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This book explores graphic narratives and comics in India and demonstrates how these forms serve as sites on which myths are enacted and recast. It uses the case studies of a comics version of the Mahabharata War, a folk artist’s rendition of a comic book story, and a commercial project to re-imagine two of India’s most famous epics – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – as science fiction and superhero tales. It discusses comic books and self-published graphic novels; bardic performance aided with painted scrolls and commercial superhero comics; myths, folklore, and science fiction; and different pictorial styles and genres of graphic narration and storytelling. It also examines the actual process of the creation of comics besides discussions with artists on the tools and location of the comics medium as well as the method and impact of translation and crossover genres in such narratives. With its clear, lucid style and rich illustrations, the book will be useful to scholars and researchers of sociology, anthropology, visual culture and media, and South Asian studies, as well as those working on art history, religion, popular culture, graphic novels, art and design, folk culture, literature, and performing arts.
What is knowledge, and ignorance? How is it decided? Do power and power relations influence this process? Does the spread of knowledge lead to more ignorance? Is ignorance socially produced? Is knowledge always socially contextualized? This book deals with these important questions on the interplay of knowledge, ignorance and power located in varied contexts in India. As systematic knowledge grows, so does the possibility of ignorance. Ignorance is a state which people attribute to others and is loaded with moral judgment. Thus, being underdeveloped often ‘implies a kind of stupidity or failure’. This volume seeks to be premised in a framework where ignorance is understood as being a socially produced and maintained phenomenon, where the ways of knowing and not knowing are interdependent. It is a novel attempt for an academic re-orientation of the Knowledge–Ignorance paradigm through a process of re-interpretation of the bounded purview attached with the existing epistemological understandings. It focuses on concrete case studies, often with an ethnographic stint. The volume critically looks at various aspects: Epistemological Issues; Understanding Community Perspectives and the State; Natural Resources, Power and Ignorance; Media and Production of Non-Knowledge; and other emerging areas. Each essay bears a striking similarity – that of understanding the complex processes and dynamics of the production of ignorance in a field of commonly held beliefs of 'knowledge' - be it scientific, societal, religious, magical or political - through the overarching realm of power. This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to a cross-section of academics and students of sociology, social anthropology, political science, human geography, history, public policy and development studies.
This book critically examines the cultural politics of visuals in South Asia. It makes a key contribution to the study of visuals in the social sciences in South Asia by studying the interplay of the seen and unseen, and the visual and nonvisual. The volume explores interrelated themes including the vernacular visual and visuality, ways of seeing in South Asia and the methodology of hermeneutic sensorium, anxiety and politics of the visuals across the region and the trajectory of visual anthropology, significance of visual symbols and representations in contemporary performances and folk art, visual landscapes of loss and recovery and representation of refugees, visual public in South Asia and making of visuals for contemporary consumptions. The chapters unravel the concepts of visual, visibility, visuality while attending to determinant meta-ideas, such as memory and modernity, trajectories of tradition, fluidity and hybridity, and visual performative politics. Based on interdisciplinary resources, the chapters in this volume present a wide array of empirical findings across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, along with analytical readings of the visual culture of the subcontinent across borders. The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of visual and cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, sociology, political studies, media and communications studies, performance studies, art history, television and film studies, photography studies, and South Asian studies. It will also interest practitioners including artists, visual artists, photographers, filmmakers and media critics.
'A splendid work of art, In Defence of the Ordinary returns drama, pleasure and awakening to everyday life ... in the tradition of cultural critics like Ashis Nandy and Umberto Eco... The book is one of a kind.' -Prathama Banerjee is a noted historian of the global south and Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. '[A] flâneur of our everyday spheres of life, [the author] excavates the multiple layers of social, political and artistic thinking and experimentation ... with an unparalleled lightness of prose worthy of a Balthasar Gracián and Georg Lichtenberg.' -Ramin Jahanbegloo is a philosopher and Vice Dean and Director at Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Peace Studies, O.P. Jindal Global University, India. '[The] book builds an engaging web of thoughts about things which are ordinary but in their very ordinariness hide deep social truths... Dev Nath Pathak brings a lightness to his critical eye while reminding us of how much of the ordinary has been forgotten in academic pursuits.' -Sundar Sarukkai is a renowned philosopher and thinker in contemporary India. In Defence of the Ordinary is laced with light humour, soaked in serious sarcasm and powered with poetic polemics. Informed by sources such as psychoanalysis, philosophy, yoga, anthropology, popular cinema, folk songs and everything that is part of an ordinary living, it is a sociologist's sincere ruminations on the layered ordinariness. The book invites us to rethink the ways of seeing, understanding, enacting, emoting and relating with provocative ideas like why we don't value ordinariness and how our pursuit of extraordinary is misleading us into mishaps. The key objective of the human existence is that of the book too, namely, awakening the dormant potentials of emancipation every day rather than waiting for an occasional charisma induced by a holy book or a secular gimmick or an orchestrated leadership.
