Amar Chitra Katha, being comics and described by its makers as a route to Indian roots, has replaced the stereotypical western comic book superheroes by narrating and celebrating native heroes fetched from Indian history, mythology, legends and folk culture satisfying the needs of comic-book adventurism as well as an education achieved through entertainment. The Amar Chitra Katha ‘heroic’ graphic historical biographies were not merely intended to be a source of historical knowledge about India but also an inspiration to emulate the ideals of such heroes of native history. The present paper is a study of graphic visualizations of certain episodes related to tiger-hunting in select historical titles of Amar Chitra Katha. The paper attempts to critically examine the politics of visual aesthetics and graphic narration of historical facts related to the tiger- hunting available in such graphic historical biographies and thereby tries to diagnose whether such historical representations need to be analyzed with regard to the methodologies of representation involving postcolonial nationalist writing back or communal stereotyping and rewritten according to the pressing needs of the contemporary world concerning erosion of wildlife and anthropogenic natural disorder.

Deviating from commonplace comicbook superheroisms, recent comicbook graphic narrations of historical and statistical data promise to produce a humanization and visualization that apart from informing the audience about social realities of past and present manage also to stimulate an aesthetic response and emotionally attached sensitization. Based on statistical data provided in Indian Exclusion Report, 2015, ‘Hard Times’ by Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura is a comic that utilizes graphic language in order to voice concerns about struggles of working-class women and their exclusions. While it directly presents a literary and fictional narrative involving a young, widowed woman forced to work in the garments’ factory in the city and the challenges she faces in her workplace, it acts as a prologue to a graphic historical survey and data visualization of the general condition of women at workplaces and their position in the society at large. The present paper is a study of the ideologies and visual stylistics of graphic history and data visualization available in the fictional narrative in ‘Hard Times’ directed towards an attempt at identifying the processes of de-elitization of the comicbook narration and its ability to visualize multiple layers of personal and public history, historical and statistical data, the women’s spoken, unspoken, marginalized and unspeakable experiences, which often deviate from officially, academically and alphabetically mediated histories and statistics.