Multi-modal engagement with Aranya: appropriating ecological awareness in Amruta Patil and Devdutt Pattanaik’s graphic tale Aranyaka: Book of the Forest

This research article will discuss the manner in which multi-modal narratology anchors ecological consciousness in Indian literary and visual practices with special reference to Amruta Patil and Devdutt Pattanaik’s Aranyaka: Book of the Forest. After mapping the different visual-verbal narrative technique and its implications in representing ecological concerns, the paper will show how Aranyaka triggers the ‘ecological thought’ of human and non-human entanglement in aranya, the ‘contact zone’ of multispecies. It further aims to reveal how the ‘transmedial’ narrative with its two tracks of narratology, involving image-narrative on one hand and word-narrative on the other, revives the life of aranya before the post-millennial city dwellers who are increasingly being removed from ‘ecological awareness’ in their highly mechanised world. The sketches accompanied by word bubbles render tactility to the entire narrative and bring together two apparently disparate entities, the human and the non-human, in the network of narratology.