ABSTRACT
This chapter situates South Asian graphic narratives' interest in the "local" within the emerging trend of "planetarity" that Amy Elias and Christian Moraru, among others, identify as characterizing the arts of the present. After positioning this South Asian aesthetic tendency within the "planetary" cultural history, it takes a cognitive approach to decode the manner in which the notion of "local," used as a mode for knowledge production, is materialized in South Asian graphic narratives through embodied, multimodal metaphors. For case study, the chapter presents a multiauthored collection of graphic narratives that through its very title—First Hand—draws attention to the embodied means for experiencing and expressing local knowledge. The nonfiction narratives in First Hand, though socially concerned and politically charged, differ from those produced as part of the "grassroots comics" movement initiated by Sharad Sharma and Leif Packalen.
