Cozy Moments: The Visual World of Rajiv Eipe

Like that of many of his contemporaries, Rajiv Eipe’s art straddles a variety of forms, genres, styles, and media: animation, picture books, children’s books, and comics, in combinations of crayons, pencils, inks, charcoal, paints, crayon, and digital media. He has also written some of his more recent picture books. Eipe’s comic work includes shorter pieces, narratives in anthologies such as When Kulbhushan Met Stockli (2009), and cartoons (in collaboration with Manta Ray Comics) in magazines such as the Mint on Sunday.

I

In Hush (Manta Ray, 2010), a wordless graphic narrative scripted by Pratheek Thomas, Eipe’s soft greys and close-set panels lend the story an uneasy coziness. Hush is a story of child sexual abuse and enforced silence. The comic builds a startling contrast between the trappings of the world Maya inhabits (delicate, many-toned, fluid greys) and the absolute control it wields over her ability to speak of her abuse. Past and present coexist uneasily. Ink and brush on a white background indicate the panels set in the present, while rough-textured pencils and a black background suggest the encroaching past (Eipe, “Personal Interview” 2021).

The cover, an impressionistic face in bold splashes of ink—purples, blacks, maroons—throws this silence into relief: a white tear across the character’s face removes her mouth and replaces it with the title, an imperative Hush.

Sound enters Hush in the very first panel, purely by the suggestion of its consequences: a bullet hole in a blackboard, the cracks radiating out. The gun—the only sound source, since Maya will not, cannot speak—accompanies her ominously across panels. Hush is visually cryptic, condensed—Maya’s name is only mentioned in the cast list at the end. She could be, until that point—in her school uniform and ponytail, in the deliberate middle-class everydayness of her school and her classmates and her teachers—anyone.

Though they wear the same uniform, the gaps in experience and understanding between Maya and her classmates are depicted literally in the aftermath of the shot (fig. 1). Maya’s classmates’ shock and horror are depicted in involuntary close-ups, two strips of widened eyes and open mouths running across the top and bottom of the page. In contrast, Maya is closed and closed off. She is positioned in a middle panel, at a greater distance from the reader. Her face and body are set, decisive, and there is no suggestion of recoil. Maya’s isolation is physical, emotional, and appears irrevocable. The students behind and next to her recede and tilt away. The blackboard frames this moment: a bullet hole and a smear of blood that indicates the trajectory of the body’s fall.

A change in medium and texture heralds changes in time. Black backgrounds and a rougher, more granular texture take Maya back to her past, home, and family. These memory panels exhibit bleeding backgrounds and ill-defined edges. At the dinner table, Maya and her abusive father occupy the head and foot, set against each other, estranged; her mother and sister sit in a line along one side, connecting them. The reader occupies the fourth side of the table, another silent, unwilling participant.

E. Dawson Varughese notes that Hush is a slim volume (17 pages), comparable in size to popular children’s comics like Amar Chitra Katha. In her reading, Hush demonstrates a critical break from the traditions of children’s comics in its foregrounding of the social and familial hierarchies that enable child sexual abuse when it “destabilises the idea of the (male) heroic and honourable” (42), as it positions a teacher (a vice-principal) as the abuser, derelict in both parental and pedagogic duties.

In Pramod K. Nayar’s reading, Hush “demonstrates in a visual medium the absence of a language in which to speak about the silence surrounding the subject of child abuse” (142) in its repeating motifs of enclosure and helplessness (141-7).

The exterior of Maya’s school (of which her father is the vice-principal) is regular, divided up into neat cells, not unlike a comic book. The panel windows are blank and impersonal, echoed in the glass windows of the school buses and the gathering police vans. As Maya takes refuge in a bathroom (fig. 2), the regularity and symmetry of these structures loom large, succeeded immediately by an image of Maya crouched among the shadows on the bathroom floor. The shades are darkest under Maya’s eyes and face as if to emphasize her helplessness against the multiple communities and structures that enclose her and her abuser together, placing her in a position of obedience as a silent listener (student, daughter, child) to his role as speaker and director (teacher-cum-vice-principal, father, adult).

