Vol. 7, Issue 2, Part E (2025)

Amruta Patil’s Kari (HarperCollins, 2008) stands at the intersection of queer narrative, visual art, and Indian urban realism. Emerging as one of the earliest Indian graphic novels to foreground lesbian subjectivity, the text moves beyond the “coming-out” paradigm to inhabit the textures of queer survival and affective loneliness. Patil’s protagonist, Kari, is not a heroic figure of liberation but a weary flâneur who drifts through “Smog City,” trying to breathe in a world that has little space for her kind of love. Through the fusion of text and image, Patil visualizes what Judith Butler calls the “constitutive failure” of gender performance (Butler 33) and what Sara Ahmed theorizes as the disorientations of queer phenomenology. The novel’s murky atmosphere—its drains, smog, and bruised skylines—renders urban space as both material and psychic landscape. Reading Kari through Butler, Ahmed, and later queer thinkers such as José Esteban Muñoz allows us to understand how lesbian identity in a heteronormative Indian metropolis becomes an ongoing negotiation between visibility and erasure, embodiment and alienation, desire and survival.