Dear Reader,
With the debate over the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026, raging all over the country, it is a good time to reconsider Amruta Patil’s Kari (2008), often described as the first lesbian graphic novel from India. However, labels do not do justice to Kari, which is many things at the same time—an existentialist novel, a work of art with amazing illustrations, a dark comedy, a love story, a biography of a city (Mumbai), a meditation on death. It begins with death deferred as Kari and the love of her life, Ruth, attempt to die by suicide but fail. Following the anti-climax, Ruth boards a flight to a land far away from Kari, and Kari falls into a metaphorical and literal sewer, later becoming its boatman.
The image of a broken Kari lying in a wasteland, trailing sewer water, staring at the indifferent city skyline in the distance, is a take on Andrew Wyeth’s heartbreaking painting, Christina’s World. Critics have debated whether Christina’s World—showing a girl in a pink frock crawling in an empty field, dragging her limp legs and looking up at a lone, equally desolate farmhouse on the horizon—is about undefeated resilience in the face of adversity or about an absolute loneliness, which drains out hope. The same can be said of this particular panel in Kari and of the novel in general.
Twenty-one-year-old Kari is a survivor, having lived through heartbreak, parental disapproval, a shift to a ruthless city, but she is not sure if she has emerged richer through the trials. The pain of being severed from Ruth still gnaws at her innards and she remains unsure of her identity. When her friend and colleague Lazarus asks her if she is a “proper lesbian”, Kari ruminates: “I roll the word ‘lesbian’ in my mouth and it feels strange there. Sort of fleshly, salivating, fresh off the boat from Lesbia, and totally inappropriate.” Then, in reply to Lazarus’ question, she says, “I’d say armchair straight, armchair gay, active loner. The circus isn’t in my life. It’s in my head.”
Kari was published in 2008: the Supreme Court’s article striking down of Article 377 was still a decade away. With state censure of homosexuality very much in place, the LGBTQIA+ community of that time must have been circumspect about expressing their identities openly. Yet I feel that Kari would have described herself in similar terms in 2026 too. She is less bothered about identity politics than about the existential quest for identity. Indeed, she tells Lazarus in another place that Ruth left her because “she had no politic.” “Means, I have no Burning Issue. Blurring genderlines? Bigotry? Cultural genocide? Dying planet? I can’t pick. My favourite form of movement is ‘float’. I stand for nothing. I espouse nothing but Ruth.”
I wonder what the present woke generations, whose sense of self is often shaped by the identity flags they wave, would make of Kari’s declaration. Would they think of her as lazy (because apolitical), fearful (of taking a stance), wishy-washy, too romantic to be political? Incidentally, according to the requirements of the Transgender Persons Amendment Bill—which demand that an individual medically prove their sexual identity—Kari would be biologically female and therefore straight, willy-nilly. Her love for a woman would be dismissed as delusion. Kari’s own criteria for judging (ineligible) men are more psychologically sound: “Does he sit with his thighs wide apart?” “Is the family dog always tied?” “Does he lose his temper with waiters?”
Besides Ruth, the other person Kari is deeply attached to is Angel, who is dying of cancer. There might be several reasons for this bond. As a “twice born” (after the failed death-by-suicide attempt), Kari has an aura of death about her that makes her gravitate towards others similarly marked. Or, as Angel says sarcastically, Kari might be seeking her fix of decay.
Or—the most evident explanation—Kari is drawn to a fragile, suffering person, who has already been discarded by a city that cares for no one. Angel recognises Kari as the boatman, a lost soul destined to steer other lost souls across the sewer. They share meaningful moments and, before dying, Angel gives Kari the most precious birthday blessing: “[D]eath will always come to you as a friend. You will not be scared.”
Patil seems to be, as the English playwright John Webster was, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “much possessed by death”. Her other remarkable work is Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean, a graphic rendering of the first book of the Mahabharata, an epic centred on death. One rarely comes across a graphic work where the text is as magnetic as the drawings, page after page. Owning the book is like possessing both a valuable artwork and a great novel.
As in Kari, iconic paintings by Western artists are referenced in the drawings of Adi Parva, but each adds something to the original. Taken together with the story—which is actually a series of interlinked narratives, with every strand branching into many more—they make the book addictive. Patil calls the setting of Adi Parva a “multiverse” and you do feel like an untethered astronaut travelling through time and space.
Unlike Kari, it begins with a birth—of the universe itself—but the birth is also a death: “The world ends, engulfed in water. Between the end of one world and the beginning of another, Vishnu sleeps. He is sheltered by the protective coils of Anant, the infinite serpent.”
Adi Parva is more polished than Kari, as befits an epic adaptation. But one can find some of Kari’s motifs lingering in Adi Parva—the endless quest for selfhood; destiny as something that is written in the stars versus destiny as the fulfillment of one’s earthly potential; the loneliness of the long distance searcher; androgyny (evidently, in ancient India, it was less problematic than it is today: Vishnu, the creator god, is androgynous, as are many other celestial beings). Mother Ganga narrates the epic—a river (we recall Kari’s sewer snaking through the city, collecting effluents, debris, and untold tales) recounts the legends she has shaped, legends that still flow with her in her currents.
The text of the Mahabharata comes under scrutiny as the audience of Ganga—made up of us, the people of Kali Yug—demands explanations for the seemingly arbitrary ways of the immortals. For instance, some listeners are irked by the realisation that the asurs always get the short shrift in conflicts with the gods. Ganga explains patiently, as one would to a child, that Vishnu’s intention is not to take sides but to maintain balance in the universe.
In another place, she lays bare the Achilles’ heel of the gods: without the immortality-bestowing amrit, which they can neither replace nor produce, the devas are nothing (the 2024 Netflix series, Kaos, about the Olympian gods, makes the same point). As the audience thrashes out Ganga’s stories, more stories are born and the cycle goes on. Ganga says, “[Y]ou are not held captive by old narratives. Tales must be tilled like the land so they keep breathing. The only thing you owe allegiance to is the essence.”
This is what Anita Nair does in her recent collection, Why I Killed My Husband and Other Such Stories, where one story uses episodes from the life of Bheem to shed light on the case of the Hathras gang rape and murder. In her review of the book, Iswarya V. mentions this story, “The Field of Flowers”, as one of the more successful pieces in the anthology. She also writes, “The Mahabharata parallel is elaborated in painstaking detail but it does not add much heft to the moral dilemma at the centre.” Read the insightful review here.
One of the early graphic novelists from India, apart from Patil, is Sarnath Banerjee. He is going strong even now, nearly two decades after publishing his first novel. His latest is Absolute Jafar, a semi-autobiographical novel about a lonely drifter called Bhrigu whose life is moulded by his innate restlessness. Reviewing it, Bharath Murthy notes plot holes which create sudden glitches in the narrative, muddying the reading experience. Check out this review in the latest issue of Frontline.
I was so impressed by Kari that I wrote to Patil after reading it back in 2008. The way she referenced paintings in her narrative and design spoke to me (I was an aspiring painter in those days), as did Kari’s character. Patil replied, saying that the paintings are love notes woven into the fabric of Kari, and that, apart from the tributes to well-known artists (Wyeth, Kahlo, Klimt, Da Vinci), there are also less public references—secret winks to those who share the camaraderie. That Patil took the trouble to reply to a cringe fan mail made me blush to the roots. Thanks to the infinite memory of cyberspace, the mail is still with me.
More gupshup next week. Till then,
Anusua Mukherjee
Deputy Editor, Frontline