoved. “This is not love,” she says to his sister Trijata. “He just wants to possess me.” Then Pattanaik puts in Sita’s mouth these transcendental words: “I am not my body. I will never ever be violated.”

It is a hope we have all nurtured: to cease to be identified only with our bodies. But Pattanaik’s insistence on Sita’s status as goddess (“I cannot be abandoned by anyone”) elides the fact that neither Sita’s world—nor, sadly, our own—is prepared to do women any such favours. Throughout the Ramayan, the married woman’s embrace of another man is heavily punished even when unintentional (the classic case being Ahilya’s of Indra, who has taken the form of Ahilya’s husband Gautama). And anyway, as the supremely tragic example of Sita shows, being “pure of thought and body” cannot protect any woman from having her reputation besmirched. Reputation is everything, and it is not in a woman’s hands. Ram declares that he has fought a war, but only to restore the honour of his family name; Sita is nothing but “grit in [his] eye”, for she has chosen to live under another man’s roof rather than kill herself. There, in a nutshell, is the tragedy of patriarchy: to keep “honour” alive, women must die. Men, meanwhile, are expected to acquire the wives of the men they slay, and considered honourable when they “accept” them as wives, rather than take them by force.

But while Pattanaik points to the killing of Tadaka by Ram as signalling the epic’s “acceptance of male violence against women”, he seems not to acknowledge the violence done to Sita by Ram’s spurning of her. In allowing Ram the privilege of splitting into the man who loves his wife, and the king who must reject his queen, Pattanaik allows “honour” in by the back door.

Eventually, if the Ramayan has been “criticized by feminists” and “deconstructed by academicians”, there are real reasons for it. In any case, Pattanaik’s categories seem sweeping and not useful. When he refers to the “Ram of academics” versus “Ram of devotees”, or “Western thought” versus “traditional Indian thought”, he means a certain kind of rationalist who-what-where history, while ignoring reams of philosophy, anthropology and religious studies, much of it “Western”, that has been crucial to studying Indian myth. Oddly, Pattanaik’s own book is strewn with distracting factoid “boxes” that draw on this work—providing alternative folk recensions and narrative variations of the sort that Paula Richman has spent a career gathering, mythic analysis of the Wendy Doniger variety. One is left wondering why he feels the need to diss the bricks of which his house is built. Pattanaik sees the richness and complexity thrown up by the living text, and then places it disdainfully in his supplementary narrative, as if he fears causing offence to some imaginary unquestioning devotee.

Published in Mint Lounge.

Talking Pictures: a report on graphic storytelling

As graphic storytelling gains momentum in the world of Indian English literature, a slew of indie publishers become the champions of a new visual culture.

First published in Elle India, July 2013.

A page from Blaft's Times New Roman and Countrymen

The Obliterary Journal is a compendium of comics, typography and all sorts of visual pleasures, brought out by Blaft in 2012. It opens with a graphic foreword in which a bunch of symbols declare a war on text. “Obliterate literature!” says one angry pictogram. “Down with novels! Long live comics with publications of remarkable variety. And picture books and graffiti and wacky art!” “Alphabets are stupid!” pronounces another annoyed glyph. “Unless you handpaint them with a lot of style...” 

There couldn’t be a better illustration of the exciting new climate for visual storytelling in Indian English publishing than this mock-serious manifesto. Of course, even such a whimsical call-to-arms recognises that books with “lengthy passages of unadorned text” aren’t going away anytime soon. But more and more publishers are beginning to see that there are other ways to tell stories than just through text. There is a realisation that the visual book can often do things that the purely verbal might find difficult. They can bridge the imagined gulf between children and grown-ups, serious and non-serious, and subvert the common perception of the picture book as necessarily lightweight. Conversely, they can leaven even the most serious subjects with a joie de vivre that can only come from images.

Mainstream publishers like Penguin and Harpercollins have used this medium to bring physicality and dynamism to subjects as varied as our gated cities, the Mahabharata and the emergency through writer-illustrators like Sarnath Banerjee, Amruta Patil and Vishwajyoti Ghosh. But it is the smaller, independent publishing houses that are really altering the Indian literary landscape. And they are the ones pushing the image to centrestage with publications of remarkable variety. 

Manta Ray (MaRa)

The publishing collective’s self-proclaimed goal is to move away from escapist fantasy and superheroes to tell real stories about young people in India – their target readership. Their first book Hush (2010) told a tale of child sexual abuse in beautifully hand-drawn black-and- white sketched panels. Stark as its subject was, Hush was also striking for sticking absolutely to the suggestion of its title: it used no words. “I didn’t think I had the right to express what the girl is going through. I didn’t want to put words in her mouth,” says Prateek Thomas, one of MaRa’s founders, who wrote the detailed script on which the book is based. “Also, as a writer, I avoid declamation, exposition. I try to keep brevity. I like the art to do the talking.” Their more recent publications – an anthology of four stories called Mixtape and Twelve, a series of 12 character-driven narratives united only by the theme of choice – don’t steer as completely clear of words. But what they do share is Hush’s distinctive quality of not spelling out everything. That puzzle-like effect is deliberate, says Thomas: “not to make it hard on the reader, but to make you pick the book up again... to see things you didn’t see the first time.”

