Traversing through transmedia: dynamism of augmented reality comics and gender-based violence in Ram Devineni’s Priya series
Article, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2025, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
This article seeks to investigate how Ram Devineni and his team’s productions–Priya’s Shakti (2014), Priya’s Mirror (2016), and Priya and the Lost Girls (2019)–break the coveted layers of frames and panels of comics and go beyond them to sensitise the readers on the nuances of gender-based violence in India with the incorporation of augmented reality. Within the fields of comics studies and gender studies, the article also explores how augmented reality in graphic narratives encourages and facilitates its readers in being sensitised to the gender roles and gender-based issues pertinent in South Asian societies. Before the series’ origin as an outcome of the protest against the 2012 Delhi-Rape Case, Devineni locates the diverse nuances of gender-based violence (rape, acid attack, sex trafficking) and addresses them in their comics using Hindu Mythology as a tool.
Interview with Richard McGuire
Note, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2025, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
In this interview, Richard McGuire talks about his creative process as a cartoonist and illustrator. With a special emphasis on his books Here and Sequential Drawings, McGuire elaborates on his experiments with the notions of ‘space’ and ‘time’ through graphic narratives.
Framing the feminine fury: gender performativity through decolonial visuality in select Indian comics
Article, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2025, DOI Link
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Within the intersection of decolonial studies and comic studies, this paper examines how decolonial visual styles have been employed in two comics narratives, ‘Someday’ by Samidha Gunjal and ‘Ever After’ by Priyanka Kumar. The specific formal styles have been used to locate the traumatised reality and monotonous life due to the gendering practices prevalent in India. The comics cultivate the everyday stories of the Indian middle-class women, both inside and outside of their domicile. In the light of ‘pornotroping’ and ‘coloniality of gender’, they show how gendered practices relegate the feminine self to the level of a ‘disciplined body’, making them invisible and mute. This paper will ascertain how these narratives exemplify decolonised counter comics narratives on personal sufferings. These narratives are then inflicted upon and against the dominant gender discourse based on heteronormative performativity in India. They help churn out the possibilities of feminine liberation from the shackles of interminable psychological and physical violence created within a gendered reality.
Interview with Somesh Kumar
Note, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2025, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
In this interview, Haleema Badar and Partha Bhattacharjee discussed with Somesh Kumar on his significant contributions as an illustrator and graphic designer. Recently, he published an online graphic novel called ‘Little by Little,’ where he shares stories from his family and childhood. Somesh Kumar’s graphic novel ‘Little by Little’ is memoir that tells him growing up in different parts of the Indian state of Bihar and his journey of becoming an illustrator and graphic designer. In this series, Kumar also sheds light on his evolving relationship with his father who eventually turns into an alcoholic. Readers can access his graphic novel via the given link: http://www.littlebylittle.online/. This interview was conducted via email. The questions were e-mailed to Somesh Kumar and he typed down his answers in reply to the sent email.
Interview with Karin Hauser
Note, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2024, DOI Link
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In this interview, Partha Bhattacharjee, Rounak Gupta, and Priyanka Tripathi will interview Karin Hauser. Karin is a freelance illustrator and graphic designer who illustrated her graphic narrative, Über das Treiben von Knospen.
Fractured identities and wounded memories in Indian comics on partition: a decolonial reading of frame and panel
Article, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2024, DOI Link
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Within the liaison of decoloniality studies and comics studies, this paper investigates how the decolonial visual style in the comics anthology This Side That Side (Ghosh 2013) has been used to locate the traumatised past and violation of human rights due to the ‘b/ordering’ practices of partition of India. ‘The Taboo’ by Malini Gupta and Dyuti Mittal, ‘An Afterlife’ by Sanjoy Chakraborty, and ‘Making Faces’ by Orijit Sen cultivate the stories of the inhumane condition of the migrants and victims during and after the Indo-Pakistan and Indo-Bangladesh-Pakistan partition. These narratives exemplify decolonised counter comics narratives on collective and personal memories inflicted upon and against the dominant partition discourse. They help churn out the human stories of the interminable psychological violence of partition and post-partitioned reality.
Lament graphically drawn: Dynamism of Indian comics in sensitizing child abuse inside the House
Book chapter, Articulating Childhood Trauma: In the Context of War, Sexual Abuse and Disability, 2024, DOI Link
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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.
COMPLEX COMICS, COMPLEX TRAUMA: Registration of Traumatized Childhood in the “Autographics” of Phoebe Gloeckner
Book chapter, BOOM! SPLAT!: Comics and Violence, 2024,
Transcending the Trouble, Trauma, and Pain of Failed Marriage and Closeted Sexuality in Indian Web Series Made in Heaven
Article, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2023, DOI Link
Interview with Ikroop Sandhu
Note, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2023, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
In this interview, Haleema Badar and Partha Bhattacharjee engage in a conversation with Ikroop Sandhu and explore her contributions as an illustrator and visual storyteller. She has contributed to the most prestigious anthologies Pao Collective, This Side, That Side. Her graphic novel on Bhagat Singh, titled Inquilab Zindabad was published in April 2022.
