The 12 Best Indian Graphic Novels, and What the Art Actually Does

This is Bhimrao Ambedkar's life told through the humiliations he documented himself: being made to sit apart at school, being refused water, being turned away from lodgings. Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam drew it in the Pardhan Gond tradition, with text by Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand for Navayana. They declined to use square panels, so frames take the shape of fish and scorpions and birds, speech leaves people through beaked balloons, and water moves across the page like water. Present-day news reports of caste violence are stitched in beside the historical chapters.

Kari lives in a shared flat, works an advertising job she treats with open contempt, and keeps returning in her head to the sewer under the city, which she describes as if she were its boatman. The narration is first person, wry and sharp, closer to a diary written by someone who reads too much than to comic dialogue. Amruta Patil was the first Indian woman to publish a graphic novel, and this was it. The art is mostly grey and black, so the pages where colour arrives hit like a change in weather.

Munnu is the youngest in a Srinagar family, more interested in drawing than in school, and he grows into a newspaper cartoonist while the 1990s happen around him. Crackdowns, curfews, identity parades and disappearances are handled the way weather is handled in other childhood books, as the conditions rather than the subject. Malik Sajad's single formal decision carries enormous weight: Kashmiris appear as hangul deer, a protected and dwindling species, while everyone else is drawn as human. The ink is heavy, scratched, almost carved, and it never lets the page feel light.

Jehangir Rangoonwalla sells second-hand books in Connaught Place and dispenses advice to a rotating cast of men who wander in with their problems. A collector chases objects he does not need. A newly married man worries about his performance. A perpetual student in a Calcutta room theorises about everything and finishes nothing. There is no single plot, just a corridor of lives that keep brushing past each other. Sarnath Banerjee draws in a loose, deliberately unpretty line and drops in photographs, footnotes and asides whenever it suits him.

The frame is a riverbank at night, where Ganga narrates the origin stories that sit before the Mahabharata everyone thinks they know: the churning of the ocean, the coming of the Kuru line, the snake sacrifice. Amruta Patil paints rather than draws, so most pages have no borders at all and read as single images with text laid into them. It is closer to sitting through an oral telling than to reading a comic, and the pace is slow by design. Sauptik continues the same telling if this one works on you.

The order of making matters here. Moyna Chitrakar, a Patua scroll painter from Bengal, painted the whole narrative in the tradition she was raised in, and Samhita Arni then wrote Sita's account to fit the images. So the words follow the pictures rather than the other way round, which almost never happens in comics. Sita narrates from the forest and from Lanka, and the war looks different when the person telling you about it is not the one holding a bow. Tara Books published it, and the flat, unshaded Patua colour is unlike anything else here.

An English creature with an inconvenient appetite is put on a boat and sent to the Company's territories, where he meets something that has been feeding on this coast far longer than his kind has existed in Europe. Around that collision Ram V builds a story about empire, trade and who gets called a monster, with letters and journals threading through the panels. It ran as single issues before Vault collected it in 2019. Sumit Kumar's art is loose, wet and atmospheric, and the colour keeps the Indian sequences warm while the English ones stay drained and grey.

Two timelines run at once. In one, a modern Calcutta man goes looking for a missing volume with the obsessiveness of a person avoiding his own life. In the other, Company-era Calcutta unfolds with its printers, brothels, quacks and Europeans on the make. Sarnath Banerjee cuts old engravings into his own ink work, hangs footnotes off the panels, and lets the myth of the Wandering Jew wander through the whole thing. It is his most ambitious book and his least disciplined, which are related facts.

A graffiti writer paints a wall in a Mumbai suburb, and the book uses that wall as the point where four lives keep crossing: the artist, a poet, a girl chasing work as an actor, and a boy whose neighbourhood is pulling him toward something worse. Nobody gets rescued, nobody gets discovered, and the ending is honest about how these stories usually go. It is around seventy pages, so it fits in one sitting, and Anand RK's colour work makes the city look the way it looks at eight in the evening.

Nikhil Gulati worked with the archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer to build a comic about the Indus civilisation that stays inside the evidence. You get city drainage, seals, trade routes, what the script does and does not tell us, and a running honesty about which parts are guesses. The drawing is plain and diagrammatic rather than showy, which is the right call, because the job here is to make you see a drain system and a bead workshop and understand why both matter. It is also careful about the political fights that surround this material.

Appupen has spent his career building Halahala, a world with its own gods, corporations and ruins, and this book gives you five of its stories with no dialogue at all. Some are love stories, some are about power eating its own people, and all of them ask you to read visual clues the way you would read sentences. The line work is dense and black and owes something to both temple carving and underground European comics. Nothing is explained, which is either the appeal or the problem depending on your patience.

Arjun Kadam used to be a rising name in the Mumbai Encounter Squad, the unit that carried out extrajudicial killings with official approval. Five years on he is an addict with nothing left, and the book pulls him back into that world for one more round. Saurav Mohapatra writes it as proper noir, with the moral rot spread evenly across the police, the press and the gangs, and Vivek Shinde draws it in slabs of black that make Mumbai look permanently three in the morning. Archaia published the first book in 2013.