Abstract 11: Prof. Dorothy Figuieira
"Bhimayana: One Ramayana among Many."
In
this paper I examine how Ambedkar has faired in artistic renderings in recent
years. I focus primarily on his biography had recently taken graphic form
with the clever title, the Bhimayana. None of the reviews seemed to
comment on the fact that the title clearly indicated that this graphic
biography of Ambedkar was written as a reworking of the Ramayana, the Sanskrit
epic that has undergone many rewritings.
What
is so interesting about the many versions of the Ramayana is the manner in
which, as Paula Richman and A.K Ramanujan have shown, they all present a
counter-discourse to the Urtext, the Valmiki Ramayana. As such, they
comprise a dissident literature that can be seen as answering back the
brahmanical ideology expressed in the epic. In this paper, I look at how the
Bhimayana functions as a rewriting of the epic in the pictoral form of the
graphic novel.
I
will examine how its dissenting position is shaped by its mode of expression.
In particular, I will look at how the interplay between word and image in the
text contributes to the subversion of the nationalist narrative of the
epic. The format presents a challenge to traditional modes of reading
image and word together.
No comments:
Post a Comment