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.

It's A Funny Thing: Photography Review

Kapil Das’ photographs capture the whimsy of this world without exoticising it



Among the less prominently displayed photographs in Kapil Das’ first solo exhibition — 154 Neshvilla Road and Other Stories — is a picture of a bathroom. It’s a tightly framed image of an Indian-style squat toilet, above which is perched a rather wonderful contraption: a plastic toilet seat atop four splayed plastic legs. It’s the kind of thing that might have for many of its viewers a familiarity born of growing up in middle-class Indian homes in the 1980s: a cheap and quick alternative to the expensive process of remodelling the bathroom. But in a world where magazine advertisements bombard us with images of Italian-tiled bathrooms with perfectly choreographed water flowing out of sparkling steel faucets, it is also an image that could shock. What saves it from being maudlin or depressing (or worse, faux-grungy — think of Delhi Belly) is the air of long-term domesticity that surrounds the ostensibly temporary commode: the bottle of Domex, the toilet brush, the mug, the empty roll of toilet paper and, most importantly, the magazine rolled up for loo reading, balanced carefully between the tap and the wall.

The first section of Kapil Das’ show is devoted to a cluster of images very like the one I’ve spoken of above (though it is placed at some distance from them). Fittingly tacked to the wall with white drawing pins, these are pictures of Das’ family home in Dehradun. It is a home life of some gravity, involving as it does an ill brother and parents who have had to devote their lives to being caregivers. To turn his camera upon a life that he presumably once shared—and has since left behind—is not an easy thing to do. But Das’ gaze manages to be affectionate without being sentimental, truthful without being ruthless. When he trains his camera on the grimy detritus of the everyday—the wrinkled aluminium foil around the kitchen exhaust, the folded Doon Times on a bedside table, with the marks of many mugs of tea on it, the hand towel wound around the fridge handle—we see the dirt, but we also see the ceaseless care that goes into making the world habitable. We see the heart-shaped cake on the gas stove, the laid-out toe socks, the handknitted sweaters that swaddle every member of the house, including the dog.




Das’ images capture the whimsy of this world without exoticising it. There is the close up of ‘The Engineer’s Diary’, with the curious Hindi subtitle (in cut-out letters from print): ‘Gambheer paagal ladki ka’. There is the arrangement of a set of tea cosies in careful symmetry, their embroidered pink roses faint-hearted before the assault of the flowered tablecloth on which they sit. There is the ‘Original Photograph’ of Sai Baba, propped up beside the Sharadiya Utsav Puja Samiti programme for 2009-10, which, together with the poem tacked on a wall that reads, ‘The Lord to me the kingdom gave, He made prudent, strong and brave, He guided me with right and ruth, Filling my heart with love and truth, No tongue of man can sum his state. Allahu Akbar! God is Great’ gives the impression of a house comfortably pervaded by an embrace-all sense of the religious. Then there is the old box television, doubling up in that ever-so-familiar way as a mantelpiece for a collection of objets’d’art: two separate vases of fake plastic flowers, an Eiffel tower replica, a wooden stork, a golden clock. The TV screen reads: ‘Welcome’. It is a collection of things that might be referred to as kitschy. But if kitsch “is the absolute denial of shit”, as Milan Kundera once described it, then Kapil Das is in no danger of being accused of it. However many cross-stitched pictures and embroidered cushion covers he may photograph, Das’ view of the world is anything but cosy and sanitised. Enshrined in Das’ unsparing vision, kitsch becomes a kind of museum of itself.

The museumising of life is, of course, one of the ways in which the act of photography itself might be understood: a desire to document each moment as one lives it. But our photographer is less interested in the capturing of moments than he is in the slow progression of time—and the attempts we make to freeze it, to halt its process of material transformation. The second part of the exhibition reveals his fascination with embalmed objects, from stuffed animals to deformed babies in jars of formaldehyde. And he makes it clear that he is not the only one to be so fascinated. He shows us the young man capturing a stuffed tiger on his mobile phone (in the glare of a light fixture that seems to emerge from a leopard’s mouth), and the little boy in the Janki Ma Touring Museum with his nose pressed against the glass jar, transfixed by the big-headed baby that lies preserved within. He shows us a woman—the little boy’s mother?—gazing at another baby in another jar with an expression of concern, even as a hand in the foreground lifts it out of the formaldehyde, in defiance of the repeated injunction ‘Chhuna mana hai’ (Touching not allowed). In another image, two boys in fresh holiday shirts seem distractedly to doff their straw hats to a baby in a case.

Other images reveal a preoccupation with objects that seek to approximate life and the living. There is the head of what first seems like a dead pig, though it is so uncannily pink that one wonders if it ever lived at all. Even more surreal is the glass jar filled with ice cream cones, each of them seemingly already filled with tutti frutti ice cream. A whole series of pictures devoted to the Ooty-based Wax World: a collection of lifesize wax likenesses of famous people, a kind of small-time Madame Tussaud’s. Subhas Bose salutes us in uniform, while Tagore looks a little befuddled. A worried looking figure whose hat is the only thing that might identify him as Bhagat Singh fiddles nervously with what looks like a bunch of dynamite sticks. Abdul Kalam Azad seems troubled to be enclosed behind a railing, and even has a policeman who guards his exit. A red-lipsticked Nehru gets to gaze dreamily into the distance, while Gandhi sits cross-legged, presiding grimly over an appeal for funds to help keep Wax World alive. The recognisability of these figures—and the slight ridiculousness of their predicament—imbues the series with a kind of easy, humorous appeal. We let our guard down. But with the last image, Das suddenly returns to the predeliction for the surreal that appears to be his signature style: a lifesize waxen man sits by the side of the road, his scooter seems to have overturned, and he is surrounded by debris. What one notices first is a bottle by his side, filled with what is meant to be alcohol; followed by the disconcertingly glazed look in his eye. Ah, an accident, is one’s first thought, accompanied by the impulse to laugh at the alcohol which is placed, blameworthy and unharmed, by the man’s side: Exhibit A. It is only later that one realises that he does not simply have his hands crossed in his lap; what he has is one hand with which he holds on to the other—the latter chillingly detached at the elbow.

Another set of images here, called Toran Natak Company, is the closest we come to a series of portraits. And yet, even here, things are not straight up. One boy’s face is hidden by a strategically positioned balloon (or is it a bubblegum bubble?), while another holds out a pistol and hides behind a baby-sized doll: a staged kidnapping. Two girls—or maybe the same girl, twice—pose for portraits with their faces screened. The other form of subterfuge that Das seems drawn to is the mask: does it hide what we are, or allow us greater freedom? The man with an ape’s face can glare at the camera as much as he likes without being seen, while the man in the Amitabh get-up convinces us more with his posture than his face.

The images in this show are deceptively simple, but they refuse easy categorisation. They do not pander to our desire for either the artfully composed or the cosily domestic. The exhibition shows us a photographer who refuses the easy way out.

154 Neshvilla Road and Other Stories is showing at Photoink, New Delhi, till 12 November 2011.

Published in Open magazine.