In The Hindu, a review of Amruta Patil’s graphic novel, Kari:
Patil worked as a museum security guard in Boston, guarding “mummies and medieval Madonnas”. Surrounded by the materiality of history, it is easy to see how a writer can “secularise” a religious iconology by placing it in the religion-aseptic atmosphere of a graphic novel about a lesbian or in the artificial secular atmosphere of an advertising agency or an aeroplane. “The airport was a ford, and she crossed over”: in the first row sits a bearded man with a newspaper in hand, this small frame embedded in a larger frame from where the world appears like a Cubist’s construct. Patil, through four weak lines, turns the spine of the newspaper into a cross and the bearded man to Jesus. This she does without any direct textual allusion, leaving it half-done until we reach the last phrase “crossed over” and the verb has involuntarily become a noun (“cross”) in our heads. The woman behind Patil’s Jesus could well be Gauguin’s Virgin Mary.
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