Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Across South Asia and particularly within India, it has been argued that the role of visuality is defining given that the concepts of darshan and drishti (as ideas of ‘seeing’ or ‘gazing’) are often at the heart of Hindu modes of haptic visuality, and the same can also be said of broader (non-Hindu) Indian and thus broader South Asian cultural practices in a related haptic notion such as nazar. The appetite in South Asia for comics and graphic novels is nascent in Bangladesh and Nepal but is clearly gathering pace in India, and their representation within this book is testament to this trend. The pluralities of India and the South Asia region, with its contradictions and possibilities of modern living alongside older practices and customs across the region are brought into sharp relief in the collection of chapters presented here.