People love easy synopses. Amruta Patil, India’s first female writer-graphic novelist, is quick to counter the trite summary of her 2008 debut from Harper Collins, Kari, as a comic about a suicidal lesbian. Now that the graphic novel is emerging in India, notably from innovators like Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Amruta wanted to send out an unusual protagonist into the literary scene. “Kari is a young, deeply introverted, asocial and queer woman, a counterpoint to the hyperfeminine prototypes you keep coming across.” Twice during the course of the story, Kari stands on the brink, literally teetering on the ledge of a building. The first time round, she chooses to jump; the second, she chooses not to.
And yet, the book is not an angsty coming-out tale. Kari is dark, funny and detached and her queerness is incidental, rather than central to her journey. And before you jump to conclusions, the book is not autobiographical. For her debut, Amruta chose an atypical literary crossover, more text-based than most graphic novels, the story flowing back and forth between voiceover narration and visuals. She’s the first to admit that not all her experiments worked: “The book is very raw – I was working on instinct.” Even so, Kari announces a highly individual voice, part of the growing chorus of women authors in world comics. Last January, Amruta returned to New Delhi after a European residency at the Maison des Auteurs in Angoulême, France’s capital of comics, with some valuable insights: “I ought to stop apologising for my lack of exposure to ‘norms’. My lack of familiarity with storytelling traditions, my gender, my foreignness – these could all be assets. And I need to tell stories that matter.”
Few stories matter more in India than the great all-encompassing mythohistorical epic, the Mahabharat, which she immersed herself in as a child through the comic-book adaptations in the ubiquitous Amar Chitra Katha series. Now, almost as a coming-of-age ritual, she has chosen to engage with these classics in her next project, Parva. “It’s a mammoth of a project that I am trying to steer by its tail. It keeps on changing me. I have gone from cocky and ambitious to far more diffident and humble. I am living differently, more pared down, austere. The way I eat has changed, and the way I conduct myself in the world. It has slowed me down, made me aware of hubris, and hopefully helped me become a little more thorough. Which is the only way you ought to work on a project like this. You don’t want to play with cosmic tales lightly.”
By Paul Gravett