‘The problem of gender violence in India… was not a legal problem, but a cultural problem’: a conversation with comics creator Ram Devineni
Article, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2022, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
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.
Integrating medical education with graphic narration: interview with Dr. Priyanga Singh
Note, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2022, DOI Link
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In this interview, Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi discuss and analyse Dr. Priyanga Singh’s contributions as a medical illustrator. In her illustrations, Dr. Singh integrates her knowledge of medicine and experience as a medical professional through the visual art of storytelling. Graphic narration, for her, acts as a productive trope of devising a method of medical education.
Penning the pain of partition: Refugee camp narratives in Indian comics
Article, Studies in Comics, 2022, DOI Link
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Within the melange of comics studies, migration studies and autobiography studies, this article investigates the process in which the collective trauma as well as the personal trauma of refugee women has been portrayed through the visual medium in Malini Gupta and Dyuti Mittal’s ‘The Taboo’, Syeda Farhana’s ‘Little Women’ and Maria M. Litwa’s ‘Welcome to Geneva Camp’. These stories focus on the issues faced by women who migrated to Bangladesh from parts of Bengal and Bihar and thereby experienced a crucial, grief stricken life in refugee camps during the Indo–Bangladesh–Pakistan partition. Life in these refugee camps meant not only meagre resources but also a loss of nationality. In the absence of such validation, these migrants faced an extreme sense of identity or existential crisis. The group photographs, family photographs, complex roadmaps and the map of the subcontinent in the aforementioned graphic narratives Delivered by Intellect to: are merged to serve as the ‘narreme’, the base of narratives. They are organized on the basis of experiences of women from various classes, castes and provinces, contesting with the interminable psychological violence of partition and post-partitioned reality.
What is translated; what is not translated: studying the translation process of select Bengali Dalit short stories
Article, Translator, 2022, DOI Link
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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.
Spit bubbles, speech bubbles, and COVID-19: creating comics in the age of post-infection India
Article, Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine, 2022, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
Positioning this essay at intersection of comics studies, visual literacy studies, and information literacy studies, we investigate an interdisciplinary liaison between crisis in the age of COVID-19 and its awareness campaign through Indian comics. With a focus on awareness programme, Indian artists designed comics to demonstrate their vital position in social engagement through this visual medium. Following impending threats and growing concerns, people of all ages glued themselves to social media, newspapers, and television to keep them updated on the impact of COVID-19. Indian comics e.g. Nagraj Strikes: The Attack of Coronaman (2020), Priya’s Mask (2020), Kids, Vaayu, and Corona: Who Wins the Fight? (2020), and ‘Be aware of Droplets & Bubbles!!’ (2020) aimed to help children comprehend the precautionary steps to be taken to save themselves from getting infected with Coronavirus. While the first three comics showcase spit-bubbles primarily as the source of COVID-19, infusing the content with a tinge of superhero fantasy, ‘Be aware of Droplets & Bubbles!!’ (2020) unveils the microbiological evolution and mutation of the pathogen in comics format. The objective of the article is to show how Indian comics on COVID-19 can be an advantageous communicative medium to nurture knowledge and edutainment in post-infection India.
Performance beyond the panel: (S)exploitation and trafficking in Ram Devineni’s Priya and the Lost Girls
Article, Journal of Gender Studies, 2022, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
Positioned at the intersection of comics studies and gender studies, this article examines the process in which the ‘performance’ of Ram Devineni’s comic Priya and the Lost Girls (2019), with a honing narrative intertwined with Augmented Reality, sensitizes its readers towards the issue of sex/human trafficking in India. Throughout the enigmatic journey, Priya, the superheroine in the narrative comes to rescue several women who have fallen into the trap of the sex trafficking racket either due to economical vulnerabilities or some other issues. Priya, in the leading role of a ‘Messiah’ liberates these victims and provides message at the end. The compelling visual metaphors, designs, speech balloons, and the audio elements in this comic pose compelling questions pertaining to the castrated and unsusceptible position of victims in the society and encourage maintaining healthy social relations among people. Within the postulates of gender studies, comics studies, and visual studies, our reading focuses on how comics medium in Ram Devineni’s Priya and the Lost Girls contributes to the process of social sensitization and extend awareness on the prevention, protection, and prosecution of sex trafficking in South Asian countries, especially in the Indian subcontinent.
