Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how caste/gendered spaces are renegotiated in A Gardener in the Wasteland: Jotiba Phule's Fight for Liberty to understand how visual narratives that describe oppression based on caste and gender succeed by reworking (mythic/mundane) images they want to challenge.

Paper long abstract:

A Gardener in the Wasteland: Jotiba Phule's Fight for Liberty (2011) by Srividya Natrajan (writer) and Aparajita Ninan (illustrator) is a work where the writer and illustrator together work to create a visual narrative that subverts and resists existing stereotypes or past narratives. Fusing both past and present, both, temporally and spatially they highlight the pervasive issue of caste in contemporary society. In our paper we make a study of three different spaces where workings of caste and gender can be examined: creative space of two women storytellers (writer/illustrator) telling their version (of story), within a textual space that delineates caste issues along with woman's question, and the space of meta-narratives (cultural dictates, and graphic novel contained by its own limiting sub-culture) that re-impose constraints. How does gendering of caste spaces function within a textual space and outside? We want to study how much the narratives that describe oppression based on caste and gender succeed by reworking the (mythic/mundane) images they want to challenge. Since any representation is bound by the phallogo-centric discourse, is there is a possibility of reshaping the past narratives by revisiting them? If so, how does the text depict an urbane space (textual/temporal) as a prospect where caste infiltration can be seemingly innocuous yet predominant?