Suniti Madaan discusses how Amruta Patil’s graphic narrative Kari reconceptualises graphic medicine to trace the sociocultural and temporal paradigms of sickness in Mumbai.
Kari (2008) by Amruta Patil, one of the first few graphic novels in India, and the first one by a woman, has been read and analysed in several ways, but not through the lens of graphic medicine. Or as one exploring intersection between queerness, time, and the slow violence of the city on bodies thereby creating an assemblage of sickness. The queer form of the comic genre, the queer life of Kari, and the unconventional temporalities and spatial positions she occupies in Mumbai draw attention to their relational network and towards queering of time as a care-giving act. The narrative begins with the double suicide of its protagonist, Kari, and her girlfriend, Ruth. The graphic imagery is thick with focus on bodies and what Chloe Ahmann calls, (their) “sluggish temporalities of suffering” (Ahmann 144). The first page of the graphic narrative shows the clinical connection between the hearts of Kari and Ruth, and their sustenance from each other’s bodies. When their double suicide fails, Ruth leaves Mumbai, and Kari decides to become a boatman of the sewers, ferrying the dead and the abandoned, as a return of favour to the sewer’s gift of a second life. This ghostly temporality, and access to forbidden locations, visually marks the relation between the sewers at nighttime, and normative life in the day time. Kari’s body concretises the mechanics of slow violence which Ahmann notes are “difficult to represent, even to perceive (144).
Kari uses page and narrative breaks in the comic form to suggest the dialectical relationship between night and day time in Kari’s life. Her life is traced through the markings of the gutter spaces, which hold her life together after her own suicide, shifting into her caregiving potential towards the dying Angel and her cat, and also Kari’s own roommates. The sewers and the gutter space become representative of “body-without-organs”, connecting the comic form to the assemblage of illness the graphic narrative depicts. Kari explores how pain and care coexist and are mutually dependant. The plurivectorial (Groensteen) design of the comic form, where the part and the whole are simultaneously visible, invites the readers to make these connections and navigate the gutters of the graphic narrative with Kari.
Graphic Medicine and illness as body-without-organs (BwO)
The affordances of a plurivectorial (Groensteen) reading of Kari, which means reading the comic page in panels and as a whole, is instructive for reading texts of graphic medicine. Ian Williams cites Alan Radley regarding the role of graphic medicine, ““Whatever is shown about illness inevitably concerns medicine, whether this occurs by virtue of its presence or by virtue of its absence in the image”” (Williams 2015: 117). Jason Dittmer further talks of the comic as micro-geographies, as a recreation of maps that have interpretive flexibility. The hidden spaces of the modern city that Patil depicts, such as trains, sewers, and unsanitary home arrangements, create circumstances and assemblages of sickness. Sarah Curtis (2010) notes how “long term exposure to material poverty and degraded physical environment may also contribute significantly to the burden of distress and mental ill-health in populations around the world.” (142). Narratives of graphic medicine visibilize sickness through networks of relationships embedded into life under late-stage capitalism with concomitant pollution of water and air, breakdown in communication, and oppression from linear time frames that are incompatible with concrete human bodies. In doing so, Graphic Medicine empowers the public with the ability to interpret, represent, and articulate their experiences of sickness, pain, and suffering within the spectrum of ambiguity in which they occur. Quoting Alan Radley, Ian Williams argues that the depiction of the sick body and their struggle might “establish (however tentatively) a viable way of living in the world” (Czerwieck et.al. 2015). Kari, as a citizen of Mumbai, is both part of the illness assemblage, as the comic depicts, and the one that forms part of the network of caregiving. As a pictorial medium where the panels are connected over time, context, and interpretation, the reader is invited to enter Kari’s life through her struggle with both life and death.
