Art needs a medium to get transmitted across cultures. Transmission can be seen as the primary objective of a ‘re-telling,’ which needs to be understood as a distinguishable category from ‘ cultural translation’ or even ‘adaptation.’ Referring to some of the contemporary graphic novel adaptations of Indian epics, the essay proposes to use the critical and theoretical concepts of adaptation to study how stories, ideas and characters from epics are retold through the medium of  the graphic novel. The essay therefore lays emphasis on the approach to reading and interpreting graphic books of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, with the purpose of  understanding ‘retelling’from the perspectives of first-person narrators of the selected texts. The texts chosen: Tara Publishers’s Sita’s Ramayana (2011)  and Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva (2012, HaperCollins India), represent each of the epics.Published around the same period, both market themselves as graphic novels, the former as an adaptation and the latter as a retelling. Incidentally, they also adopt the female first-person narrative. The rationale for such a selection empowers the analysis by seeing how two different graphic novels visualize the two epics and what specific techniques of image-word-panel sequentialization they deploy. Methodologically, the analysis will benefit by using concepts from Linda Hutcheon’s theory of literary adaptation to assess the techniques used in the process of retelling and/or adaptation, as they can be meaningfully applied to decipher the various visual interpretive strategies used by the author/artist. The focus of this survey, therefore is to determine and discuss common visual interpretive strategies adopted in the process of retelling and adapting the epics. It must be told at the very outset that the essay is not an evaluative study between source and target texts. That is to say, the graphic books selected for the study are not adaptations of original’ texts but have been adapted from already existing retellings  (visual, performative and oral storytelling) of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

Asha Kasbekar explains Amar Chitra Katha’s (ACK, India’s first successful comic book industry venture) impulse to go back to mythology and history and its clarity of vision vis-à-vis its readership which constituted both “children and adults” (95). Emphasizing ACK’s inter-medial and inter-textual inspirations, she asserts, “Most of these retellings from the epics are an amalgam of different sources and different telling of the same myths” (96). ACK from its conception to its execution was a unique idea that mixed education with entertainment, merging the historical and the mythological.

Scholars claim that  besides meeting its self-admitted pedagogic visions of making young India aware of its roots in history and mythology, the ACK was also surreptitiously carving a nationalist/masculinist/Hindutva ideology through the use of recurrent themes and imagery. The works of  Susan Wadley and Lawrence Babb (1998), John Lent (2001), Aruna Rao (2001), Karline McLain (2005), Nandini Chandra (2008) and Deepa Sreenivas (2010) besides charting a historiography of the ACK, make detailed surveys and analyses of how the comic book medium was being used by its creators to etch out an integrationist agenda. All of these works claim, in one way or the other that the ACK was, in the domain of popular culture production, one of the most powerful tools of nation-building. Karline McLain’s comment seems to sum up the central vein of ACK scholarship so far:

Through content analysis alone, it is easy to conclude that the Amar Chitra Katha comic book series conveys a hegemonic conception of “Indianness” to its readers, one that entails the marginalization of Muslims and other religious and cultural “outsiders” from the national past, the recasting of women in so-called “traditional” roles, and the privileging of middle-class Hindu culture. (Whose Immortal? vi-vii)

With its titles on mythology, history, and biographies of great leaders, the ACK “was actively engaged in producing the modern bourgeois subject . . . by writing a counter-history which was projective rather than merely factual” (Sreenivas 37-38). Harleen Singh also argues that that the comic book format allowed the ACK to mix mythology and history just as the itihasa-purana literary tradition of India, since this visual form “provide(s) a particularly indelible medium of harking back to the ancient through the use of modernity’s devices” (“Graphics of Freedom”n.p.). Images from mythology which undeniably are treated also as religious images in India, were being used as metaphors for etching out  a national identity. Hindu religion, being predominantly iconocentric, provided a platform for various forms of audio/visual media to invite the masses to be drawn in and associate with images based on an archetypal familiarity.

