The Hindu on Books | The pull of graphic novels, remembering Rukmini Devi Arundale and more

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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. When Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus, about the Holocaust, was banned in several schools in America, he said in an interview: “We haven’t learned much from the past, but there are some things you should be able to figure out. Book burning leads to people burning. It’s something that needs to be fought against.” The ban, of course, led to a rise in sales. Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran, Persepolis, translated into English in 2003, has not been out of print since its publication in 2001. Graphic novels are seeing a spurt in sales, and Indian booksellers say the demand has gone up by over 50% since the pandemic, despite the steep rise in cost of paper. While myths are perhaps the most popular genre – Amar Chitra Katha continues to sell -- the content of graphic novels has expanded to environment, technology, public policy, memoirs, biographies and even experimental, genre-defying stories. Naveen Kishore, publisher, Seagull Books, says the publishing house is relooking the best stories by Mahasweta Devi as a series of graphic novels. Karthik Venkatesh, Executive Editor at Penguin Random House India, says it is committed to the graphic novel format, and is reissuing artist Sarnath Banerjee’s books with new covers.

In reviews, we read four recently-published graphic works, both fiction and non-fiction. We also carry an excerpt from Madhumita Murgia’s upcoming book, Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI (Picador), longlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, 2024 and pay tribute to theosophist and creative genius Rukmini Devi Arundale as a monograph is set to be published on her life.

Books of the week

The Moral Contagion (HarperCollins), written by Julia Hauser and illustrated by Sarnath Banerjee, journeys from 6th century Constantinople to 19th Bombay to find out the influence of the plague on ideas of self and society. In his review, Joshua Muyiwa writes that through the prologue, nine chapters and an epilogue running a little over a hundred pages, Hauser, in her text, and Sarnath, in his images, illuminate our understanding of the many ways that contagions over the centuries have shaped our contemporary. “We are shown fear of disease leading to the locating of unsuspecting scapegoats to blame, another reverberation seen in our own contemporary responses in the pandemic [COVID-19}. We learn that religious and ethnic minorities were the first to be blamed; in medieval Europe, Jewish communities were accused of poisoning public wells and therefore causing the plague. In India, during the 19th century in Bombay, the plague was seen as a ‘native’ disease leading to entire working-class neighbourhoods being bulldozed completely to get rid of the plague.”

In We, the Citizens (Penguin), Khyati Pathak, Anupam Manur and Pranay Kotasthane take to the graphic novel format to talk about the concepts of public policy in a “manner relatable for readers of all ages.” Swati Daftuar, in her review, says the three authors, a writer-cartoonist, a public policy researcher and an economics professor, are largely successful in breaking down large, complex ideas to their basic, single-cell components with the help of simple illustrations. Says Pathak: “The first reading of every chapter was done by my daughter, who was 11 at the time. And I wanted her to understand or at least get the gist of what we’re trying to say.”

Joshy Benedict’s graphic novel Pig Flip (HarperCollins), translated to English by K.K. Muralidharan, is a tale of addiction and the human predicament. ‘Pannimalathu’ (Pig Flip), a card game popular in villages of Kerala, rides solely on luck and requires zero talent, says Benedict, who has watched gamblers in his village lose their minds and money to it, writes Anusuya Menon. “Babycha’s character is a rough iteration of a person I knew from my village; I even told him that my character is based on him and he broke into a fit of laughter.” Benedict, an artist and animator, is from Pulloorampara, a hillside village about 40 kilometres from Kozhikode city. “When I was working as an animator, I came across a couple of foreign graphic novels, especially in French, which were exemplary in style and presentation. When I set to work on my book, I wanted to do it in a way I liked, in my own style, but there could be influences from the works I have seen.”

With our reality being fundamentally reshaped by the possibility of dreaming, thinking machines, Dream Machine (Context), a graphic novel written by Appupen and Laurent Daudet, and drawn and adapted by Appupen, warns against their rise. In his review, Jaideep Unudurti says it is an intense novel, working on many levels. When a company called KLAI, which has expertise in Large Language Models and text-based learning, the underlying technology behind generative AI, enters into a lucrative deal with REAL.E, a kind of combination of Facebook and Microsoft, which is about to unveil a “metaverse” game, things happen. Especially when Ayyo, an artist specialising in “conspiracy comics” from India, proposes to work on a comic to demystify the whole process. Rather appropriately, says Unudurti, this hi-tech tale draws on the medieval European legend of Faust, where a scholar signs away his soul to the devil, in return for eternal knowledge and unlimited pleasure.

Spotlight

V.R. Devika’s monograph, Rukmini Devi Arundale: Arts Revivalist and Institution Builder, is going to be published soon by by Niyogi Books in the series ‘Pioneers of Modern India’. Rukmini Devi Arundale who would have turned 120 years old on February 29 led an extraordinary life. A theosophist, dancer and choreographer, she ensured that the joy of Bharatanatyam became available to all, irrespective of caste, language and nationality, when she set up Kalakshetra. “It must have taken enormous courage to find and learn Bharatanatyam which was not open to women of her community. She was 29 and married. There was consternation among theosophists who were shocked that the wife of the president of the society [George Arundale] was learning dance that many of them had taken a pledge to not even witness.”

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• In The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal (Speaking Tiger), Gurcharan Das explores how India began its journey to a liberal order—a free market and a free society—in the 1990s and how, three decades later, this order appears to be in retreat. The future looks uncertain, he writes, but there may yet be reason for hope.
• The collection of 20 stories in Rising 2.0: 20 More Women Who Changed India (Rupa) by Kiran Manral showcases the resilience and strength of iconic Indian women, who rose to be trailblazers and trendsetters against all odds, including the likes of Ismat Chughtai, Begum Akhtar, Dutee Chand, Kalpana Chawla, Irom Chanu Sharmila, Cornelia Sorabji, Sarojini Naidu and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay.
• In Search of the Indian Village: Stories and Reports (Aleph), edited by Mamang Dai, captures rural India through fiction, commentary, scholarship, and reportage. There’s Ruskin Bond’s ‘The Blue Umbrella’, a heart-warming tale of friendship set in a small Himalayan village, Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Seed’ on the hierarchies of caste; reportage by P. Sainath; and other stories of lived experiences.
• Ismat Chughtai’s brother and literary mentor was Azeem Baig, an iconoclast and a feminist. His Vampire: A Novel (Speaking Tiger) was first published in Urdu in the 1930s. His granddaughter Zoovia Hamiduddin has now translated it into English, a novel which has contemporary relevance.