Shivani Sharma is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. Her research interests include South-Asian literature, Comics studies, and Transmedia studies. In her doctoral thesis, she is developing a semiotic analysis of the epic narrative with a particular focus on the Mahābhārata and media platforms.

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Abstract of the Lecture

Classics as Popular Stories: A Semiotic Reading of Select Indian Classical Tales in Comics and Graphic Novels 

This talk maps out the transmission of Indian classical stories in comics and graphic novels. It explores the semiotic function of these mediums in retelling the Indian tales through their unique artistic visions. The talk discusses the selective tales from Puranas, Upanishads and the epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and explicates the process of their (re)telling in the visual-verbal mediums. It explores how the comic narratives draw inspiration from the local visual art traditions such as temple art, old manuscripts and calendar art. The discussion includes a critical analysis of semantic layers of the popular representations of the classical tales and the poetics of cultural production of these narratives.