What these critical works of scholarship of the ACK however tend to overlook is that neither Anant Pai, in attempting to create a comics canon, nor the political flavor of their contemporary times in propagandizing Hinduism, created Hindutva/nationalist agenda. The stakeholders were barely fanning the airs of an already existing identitarianism—political and religious alike. The genre of the ‘mythologicals’ primarily residing in the domain of visual culture was seen possibly as one of the best ways of re-creating a nation. Mythology supplanted history, and popular genres such as films and comic books were targeted to be among the more potent media for voicing this newly-formed impulse of ‘imaging’ and ‘imagining’ the nation.

This essay  moves beyond  the ACK—which had for long defined the comic book industry in India— and looks at comics and graphic novels, within what E. Dawson Varughese calls the ‘post-millenial” moment (10). It could be argued that comics and graphic novels in their own ways adapt and retell mythological epics to speak to completely different audiences, demarcated by their age-groups and/or their, potential permeability into other media. In fact, it is this translatability into the visual which contributes to their status as living entities. Common to all of such visual avatars of epics is an assumption that mythology provides enduring raw material.  Myths and their  archetypes almost always occupy the center  of mainstream cultural productions.

Genre, Medium, Narrative

Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, is believed to have given the term ‘graphic novel’ commercial value. It was popularized as a graphic novel and not as a comic because the term ‘novel’ had obvious market implications. The genre instantly hit the public domain as  serious art distinguishing itself from the comics genre meant for  children and young adults.  The graphic novel therefore could take the liberty of including text and imagery which would not be appropriate for children’s reading. But the first graphic novels were primarily image-oriented.  For instance, France Masareel’s 25 Images of Man’s Passions (1918) or Lynd Ward’s Gods’ Man (1929) were ‘silent’ graphic art-works  in sequential form.Will Eisner described the graphic novel as a visual narrative with words in the 1970s  (see Eisner’s “Introduction” to A Contract…). Eisner’s A Contract with God, published in 1978, came to be known as the first graphic novel (images and  words). With the proliferation of the graphic novel market, it also became imperative to keep the distinction between the graphic novel and the graphic narrative intact. The latter included all forms of visual narratives, such as cinema, cartoons, and ‘performative’ arts such as the Opera. With the increasing popularity of the graphic novels, there came a huge demand for the ‘illustrated’ versions of the classics, such as the Moby Dick and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. These books were not, technically speaking, adaptations, because they did not change the ‘content’ of the novels. They were abridged pictorial ‘representations’ of the classics.

In India, Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor (2004) was popularized as the country’s first ‘graphic novel’.  Though Orijit Sen’s A River of Stories (1994) was published a decade earlier, it lacked the marketing required to be popularly received as a graphic novel. Why were these books with pictures not promoted simply as comics? Marketing and publishing dynamics were clearly not the only two factors behind this form’s popularization. They were called graphic novels because they were introducing themes which were hitherto unexplored in the given medium. Corridor was meant for adult readership not just because it contained explicit sexual content but because both its language and its theme were complex. A graphic novel could take more liberty with thematic expressions (textual and pictorial) because its function was not restricted to entertaining  children. Pramod K. Nayar in his detailed reading of Bhimayana, maintains the distinction between graphic novel and comics. He quotes Lila Christensen to describe graphic novels  “in contrast to superhero comic books,” the former being “more serious, often nonfiction, full-length, sequential art novels that explore the issues of race, social justice, global conflict, and war with intelligence and humor” ( qtd in Nayar, 5). Speaking of the status of graphic novels in India he observes, “Home-grown graphic novels—as opposed to comic books—have appeared from Penguin and other publishing houses since 2004 with works by Sarnath Banerjee, Naseer Ahmed and Amruta Patil,” admitting though that they are still very niche genres (4-5).

