The graphic representations of Mahabharata negotiating the sacred

Abstract

The popular adaptations of the Mahabharata in the form of comics and graphic narratives have not only been more instrumental in contemporary mediation and rumination but have also ensured the epic an illustrious afterlife. They have salvaged the epic from going redundant in the flippancy of the digital world and warrant numerous readings to gauge their evasive storylines and motifs. The proposed study seeks to follow the graphic trail of how the traditions of both the popular and the spectacular based on the Mahabharata, have come to assert themselves in comics and graphic narratives. Through their multimodal agency, graphic narratives have been successful in rendering the extra-spatial and extra-temporal infinitude of the text to images. The agency of naturality, sociality and semiotics facilitates meaning making and perceptivity in the graphic realm. Mahabharata remains the essence of a vast interconnected tradition within which one can distinguish epic, classical, postclassical, colonial and postcolonial phases without relinquishing a sense of continuity. The graphic narratives are the next stop in the natural progression of this historicity. These graphic narratives are a site of negotiation where contemporary mythos of Mahabharata is debated. The graphic renditions have rendered sacrosanct heroes and gods of Mahabharata in a fantasy mythical dream universe, where their stories are enjoying renewed philology and potency. Their poignant life stories reincarnate them as modern superheroes appealing to the imagination, creativity, and the arts of Graphic fiction. These graphic narratives can be viewed as illustrative exercises of decimating and reinventing the established canon of textual discourse of Mahabharata. They may even be regarded as amelioration of World Literature, to which Mahabharata belongs and have given a visual pre-eminence and relevance to an otherwise antiquated and pedantic text. newline