Blaft

A page from Blaft's Kumari Loves a Monster

For this publisher, the visual is often an end in itself. From tear-out ‘postcard books’ that reproduce Hindi pulp fiction covers (Heroes, Goondas, Vamps and Good Girls [2009]) or juxtapose contemporary newspaper classifieds with retro images from Hindi cinema and Raja Ravi Varma (Times New Roman and Countrymen [2009]), to the tongue-in- cheek, hard-to-explain subversive madness of Kumari Loves a Monster (2010), Blaft revels in the goofy, kitschy, off-the-wall worlds of Indian art. As Blaft founder Rakesh Khanna says, this is art that cannot be packaged either as “tourist coffee-table book [or in] a white cube gallery with wine and cheese”. Their devotion to typography and pulp cover art can sometimes junk narrative preoccupations in favour of a celebratory visual anthropology. 

Tara Books

The cover of I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

A love of Indian visual traditions is also enshrined in the work of Tara Books, whose originary question when they started out in 1998 was, “Can different visual cultures survive in a rapidly homogenising world?” Since then, they have blazed a trail, working with indigenous artists from Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Bengal. They adapt artisanal traditions of bookmaking – handmade paper manufacturers, silkscreen printers and hand binders – to produce handmade books on an astounding scale. Tara’s innovative design practice has created playful, stunning books. 

Whether it’s turning the vertical Patua scroll into a horizontal accordion book (The Enduring Ark [2013]), adapting Patua imagery into a Western-style panelled graphic narrative (Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar’s Sita’s Ramayana [2011]), or even matching up the marvellous micros and macros of Gond artist Ram Singh Urveti’s imagination with a 17th- century English trick poem (I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail [2012]) – Tara Books fuse the contemporary with the traditional. Their books travel to the US, the UK, Brazil and Mexico via handmade book collectives and children’s book publishers, reversing the usual flow of visual communication from west to east. “What we take from our immediate visual context, it goes all over the world,” says V Geetha, editorial director at Tara.

Navayana

A page from Bhimayana

Also working with traditional Indian artists is Navayana. Its hard-hitting work on caste and marginalisation includes two visual books – A Gardener in the Wasteland (2011), a cheeky, unstintingly graphic interpretation of Jotiba Phule’s Gulamgiri, and Bhimayana (2011), in which Gond artists Durgabai and Subhash Vyam recreated experiences of untouchability from Bhimrao Ambedkar’s life. The ecology of Gond art is filtered through the individual readings of the Vyams and their textual collaborators, Srividya Natarajan and Navayana founder, S Anand, to create a work that is unique and often profound. Traditional digna floor patterns are used as page dividers instead of panels, the thirsty young Bhim is imagined as a fish, and when Ambedkar finds himself homeless and takes shelter in a park, he becomes the park.

Did you believe that reading takes time, and pictures can be looked at in a jiffy? But images can be more multifarious than text, unfurling new meanings with each reading. “You can spend two minutes with each panel in Bhimayana, or two hours. Or two days,” says Anand.

While one finger constantly hovers on the page down button, these are books that can make us hit pause. The picture speaks, and we cannot help but listen.

Book Review: Channelling the Mahabharata

Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean
Via Amruta Patil
Harper Collins, Rs 799
Pages: 276

Adi Parva is the richly imagined and stunningly executed first volume in Amruta Patil's forthcoming Parva trilogy, a pictorial retelling of the Mahabharata. As different as Adi Parva's jewel tones and lush forest glades are from the spiky, angsty, black and white world of Patil's first book, Kari (2008), they would both be described as graphic novels. Yet the two narrative endeavours could not be more unlike each other. Kari's authorial voice is so intimate and personal that at least one reviewer felt it read "like a reconstituted memoir". In contrast, Adi Parva positions itself self-consciously as a retelling of what is perhaps our most enduring story — if one can refer to the innumerable nested narratives that make up the Mahabharata as a single story.

In an essay called 'The Storyteller', Walter Benjamin made a characteristically fertile, provocative suggestion: that the rise of the novel marks the end of storytelling. "What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature — the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella — is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it," wrote Benjamin. In a 1977 lecture, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss made a similar throwaway reference to the moment "when myth disappeared as a literary genre and was replaced by the novel." Both Benjamin and Levi-Strauss gesture to a binary in which myth — and its community of oral re-tellers — form one end of the spectrum, while the novel — and its solitary, textual originator — forms the other.

Adi Parva is fascinating, first of all, because it attempts to marry these two apparent binaries: to enshrine the oldest stories in book form, to put her stamp on them not just verbally but visually. There's no denying that this involves freezing that which was meant to be perpetually retold, to be imagined differently each time it was heard. But in a world where less and less of us will hear these stories from a grandmother or a village bard, this book is a precious gift.