The networks of illness that Kari depicts are both somatic and psychological: the mental distress faced by Kari after her suicide attempt, Angel’s cancer, and the slow violence (Ahmann 2018) of the city. Ahmann notes slow violence is the general wearing out, to “deterioration as a defining condition of . . . historical existence” (Berlant 2011, 95)” (Ahmann 144) which is also, “incremental and accretive” (144). Recent scholarly works on the spatial and temporal (Andrews et al. 2022) aspects of health and sickness and care and well-being as assemblage (Duff and Hill 2022) have similarly emphasized the seemingly ineffable forces and networks influencing health and well-being. Kari’s interiority is portrayed through the depiction of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) inflicted by the city. As a boatman of the sewers, Kari ferries through the dregs and waste of the city which are in a dialectical relation to the living. Kari has promised the city that she would “unclog her sewers when she couldn’t breathe” (Patil 2008: 31). At nighttime she surveys the city to save others who might be losing the battle of surviving in the “smog city.” This encounter with waste enables Kari to become a caregiver from a victim. The sickness, its suffering, and its care begin, therefore not with the individual but as an assemblage of relations, in a state of existence which Deleuze has called “body without organs.”
The idea is to push the limitation of graphic medicine beyond the image of the body in sickness and needing care, to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of body-without-organs (Fox 2011) which Nick J. Fox (2011) proposes in his work as the entity towards which the body is always reaching out. He explains:
a body-without-organs, an organic/non-organic confluence of biology, culture and environment (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 9). The body-without-organs emerges from a sea of relations that may be physical, psychological or cultural. (Fox 2011: 360)
The sequential graphic narrative lays down the relational network of this body-without-organs that spreads across Kari’s socials and her material life moving towards ways of overcoming the burden of desire itself. Her shared flat, her office, the profession that takes her around the city, and the train rides back and forth, both engender and frustrate desire by turns. Each of these locations, however, materialize the locations where sickness and its resistance, both physical and mental, inhabit. Kari encounters sick bodies in the office in the form of Angel, sick bodies on train, and finally the unplanned abortion of her roommate accompanied by the excruciating mental distress felt by her roommates. Without the vocabulary for medical health discourse, Kari and her roommates seek each other’s presence for support. The understanding of the connected nature of death to the many activities of life is what finally liberates Kari from the oppression of desire towards the end of the narrative. It is her embrace of the status of the nomadic, body-without-organ status, that which generates, as Fox suggests, “an active, experimenting, engaged and engaging agency, with the capacity and motivation to form new relations (Buchanan 1997: 83).” (Fox 2011) which helps her return to a will towards life rather than death. Patil is able to trace this journey through the spatial territory that her deterritorialized self traverses, to become oriented to the dialectic of health and sickness.
Queer Temporality and Care
Two points are to be made here, first, of sickness and caregiving not existing as linear, straightforward relationships but within the assemblage of the body’s interaction with the world and its capacity to affect and be affected; and secondly the alternative temporality which Kari occupies after her attempted suicide as a strategy for survival. On her commutes, Kari encounters fellow passengers in the train who are sweating, injured, or who have died on the tracks. She stumbles through Mumbai, its slums, train crowds, rain, and busy streets, with a fleeting rapidity. As a boatman at night, Kari regains control over her life by re-living the duration of the time lost during the day. She admits there is no time in Mumbai to feel the pain of others or make enquiries of the same. In a life packed with corporate work routines and long travels on the train through stench, crowds, and fatigue, the space and time for community care is entirely lost. In the act of showing those battered through everyday struggles and actual injuries, Patil is documenting all the ways in which the city generates weariness of the body and mind. The queer identity of Kari further situates her outside linear time, which is dominant in a capitalist society. Jonathan Martineau argues that time is a “locus of struggle…a powerful political and ideological tool” (5). As a boatman, and as a caregiver, Kari performs actions that lie outside the productive valences of work. Both actions are dissociated from the possibility of reproductive futurity. Lisa Baraitser would identify this as practices of “maintenance” which “keep things going” (Baraitser 2015, 21). Baraitser argues that both the labour and the time embedded within maintenance is hidden. Kari as a graphic narrative visibilizes this invisible maintenance work, with Lazarus and his STD scare, or time spent with Angel, shedding light on the role of maintenance and its alternative temporality.
