At first glance, the “Indian graphic novel” has only recently appeared as both a material artifact and a marketing category, and it may look like the confluence of two previously distinct narrative forms: Indian comics and the contemporary Indian novel – the latter especially in its highly visible postcolonial and globalized form, written in English. As such a hybrid, the Indian graphic novel would appear to balance, on one hand, elite literary modes and, on the other, mass cultural images – a combination perhaps akin to the occasional mainstream film adaptation of a work of “serious” Indian fiction. But the Indian graphic novel may in fact be less a melding of now assimilated (if not “native”) forms – Indian comics and the Indian novel – or even a “mature” development of the earlier Indian comic, than an appropriation of a format that arrived with – rather than acquired – legitimate artistic credentials.

At least since Sarnath Banerjee's Corridor was self-proclaimed on its cover “a graphic novel” in 2004, Indian writers, artists, publishers, critics, and readers have largely accepted the English-language term (rather than, say, the more common European designation “album”) as a means to explicitly or implicitly affiliate Indian examples with their international counterparts. Recognized (although with frequent imprecision and lingering resistance) in the United States as a means to legitimate the marketing of previously dismissed “comics” or “funny books” in bookstores and to draw their ideal readers from culturally literate adults, the “graphic novel” implicitly carries an air of sophistication and, in its global reach, cosmopolitanism, if not pretension. Deployed in India only within the first decade of the twenty-first century, the term tends to therefore associate Indian examples with an international network rather than affirming their (debatable) indigenous cultural roots in earlier Indian narrative forms. This is to say that the texts most often identified as Indian graphic novels seem not to derive from earlier Indian comics, except perhaps in an oppositional way, positioning earlier or even contemporaneous mainstream Indian comics as counter-examples rather than precursors or peers. The graphic novel thus appears to have arrived in India fully formed, whereas its American counterpart at least partly emerged directly out of mainstream comics, even if it has also at times boldly asserted its independence from the mainstream.