The panels that achieve the final conflation of parent, teacher, vice-principal, and abuser are narrow strips that flash rapidly back and forth in time, paralleling the stuttering door of the boys’ toilet Maya has locked herself into. Maya’s enforced silence and her rapidly narrowing future have become one in her narrative, which sweeps towards a fragmenting finale where Maya lifts the gun to her head. In the end, it is the gun (described by Nayar as prosthesis, unavoidable (144)) that becomes the panels’ focus rather than Maya herself.

The repeating closed, cellular motif seems to echo Varughese’s concern that Hush does not allow its protagonist a future (50). Just as it opens after a gunshot, Hush closes before one, still soundless. It also calls to mind Hilary Chute’s observation that

“The essential form of comics—its collection of frames—is relevant to its inclination to document. Documentary (as an adjective and a noun) is about the presentation of evidence. In its succession of replete frames, comics calls attention to itself, specifically, as evidence. Comics makes a reader access the unfolding of evidence in the movement of its basic grammar, by aggregating and accumulating frames of information.” (2)

As Chute suggests, Hush documents and collates the evidence of Maya’s experience and her helplessness, presenting the unspeakable to the reader.

Hush’s tragedy is in the blacking over and whiting over, the narrowing and closing up of frames that depict Maya’s ultimate inability to share and present her experience for herself. Moments of violence—the sexual abuse, the shooting—are depicted as gaps, tears in the chronology of the panels. They are built up to, and their aftermaths are depicted. The slivers of time in which violence is enacted appear to be not just unspeakable, but also un-enclosable and unseeable.

II

Between 2011 and 2016, Rajiv Eipe illustrated several cartoons that appeared in the Mint—Manta Ray’s The Small Picture and Chimera’s The Big Picture, many of them with recurring collaborators. Where The Big Picture had longer comics, The Small Picture typically consisted of one-page cartoons, often current and sometimes caustic in their narratives.

The soft, smudged backgrounds, the details of homeliness (wall hangings, toys on the sofa) lend the comic a softness and intimacy that are unusual in political cartoons. Only in the last panel does the narrative break overtly into caricature, using what Charles Hatfield has termed “graphic excess” (114)—the exaggerated posture, features, and speech.

In style, “Here We Go Again” is typical of The Small Picture: it appears to occupy a narrative space analogous to the newspaper’s “middle,” combining features of the political cartoon (timely and time-bound, single-image, caricaturing) and the longer comic strip “funnies” that provide their own narrative impetus rather than work in tandem with the news[1].

In comparison, The Big Picture, syndicated by Chimera and featuring many of the same creators, takes a more long-form approach to current events. Eipe’s work for this segment is exemplified by his illustrations for a script by C. G. Salamander, “Scavenger Hunt.”

“Scavenger Hunt” is a series of linked portraits leading into a commentary on manual scavenging in India. It bears the visually striking choices of moody charcoals that depict shadowed places and people, and bright, colorful flowers that replace the dirt and excreta people are forced to clean.  This incongruity of image and referent lends the comic an uneasy surrealism heightened by the concluding scene, depicting a little girl crouching over the waste from a train, holding up a single yellow flower.

Rather than romanticizing the work of manual scavenging, the visual metaphor of the flower is rendered treacherous by the circling flies and the girl’s wide-eyed examination of it, echoing the textual narrative; the gap between flower and excreta seems to reflect the gap between the law and the lives of those subject to it.

III

Eipe’s work also includes illustrations for many children’s books and picture books. His first published work as an illustrator is for a picture book written by Geeta Dharmarajan, Dinosaur-Long-as-127-Kids (Katha, 2010). This is a joyfully and richly colored book, with bold, popping shapes and colors.

Of especial interest are some of his recent picture books, which he has also written. The main character in DIVE! (2016) is observant and intricately detailed, navigating a narrative of ocean exploration comprised of underwater scenes held loosely together. The lush open world of Ammachi’s Amazing Machines (2016) shares this sensibility, though the humans here are not merely observers of but active inhabitants of the natural world. Ammachi and her grandson are drawn in curves, round and generous; their world, both natural and mechanical, speaks of abundance. The palette is bright creams, warm, luminous greys and browns, and friendly yellows and greens. Both interior and exterior spaces are often boundless, open to possibility. Bodies, especially hands—Sooraj’s and Ammachi’s—are active, animated, in motion. They are often depicted working together on Ammachi’s contraptions. Both machines and nature in Ammachi are drawn on a human scale, softened and tamed. There is a bodily intimacy as well—Sooraj and Ammachi clamber over trees and pulleys; old sarees and household bits are pressed into service in making these machines. The thin lines and colors allow for continuity among humans, nature, and machines.