Graphic novels are a dual-form expression combined in a medium  that uses bothgraphic and literary representation to narrate a story. They bring together the fields of cinematic portrayal, mass media, canonical and non-canonical literature, to blur the distinctions between these categories. They are one of the most representative expressions of a consumer culture which debunks the hierarchical distinction between the high and the low forms of art. I use ‘graphic novel’ as an umbrella term for the purpose of analysis here, as it can be seen as both a material entity and a medium, and may include comics, illustrated books, picture books etc. Although most of these forms use comparably similar format and tools of storytelling, there might be subtle and crucial differences between them, ranging from their content and ideological perspectives to their marketing strategies. Since this essay is not looking at other forms of graphic narratives such as digital comics (better known as Webomics) or zines, the term ‘graphic novel’ provides a simplistic and functional reference point. As a cluster term, it seems to provide for more intricate format distinctions such as a longform graphic narrative in pages, and an ‘illustrated classics’ version.  Of the various sub-forms, comics and graphic novels tend toward a greater degree of sequential arrangement. Theorists often have class/category confusions over these forms or subgenres of the graphic book.  “Graphic Narrative” is a term Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven prefer to use over graphic novel, which they believe could be a misnomer (767). Graphic narrative can be seen as an intricate language which exhibits a confrontational suturing of verbal and visual modes to create a palimpsest, which in turn re-orients the reader’s notions of a text by creating layers of subtexts simultaneously. The narrative frame which holds the image is a key narratorial device in the ‘langue’ of the graphic narrative medium. The ‘frame’ occupies a cognitive centrality to closure in graphic narratives. Besides providing the narrative frame (context) of the story, the literal frame or the border of the panel also allows a relative freedom to adjust and synchronize narrative information by realizing in variant combinatory ways, its articulatory potential. For instance, the length of the panel can be increased or decreased to show the passing of time, Aaron Meskin vouches for the uniqueness of both the image and the text to contribute to meaning, “Neither the text nor the image have a more fundamental role than the other, but they work together to create the story-world of the comic” (391). Meskin’s comment speaks of a structural ideal in composing the language of comics. But this does not seem to be the norm, as much comics scholarship, rather than establishing a theory of symbiosis, tends to work up models in which either the verbal or the visual dominate.

Representation and Re-telling—Understanding Adaptation

The Indian comics industry though not inspired was definitely being influenced by (and in turn influencing) cultures outside of India. Most Indian cartoon serials in India used the Disney style of art in the very beginning. John A. Lent claims, that westernization is often “appropriated”  to suit the more traditional contexts and sensibilities of the market. (Lent 5)  He also quotes Aruna Rao and says,

Indian comics superstar Bahadur wears western blue jeans with an Indian shirt (kurta), to show he is both modern and aware of his roots, and how plots are mixed so that masked superheroes go home to their parents at night and villainesses seek to destroy the universe because they cannot find a suitable husband. (Lent 5)

One could say foreign writers/artists/cartoonists similarly “appropriate” Indian (or Asian) elements to suit their own cultural context. The Japanese ‘Manga’ is an excellent example of this hybridization. (Manga productions dominate the Western Graphic art scene today, see the popularity of Death Note or Astro Boy for instance).

The ACK, “played an important part in the transmission of traditional stories and myths” (Rao in Lent, 43), attention needs to be brought to the term “transmission” here which  can be seen as the primary objective of a ‘re-telling.’[1] Hutcheon puts it better when she says, “We retell—and show again and interact anew with—stories over and over; in the process, they change with each repetition, and yet they are recognizably the same… In the workings of the human imagination, adaptation is the norm, not the exception” (177).

Adaptation can be classified from the perspective of “the process of creation” which leads to its (re-)interpretation or (re-)creation—Hutcheon calls it ‘appropriation’ or salvaging (Hutcheon 8-9). She quotes Priscilla Galloway as an adapter belonging to this category, “an adapter of mythic and historical narratives for children and young adults that are worth knowing but will not necessarily speak to a new audience without creative reanimation” (9). And finally, adaptation can be classified as depending upon its “process of reception” (8) Based on their modes of engagement, graphic adaptation could be any of these: “Transposition,” “appropriation,” or “a repetition with variation” (7)  Based on their degree of involvement they could be showing/performative(theatre and drama), telling/narrating (novels), and “interactive” (22) (for instance, visual multimedia). Graphic novel adaptations involve all three degrees and modes of representations.

The process of adaptation implies “transference,” “displacement” and “surgical art” (Hutcheon 18-19) or tailor-finishing an old (a relatively older) work to cater to a new reader/audience. And this ‘transference’ of matter from one medium to the other, entails the question of what is lost and what is gained.  Through this essay, I focus on  locating the ‘gaps’ that the adapted text picks from a source text only to ‘fill’ them to say something new.

