1st Edition

Superheroes in Indian Comics Deliberations from Anthropology

By Roma Chatterji, Amaan Shreyas Copyright 2026
220 Pages 9 Color & 53 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge India

220 Pages 9 Color & 53 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge India

220 Pages 9 Color & 53 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge India

There is a prevailing sense that commercial Superhero Comics cannot be serious objects of academic enquiry. It is the hallowed graphic novel, with its auteur/author, for which serious work is reserved. This volume presents the work of three publishing houses who publish Superhero Comics in Delhi and Mumbai. It analyses their techniques of narration associated with the serial publication of... Read more

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Indian superhero comics

1 Comics for commerce: The conceptual case for commercial superhero comics and visual storytelling 

2 Nagraj – making a superhero 

3 Superheroes, myths, and horror fiction

4 The limits of the superhero myth

5 Comic book images

6 Locating the IP: Whose comic is it, anyway?

7 The future of Indian comics

Appendix

References

Index

Biography

Roma Chatterji retired as Professor of Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University in 2021, and is currently Visiting Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence. Her publications include Writing Identities: Folk Culture and the Performative Traditions in Purulia, West Bengal (2009); Speaking with Pictures: Folk Art and the Narrative Tradition in India (2012); Graphic Narratives and the Mythological Imagination in India (2019); (with Deepak Mehta) Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life (2007). She has also edited Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance (2014) and (with Deepak Mehta) Riot Discourses (2007).

Amaan Shreyas is Practising Advocate at the Supreme Court of India and the High Court of Delhi. He completed an M.Phil in Sociology with a dissertation on fake news in India at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics and an LLM from Columbia University. Amaan was also an undergraduate Writing Fellow at Ashoka University. He is interested in the circulation of narrative forms in online media ecologies and has published (with Roma Chatterji) "Seriality and Millennial Fandom in the Indian Superhero Comic Nagraj" in the Journal of Graphic Novel and Comics, 2021.