Kari reflects on how sickness is a break, a pause in the lifelong cycle of capitalist value production. The long hours that Kari spends with Angel, making tea, feeding her cat, and just keeping company is a slow diffusion of time. This takes place through perspective shifts in panels and by recording the effusion of smell. Angel’s dying body decomposes through bodily gases which “smell of violent gastric juices” (Patil 2008, 55), mirrored in the stench of the sewers, from what Kari identifies as the city’s lower intestines. In Byung Chul Han’s Scent of Time, he writes, “the sense of smell is an organ of remembrance and reawakening.” (Han 2017, 56). The smell with its non-linear coordinates, moves through past and present, and links the experience of concrete time of the body with others. The stench as a reflection of time connects Kari to others in the city. Kari leans into this temporality of smell by paying attention to it, this attention is captured in the graphic representation through a perspective-to-perspective shift in panels, depicting smell from the sewers, industrial pollutants, tea, spices. The form of the graphic narrative incorporates this non-linear diffusion of time through scenes that capture many modes of lingering.
As a queer person, Kari’s life is not moving towards reproductive futurity, and the space she shares with her roommates, and Lazarus, similarly avoids this burden of movement towards a purpose. Jack Halberstam would identify this as a queer subculture developed as “alternatives to kinship-based notions of community.” (Halberstam 2003, 1). This space allows the roommates time to attend to each other’s broken hearts and through sexual health crises. This repair work saves Kari in the end when she embraces her alternative temporality, opened up for carework and a queer life. A sideways temporality thus produces pockets of time for care. Kari begins with the failed suicide and ends via a labyrinthine journey through the sewers and Angel’s apartment into an embrace of life as possessing duration. The city as a body-without-organs, thus challenges the normative chronology of the city’s temporarily, showing that its material contents are made of multiple temporalities, often in dialectic relationships with each other. Kari’s boatman enlivens both this BwO as well as the alternative temporality as a way to witness it and develop care mechanisms through attention bought on the currency of time.
Conclusion
Sickness is also exhaustion, tiredness, deviance, and a metaphor in Kari that does not repel but attracts those who are mentally afflicted. Angel’s sickness is both a portal guiding transition from death to life for Kari and becoming an oracle for life. The small community of Kari, Angel, and Angel’s cat finds moments of respite from pain through aimless leisure repossessing duration. Patil expands the scope and the nature of carework outside of the burdens it places on the caregiver and the experience of shame and guilt from those receiving care. There is some parallel between the sick body of Angel and the aching heart of Kari, a lesbian trying to survive in a heteronormative society. What is compelling in the book is the acknowledgment of the persistence of sickness, mental or physical, amidst life. The reminder that there is no escape from the fragility of the human body and the juxtaposition and contrast between the fast life of the city that doesn’t care for the body and the slow attention required for rest, reparation, love, and other life-giving sentiments. Kari’s care extends to both human and non-human, as she carries Angel’s cat, Pollydeuces, to a new house when Angel passes away.
About the author
Suniti Madaan (she/her) is a writer, translator, and an Assistant Professor at Vivekanand Institute of Professional Studies, with a specialisation in Comics and Graphic Narratives, and Childhood Studies. She has vast experience of teaching in areas such as World Literature, Indian Writing, Translation Studies and Gender Studies.
References
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Duff and Hill, 2022. C. Duff, N. Hill. Wellbeing as social care: on assemblages and the ‘commons’ Wellbeing, Space and Society, 3 (2022), Article 100078.
Fox, N. J. (2011). The ill-health assemblage: Beyond the body-with-organs. Health Sociology Review, 20(4), 359–371. https://doi.org/10.5172/hesr.2011.20.4.359
Halberstam, J. (2003). What’s that Smell? Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6(3), 313-333. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779030063005 (Original work published 2003)
Han, B. (2015). The Burnout Society. United States: Stanford University Press.
Patil, A. (2016). Kari. India: HarperCollins Publishers India.
Williams, Ian et al. (2025). Graphic Medicine Manifesto: Tenth-Anniversary Edition. United States: Penn State University Press.