A graphic novel can be analyzed in multiple ways: through a formal structural analysis (using Semiotics, see for instance Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics, 2007) which would focus on its  formal characteristics such as  the plot, the point of view, and narrative strategies with regards to its visual characteristics. One can even look at graphic novels from the vantage point of cognitive psychology which would enable one to understand the use of graphic art as a ‘gestalt’ representation of contemporary culture  (for instance, Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities, edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji 2020). The questions we then ask are: how does the constant re-visualising of epics operate and fit within the terminology of adaptation theory, how do the epics (The Mahabharata and The Ramayana) get adapted to the form of the graphic novel? The process of adaptation here is two-tiered: it is ‘transposition,’ as it engages in inter-generic adaptation—from epic to novel, and  it is ‘transmutation’ and ‘transcoding’ at the level of visual expression—word/text to image/icons/symbols[2]. Since the essay, as stated earlier, looks at how the visual aspects of epics are brought to the popular domain (through graphic novel renditions), the following half of this study will engage in a sustained analysis of  the techniques of adaptation/retelling. To serve the purpose, I have selected two graphic novels:  adaptations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. . Although the selection of texts, at the first instance, may appear feminist and female-centric, the objective of this project is not to execute a feminist reading of the texts.  It is to understand the visual narrative strategies that facilitate a differential telling. It can however be argued, that since the  Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are traditionally read, seen, and perceived as epics of the ‘male ideal’ (the former as paurushottam and the latter as purusharth), many of their contemporary retellings are  categorically ‘against the grain’ and choose to spin the tales toward deconstructionist directions.

Theory as Praxis

Case Study One

Sita’s Ramayana—Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar (Tara Books)

The cover page of Sita’s Ramyana has a picture of Sita in what is called the ‘patua’ art style. The ‘patua’ artists or ‘Chitrakars,’ as they are known, can be traced to the thirteenth century, and are now known to have settled in West Bengal as a mixed community of Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. One may also find parallels of the ‘patua’ art form in the nineteenth century ‘patas’ paintings of Kalighat, which are believed to have evolved from the earlier ‘patua’ style, and were used in the colonial era as a medium to ridicule and satirize the “babu culture” of the British. This satiric note is also evident in Sita’s Ramayana, as will be discussed later.

Sita’s Ramayana is a collaborative project between the writer Samhita Arni and the illustrator Moyna Chitrakar. Other contributors include —Orijit Sen, a comic artist with Tara Publishers and Jonathan Yamakami, a resident designer with the same. Arni,  gives an account of the conception and initiation of this bookMoyna Chitrakar took part in a graphic narratives workshop conducted by Tara Publishers. It is during this workshop that Chitrakar and other patua artists learnt to organize ‘patua’ as an alternative comic art. They converted the vertical panels of the scroll into horizontal pictures, which when compiled would take the form of a sequentially arranged narrative – the form of the graphic novel. Arni, however, was a much later addition to the project. She was chosen by Tara to assume authorship for the work by providing a written narrative to the picture art. The concluding note of Sita’s Ramayana says that the novel was “painted before it was written.” Arni too, in many of her interviews (the Indiacurrent Website) has admitted that she plays second fiddle to Chitrakar. Her job has been only to weave a narrative around the images.. So, it is safe to say that this is where the first level or kind of encounter between the images and the text takes place. It can also be inferred that the production of a graphic novel does not depend on the chronology of what came first: the art or the text. The art may precede the text as in the case of Arni-Chitrakar’s novel; the text may precede the art, as in the case of Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva. One might even say that these processes cannot be so sharply distinguished. The process of imagining the text requires a vivid graphic, image-based world in the mind of the writer and the process of imagining art is never quite without words. The cognitive processes that structure artistic creation cannot be sequentially arranged in terms of what precedes what.

The process of adaption Sita’s Ramayana uses is  “repetition without replication” (Hutcheon 7,8)   It fits into the category of ‘transposition’ because it undergoes a shift of ‘genre’ (epic to novel); a shift of frame and context, (telling the same story from a different point of view, to create a different interpretation).it is at the same time an ‘appropriation’ because it offers a newer interpretation of the Ramayana from a woman’s vantage point, creating a wholly new cultural product.

