The Transmediation of India's Comics

Abstract

In 1967, India’s largest comics producing company, Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), began publishing comic books in multiple languages with a focus on religious and traditional narratives. Despite a diverse comics culture with visual narratives proliferating throughout India, ACK became powerful because it intertwined folklore and devotional texts with the national Hindutva movement, which called for the establishment of Hinduism alone as the national religion and culture. However, other Indian companies like Vivalok Comics and World Comics India, as well as individual creators, have begun in recent decades to publish, taking advantage of comics’ reflexive power to connect local, more traditional ways of knowing to mass media. While the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) series was designed especially to transfer Hindu traditional narratives and knowledge to youth, more recent comics have focused on demonstrating India’s cultural diversity. This shift has also emphasized the participatory quality of comics culture, framing comics creators less as fine artists and more as fan or folk artists who take part in a common community and storytelling experience. From graphic novels on the Narmada Dam Project to comic books that teach the value of folklore, this paper will show how comics readers and artists in India are drawing more and more upon fan discourse in identifying comics communities as traditional, localized ones.