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23 - The Indian Graphic Novel
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- By Corey K. Creekmur, University of Iowa
- Edited by Ulka Anjaria, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- A History of the Indian Novel in English
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 08 July 2015, pp 348-358
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Summary
At first glance, the “Indian graphic novel” has only recently appeared as both a material artifact and a marketing category, and it may look like the confluence of two previously distinct narrative forms: Indian comics and the contemporary Indian novel – the latter especially in its highly visible postcolonial and globalized form, written in English. As such a hybrid, the Indian graphic novel would appear to balance, on one hand, elite literary modes and, on the other, mass cultural images – a combination perhaps akin to the occasional mainstream film adaptation of a work of “serious” Indian fiction. But the Indian graphic novel may in fact be less a melding of now assimilated (if not “native”) forms – Indian comics and the Indian novel – or even a “mature” development of the earlier Indian comic, than an appropriation of a format that arrived with – rather than acquired – legitimate artistic credentials.
At least since Sarnath Banerjee's Corridor was self-proclaimed on its cover “a graphic novel” in 2004, Indian writers, artists, publishers, critics, and readers have largely accepted the English-language term (rather than, say, the more common European designation “album”) as a means to explicitly or implicitly affiliate Indian examples with their international counterparts. Recognized (although with frequent imprecision and lingering resistance) in the United States as a means to legitimate the marketing of previously dismissed “comics” or “funny books” in bookstores and to draw their ideal readers from culturally literate adults, the “graphic novel” implicitly carries an air of sophistication and, in its global reach, cosmopolitanism, if not pretension. Deployed in India only within the first decade of the twenty-first century, the term tends to therefore associate Indian examples with an international network rather than affirming their (debatable) indigenous cultural roots in earlier Indian narrative forms. This is to say that the texts most often identified as Indian graphic novels seem not to derive from earlier Indian comics, except perhaps in an oppositional way, positioning earlier or even contemporaneous mainstream Indian comics as counter-examples rather than precursors or peers. The graphic novel thus appears to have arrived in India fully formed, whereas its American counterpart at least partly emerged directly out of mainstream comics, even if it has also at times boldly asserted its independence from the mainstream.
8 - Indian Film Noir
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- By Corey K. Creekmur, University of Iowa
- Edited by Homer B. Pettey, Associate Professor of Literature and Film, University of Arizona, R. Barton Palmer, Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature, Clemson University
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- Book:
- International Noir
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 August 2016
- Print publication:
- 11 November 2014, pp 182-192
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Summary
Has the Indian film industry – often identified as the world's largest – produced film noir? Pursuing an answer to this seemingly straightforward question may require, like the tangled plots of many noir films, tracing a forward path through a series of flashbacks and unexpected detours. Most claims for the existence of non-Hollywood film noir are relatively recent, reinforcing the fundamental historical circumstance succinctly emphasised by Tom Gunning: ‘Film noir may be the great achievement of film studies’. Indeed, any attempt to expand the international purview of film noir, once viewed as distinctly and exclusively American (despite recognisable European roots), cannot ignore the nagging reminder that film noir was discovered – if not wholly invented – by film critics rather than the Hollywood studio filmmakers making movies they and their initial audiences would have readily identified as thrillers, detective stories or mysteries, among other more familiar genre terms. As has been the case elsewhere, the designation or categorisation of a group of films as ‘Indian film noir’ is emphatically retroactive, a critical act of explicit historical reclassification that may ultimately be as misleading as illuminating. In fact, as Nikki J. Y. Lee and Julian Stringer have warned, the larger, now commonly invoked category of ‘Asian noir’ may be no more than a ‘dubiously unifying concept’, ‘a mere category of convenience behind which lurk a range of more stubbornly complex stories concerning the historically specific characteristics of multiple regional film industries’. If we belatedly locate examples of Indian film noir, we must also acknowledge the historical and cultural conditions that now allow us to do so, decades after the films we seek to make comprehensible through this category were made and enjoyed: in short, any responsible claim for the existence of Indian film noir must waver with critical uncertainty.
Nevertheless, while crime stories, as elsewhere, have been an unsurprisingly common component of Indian popular cinema, contemporary critics have, if only in passing, increasingly attributed a ‘darker’ aspect to a portion of India's vast corpus of films, thereby affiliating these recently retrieved examples with Hollywood and other commercial national cinemas, in effect constructing a comparative perspective that retrospectively ‘corrects’ the absence of popular Indian cinema from most historical accounts of world cinema until the 1990s. Now that popular Indian cinema has secured a place in this expanded history, perhaps, it appears, there once was Indian film noir too.