Page - 17 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

Playing with Words, Worlds, and Images | 17www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 15–30 something that has led to each book being a new visual experiment. In Kari I was operating in a far more timorous space of someone unsure of her méti- er, drawing a clear divide between “illustration” and “painting”. In the later books, I started to paint, take more risks, gain more control over the media. Bornet: Could we talk some more about the connection between the visual el- ements and the text in your work? How do you conceive the relation between both? Does the medium of graphic novels open up new ways of expression for you? Why is this medium particularly suited for what you want to say? Patil: The connection is hard-wired. From age three or five onwards, I have known my brain to be boot-camped into the writing side and the drawing side – text and image have always worked in tandem. It was only a matter of figuring out how to put the two things together. After college, I joined an advertising agency in a hyphenated copywriter-art director job de- scription. Even there, text and art were happening together. Maybe I could have written scripts for films? Done animation? But the idea of working in large groups isn’t appealing to me. So the graphic novel became an attrac- tive proposition: you get to art-direct it and you get to write. You have to remember that in the 2000s there was no “scene” to speak of in India for those interested in sequential art. Books were hard to find, and forbiddingly expensive. It’s still a bit of an underdog medium. Nobody knows quite what to do with my books. I always say this, that Indian publishing has been avantgarde in that mainstream publishers have taken on graphic novels in their lists, and publishers do not segregate writers of literary fiction and writers of graphic fiction when inviting people to lit fests, but the books still don’t get nominated for “literary” awards, because people have yet to make that leap of imagination. While I didn’t choose my medium in a sly way to capture a market, I recog- nise the benefits of being a graphic novelist and a first mover. Many people can write a good book in words, but not that many can do it with text and image. Globally, sequential art is one of the fastest growing segments in liter- ature – people’s fractured attention spans and visually led cognition have en- sured that. It’s only a matter of time before India tunes into this fact as well. Knauss: You just mention people’s short attention span, but when I was read- ing/viewing your novels, I realised that they need more attention: I had to pause and take time to look at the page as a whole, the words and the image. Patil: What you’re saying about my books needing attention is true – it’s a learned skill, reading sequential art is just a bit more intuitive than read- ing sheet music.