Her works hold the reader captive with their sinewy, multilayered storylines. The country’s first female graphic novelist constructs and deconstructs narratives with a view to tell stories that are progressive, socially relevant and epic in scale, finds Ranjabati Das
In this day and age of rehearsal and performance, repeated ad nauseam in the search of instant gratification, you invest eight years in two books. What gives?” I quip. “I haven’t been led by practicality or economics — I should learn to be more balanced. But it’s good to take on idealistic and unreasonable projects at least a couple of times in a lifetime,” Amruta Patil says unfalteringly on a video call from France.
Shuttling between the small medieval town of Angoulême (she treats it as her hermitage) and Goa, she creates avantgarde objets d’art that are laced and interlaced with a delicate insouciance — coincidentally all words loaned from French. Each of her panels is deliberate and indispensable. Pregnant with meaning and delivering new realisations with every reread you invest in it, her painstakingly produced works that are decidedly feminist in character have acted as universal cues for young women irrespective of gender identity, sexual orientation and ethnicity. Take her debut offering Kari, for example. At 29, while working in her first job as a copywriter in an ad agency, Patil created her very first protagonist, the queer and eponymous heroine Kari, an alter ego subconsciously drawn from her own experiences. One of the first queer leads in Indian literature — and a first in the world of Indian graphic novels — Kari is significant because she saw the light of day exactly a decade ago, at a time when smartphones weren’t ubiquitous and the gender dialogue hadn’t progressed as much as it has today. ‘I think it was a coming-of-age thing for Indian young adult literature,’ she had declared about Kari, an urban exploration of female sexuality and psyche, in 2012.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November-December 2018 من Verve.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November-December 2018 من Verve.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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