Comics have been making their way into museums and art galleries for a while now. Over the last couple of years alone, Kolkata mounted an exhibition on the material craft of comics on the heels of a historical survey of Bengali comics from the 1920s to the present. Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art turned itself into an embodied romp across the history of comics, buffeted on both sides by a live archive of zines. All this alongside the Comic Cons trudging along each year while the Indie Comix Fests undyingly hop across cities as an open-source, comics-focused alternative.
Cartoonist Amruta Patil’s new exhibition A Moving Line, which opened at MAP Bengaluru on July 24, brings together more than 250 works spanning artefacts across millennia: temple carvings from Bengaluru’s own Someshwara temple to kaavad shrines and pattachitra scrolls; from the Tagore family’s early experiments with social caricature and the Ray family’s patronage for Sandesh to Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle; from the deflatingly satirical strips of Bengal’s Basantak to glimpses of Pran’s Chacha Chaudhary and Falah Faisal’s Musalman; from thousands of webcomics blooming across platforms to the ongoing boom in graphic novels. It presents, as Patil herself put it, a constellation of idea clusters rather than an exhaustive chronology.
Yet time exerts its own pull: What does it mean to...