School of Journalism and Communication

In this chapter, we examine how three different graphic narratives from the anthology 'This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition' (2016) contribute to puncturing the silence that has long obscured the violence accompanying the partition of the Indian subcontinent. We argue how these narratives, in their collaborative authoring and through their textual and aesthetic strategies, defy artificial borders to create a new collective memory culture, one that seeks to confront and thus to heal a suppressed social trauma that continues to haunt these nations. Through explorations of genre, narrative voice, and aesthetic representation, we demonstrate how these graphic narratives challenge violence, whether of colonial historiography or postcolonial state policy, and how comics can effectively portray displacement and resistance. The resurrection of old memories and the sharing of traumatic testimonies also build empathetic solidarities that counter the habitual and mutual othering that informs antagonistic national histories, thereby inviting the recognition of shared pasts and hope for shared futures.

This article is an analysis of the representation of the mythological character of Sita in two contemporary graphic narratives, 'Sita: Daughter of the Earth' (Nagpal and Manikandan) and 'Sita’s Ramayana' (Arni and Chitrakar). It studies these two texts for their negotiations of womanhood and goddess-hood, patriarchy and feminism, through their varying interpretations of Sita’s subjecthood, agency, and resistance. It demonstrates how Sita, as ‘a daughter of the earth’, is variously an obedient subject to the Law of Patriarchy (the pativrata nari) and a questioning subject who challenges patriarchy’s foundational values and discovers strength in solidarity with victims of patriarchal violence. How does Sita come of age in the course of these narratives? How can the same epic tale, narrated from a woman’s perspective, be presented as a celebration of self-fulfilment in one adaptation, and a lament of tragic self-effacement in another? How does the relationship between word and image in these graphic narratives serve to add layers to the story and lay bare its ironies and contradictions? Through an examination of key incidents from these narratives, such as the pivotal agnipariksha episode, this article argues that contradictory interpretations of Sita’s symbolic significance continue to flourish in contemporary (graphic) adaptations of her story.