Writing in The Common Woman: Gender in the Postmillennial Indian Graphic Narratives

Abstract

Until the postmillennial surge of graphic narrative cultures in India, the authorial voices within the field of Indian graphic narratives and comics had been predominantly male. Shankar Pillai, the Father of Political Cartooning in India and the creator of the political column, Shankar’s Weekly, in 1948 would occasionally draw female politicians to mock them in his column. When R.K.Laxman started the daily comic strip called You Said It, featuring the character “The Common Man,” he also drew an unnamed wife for his protagonist, “The Common Woman”, and for the next 50 years, she would make occasional appearances. From the mid-‘60s, when India saw a boom of indigenous comics which were often inspired by international and detective comics, women seldom played important roles beyond that of over sexualized love interests for villains. The massive shifts in the Indian graphic narrative scene in the postmillennial moment brought with itself an inclusion of female voices and dynamic female characters has made the texts a site for critically important representation and resistance, and as a whole a look towards multiple modes of feminist futurities. Tracing a historical overview of female characters in Indian graphic narratives, this paper examines the postmillennial graphic narrative as a powerful medium for interrogating gender by subverting heteronormativity and challenging patriarchal norms. Using Priya’s Shakti and its sequels as case studies, I explore the postmillennial graphic narratives’ representation of marginalized bodies, but beyond that its evolution as a site that actively reconfigures the visual narrative and symbolic vocabularies through which gender is imagined and contested in contemporary India.