Superheroes in Indian Comics: Deliberations from Anthropology

There is a prevailing sense that commercial Superhero Comics cannot be serious objects of academic enquiry. It is the hallowed graphic novel, with its auteur/author, for which serious work is reserved.

This volume presents the work of three publishing houses who publish Superhero Comics in Delhi and Mumbai. It analyses their techniques of narration associated with the serial publication of commercial comics such as open-ended plots, frequent re-boots of the storyline, extended story arcs, and a complex narrative universe to throw into sharper relief the value of superhero comic books as distinct from the graphic novel. Through an exploration of commercial Superhero Comics, the authors wish to draw attention to a fluidity embedded in Superhero Comics, which is influenced by external pressures of distribution and production that are generally ignored in the desire to view a comic text as a discrete and disembodied whole. Superhero Comics then emerge as a post-modern vehicle to test serious socio-political issues in the mode of fantasy.

This ethnographic attempt to understand the contexts of production, circulation, and consumption of Superhero Comics will be of interest to comics scholars, students of popular culture, sociology, social anthropology, literature, and the arts.

Roma Chatterji retired as Professor of Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University in 2021, and is currently Visiting Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence. Her publications include: Writing Identities: Folk Culture and the Performative Traditions in Purulia, West Bengal (2009); Speaking with Pictures: Folk Art and the Narrative Tradition in India (2012); Graphic Narratives and the Mythological Imagination in India (2019); (with Deepak Mehta) Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life (2007). She has also edited Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance (2014) and (with Deepak Mehta) Riot Discourses (2007).

Amaan Shreyas, is a practising Advocate at the Supreme Court of India and the High Court of Delhi. He completed an M.Phil in Sociology with a dissertation on Fake News in India at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics and an LLM from Columbia University. Amaan was also an Undergraduate Writing Fellow at Ashoka University. He is interested in the circulation of narrative forms in online Media Ecologies and has published, (with Roma Chatterji) ＂Seriality and Millennial Fandom in the Indian Superhero Comic Nagraj.＂ Journal of Graphic Novel and Comics. 2021

’Disruption, Demarcation and Disclosure’, Seminar, Special Issue on Containing Violence, March 2017. [Author/editor biography(ies) - mandatory for HSS, recommended for STEM if they can fit]