Discovering the self: in conversation with Dyuti Mittal

ABSTRACT

In this conversation, Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi will explore Dyuti Mittal’s (New Delhi, India) use of art, visual strategies, and avant-garde techniques she employs in her comics and graphic narratives. Through unusual patterns and unorthodox contents, Dyuti traverses through diverse visual semantics and experiments with the ink pen and colours. Being a contemporary avant-garde comics artist and writer, Mittal is renowned for her comics – Flaw, ‘The Taboo,’ ‘Imagining Loss,’ ‘Love Story,’ ‘I’m Pretentious,’ and ‘Jackals and Arabs’ among the others. She has her signature style of making art and she believes – ‘Do not let the self be defined, but question, search, find your own voice and reflect. Nothing can be built without a strong foundation and nothing is yours but the answers you seek.’ Within and beyond such declarations, graphic design, the art of storytelling, pencilling and inking, and employment of colours with proper implication – are the topics that will be discussed in this conversation. Upon careful analysis of Dyuti’s works, the conversation was conducted in a questionnaire via email.

KEYWORDS:

• Comics
• inking and pencilling
• art
• design
• storytelling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Partha Bhattacharjee

Partha Bhattacharjee is currently working as an Assistant Professor of English in Amity University Patna (17th July 2019 – till date). He has earned his Doctoral Degree from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Patna on 15th April 2019 under the supervision of Dr. Priyanka Tripathi, Associate Professor of English. Prior to that, he pursued MPhil and M.A. in English respectively from The University of Burdwan, India. Apart from three book chapters in edited volumes, Tintin in Tibet by Herge: A Critical Companion (2021), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (2020), and Performativity, Cultural Construction, and the Graphic Narrative (Routledge Advances in Comics Studies) (2019), he has published with reputed journals, Studies in Comics (Q2), Journal of International Women's Studies, Journal of Gender Studies (Taylor & Francis, Q1), Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Taylor & Francis, Q1), The Translator (Taylor & Francis Q1), IUP Journal of English Studies (Q3), Atlantic Literary Review, to name a few.

Priyanka Tripathi

Priyanka Tripathi is an Associate Professor of English and Head, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna (India). She has published extensively with Indian Literature, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Postcolonial Studies, Economic and Political Weekly amongst others. She is the recipient of JIWS fellowship 2021-22 for her proposal, “Re-storying Widowhood: The (In) Visible Lives of the Bastuhara Nari of Varanasi”. Currently, she is working on an ICSSR funded project entitled, “Mapping Domestic Violence in the times of Covid-19: A Study from Bihar”. She is also Book Reviews Editor for Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and works in the area of Gender Studies, South Asian Fiction, GeoHumanities and Graphic Novels. Her email id is [email protected].