The subject of rape and sexual abuse in comics is a sensitive issue, especially for its visual content. Using Hemavathy Guha's "Asha, Now" (from the anthology Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back (2015) by Priya Kuriyan et al.) and Pratheek Thomas and Rajiv Eipe's (illustrator) HUSH (2010), this chapter discusses how in these comics the visual metaphor and the visual rhetoric help in bridging the "gutter" (space between two panels), breaking/breaching the barriers of silence through the "meaning-making material practices" (Foss 2004, 305). While the former unveils Asha's experience with sexual abuse inside the house and the difficulties in living in such an atmosphere, the latter revolves around Maya, a victim of child sexual abuse, stalked and abused by her own father. The scopophilic desire inside the House causes psychological trauma which a child does not want to share even with the family. The prime motive for illustrating these agonizing narratives is to give a voice to sexually abused girls as these reports are hardly lodged as criminal cases. Within the postulates of childhood studies and comics studies, this chapter explores the nuances of sexual oppression inside the house and incestuous abuse which are depicted in these select Indian graphic narratives.

The study analyzes two Bengali Dalit autobiographies in both original and translated versions. One is Itibritte Chandal Jiban (2012) by Manoranjan Byapari (trans. Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit in 2018), and the other is Amar Bhubane Ami Benche Thaki (2013) by Manohar Mouli Biswas (trans. Surviving in My World: Growing Up Dalit in Bengal in 2015). The present research brings forward some standpoints. First, the translation of Dalit autobiographies creates transnational solidarity. Second, the translators play the role of gatekeepers to show that translation sustains the literary and cultural essence ingrained within the texts and initiates and engages dialogic discussions among the audience and readers on the global platform. Third, the translation of Dalit autobiographies arrests the attention of those global readers who barely nurture any idea on caste, class, and casteist politics and deeprooted issues like untouchability in India and constructs a distinct literary geography.

Presented below is a conversation between Ram Devineni and Comics-cum-Gender Studies scholars from India. Leveraging upon these two dimensions, the scholars involved in this interview problematise gender violence in the context of India and explore the possibilities of comics as a genre to sensitise society towards violence against women. In this conversation, Priyanka Tripathi and Bidisha Pal, both scholars of gender studies, lay the basic premise of gender discrimination and violence against women and discuss various operating forces in society. Comics scholar Partha Bhattacharjee points and counterpoints the relevance of comics in understanding this liaison between gender and society, especially as an emerging and popular medium with a possibility of massive outreach.

The present study addresses the translation process of select Bengali Dalit short stories from two anthologies: Survival and Other Stories: Bangla Dalit Fiction in Translation (2012) and Stories of Social Awakening: Reflections of Dalit Refugee Lives of Bengal (2017). The translators of the marginalised texts have to grapple with the socio-political and cultural dimensions of the texts. The above anthologies are translated from original Bengali stories that are enriched in both dialects of rural speech communities and standard written form of Bengali with culturally and socio-politically loaded terms. Notably, in some translated stories, some terms and expressions of the originals lack proper equivalents and these cause cultural and linguistic gaps in understanding. Conversely, there are some expressions where both the rural and marginal ethos gains a novel aestheticism and the translation process becomes a ‘transcreation’. The article, through analysing and comparing both the original and translated stories, aims to study the nature and aspects of translation and transcreation processes.

This study analyzes the lopsided relationship between gender and caste and the intertwining body politics in select Bollywood films. Bandit Queen (1994) and Article 15 (2019) are films that depict marginalized Dalit women—victims of (s)exploitation and twofold oppressions of graded patriarchy. Based upon real incidents, Bandit Queen tells the tale of Phoolan Devi who is gang-raped by the upper caste Thakur Shri Ram and his clans of the village while Article 15 takes recourse to the gruesome Badayun rape case of 2014 and presents the murder and possible rape of two lower caste young girls. In both the films, the marginalized women are imprisoned and ghettoized in the “mutual bracketing” (Guru 112) of caste and gender. Their bodies thus become the ploys of the power dynamics of a caste-ridden society. The body is to be captured, controlled, and incarcerated by both the apparatus of hegemonic masculinity and the hierarchical ladder of the caste system. Dalit women’s bodies are the territories that are to be possessed through the weapons of sexual violence; the gang rape “perpetrated by the conquerors is a metonymic celebration of territorial acquisition” (Spivak 303). Within the framework triad of caste studies, gender studies, and body politics studies, this paper investigates dynamics of power through a detailed analysis of the films and aims to point out whether and how the films make any differentiations from the real incidents. These films produce socially conscious visual landscapes directed at a society that horridly bears spectacular and brutal realities that are often swept under the rug.

The present study examines the concept of autoethnography in a Bengali Dalit autobiography. Dalit autobiographies are distinct from the mainstream autobiographies; Dalit self-narratives often become alternative historiographies which draw out the suppressed voices of history surrounding the self and the society. This very particularity makes the autobiography an ‘autoethnography’– a term which connotes a simultaneous representative tale or ‘graphy’ of ‘auto’ (self) and ‘ethno’ (culture). The study embarks on Surviving in My World: Growing Up Dalit in Bengal (2015) by the Bengali Dalit author Manohar Mouli Biswas, translated and edited by Jaydeep Sarangi and Angana Dutta. Apart from being a bildungsroman, Biswas’ auto-narrative frequently ventures to the cultural and social spheres of the Bengali Namasudra Chandal community which Biswas belongs to. Biswas also provides occasional allusions to the surrounding historical and literary events and the intertwining personal and collective memory of the suffering and surviving in a casteist and partitioned Bengal. Through a minute study of Surviving in My World, the article tends to validate the concept of autoethnography by substantiating examples from the text, how the autobiography of a Bengali Dalit appropriates the term in its presentation and whether the simultaneous monologic and polyphonic narratorial voices cause any meddling in the authenticity of narrative representation.

While, popular culture like films has more generalized mass appeal and flexibility of evolution with spatiotemporal changing dimensions of reality; folk cultures are mainly indigenous, relatively inflexible and slowly resistant to change. Popular films like Agantuk (1991) by Satyajit Ray, Barfi! (2012) by Anurag Basu and Jagga Jasoos (2017) by Anurag Basu make citations of three different tribal folk performances of Eastern India namely ‘Santhali’ of Jharkhand and West Bengal, ‘Purulia Chhau’ of West Bengal and ‘Bihu’ of Assam respectively. The very enactment of folk performances in the films attain the forms of ‘cultural guerrillas’ when the heteroglossia of indigenous marginal and minor folk culture make its existence in the majoritarian popular cultures like films and a cultural negotiation happens between two diagonally opposite cultures. ‘Cultural Rigging’ is a term coined by the Bengali Dalit poet Manohar Mouli Biswas to mention the tendency of a culture being performed by another culture when it becomes ‘highly enjoyable’ (38). The article aims to analyze the very tryst of the popular and folk culture through three intertwining concepts: acculturation, cultural resistance and cultural rigging with a select study of the films and tribal folk performances.