Center for South Asia Weekly Lecture Series: Anwesha Maity (Comparative Literature, UW-Madison)

I will focus on a reading of a few stories from two “classic” Bangla comic strips— Narayan Debnath’s Bantul the Great and Handa- Bhonda, published serially in the periodical Shuktara since the 1960s. Apart from overarching themes like Bengali identity and an unambiguous moral compass, these comics also draw our attention to the construction of masculinity and alternative body-image, leading to a reassessment of marginality within the postcolonial Bengali-middle class milieu.