Graphically Speaking…

The novel begins with an external omniscient voice introducing the reader to the plot. It says, “For a thousand years the Dandaka forest slept” (Sita’s 7). Now, this is an instance of ‘appropriation.’  Since the narrator of Sita’s Ramayana is Sita herself, the story has to begin with Sita and not Ram or any other character in the epic. This novel ‘appropriates’ Valmiki’s narrative voice (Ramayana begins with the episode in which Valmiki feels intense agony at the death of the mating Krauncha bird), who is believed to have narrated the Ramayana to Luv and Kush, to that of Sita’s. In a stroke of brilliant symbolism and imagery, Arni sets the novel in the Dandaka forest. This first line of the novel appears in a white caption against a black backdrop—setting the tone of the novel through the symbolic use of the color black. It is also indicative of the dark and dense sleep of the forest. Continuing with the omniscient-narration, the very next page opens up to introduce the central character of the novel, referred to as ‘the daughter of the Earth,’ (Sita’s 8) the panel placed against a white backdrop, with a face close-up focusing on Sita’s tears. The flowers of the Dandaka forest seem to be sharing in Sita’s agony (see Image 1 below). The external narration gives way to an internal narrative frame which is carried forward by Sita herself. She hears the forest whispering questions and addresses the forest, taking up to narrate her story. Thence begins the first-person narrative. The Ramayana begins precisely where it almost ends—with Sita’s banishment. A heavily pregnant Sita “beg(s)” for refuge to the forest. She complains, “The world of men has banished (her)”  (Sita’s 9), so nature is the only shelter accessible to her. No sooner does the story begin than it cuts to the moment of the historical exile of Rama along with Sita and Lakshman. While the initial external narrative voice occurs as free text without any borders, Sita’s lines occur in text box and bubble diagrams positioned within the panels. The slightly longer dialogues appear in small fonts and lower case, whereas Sita’s emotional and intensely felt expressions occur in short one-liners in upper case bold fonts. Such minor innovations in the discourse of a graphic novel serve not simply to distribute attention to characters as and when required by the plot, but also to heighten the dramatic effect of the novel. The lines spoken by other characters are featured through bubbles or what are  known as ‘speech balloons.’

Speaking of the narrative structure, there is yet another internal frame within the main narrative—that of Sita’s encounter with Hanuman. In this episode, Hanuman tells Sita how he came to know of Rama and eventually rescues Sita: “And Hanuman told me …” (Sita’s 36). The reader now gets involved in a concentric narrative framework in which the authorial voice tells the reader of a certain Dandaka forest, that  becomes the primary audience to Sita’s story/history, which in turn invites narrative strands from Hanuman, who within the primary frame of Sita’s narrative explains (to Sita) how he got involved within the project of rescuing her, (to which Sita, in flashback, is the primary audience and by the time-frame of the narrative, the Dandaka and the external reader are the secondary audience). Then again, both these external audiences (the forest and the contemporary reader) are separated by time, the former by fourteen years from the historical moment of the Ramayana and the latter by eons. But a similar sensibility holds them together—their  empathy to Sita’s condition.

This narrative strategy of multiple internal frames is a stylistic innovation or an instance of “remoulding” of the ‘fabula’ in a manner which makes the epic narrative most conducive to a retelling from a feminist and environmental perspective. The epic as a whole then becomes redundant to this feminist/female telling; only that which is relevant to Sita’a point of view gets selected and filtered to the readers (and the internal audience). All of Rama’s feats and political pacts are treated with certain condescension in the novel. As mentioned earlier, the ‘patua’ art form ridiculed and satirized the ‘babu’ culture of the British, Moyna Chitrakar’s paintings also, most poignantly bring out the satiric tone in Sita’a narrative, both through the images and the text. The novel is anti-war in its stance. It critiques the “world of men” for perpetration of violence on women, animals, and nature. The novel justifies an ecocritical consciousness which sees war and violence as futile, boosting man’s vain glory. Rama has not been given agency in the novel.

