![]() This two-page verbal-visual montage is able to narrativize oppression as an ongoing process, and sets the tone for the rest of the narrative, where Natarajan and Ninan re-inscribe Gulamgiri through foregrounding Jotiba and Savitribai Phule’s struggles against caste oppression and their contribution to social reform in India in the 19th century, and represent the challenges continuing to the present. Walking past this incident, they halt at a poster of the film Batman Begins, and Ninan exclaims why she understands the need for superheroes: “to swoop down out of the sky and kick the baddies to bits” (p. ![]() As the authors walk through a New Delhi neighbourhood, they witness a group of children being beaten and abused using references to the ‘untouchable’ caste for inadvertently kicking a football into the house of a (supposedly) pious upper-caste man. ![]() In the opening pages of A Gardener in the Wasteland, the authors of the book, writer Srividya Natarajan and artist Aparajita Ninan, appear on the page discussing their plan to ‘adapt’ the 1873 work of Jotiba Phule Gulamgiri (Slavery). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |