New Energy for Indian Comics: A Qualitative Study at Comic Con India

Based on more than thirty semi-structured interviews conducted at Comic Con India in New Delhi in December 2016, this article explores the current status and perception of comics in India from the point of view of different stakeholders including publishers, artists, scholars, and fans. Studies of Indian comics are comparatively scarce in the growing comics studies field apart from historical and cultural analyses, many of them focusing only on the most prolific publisher of Indian comics, Amar Chitra Katha. This research goes beyond those studies to understand how comics are being consumed in India, the ways they are used by casual readers and scholars alike, and what is at stake if Indian libraries and cultural institutions do not collect and preserve these materials. This research brings to comics studies an understanding of the cultural status and circulation of comics in India. It also establishes for library and information studies the relative urgency of the need to address barriers to popular culture preservation in India and investigates the role academic libraries abroad could play in addressing those issues.