The narrative, because it is framed through Sita’s perspective, engages in the act of ‘appropriating’ a very interesting and innovative narrative strategy—making Trijatha, Sita’s caretaker/confidante in Asoka Vatika (where Sita is held captive by Ravan) narrate the battle in Lanka. Since Sita is imprisoned and has no accessibility to the war between Ram and Ravan, she cannot possibly narrate the actual happenings at the battlefield to the Dandaka.  It is Trijatha, who then becomes indispensable to the plot and narrative structure. She is shown to have been blessed with foresight and ‘divyadrishti’ with which she, like Sanjay in The Mahabharata, delivers the action of the war to Sita. This strategy serves to restore and preserve Sita’s perspective in the text. There is another interesting way in which the narrative unfolds—the entire story Sita tells to the forest is in flashback but there comes a point in the novel where Sita has finished recounting how she arrived at the Dandaka. The story from here on is no longer in Sita’s first-person narration. The omniscient external voice is brought in again to continue the narrative—“The forest heard Sita’s story. Her tale was passed from tree to tree, leaf to leaf. […] And the whispers of the forest were borne by the breeze to the hermitage of Valmiki” (Sita’s 128-130). The novel never holds Valmiki to be the original narrator of the Ramayana.

Rama and other male characters in the novel speak most sparingly. The over-worked analysis of the Ramayana as a story of ‘dharma’ and the victory of good over evil, of loyalty and filial love, goes in vain as Sita’s narration does not allow the reader to justify any of these perspectives. Sita’s tragedy is a direct outcome of the war. The novel seems to condemn patriarchal notions of war and victory. There are subtle references to the terrible atrocities associated with war and the heavy price that women pay, whether they are on the winning side or the losing side.

Sita is presented as bold, eloquent, perspective, and critical. She describes her innermost thoughts effortlessly and narrates freely her deepest regrets and complaints. Such a feminist take however is not the first of its kind. The chapter by V. Geetha at the end of the novel mentions the sixteenth century Chandrabati Ramayana as the first feminist telling of the Ramayana, but she also says that Chitrakar has not drawn on that text at all as she was not aware of it. Except a few details here and there, Arni bases her prose thoroughly in Valamiki’s Ramayana. The novel transposes not only the images or the graphic art but also the narration, as V. Geetha rightly says, “Sita’s Ramayana belongs then to a distinctive female narrative tradition. Kept alive by folk songs and memories, this tradition continues to leaven the epic world of heroes and war with virtues of nurture, compassion and tolerance” (Sita’s 151).

Case Study Two

Amruta Patil’s Parva duology:

Adi Parva comes “via” Amruta Patil. In using this term, Patil signifies the epistemological necessity of receiving the Mahabharata not simply as a religious text, but as a story of cosmic proportions that needs to be carried across generations. Since all stories are transferred via narrators, the concept of ‘retelling’ becomes inextricably tied to the whole tradition of storytelling. Patil positions herself as a (female) sutradhaar of  the epic, a reteller of a story so well inscribed in the collective memories of the Indian mindscape that there is no need to hear them. The fact that in ancient Sanskrit kavya and natyas, a sutradhaar undertakes the choric function and is never a woman, makes Patil’s choice of casting a woman sutradhaar, critically impressive. This involves what Hutcheon would call the “surgical art” (Hutcheon 18) of adaptation. Patil not only transposes the epic into a graphic novel, but also unifies the epic’s narrative voice in Ganga (instead of the pluri-vocal sautis, who carry forward the Mahabharata story through a complex structure of fractals). This therefore becomes a “re-creation” of the original epic through a radical re-vision. Ganga, unquestionably lends feminist undertones to the telling, but she functions more as an extended metaphor for the fluidity of the epic that makes it contemporaneous. In the “Author’s Note” to Adi Parva, she reiterates the “need for retelling stories,” as “Cosmic tales are like fish tanks in their need for continuous aeration” (259). The image equivalent of the visual metaphor of the sutradhaar-as-reteller is captured by portraying the umbilical of Vishnu, in whose sleeping mind the cosmic tales eternally unfold. Themes, motifs, characters, and stories recur as they are retold by different sutradhaars in different time frames, or even in parallel time-frames, to borrow quantum parlance.

