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Abstact
This article argues that comics production in India should be configured as a collaborative artistic endeavour that visualizes Delhi’s segregationist infrastructure, claiming a right to the city through the representation and facilitation of more socially inclusive urban spaces. Through a discussion of the work of three of the Pao Collective’s founding members – Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh – it argues that the group, as for other comics collectives in cities across the world, should be understood as a networked urban social movement. Their graphic narratives and comics art counter the proliferating segregation and uneven development of neo-liberal Delhi by depicting and diagnosing urban violence. Meanwhile, their collaborative production processes and socialized consumption practices, and the radical comix traditions on which these movements draw (and which are sometimes occluded by the label “Indian Graphic Novel”) create socially networked and politically active spaces that resist the divisions marking Delhi’s contemporary urban fabric.
Notes
1. The comic was funded by the Sarai Programme at Delhi’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Though there was a limited print run, the comic is still available online in Sarai's archives to download as a free PDF document: http://archive.sarai.net/items/show/10. Though its material circulation is therefore difficult to trace, these collaborative production processes disavow formal, profit-oriented marketplaces and exploit the synergies – as do a number of Sarai's commissioned projects – between online and offline urban space.
2. Ghosh’s allusion to self-censorship further invokes the Comics Code, which was in fact created by the comics industry to protect itself from legal regulation by external state organizations (Wolk Citation2007, 38).