An Eclectic Spread | Meenakshi Srihari

Review: Longform 2022, An Anthology of Graphic Narratives, edited by Sarabjit Sen, Debkumar Mitra, Sekhar Mukherjee and Pinaki De. Penguin Books, 2022.

What sets the Longform Anthologies (the first was published in 2016) apart from most other Indian comics anthologies that have cropped up steadily over the last decade –such as the monumental collection on the Partition, This Side That Side: Restorying Partition, edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, or Blaft’s Obliterary Journal, with comics attempting to ‘obliterate’ text-dominant literary cultures (in Volume I) and those on meat-eating (in Volume II) is the lack of an announced theme. While in many ways this suffuses the reader’s expectations with mystery, the range in terms of technique and complexity across the eighteen texts collected in the Longform Anthology (Volume 2) makes its evaluation impossible, perhaps reiterating that a single story about India cannot exist. At least a couple of broad themes and formal devices connect the stories in this anthology, such as homes and homelands, coming-of-age, and illness and the body, though for the most part, the curation remains an eclectic spread.

“Noor” narrates the story of a young boy whose happy life is destroyed by a fire that kills his mother and takes away their home. The only remnant of this life is his mother’s red box, which Noor carries everywhere with him as he wanders off by himself and is eventually rescued by Misbah, a ragpicker and drug peddler. Drawn with a largely black and white palette, red emerges as a character that consumes Noor, appearing first as the flames that brought down his house, then as the box that sustains his memories of the past, and finally as the container of a drug that Noor uses to drift into a world of memories. The scantily worded story represents the precarious lives of characters such as Noor in this country – young, poor, displaced, and doing anything to survive. Sarabjit Sen’s ironically titled “A Pilgrim’s Progress”, more directly brings homelessness and poverty into the picture through his depiction of how capitalism lures the poor into further doom.

“Murder,” the opening story by Debjyoti Saha is another boyhood story which examines the myth making that surrounds crows in India. If crows seem like unlikely characters for a story (not very unlikely – we have, after all, grown up with Amar Chitra Katha’s Kalia the Crow), they soon entirely occupy the protagonist’s head as he begins seeing them everywhere. With some witty panels that set up interesting contrasts– one with a caged bird, followed by the text, “Aren’t birds supposed to be sweet and dainty” (9) stands out – Saha points to how storytelling lies at the heart of how we paint and perceive the other and decide our relationship with them.

The first of at least three narratives that are surreal in terms of storytelling and/or art is “Fledged” by Jerry Antony, which with blue washed out colours follows a conversation between a young boy and a giant rabbit which can fly (this does not, to the writer’s credit, surprise us at all), and which asks if to fly is also to let your imagination soar. Noah Van Sciver’s “Holly Hill” is another boyhood story, and could easily be the most composed story of the lot, recollecting those years of adolescent life when time seems infinite and the luxury of ambling through everyday life, very real.

Among the graphic narratives in the collection that follow some typical conventions of the visual medium, including cinematic techniques such as focalisation, we find a careful and deliberate use of spatiality to show the passage of time, a trademark of the “juxtaposition in deliberate sequence” that Scott McCloud declares as the definition of comics in the first few pages of Understanding Comics. Time and the coalescing of temporalities form both the theme and an important formal technique in a few of the narratives.  In “Oye Tubbu”, for example, where we look at the humdrum life of a man and his grandma, the emphasis on fabula time makes everydayness a prominent theme and defines the grammar of the narrative. The narrator undertakes the task of describing his grandma through elements she engages with most – medicine, food, and religion, focusing on moments of comic relief that one encounters in the otherwise arduous process of ageing.

Movement is once again the hero in the cinematically structured “Kallan” – Malayalam for thief – set in a crowded marketplace in Cochin, where we follow the stealthy movements of a thief until in a twist of fate – and a sudden change of momentum in the narrative – the thief gets caught in a bus for a crime he does not commit. Some stories in the volume appear merely as flights of fancy, experimenting with form and figure, such as “Storm Over a Teacup”, which while surreal in its depiction of people with multiple sets of eyes and teeth, stays true to its title, dramatically portraying an otherwise mundane day at a tea stall. Both “Kallan” and “Storm” appear as exercises in focalisation and narrative time.

Another theme that one discovers in the anthology is illness and the body. We walk through the doors of an HDU (a High Dependency Unit) into the story of “Patient No. 259”, in which Sudhanya Dasgupta makes an important point through the fictionalised recollection of her mother’s hospitalisation after a cerebral attack: that the diminutive labels that medical terminology imposes upon a person often lack, what proponents of Narrative Medicine have called a “thick” description of their story. Dasgupta and Manisha Naskar supplement this lack with a foray into the mother’s memories of a childhood spent as a refugee in Calcutta. The coming together of an illness and partition narrative brings the idea of a corporeal home and a geographical home into neat conjunction. Other tales revolving around the body include “It was just another day” by Gayatri Menon, a mother’s rumination about her unborn child after a surgery removing the foetus, and one of the more experimental tales in the anthology, “Chimera” by Srijita and Oz, that describes addiction in a cyberpunk style that pops with colour and swanky font but is hazy in terms of plot.

A standout piece in the anthology is “Bose Vs Bose” by Arghya Manna, who paints in the fictionalised biographical sketch of the physicist, biologist, and philosopher Jagadish Chandra Bose the inner turmoil caused by questions of the commingling of science and spirituality. If Manna’s journey to the limelight was through his publication in a medical journal[i] where his skills at scaling up and animating microscopic events such as the splitting of spit bubbles came to the fore, “Bose Vs Bose” shows a scientist exploring a world that grows around us, inside us, and impinges upon our consciousness, making all borders permeable. The idea of imagination and its limitlessness that runs through several of the stories is at its best in both theme and form in the story. It leaves us with this provocation: “The real is one. Wise men call it variously” (103).

The Longform Anthology joins other commendable (and arguably, more nuanced) comics published in 2022 such as the four issues of the Orijit Sen-edited Comixense, Nikhil Gulati’s The Story of Indus and the republished River of Stories. 2022 also marked a seminal point for comics scholarship, with Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics turning 30. If scholars worldwide are deliberating[ii] how McCloud’s definitions of the panel or the gutter have grown beyond their initial descriptions in the last three decades, a formally inventive volume like the Longform Anthology is only testament to the ever-morphing nature of the comics form.

Works cited:

Manna, Argha. “Be Aware of Droplets and Bubbles.” Annals of Internal Medicine, 2019, Web only, doi: 10.7326/G20-0114.

McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Perennial, 1993.

Sen, Sarabjit, Debkumar Mitra, Sekhar Mukerjee and Pinaki De, editors. Longform 2022, An Anthology of Graphic Narratives, Penguin Books, 2022.

“Understanding Comics at 30,” Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, edited by Rachel Miller and Daniel Worden, vol. 6, no. 3, Fall 2022.

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Notes:

[i] The Annals of Internal Medicine carried Arghya Manna’s graphic piece on spit bubbles and covid infections in 2019.

[ii] See for instance, Ohio University Press’s Inks, volume 6, issue 3, which is dedicated to examining McCloud’s Understanding Comics at 30.

Meenakshi Srihari teaches at NIT, Andhra Pradesh and is Project Assistant with the IWE Online project and the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. Her interests include the Health Humanities and Graphic Medicine. Her work has appeared in Medical Humanities, Media Watch and Synapsis.