Visualising caste: A Gardener in the Wasteland and the politics of graphic adaptation

Abstract

In this article, I look at the graphic adaptation of Phule’s Gulamgiri (1873) (also known as Slavery) and argue how visuality offers a unique approach in the understanding of caste in contemporary Indian society. I explain how the genre, through its pictorial description, extends Gulamgiri’s critique of Hinduism by including modern-day debates over caste discrimination. Some of the questions that I discuss in the article include: the necessity of adaptation of a nineteenth-century historical text through the medium of a very nascent contemporary Indian genre; why the issue of caste that has been exhaustively discussed and had stood strong throughout time is being revived by contemporary writers; how the narration in graphic novel form reconfigures (or resembles) the original text and, lastly, does the graphic novel help or hinder in conveying the holistic understanding of the problem of caste from Phule to present times.