India: Cosmic Comics: Imaging the Ganga-Jamuna Doab of North India

Full Course Description

There has come to be an expansive space over 800 kilometers long with a width ranging between 90 km and 0.7cm that is revered by millions of people as holy, otherworldly, with super-natural powers in northern India. It has been extensively written about, studied in fragments, and captivated the imaginations of tyrants, empires, the handicapped, priests, artists, designers, and engineers alike. Today millions of homes line the edges of this space as do wildlife, farms, highways, factories, cities, and temples not too mention all of the living and non-living materials that reside within it. This space, the Ganga-Jamuna doab of India, has been a testing ground for imagining and synthesizing new conceptualizations of nature and space. This travel course explored the possibilities of representing and navigating the environment between the Ganga (Ganges) and Jamuna Rivers (known as the doab) of northern India through modes of comic representation. Comics, unlike other forms of media, require a viewer to make associations and connections across images and narratives, encouraging visual and intellectual participation in the subject. The tradition of comic books in India is one of incorporating mythology, history, and contemporary environmental issues from urbanization to pollution. Similarly, artists, architects, designers, activists, and global foundations use the medium of comic books to explore and disseminate specific ideas and morals. Students developed a series of comic books that explored the unique scales and instruments of this environment to picture a new understanding of this territory and its representation. Text, photography, advertising, cartography, as well as collage and montage served to foreground the unique spatial and cultural customs of this landscape in order to engage a larger public beyond our respective disciplines. Students traversed this space along the major infrastructural routes—namely highways, canals, rivers, and rail lines—culminating at the confluence of the Ganga and Jamuna Rivers, the most sacred space in all of Hinduism where millions come to bathe during the month of January.