Graphic novel creater Jai Undurti talks to Postnoon on the unique concept of a comic kaleidoscope of Hyderabad.
Hyderabad:
Just a few weeks away from the big Comic Con festival in the City, the young lovers of fun have already begun to experience the festival as they got to meet a well known Hyderabad Graphic Novel creator Jai Undurti, who interacted with a hundred-odd audience and shared his ideas of a graphic novel at the coffee cup cafe recently. Speaking to Postnoon, he shares his thoughts about his novel, the Comic Con coming to city and much more.
About their Hyderabad Graphic Novel, which will be on display at the comic con festival, creators Jai and Jasraman Grewal say that the novel is an attempt to tell the story of the City through sequential art. “We are both outsiders but we place ourselves in the long tradition of travellers writing about the City. Great cities influence their inhabitants completely right down to the very way of thinking and perceiving the world,“ says Jai. Just as Mumbai or Paris have their own distinctive ‘voices’, the kineticism of Bombay, for example, often shows in works written there. Hyderabad too has a distinctive psycho-geographical signature.
They call the City the 0.0 Cartesian coordinate, the starting point for all explorations. Jai and Grewal worked with lead artist Harsho Mohan Chattoraj from Kolkata and Federico Zumel from Argentina. Colourist Neeraj Menon and letterer Aditya Bidikar completed the team for the book that will be released next month at the Hyderabad edition of Comic Con India. A digital edition is also in the works.
“It is not a respectable history, but rather a collection of the myths, legends and folklore that has surrounded the City since her birth”. “You could say we use facts as stepping stones to the truth,” says Jai.
The graphic novel consists of four episodes set in different eras.
Undurti came up a mechanism of a time-travelling auto to tie the disparate chrono-threads together. The stories span time and space:
An obsessed scholar travels back in time to meet a mysterious poet.
Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges journeys to Hyderabad to hunt down a mythical beast, a ‘dreamtiger’ whose very sight leads the hunter to madness. A man uncovers a paranoid conspiracy theory on the creation of cities themselves, uncovering their true reason for ‘living’.
The project began as a photo-documentation on the ‘base of the pyramid’- petty entrepreneurs and street vendors. Gradually it evolved into an archival effort. At this point the duo approached Yugantar, the NGO which had commissioned the photo-project. Despite initial skepticism Yugantar agreed to put down the seed money for the first episode and graphic novel was born.
When asked why they chose this medium, Jai, replies, “Comics have been with us ever since the first cave-man sketched on the walls of his abode. Comics have a 40,000 year history – to tell stories through pictures is one of the most deeply ingrained traits of being human. It was out of our respect for the power of this medium that made us choose it”.
Words can be an extremely limiting factor in writing certain things. And when you need to convey an idea in a single stroke rather than serpentine descriptions: a picture is magic. “The Hyderabad we are interested in is long gone, only comics could bring to life this vanished city”.
Talking about the speciality of the novel, he says, “there is no novel that just talks about the City. There are two types of novels mostly in the county, either superhero or mythology. These City-centric is new.” He adds, “we invited people to tell us there locality stories and we would make them into a graphic story. We have been getting few and we are encouraging it and might come up with every locality story.”
How comic con will help City Comic fans, he says, “the festival is already creating a lot of buzz, more than 100 turned up to the workshop, when we expected 25. After the festival there will more groups and many people will start talking about comics and find many like minded people and will start hanging out with each other.”
The Comic Con festival is scheduled to begin on 21st September, you will find the Hyderabad Graphic Novel team at the venue.
source: http://www.postnoon.com / PostNoon / Home> City / by Arun Daniel Yellamaty / August 30th, 2013