Lands that make us: decoding maps, landscapes, and identities in Aaniya Asrani’s Portraits of Exile

ABSTRACT The question of Tibetan refugees retains a unique matrix in world history. Though many Tibetans have fled from their motherland and settled in various parts of the world, they still believe themselves to be Tibetan citizens. Aaniya Asrani, through her three-part graphic non-fiction series Portraits of Exile, looks at the lives of Tibetans in exile residing in Bylakuppe. It is a geoGraphic novel that combines the spatial qualities of comics with geographical methods and is the first graphic narrative produced in India concerning the Tibetan experience. Asrani uses landscapes as fabrics for expressing the truth of refugeehood, and cultural trauma recalled through individual experiences. The paper attempts to look at Asrani’s mapping project from the perspective of Geohumanities; her use of maps, structuring of landscapes, and assertion of identities is looked upon using the lens of narrative cartography, cultural geography, and place identity, respectively.