In the gutter: a poetics of waste in Amruta Patil’s Kari

This article examines the use of the gutter space in India’s first queer graphic narrative, Kari (2008). The article brings postcolonial studies, queer studies, eco-criticism, and the study of graphic narratives into a shared critical framework. It argues that Patil’s formal experimentation with the gutter space, and her use of the stream of consciousness form in the textual aspects of the graphic narrative bring to light an experimentative aesthetic. This innovation reconfigures the relationship between the visual and the ethical by intertwining the concepts of waste and wasted space within the gutter. The blank interstices between panels are thus reimagined not merely as traditional sites of narrative transition but as imbued with social and ecological meaning. This aesthetic manoeuvre aligns the graphic margin with the social margin. Through this layered multivalent correspondence, Kari renders visible the convergence of the marginal space of the page and the marginal identities of society – queer, postcolonial, and gendered – that inhabit the urban space of Smog City. The narrative’s recurring encounters with waste (detritus, pollution, cramped spaces, bodily abjection, and death worlds) are infused with an ethics of care. This leads to a transformation of waste from a symbol of exclusion into a point of relationality and survival. Reading Kari thus reveals how aesthetic form and ethical attention converge to articulate an alternative politics of care within the ruins and death worlds of contemporary cities, merging necropolitics with queer studies. The text thus opens a world where wasted bodies, broken ecologies, and queer subjectivities persist in the liminal space of both the textual medium and the postcolonial urban world of Mumbai. The final section reads the influence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway on the climax of this graphic narrative to highlight the persistence of resilience, life, and care despite the ruins and necropolitics of its contemporary time.