When Patil says, “The real scope of the Mahabharat,” is far beyond the “the sum total of two things—the fratricidal battle between the Kuru princes and the battlefield dialogue between the avatar, Krshn, and his protégé Arjun,” she is implying that this thematic reduction is not her concern in the novel. To her the Mahabharata

sprawls from fantastic creation myths to gritty battlefields; from bodily preoccupations to the material and the spiritual; from grooming kings to encouraging renunciates. An ambitious arena, and yet at its core, the Mahabharata is a treatise on something as elementary as right conduct and excellent form. (Adi Parva, 260)

It may be inferred that the novel does not play with the ‘essence’ of the Mahabharata. The moral universe of Patils’ Adi Parva is the same as the ‘original’ story of the Mahabharata. Structurally, it is “interactive” (Hutcheon, A Theory: Second Edition xvii) in the sense that the interaction is used as a metaphor for the linear (symbolically cyclical) progression of the act of narration.

Besides the framework she seeks to retell  the Mahabharata by contemporizing it, by giving it a science-lingo touch-up. Scientific metaphors are invoked to understand cosmic/philosophical ideas and beliefs. In a section titled “Navigators of the Multiverse” (Adi Parva 72), Patil places a text box on the top of the page against a background of haphazard black and blue brush strokes, giving it the appearance of a dark, ever spanning multiverse, as if she were trying to grasp the scientific metaphor of time travel through black hole tunnels; and the text reads,

the rishis are the navigators of the multiverse. They interact with beings on the simplest of terms—with warning or announcement, passion or wrath, blessing or curse. Passion to intervene with genetic data. Wrath to cut arrogance to size. Blessing to offset a curse. Curse to engineer the future. (73)

In Sauptik Parva, Patil evokes “genetic data” again. She uses the visual/verbal metaphor of the DNA double helix, functioning as an image equivalent of the concept of spatio-temporality. Time as a metaphor is integral to a philosophical understanding of the epic. Pictorially representing the structure of the DNA (see Image 1, below), the text amplifies the significance of the gene as a potent medium to carry a given information down histories and generations, “The most effective ways to send data into the future? To reproduce. To teach. To leave seeds buried to awaken in time, at the right moment” (Sauptik, 17). The metaphor of the double-helix (also a spiral) serves as a literal marker of the perpetual bond that genealogies and family trees form, as also conjuring up the symbolic effect of the narrative structure of the epic itself: an oral history passed down through an unbroken chain of sautis or narrator-storytellers.

Image 1, Sauptik Parva (np)  

The purpose of retelling for Patil is “to improvise the narrative to reflect the time,” (Parva 259) in which it is being told.. She uses the narrative’s innate post-modernity (in its self-reflexivity and nested-narrative structure) to achieve the desired improvization. In an interview with Paul Gravett, Patil says, “Staying faithful to the original is an immense responsibility. The trick is in being respectful to the essence, without being enslaved by earlier manifestations” (qtd in Gravett). Patil’s retelling then condenses the Mahabharata from its first book,‘Adi Parvam,’ and one of the last books, ‘Sauptik Parvam.’ Her focus, at all times, coheres to the core philosophy of the epic—cosmic equilibrium.

Conclusion

There exists a wide variety of retellings and adaptations of myths  in the Indian market, one of which follows the patent formula of adapting the epics for the genre of superhero/action-adventure comics (see for instance, Ramayana 3392 AD, Ashok Banker’s Prince of Ayodhya and Campfire’s mythology titles). The focus of such graphic novel adaptations is simply to tinker with the existing iconography of the Gods and refashion them into avatars more easily comprehensible for a modern-day digitalized reader market. “Indian publishers such as Holy Cow Entertainment, Vimanika Comics and Campfire Graphic Novels” says Shefali Anand, “comic books and graphic novels that combine familiar story lines with new scenes and dialogue and are ‘trying to give cutting-edge art to the same old mythological stories’ ” (“The Gods have been Working Out”). This cannot be said about Adi Parva, or Sita’s Ramayana, which strive to make a sustained effort to achieve the desired impact of echoing the epics’ metaphorical universe. Incorporating compact metaphors from diverse artistic traditions, ranging from folk to world art movements, Patil’s graphic novel is committed to the idea of “retelling” as she realizes that the reteller’s function is to safeguard the “essence” and that the story ought to improve with each telling,

