'Graphic novelists are influential in an arena where nobody cares about influence.'
– Sarnath Banerjee, in conversation
The graphic novel in India is a bastard child with many snarling parents. The anxiety related to its influences, to borrow the literary critic Harold Bloom's hoary phrase, are both vicious and various. How is one to trace this heritage? A casual empiricist would say that the story of the graphic novel begins with Will Eisner and R Crumb in the 1960s, or perhaps with the Superman comics of the 1930s. A purist would head back to the 19th century, to credit Rodolphe Töpffer with founder-status. Scott McCloud, the ultimate comics nerd, would take you all the way to Sumerian cuneiform.
To trace the history of the genre in the Subcontinent, we can turn to Alok Sharma, an encyclopaedia of lost cities and forgotten heroes, and the director of the documentary Chitrakatha: Indian comics beyond balloons and panels, soon to be released. From pioneer Indrajal Comics during the 1960s to the chart-busting Raj Comics of the early 1990s, Sharma unveils something of a hidden history of the genre. Indrajal Comics, Anant Pai's maiden venture, introduced figures such as Phantom and Mandrake alongside indigenous characters, beginning the region's long tango with the Western tradition of comic art. Uncle Pai continued this tradition of inter-mixture in Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), early editions of which were illustrated Western fairytales. The Story of Krishna made its debut as ACK #11 and sparked off a boom in Indian comics. Its influence eventually became so wide-ranging that it inspired a graphic novel in turn, Rogan Gosh, by the British duo Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy. The science-fiction legend Roger Zelazny is said to have kept a stack of ACKs by his bed during the writing of his well-regarded Lord of Light.
The transformation of the medium from daily strips to weekly or monthly serials was a crucial one in the early history of the graphic novel, and in the Subcontinent that void was filled by Uncle Pai. The 'pulp comics' magazine, inspired by the success of Indrajal and ACK, soon became a vibrant vernacular sub-culture. In North India alone, there was the MAD magazine-inspired Deewana, Chacha Chaudhary, Fighter Toads (borrowed from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise) and Madhu Muskans, the latter set in the fictional city of Mayapuri. Meanwhile, newspaper cartoonists made headway in other markets and regions. The English-language dailies were the fiefdom of the sardonic R K Laxman, while artists such as G Aravindan and V T Thomas ('Toms') became institutions in Kerala. The latter was so popular that his comic strip became the subject of copyright litigation in 1989, one of the few instances at the time of an artist suing for authorship rights. The Supreme Court awarded Toms full rights to his characters, as against the claims of Malayala Manorama, the publishers of the strip.