The machine (fig. 6) builds a physical link between Sooraj and Ammachi through the coconut tree. Both characters have their hands raised, activating the machine and reaching out to each other. These are characters with significant agency; their machine-building and their desire for barfi drive the story inexorably forward. Ammachi’s old sari on the machine doubles up as a connector between them and the house.

Much of the story takes place inside or just outside the house. The machine’s purpose is entirely domestic—to get coconuts to make barfi with. Subsequent pages reveal smaller machines that will help peel, split, and grate the coconut, moving smoothly into the cooking of the barfi. The machines are depicted as cozy, unthreatening, even familial. The distinctions between nature, human, and machine are softened and blurred. David Chute (62) uses the term “organic machine” to describe Hayao Miyazaki’s cinematic creations; the coinage would not be inaccurate for Ammachi’s machines, with their impromptu putting-together and the homely materials that are pressed into service: textured ropes, wood, and cloth.

Texture brings urban garbage to life in Anand, another picture book written and illustrated by Eipe.

As in “Scavenger Hunt,” sharp visual distinctions are used to demarcate the different spaces inhabited by various characters in Anand. There are three different visualities in play here, distinguished by palette, style, and texture: Anand’s city exists as pale, flat purple and white in the background. Anand, in contrast, is drawn in bold colors and textures, his lines clear and distinct. The garbage he collects and transports is more realistic and without the line-work that distinguishes different elements from one another. There is no symbolism or aestheticization of the garbage Anand collects. It appears in a variety of forms: some splashes and splatters, some meticulously detailed and colored. The garbage is the only element on the page that is not limited in its palette. Rising out of it, bile-yellow, is its smell—a physical, visual presence on the page. The visuality here can be compared to Eipe’s work on Pishi and Me (2018, written by Timira Gupta), where he draws the world from a child’s eye, looking up at adults and down to catalog the intricate textures, prints, and details of plants, streets, people, and places.

As with Anand, the things on the roadside are drawn with care. Pishi and Me uses a soft, earthy palette, and the objects are drawn and detailed as if to illumine the wonder they hold for the child who picks them off the street and gathers them. The things he collects become links in the relationship between him and his aunt.

Anand’s narrative is about personal connections built on an uncommon basis, as he makes a series of visits to collect garbage. Anand speaks in the first person, noting and mentioning each person and their foibles—some of these interactions are friendly, others less so. Whimsical details of face and gesture sneak in, delineating the various humans and animals that people the story. As Anand travels, music wafts out of his van in dark purplish notes that traverse the different visualities. Anand’s closest personal connection is with a child named Salim—he drums on a pair of upturned buckets, and Anand dances as Salim’s father sings in the background.

Like music, garbage is inescapable. It features on every page, simultaneously job and nuisance in Anand’s life. The triple visuality of palette, style, and texture allows the visual rendition of smell and, through that, the pervasiveness of garbage in an urban setting. The touches of yellow smell-trails act as physical connectors between the hyper-visualized garbage and the pale purple-and-white city backgrounds. The triple layering of human-city-garbage also speaks to how urban humans are estranged from their environment and the waste they produce. It is left to Anand, his music, and the wafting smell of the garbage to traverse and negotiate this gap. As in the case of Hush, the coziness (shown in the delicacy of the city, Anand’s bright grin and clothing, and the everydayness of the narrative) helps throw the endless urban production of garbage into relief. The story’s verbal narrative refrains from addressing this larger question in terms of either the production of garbage or the lives of municipal workers. Nevertheless, the visual omnipresence of the garbage renders it inescapable. The constant play of the three visualities ensures that Anand’s bright and colorful whimsy always occurs in the visual foregrounding of an endlessly variable, uncounted supply of waste.

References

Bhatia, Rahul. “Here We Go Again.” Illustrated by Rajiv Eipe, ed, Dileep Cherian. The Small Picture, Mint, 3 Apr. 2012. www.livemint.com/Opinion/1j5gq3PSQEj4aI3YY6LsQK/The-Small-Picture.html. Accessed 2 Jan. 2022.