A story passed down through the ages via oral storytellers cannot help but alter. A good storyteller, like a good teacher, speaks in the language of the hour. Her only allegiance is to the essence of the tale; the essence safeguarded, she is free to improvise the narrative to reflect the time. (Adi Parva 259)

Thus, unlike 18 Days which is designed on a self-acclaimed ‘Star Wars meets Lord of the Rings’ trope, Adi Parva does not tread the road more travelled. Graphic novels such as Sita’s Ramayana and Adi Parva in their own ways, show visible efforts of defying the tradition of comics canonized by the ACK, and make unique innovations in the ways they combine words and images, to offer a braided visual narrative which to the informed reader creates an impact akin to the assumed original, and to a new reader, unaware of the originals, perhaps encourages an entry point to the epics.

These graphic adaptations and retellings of Indian epics illustrate the relationship of the mythic to its market. Visual narratives especially, as stated earlier, conserve the epic matter through their potential malleability. Rendering the Ramayana and the Mahabharata into visual media serves paradoxically the double-function of proliferating religiously coloured perceptions, yet at the same time decolouring them of their acquired sacredness by pushing the images to the limits of sacrilege, as in Gods of the video-game format using cybernetic lingo of modern-day media.[3]The plurality of these visual traditions, however, speak of the indefatigability with which epics are adapted and retold, every iteration new, every little improvization adding on to the palimpsestic intertextual form in which these primally existed and still continue to be, not to be fossilized as their Greek counterparts, but as full-fleshed organic entities waiting to be reused, recycled, only to re-form cultural habitats. Finally, to ‘view’ the present study through a metaphor, it could be said that the various graphic novel representations are neither exclusively retellings, nor adaptations. They are instead, as Ramanujan suggests, “tellings” (“Three Hundred Ramayanas” 134) which emerge from a collective “pool of signifiers,” each capable of a “unique crystallization,” (158); only in this case they become ‘verbo-visual tellings’ through systematically patterned structures, forming distinctive crystals.

Glossary

Sutradhaar: One who holds the thread of the story, performing the narrative function. Sutra means thread and dhaar translates as the holder. Pauranic interpretations trace the term to suthar, which was also a caste of carpenters owning lineage to God Vishwakarma, the original engineer of the universe.

Purushaarth: The Mahabharata tells of the four ideals or chaturaarth, man ought to pursue in order to live a fulfilling life: dharma (righteousness), kaama (pleasure), artha (economic values), moksha (liberation).

Purushottam: Rama was considered as the ideal or the perfect man. The term is usually used in unison with the term maryaada meaning dignity or the clan’s pride.

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Works Cited

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Banker K. Ashok and Enrique Alcatena. Prince of Ayodhya, Vol.1, Penguin Books, 2010.

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Gravett, Paul. “Interview with Amruta Patil.” 6 Sep. 2012, www.paulgravett.com/articles/article/amrutapatil2.

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[1] Transmission: Literally means the process of transferring  or passing something from one place to another (OED), but in the context of literary communication and cultural translation, transmission may mean the process whereby an idea, story or cultural knowledge is passed from one generation/community/society to another. When specifically deliberating upon the role of transmission in epics, it may imply a controlled or an uncontrolled movement of historically relevant wisdom (and not just historical exactitude) to build upon and contribute to collective memory. For instance, Valmiki’s Ramayana has no mention of the “lakshman rekha,” but over centuries of retelling, the cultural transmission of Sita’s abduction story has acquired layers of meaning, and the lakshman rekha or the line of protection which Lakshman draws for Sita goes beyond serving as a metaphor.

[2] By definition transmutation implies changing from one element to the other; in the literary adaptation theory, transmutation would imply change in both form and content. The adapted text would ‘evolve’ into something ‘new.’

[3] Adaptation and Retelling: Though often used interchangeably, both these terms have a few differences. Retelling is used as an ideologically motivated enterprise, which may/may not change the original plot/story/narrative, but the stance and the overall perspective is radicalized. It may impact the reader’s received notion and relation to the original text. Adaptation is more market-oriented as it may play with the story’s innate adaptability to various media; for instance, the recasting of Mahabharata’s war into a video game suited for multi-media modalities. An apt example would be Gotham Comics’ 18 Days, which was adapted to web-comics and is planning to launch in mobile phones.