Earlier this year, eight women across Europe and Asia (and now the U.S.A.) came together to to shed light on issues close to their hearts through graphic storytelling. It started with the desire to showcase their work at the 2016 East London Comic Arts Festival (ELCAF). The impetus for the feat stemmed from one woman: Aindri Chakraborty, a communication designer and creator of the comics journalism blog There Was A Brown Crow. She encountered a vacuum when searching for South Asian representation in graphic art. Worse still was the conspicuous absence of women. Initially, Chakraborty intended to put together a feature or profile on unsung women artists who weren’t covered in mainstream media.
A South-Asian side
When this could not be realised, Chakraborty instead got the ladies to come on board for ELCAF, which cemented the Kadak Collective’s existence. Founded in March 2016, the platform is a collective of eight South Asian women who are feminists, diverse, queer-friendly and inclusive. Each is in some way connected to the other, albeit some of them have never met in person. Communication, however, is continuous and regular, all thanks to technology. The name is a nod to India’s affinity for a strong cup of tea, a.k.a. kadak chai , in an attempt to use the metaphor to start a discourse on subjects that the women are passionate about. “We are all talented enough and nobody (internationally) knows our experience. I’m sure they would want to,” says visual artist and graphic designer Mira Malhotra, who is also the founder of Studio Kohl.
Several months later, an invitation to be part of Gender Bender 2016, an endeavour of the Sandbox Collective (a Bengaluru-based group of performance artists), saw Kadak create the Reading Room. The initiative, housed in the library of The Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan featured the group’s self-published works on gender. To offer the exhibit to a wider audience, Kadak put the eight zines online.
Revisiting history
And now, three months after their participation in Gender Bender 2016, the Kadak Collective is bringing the Reading Room to Mumbai with a talk on ‘A History of Women in Comics’ by one-eighth of the group: Bengaluru-based Aarthi Parthasarathy, best known as the creator of Royal Existentials . For the founder of Falana Dimka Films, writing is comic-making and her passion for the medium has stemmed since childhood. “My family enjoyed Tintin and Asterix . Some of my earliest memories were going through Asterix for the physical humour and colours. Each time I would reread it, I would learn something new about politics. I got a lot of my sense of history through Amar Chitra Katha and Tintin. ”
In the vein of Kadak’s tenets, the talk this evening is derived from a desire to spread information about topics the collective finds interesting outside of the traditional commercial spaces. “It starts from topics from the early days between 1850s and 1860s, all the way up till the present day,” says Parthasarathy. There will be a focus on socio-political events of the time and how they led to comic creation over the years.”
Expect references to the first comic book superheroine Fantomah , whose face turned into a skull in fury, and Mother Hubbard, who uses witchcraft to fight Nazis and other bad guys.
The hour-long talk, which includes a question-and-answer session, will focus on the Western world and the characters we’re familiar with. However, Parthasarathy has taken painstaking efforts to curate examples from obscure Indian titles. But she insists that the primary aim of this Kadak event is not to judge the predecessors’ efforts, rather to simply engage and revisit history. She cites the example of Wonder Woman, a character created by psychologist William Moulton Marston in the 1940s during the height of World War II to mirror the strength of women at the time. “I just feel we are at the time when we have to revisit our history, whether it’s politics or just world events. We are moving very close to situations that we have been through, and we are not realising it, because we are not engaging in our history.”
Read and repeat
In addition to the talk, the venue will also double up as an extension of the Reading Room, where Kadak will showcase 21 titles created by the collective. There’s Thank You by Aindri Chakraborty, a hand-screen printed zine that chronicles the events in the life of a little girl who is constantly reminded to be grateful. “She goes around saying thank you to everything including the soap and shopping,” says Malhotra. “And towards the end, she gets groped by a passing stranger and realises she can’t be thankful for that.” The zine features a dollop of nostalgia in every page, harking back to products we used as children.
My Secret Crop by Kaveri Gopalakrishnan uses a thriving field of produce as a metaphor for the protagonist’s body hair. Even though the woman is proud of her hair, she’s forced to remove it at some point in her life to conform to expectations.
Another highlight is the Risograph-printed 100 Days of Travelers in Red by Akhila Krishnan, which has been described as an inversion of the male gaze. Over 100 days, Krishnan sketched people she encountered on the train in gloomy London. Her subjects each wore an item of red, immediately capturing the artist’s attention. Even though all 21 titles will not be available for sale, visitors are encouraged to spend time and experience all of them.
Kadak presents Women in Comics + Reading Room will take place at 2 p.m. today at The Cuckoo Club. Tickets are priced at Rs. 200. Visit medium.com/kadak for more information.