Chute, David. “Organic Machine: The World of Hayao Miyazaki.” Film Comment, vol. 34, no. 6, Nov./Dec. 1998, pp. 62-65.

Chute, Hillary L. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA, Harvard UP, 2016.

Eipe, Rajiv. Ammachi’s Amazing Machines. Bangalore: Pratham Books, 2016.

—, Anand. Bangalore: Pratham Books, 2018.

—, Personal Interveiew. with Shalini Srinivasan, 8 June 2021.

Gupta, Timira. Pishi and Me. Illustrated by Rajiv Eipe. Bangalore, Pratham Books, 2018.

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2005.

Nayar, Pramod K. The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique. New Delhi, Routledge, 2016.

Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. Routledge, 1993.

Salamander, C. G. “Scavenger Hunt.” Illustrated by Rajiv Eipe, edited by Dileep Cherian, The Big Picture, Chimera, Mint, Jan. 2016. https://cgsalamander.com/portfolio/comics/scavenger_hunt_january_2016_livemint.html.  Accessed 2 Jan. 2022.

Thomas, Pratheek, and Rajiv Eipe. Hush. Bangalore, Manta Ray, 2010.

Varughese, E. Dawson. Visuality and Identity in Post-millennial Indian Graphic Narratives. London, Palgrave, 2018.

Bibliography of works by Rajiv Eipe

Children’s Books (Illustrator; the writers are mentioned against each book):

Dinosaur Long as 127 Kids, Geeta Dharmarajan, Katha, 2010.

Oh No! Not Again!, Geeta Dharmarajan, Katha, 2011.

The Little Big Man, Rabindranath Tagore, Katha, 2011.

Let’s Go!, Anthara Mohan, Tulika, 2013.

Bosky’s Panchatantra, Gulzar, Red Turtle, 2014.

Septopus: Adventures Of An Almost-Octopus, Jyotin Goel, Red Turtle, 2015.

Septopus and the Secret of Captain Kidd’s Cove, Jyotin Goel, Red Turtle, 2015.

The Boy and the Drum, Umesh P. N., Pratham Books, 2015

How Does the Toothpaste Get into the Tube, Veena Prasad, Pratham Books, 2015.

Singing in the Rain, Manisha Chaudhry and Mala Kumar, Pratham Books, 2015.

Septopus: Trouble on the High Cs, Jyotin Goel, Red Turtle, 2016.

Cube Cat Cone Cat, Praba Ram and Sheela Preuitt, Pratham Books, 2016.

The Grand Story of Ikli Chokli, Vinayan Bhaskaran, Tulika, 2019.

A Book for Puchku, Deepanjana Pal, Pratham Books, 2017.

Pishi and Me, Timira Gupta, Pratham Books, 2018.

Puchku Seeks a Song, Deepanjana Pal, Pratham Books, 2019.

Ammachi’s Incredible Investigations, Vinayak Varma, Pratham Books, 2019.

Babies In My Heart, Paro Anand, Ektara, 2021.

Kitten Trouble, Bijal Vachharajani, Duckbill, 2021.

 

Picture Books (Writer and Illustrator)

Dive, Rajiv Eipe, Pratham Books, 2016.

Ammachi’s Amazing Machines, Rajiv Eipe, Pratham Books, 2016.

Anand, Rajiv Eipe, Pratham Books, 2018.

 

Comics (Illustrator):

“My Swiss Warm Up.” Anindya Roy. When Kulbhushan Met Stockli, ed Anindya Roy, Harper Collins, 2009.

Hush. Pratheek Thomas, Manta Ray, 2010.

The Message from Aristarchus. Scripted by Shalini Srinivasan, adapted from the book by J. V. Narlikar. Serialized in Brainwave magazine, July-December 2011.

“The Literary Zoo.” Rahul Bhatia, Forbes India, 2013.

“Maithili and the Minotaur.” C G Salamander, Jellyfish Monthly, 2016.

UVEP. Pratheek Thomas, Kokaachi, 2019

The Small Picture. Various, Manta Ray for Mint, 2012-14.

The Big Picture. Various, Chimera for Mint on Sunday, 2016.

[1] Though differing in the scale and length of narrativity, the comic book and the funnies are akin in their use of recurring, long-running narratives. Roger Sabin, for instance, writes of the funnies as the direct predecessors to the comic book proper. See Adult Comics: An Introduction, 1993.