Combining entertainment and education, India's most beloved comic book series, Amar Chitra Katha, or "Immortal Picture Stories," is also an important cultural institution that has helped define, for several generations of readers, what it means to be Hindu and Indian. Karline McLain worked in the ACK production offices and had many conversations with Anant Pai, founder and publisher, and with artists, writers, and readers about why the comics are so popular and what messages they convey. In this intriguing study, she explores the making of the comic books and the kinds of editorial and ideological choices that go into their production.
Longform Annual presents stories that subvert conventional narrative; stories about ordinary people; autobiographies; travel tales - and through these stories establish comics as a permanent feature on a reader's shelf. The name 'Longform' is inspired by a Joe Sacco essay on the shrinking space to tell long graphic stories. The anthology takes us through the streets of Rome and Kolkata, modern day Tehran and ancient Bhutan, around-the-corner dystopias, imaginary cities and kaleidoscopic dreamscapes. The artists presented here include well-known names from India and elsewhere, such as Prakash Moorthy, Barroux, Venkat Shyam, Allen Shaw, as well as emerging artists.
This book explores the field of Comics Studies in South Asia, illuminating an art form in which there has been a much-documented explosion of recent interest. A diverse group of scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America examine aesthetics, politics, and ideology in sequential art about South Asia and South Asian America. The book features contributions which address gender violence; authoritarian politics; caste discrimination; environmentalism; racism; and urban street art, amongst others. The unique interdisciplinary span of the volume considers mass popular comic books as well as the graphic novel. This edited volume would be of interest to those studying the influence of graphic novels, graphic narratives, and comic books in South Asia, as well as researchers interested in what these forms might have to say about important issues in society. This book was originally published as a special issue of the South Asian Review journal.
The literary canon implies the evaluation or estimation of certain literary texts as the most important during a particular time. The canon is not merely a set of texts; it is a set of standards, evaluative procedures and values. Belonging to a canon confers a guarantee of literary greatness. A canon is formed, by a particular group, to channelize cultural hegemony over others, or, can be constructed, by a governed group, to bring about cultural symmetry. The rise of diverse literatures in English in different parts of the world after the colonial rule of England was the consequence of an urge to articulate a cultural equilibrium or an urge to strike back. The process of canon formation is also a focused and bigoted act, and is always carried out to accomplish certain self-centred objectives. It is commonly accepted that canon formation is executed to accomplish or naturalize certain ideological functions. In the sphere of Indian English literature, Indian English fiction after the end of the 1980s has emerged as a new “canon”. This book looks into the process of literary canon formation in Indian universities, and examines such fiction as an alternative literary canon and as an anti-imperialistic response to the British literary canon. The book ascertains the anti-imperialistic design involved in forming the canon of post-1980 Indian English fiction, examines the gradual emerging trends in such fiction, and discerns the role of language, culture, and native ethos in the formation of a canon. It also differentiates post-1980s Indian English fiction from British fiction, bhasa fiction, and even from pre-1980s Indian English fiction.
They were inseparable - until the day they jumped. Ruth, saved by safety nets, leaves the city. Kari, saved by a sewer, crawls back into the fray of living. With Angel, Lazarus, and the girls of Crystal Palace forming the chorus to her song, she explores the dark heart of smog city - loneliness, sewers, sleeper success, death - and the memory of her absentee Other. Sensuously illustrated and livened by wry commentaries on life and love, Kari gives a new voice to graphic fiction in India.
This book explores the relationship between multiplicity and representation of non-European and European-American cultures, with a focus on comics and superheroes. The author employs a combination of research methodologies, including close reading of transmedia texts and interviews with transmedia storytellers and audiences, to better understand the way in which diverse cultures are employed as agents of multiplicity in transmedia narratives. The book addresses both commercial franchises such as superhero narratives, as well as smaller indie projects, in an attempt to elucidate the way in which key cultural symbols and concepts are utilized by writers, designers, and producers, and how these narrative choices affect audiences – both those who identify as members of the culture being represented and those who do not. Case studies include fan fiction based on Marvel’s Black Panther (2018), fan fiction and art created for the Moana (2016) and Mulan (2020) films, and creations by both U.S.-based and international indie comics artists and writers. This book will appeal to scholars and students of new media, narrative theory, cultural studies, sociocultural anthropology, folkloristics, English/literary studies, and popular culture, transmedia storytelling researchers, and both creators and fans of superhero comics.