Drawing the Minority: Muslim Identity and Counter-Narratives in Post-2014 Indian Graphic Fiction

This paper looks closely at how Muslim identity has been drawn, written, and imagined in Indian graphic fiction since 2014, a time when public life has been thick with Islamophobia and the politics of Hindutva. It focuses on a set of works including Longform (2018, 2022), First Hand Graphic Narratives (2016, 2018), Ita Mehrotra’s Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection, Malik Sajad’s Munnu, and several independent zines and asks: what happens when the stories of a community are told in panels, speech bubbles, and ink rather than on prime-time television? Through a mix of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (to unpick the power and politics in representation) and Walter Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm Theory (to see how stories persuade through coherence and emotional truth), the paper shows how these graphic works resist the stock portrayals of Muslims found in mainstream news and cinema. They replace the familiar two-dimensional villain-or-victim script with portraits that are layered, everyday, and often defiantly political. In doing so, they don’t just reflect reality, they actively reshape the way people see, speak about, and understand Muslim lives in contemporary India. This study not only theorises how these works operate as a resistant archive within contemporary India, but also offers a transferable FDA–NPT analytical framework that can be applied to other marginalised communities in graphic fiction.