IMMORTAL COMICS, EPIDERMAL POLITICS

Abstract

This article examines representations of skin color and its symbolic affiliations with discourses of gender, class, and caste in the Amar Chitra Katha (immortal pictorial stories) comic series, the first indigenous children's comics to be published in postcolonial India. We draw on the concept of colorism as defined by Black scholars in the United States to explore the lessons on gender and skin color that these comics may communicate to Indian children. Our analysis shows that Amar Chitra Katha's stories of gods, goddesses, kings, demons, and historical events associate light‐skinned masculinity with divinity, strength, virtue, compassion, and upper caste status. Comic book illustrations code dark‐skinned masculinity through the semiotics of violence, brutality, stupidity, bestiality, and low caste status. Fashioning a similar set of symbolic oppositions, these pictorial stories link light‐skinned femininity to beauty, wholesome family life, and happiness, whereas dark‐skinned femininity manifests through embodiments of grotesque physical appearance, anger, promiscuity, and deviance.

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