And Patil understands this clearly: the place of her book, and the place she must clear before she begins. Adi Parva is not "by" her, but "via" her. And when her preamble invokes the sutradhar —"Trust the humble storyteller who knows how to unravel thread. Beware the braggart who embellishes and confuses" — one can hear the echo of Benjamin's words — "it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it".

Her telling does steer clear of unnecessary explication. But the storyteller's voice is a very particular one: cool, wry, but always just this side of dramatic. The narrator is Ganga, "queen of celestial and earthly rivers", a central character in the origin-myth of the Kuru-Pandavas. She first appears here as a mortal in a white sari, telling her tale to a rapt street side gathering, even as passing men gather to challenge this woman "sitting brazenly talking to strangers in the middle of the night". Ganga and her listeners form a kind of Greek chorus, their comments and questions helping clarify the main narrative. Choosing a female narrator (rather than Ugrashravas) is a simple but radical move, allowing Patil to focus on the women with natural ease and empathy. We think, perhaps for the first time, of whether the mountain princess we have always only known as Gandhari had a name except that of the kingdom she represented, and of how Kunti must have felt when her husband King Pandu died making love to her rival queen Madri. (And we wonder how this will change in the next volume, when the narrator, we are told, will be Ashwatthama.)

There are occasions when Patil's narrative feels too clever, too knowing, too full of backchat. But textual pleasures are the least of the joys afforded by this book. With artwork that ranges from black and white sketches (for Ganga and her audience) to magnificent textured collages, with Patil drawing on and reworking everything from Botticelli's Birth of Venus to Matisse's La Danse to ancient Egyptian motifs with delicious abandon, Adi Parva is perhaps the most beautiful book you can own this year.

Published in the Indian Express.

Pen, Ink, Action

An example of Satyajit Ray's artwork for Seemabaddha (Company Limited), 1974

A long review essay I did on the graphic art of Satyajit Ray, in the November issue of Caravan:

"NOT TO HAVE SEEN THE CINEMA OF RAY means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon,” Akira Kurosawa once said—rather an overblown compliment, but my adult self would end up agreeing. However, to the Bengali child—or even a half-Bengali one like me, who grew up between cities and languages—Satyajit Ray meant much more than his films. His prolific output as a writer and illustrator, targeted largely at children and young adults, forged a very different connection with young Bangla readers than the ‘serious’ cinema for which he is known worldwide. And though I read Bangla slowly, my father, patiently reading aloud to me through family holidays and long train journeys, made sure I was introduced to Ray through his stories—and, because I would first hungrily flip through the books that were going to be read to me—through his illustrations.

These black-and-white illustrations spanned the whole range of his popular literary creations—the detective Pradosh C Mitter, whose crisply Anglicised surname is the perfect foil for the informal Bengali daaknaam by which he is better known, Feluda; the eccentric scientist Professor Shonku, whose unbelievable globetrotting sci-fi adventures come to us via a diary discovered after he’s taken off in a space rocket; and old Tarini Khuro (uncle), whose fantastic tales, traversing romantic historical settings from colonial Lucknow to the palaces of penurious Maharajas, are invariably told over a steaming cup of tea, with his younger self cast in a starring role. Illustrations also appeared alongside the many independent short stories, published 12 at a time in anthologies bearing names like Aaro Baaro (Twelve More) and Aaro Ek Dojon (And Another Dozen).

As a child who did not otherwise read Bangla fiction, I was captivated by Ray’s universe. It gave me access to a Bengali cultural landscape that was familiar, yet one I could never be part of. One reason for that was simply that I was a girl—whether it was Feluda and his companions, the middle-aged mystery writer Lalmohan Babu and the teenaged Topshe, or Uncle Tarini, or Professor Shonku, the action in Ray’s stories centred exclusively around men and boys. (The one-off stories, too, almost without exception, featured male protagonists. A Ratan Babu or Sadhan Babu or Barin Babu, invariably a single Bengali man with a middle-class job, would encounter something out of the ordinary, usually while on a trip to some smallish town not far from Calcutta, often located in what is now Jharkhand: Netarhat, Ranchi, Madhupur.) But with these very different fictional men as guides (not to mention my father, who functioned as a sort of supra-guide), I could glide in and out of a very particular Bengali masculine world in which adda and sightseeing holidays—arguably the two favourite Bengali pastimes— became actual take-off points for adventure.

Ray invariably illustrated all his stories himself. His illustrations ranged from the simplest, most basic line drawings to more elaborate sketches with a lot of cross-hatching. In the latter type of drawing, Ray’s dramatic—or perhaps we should say cinematic—sensibility emerged in his frequent use of light and shade techniques: his illustrated characters are constantly being lit up or thrown into shadow. His style was cinematic in another way, too. He loved drawing a scene like a point-of-view shot: one character barely seen, either in profile or from behind-the-shoulder, while the focus is on the character he (and it was always a he) was speaking to or looking at or spying on.

(Piece continues...)

Read the whole essay here.