(CON) TEXTUALISING GOND ART AND PAINTINGS FOR LIFE WRITING AND INDIAN GRAPHIC NARRATIVE: REFERENCE TO BHIMAYANA: EXPERIENCES OF UNTOUCHABILITY

Abstract

The pictorial Gond style of artwork has its roots in the tribal Gond art tradition adopted for narrativising fiction Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability (2012), life writings of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. The Pradhan Gond artists Subhash Vyam and Durgabai Vyam interweave historical events with contemporary incidents using the Digna pattern of the Gond style visualising the stories with immense nuances and dynamics. The novel Bhimayana adopted Gond art to visualise and narrate the life of Ambedkar in a new way of seeing and corresponding to post-millennial trends in visual culture and comical creativity. This graphic novel Bhimayana is named after the hero for the comic version of the graphic narrative, sorrowful and miserable accounts of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. The tribal Gond art and paintings had been contextualised in this fiction for interweaving the plot by bringing back story telling, symbolism, animal imageries, colours, patterns, figurative elements, and sequence of images etc. to constitute the novel, a narrative of comic and graphic strips. This paper will emphasise how this graphic novel Bhimayana juxtaposes past, present and future spatially on the page, linearly emphasising personal and historical modes while positioning itself on the high-brow of the literary canon of life narrative and Indian comics.