The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel ed. By Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Stephen E. Tabachnick
Review, South Central Review, 2022, DOI Link
‘My methodology is friendship; my lens is feminist’: interview with Nicola Streeten
Note, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2022, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
In this interview, Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi discuss with Dr. Nicola Streeten about the recent trends in UK Comics and her contributions to the genre of comics. As a co-founder of LDComics (est Laydeez Do Comics 2009, Streeten has authored Billy, You and Me: A memoir of grief and recovery (2011, Myriad Editions) and co-authored The Inking Woman: the history of British female cartoonists (2018, Myriad Editions) with Cath Tate. Her latest book is titled UK Feminist Cartoons and Comics: A Critical Survey (2020, Palgrave Macmillan).
Gendered and Casteist Body: Cast(e)ing and Castigating the Female Body in select Bollywood Films
Article, Journal of International Women's Studies, 2021,
View abstract ⏷
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.
Discovering the self: in conversation with Dyuti Mittal
Note, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2021, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
In this conversation, Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi will explore Dyuti Mittal’s (New Delhi, India) use of art, visual strategies, and avant-garde techniques she employs in her comics and graphic narratives. Through unusual patterns and unorthodox contents, Dyuti traverses through diverse visual semantics and experiments with the ink pen and colours. Being a contemporary avant-garde comics artist and writer, Mittal is renowned for her comics–Flaw, ‘The Taboo,’ ‘Imagining Loss,’ ‘Love Story,’ ‘I’m Pretentious,’ and ‘Jackals and Arabs’ among the others. She has her signature style of making art and she believes–‘Do not let the self be defined, but question, search, find your own voice and reflect. Nothing can be built without a strong foundation and nothing is yours but the answers you seek.’ Within and beyond such declarations, graphic design, the art of storytelling, pencilling and inking, and employment of colours with proper implication–are the topics that will be discussed in this conversation. Upon careful analysis of Dyuti’s works, the conversation was conducted in a questionnaire via email.
Interview with argha manna
Article, Studies in Comics, 2020, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
Argha Manna is a cancer-researcher-turned cartoonist. He worked as a research fellow at Bose Institute, India. After leaving academic research, he joined a media-house and started operating as an independent comics artist. He loves to tell stories from the history of science, social history and lab-based science through visual narratives. His blog, Drawing History of Science (https://drawinghistoryofscience.word-press.com), has been featured by Nature India. Argha has been collaborating with various scientific institutes and science communicator groups from India and abroad. His collaborators are from National Centre for Biological Science (NCBS, Bangalore), Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB, Hyderabad), Jadavpur University (Kolkata), Heidelberg Center for Transcultural Studies (University of Heidelberg, Germany) and a few others. Last year, he received STEMPeers Fellowship for creating comics on the history of vaccination and other aspects of medical histories, published in Club SciWri, a digital publication wing of STEMPeers Group. Currently, Argha is collaborating in a project, ‘Famine Tales from India and Britain’ as a graphic artist. This is a UK-based project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, led by Dr Ayesha Mukherjee, University of Exeter. In this interview, Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi speak with Indian ‘alternative’ cartoonist Argha Manna to trace his journey from a cancer researcher to a cartoonist. Manna is a storyteller of history of science, in visuals. Recently, his works reflect social problems under the light of historical and scientific theories. Bhattacharjee and Tripathi trace Manna’s shift from a science-storyteller in a visual medium to a medical-cartoonist who is working on issues related to a global pandemic, its impact on life and literature vis-à-vis social intervention. They also focus on Manna’s latest comics on COVID-19.
‘My drawing enables my catharsis…’: in conversation with Sarah Lightman
Note, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2020, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
In this interview, Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi engage in a conversation with Sarah Lightman. They discuss her strategies in creating comics with particular reference to her recent graphic narrative The Book of Sarah. In the concluding section, they unveil comics which she has recently sketched and posted on social media (Facebook, Instagram) after her father’s demise.
Bridging the gutter: Cultural construction of gender sensitivity in select Indian graphic narratives after Nirbhaya
Book chapter, Performativity, Cultural Construction, and the Graphic Novel, 2019, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
Indian English Literature in its myriad ways has tried to represent the narratives of women grappling to assert identity and to sensitize its readers toward gender and social justice. In this paper, we explore Indian graphic narratives, such as Drawing the Line (2015) by Priya Kuriyan, Larissa Bertonasco, and Ludmilla Bartscht, and the Priya series [Priya’s Shakti (2014), Priya’s Mirror (2016)] by Ram Devineni et al., published after Nirbhaya-2012, that contribute mainly in cultural and sociological construct of gender sensitivity.
The social struggle: Deconstructing the dalit subalternity in omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan: A dalit’s life
Article, IUP Journal of English Studies, 2019,
View abstract ⏷
The paper begins with the notion that autobiography is the most important and emphatic tool of self-narrative because it is an ideal blend of reality and imagination. Taking its illustrations from Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiographical narrative, Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, which retells his experiences of torment, neglect, domination, and coercion since his childhood, this paper elucidates the socioeconomic circumstances that not only questioned the Dalit subalternity but also emphasized the importance of constructing a new identity and rewriting history.
