‘A line moves people’: Cartoonist Amruta Patil on the graphic narrative exhibition she has curated

A Moving Line is an exhibition at MAP Bengaluru that connects Indian comics with much older visual and narrative traditions. It is not a complete timeline. Patil describes it as a constellation of idea clusters, allowing different forms to speak to one another. Its central concern is how a moving line can carry stories across time.

Cartoonist Amruta Patil curated the exhibition. Her own career includes Kari, India’s first queer graphic novel, along with works retelling the Mahabharata. She also works across painting, graphic novels, and curation. These experiences shape the exhibition’s broad, visual approach.

The project matters because Indian comics and graphic novels lack strong archives, dedicated funding, and spaces for criticism. Patil said curating made her realise that creators are “never alone.” The exhibition therefore records a dispersed community and helps historicise its work while placing it beside older Indian storytelling forms.

A Moving Line brings together more than 250 works. Its historical reach extends across millennia, rather than focusing only on the modern history of comics. The exhibition uses this enormous span to explore recurring ways of combining images and narrative. It does not claim to be an exhaustive chronology.

Its examples include carvings from Bengaluru’s Someshwara temple, kaavad shrines, pattachitra scrolls, caricatures by the Tagore family, and the Ray family’s connection to Sandesh. It also includes Amar Chitra Katha, Tinkle, Basantak, Chacha Chaudhary, Musalman, webcomics, and graphic novels. These works represent very different periods and forms.

The scale changes how Indian comics can be understood. Instead of treating comics as an isolated modern category, the exhibition places them within a much longer history of visual storytelling. At the same time, the article warns that these forms were made for different social settings, audiences, and purposes.

The exhibition places modern Indian comics beside many older and different visual traditions. These include temple carvings from Bengaluru’s Someshwara temple, kaavad shrines, and pattachitra scrolls. It also includes social caricatures associated with the Tagore family and the Ray family’s patronage of Sandesh.

Popular printed forms appear alongside them. The exhibition includes Amar Chitra Katha, Tinkle, Bengal’s satirical Basantak, Pran’s Chacha Chaudhary, and Falah Faisal’s Musalman. It then moves toward thousands of webcomics and the continuing growth of graphic novels. The arrangement makes a broad cultural field visible.

The key point is not that all these objects are identical. They emerged from different relations of production and were experienced by different people. By placing them together, Patil asks what a shared line can reveal while preserving the tension between temple devotion, folk practice, mass publishing, and contemporary reading.

Patil believes a line can connect very different traditions because each uses words, images, or both to communicate a story. She describes the shared impulse as merging a narrative track, whether oral or written, with a visual track. This makes the connection about storytelling rather than surface appearance.

A pattachitra scroll, a temple carving, and a comic book may organize images differently, but each can guide attention through a narrative. Patil argues that these visual elements are not merely decorative. They carry meaning. The exhibition’s title also refers to the power of a written or drawn line to move people profoundly.

This approach matters because it broadens the history of comics without pretending that every form works identically. Patil says Indian graphic storytelling has evolved alongside the nation and has witnessed events unfolding in the land. The exhibition uses that shared communicative impulse to begin a conversation across time.

When these works share exhibition space, viewers are pushed to compare forms that were created for very different relationships with makers and audiences. A temple frieze may serve devotion, while a graphic novel addresses an individual reader. Folk art involves performance and presence, unlike the modern cartoonist’s usual practice.

The article highlights concrete differences in production and viewing. Patrons, artisans, and devotees experience temple art and hero stones differently from readers encountering a graphic novel. Space also matters: horizontal, vertical, and diagonal divisions guide the eye in different ways. These differences shape how stories are built and understood.

The exhibition does not settle the comparison. It holds ancient, folk, mass-produced, and contemporary works together, then asks what happens when a line runs through them. This creates productive tension. It can reveal shared storytelling impulses, but it also reminds viewers that context, purpose, and audience cannot simply be collapsed into one category.

The exhibition presents Indian visual storytelling as a long, varied development rather than a single linear invention. It begins with forms such as temple carvings, kaavad shrines, pattachitra scrolls, and Mughal miniatures. These works combined images with narrative, but they used space, repetition, and performance in ways that differ from modern comics.

Mughal miniatures could show the same figure multiple times in one composition, presenting different moments of a story together. The article compares this convention with later experiments by Marcel Duchamp and Art Spiegelman. Modern Indian traditions include caricature, Sandesh, Amar Chitra Katha, Tinkle, Basantak, Chacha Chaudhary, and Musalman.

Today, thousands of webcomics appear across platforms, while graphic novels continue to grow. Patil’s exhibition places these forms beside older traditions without claiming an exhaustive chronology. Its purpose is to show continuities and differences in how India has combined visual form with storytelling.

The article suggests that comics differ from other visual storytelling through sequential logic. Comics depend, arguably, on how separate images, spaces, and moments work together. The reader’s eye moves through a constructed arrangement, while colour, direction, and divisions of space help organize the story.

Older forms can anticipate or resemble parts of this process without being comics in the same sense. A Mughal miniature may repeat one figure to show several moments at once. Folk artists may perform presence directly. A graphic novel, by contrast, addresses a reader through its designed sequence. These differences show why visual similarity alone cannot define comics.

Original comic artworks and archives are important because they preserve evidence of how the medium developed. The article notes India’s lack of archives, dedicated funding, spaces for discourse, and criticism. Without such records, important works and connections can disappear. Exhibitions like Patil’s help create a history that future creators, readers, and critics can examine.