Hanuman in Graphic Avatar: Reframing Ramayana in Vikram Balagopal’s Simian

Abstract

The epic tales have endured and thrived in graphic versions in multiple guises by intertwining of genres and styles like sci-fi infused, Ramayana 3392 AD, experiments with indigenous art forms like Arni’s Sita’s Ramayana, and individualistic representations like Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva. This article analyses Vikram Balagopal’s graphic novel, Simian (2014), to apprehend how the author/artist subverts the central themes of Ramayana by retelling the story from the perspective of Hanuman. Since the mainstream versions of the Ramayan accord an important but a liminal status to Hanuman, it is imperative to examine to what extent does Balagopal probe into the potential that Hanuman’s character holds for re-visioning the epic. It’s intriguing to discover that a filmmaker by training, Balagopal, instead of employing a cinematic mode, consciously chooses to adapt the Ramayana into a graphic narrative format. This paper attempts to explore the possibilities and challenges that this emerging medium of story-telling poses, and the manner in which the textual and the visual correlate, negotiate, oppose or reaffirm each other to create new meanings within the epic narrative. It further investigates how this recent retelling of the Ramayana in a graphic mode interacts with the pre-existent multi-medial Ramayana tradition.