This special issue, Narrating India through Comics, Crisis, and Contemporary Subjectivities, brings together essays that examine Indian comics as a medium deeply engaged with crisis—not as isolated events, but as ongoing conditions shaping gender, ecology, infrastructure, displacement, memory, and technological change. Through storytelling, mythology, and digital forms, these works highlight how comics in India have emerged as powerful tools for understanding contemporary subjectivity and responding to challenges posed by neoliberalism, environmental instability, and identity politics.
Abstract:
This special issue, Narrating India through Comics, Crisis, and Contemporary Subjectivities encompasses a broad range of essays that focus on Indian comics and their relationship with crisis—viewed not solely as events broken out into separate episodes but also as an ongoing circumstances affecting gender, ecology (the study of living organisms), infrastructure (the physical components of a city, such as roads, bridges, etc.), dislocation (the loss of place), memory or the past through storytelling, mythology, and modern technology. Collectively, they illustrate the fact that comics created in India now represent one of the most powerful tools available to theorise about contemporary subjectivity, as well as ways to address or resolve problems within response to the demands of neoliberalism, environmental instability, identity politics, and digital change.
Explanation in Layperson’s Terms:
The boundaries of “scholarship” and “practice” continue to dissolve as comic enthusiasts (scholars) create comics and comic creators/illustrators use theories from academia. The use of records, interview and activist sources come together, as both critical inquiry and creative works inform one another. All these interdisciplinary activities led to a more established presence for comic studies both in India and throughout the world. Libraries, publishers, museums, etc., have become aware of this interdisciplinary approach to comic scholarship. The essays, interviews, and reviews from this issue provide insight into these themes. They show that contemporary Indian comics are not just creating stories but are re-inventing the notion of story by using a variety of different narrative forms to meet the demands of our times. In the case of crisis in these works, crisis is represented in addition to being part of the construction of a whole series of events through panel transitions, disruption of space, and various modes of ways to do things together. Narratives of the self can also be understood this way as well; they are not static; they are created interactively between people, in cities, in libraries, and through technology. To discuss comics from India today is to talk of an art medium: daring in aesthetic approach, socially aware of its connection to politics through artistic expression, as well as being conscious about where style comes from and how it is created. Comics have been created for decades, but in recent years there have been more artists involved in either creating comic books or producing them with a social justice theme. This collection encourages the reader to examine how today’s comics help create culture through their own lenses and not simply to reflect on what they exist as.
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