Gender Politics and Nationalism in Contemporary Indian Graphic Novels and Comics

Abstract

This Ph.D. dissertation is motivated by the research of the academic production about how women have been represented within the nationalist discourse of Hindutva, and by the analysis of how certain women writers belonging to the fourth wave of Indian feminism are talking back. The feminist movement is driving scholars, independent artists, and writers to abolish the predominant patriarchal standards in India, responding to and providing alternative approaches in their publications to pre-conceived identities. The selected corpus, graphic novels and comics published online, is a sample of the new paradigm that is been artistically created as a countercurrent response to the ideology promoted by hindutva. The selected corpus consists of three graphic novels: Bhimayana: Experiences Of Untouchability (2011) by Durgabai Subhash Vyam, Kari (2008) by Amruta Patil, and Nirmala and Normala (2014) by Sowmya Rajendran and Niveditha Subramaniam, and three comics: Priya’s Mirror (2016) by Paromita Vohra et al., Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back! (2015) by Priya Kuriyan et al. (an anthology of fourteen comics) and Royal Existentials (2014) by Aarthi Parthasarathy and Chaitanya Krishnan. By means of an overview of the history of India in the construction of the nation regarding gender and caste issues, of all the waves of the Indian women’s movements, and the important role that new technologies play in the social movement and creative production, this Ph.D. dissertation provides the founds for a thematic analysis of the contextualised corpus. Exposing women’s vulnerability and transforming it to resilience, learning through healing stories and resisting in their defense of the movement for a better society are the main methods echoed in the corpus analysed in this dissertation. The originality of this research relays on the approach towards the social contemporary topics discussed in a fiction that has scarcely been studied, and the incorporation of interviews with the authors of the corpus, which complement and inform the arguments of this dissertation.