Unruly Bodies and Untamed Voices

Re-writing the Immortal through Tales of Amnesia

Abstract

Chitra Ganesh’s Tales of Amnesia references Amar Chitra Katha, one of India’s most widely read comic books. Ganesh’s work interrogates the patriarchal logos perpetuated in the series by creating a separate enclave in which she disrupts the phallocentric signifiers and normative structures of the referent, giving way instead to a rigorous engagement with the uncontainable multiplicity of the female narrative. This essay examines how through a combination of words and images, the artwork takes on a subversive texture by apparently mimicking convention only to invert the locus of the original discourse into a meditation upon the power dynamics that surround the representation of gender. Through the unrestrained performativity of a ‘messy’ and unrestrainedbody,GaneshpositsherworkindialoguewithJudithButler’sseminalquestion about what it means being female. The arguments put forth suggest that through her rendition of a childhood comic, mired in the indigenous familiarity of collective memory, Ganesh recalls cultural nostalgia only to reposition it entirely – telling people to remember and, like the eponymous protagonist Amnesia, forget the constrained male-hegemonic power dynamics perpetuated by the purportedly immortal picture stories.