Paratext city as text:new strategies in reading (and mapping) in Sarnath Banerjee’s The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers

ABSTRACT

Gérard Genette famously argued ‘there does not exist, and there never existed, a text without paratext’ (Genette, 263). Yet, Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic narrative The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers presents itself as a case that veers away from Genette’s claims. Upon closer inspection, the book reveals itself to be a series of paratextual information about a text that, in fact, does not exist. How then must one read such a book? And how must one map the city within the book (Calcutta, no)? Banerjee engages with the city by way of paratexts as well. This paper explores Banerjee’s endeavours to transform existing theories and his attempts to invent new ones as they serve as an invitation to ‘read’ his graphic narrative – a network of paratexts for one or more invisible texts – and the ramifications this has for the way in which we think of the act of ‘reading’ as a whole, as well as encouraging a reconsideration of how the contemporary postcolonial urban is mapped.

KEYWORDS:

• Sarnath Banerjee
• postcolonial urbanism
• paratexts
• reading
• mapping
• decolonial thought

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

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Notes

1. Even thought the State government officially changed the city’s name to Kolkata in 2001 in an attempt to reflect the pronunciation of the Bengali name of the city, I have opted to call it Calcutta for the course of this essay because it engages with a history that predates its new nomenclature.

2. Calcutta, or Kolkata as it is called now, like many other major urban centres in India has had distinct precolonial, colonial and postcolonial histories that culminate in their unique contemporaneity. The colonial port city emerged out of the coming together of precolonial villages and became the capital of British India for some time. In the twentieth century, both during the colonial rule and afterwards, it has been the centre of some of the most intense debates around nationalism, modernism, radical politics, and refugee hood. The partition of India in 1947 as well as the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 both left last impacts on the city. These forces of history has been captured in the city’s material spaces, its cultural manifestations, and its very urban fabric. Reading cultural texts about Calcutta/Kolkata is often a way to unravel the palimpsestic layered of its myriad histories.

3. In his book Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi, Ghertner discusses how the ‘project of world-class city making’ in the South Asian city (specifically Delhi, in his case) ‘is marked by a strong normative drive to reach globally indexed targets of development: to host prestigious international events, to house Fortune 500 companies, and to offer lifestyles capable of attracting global consumer classes. … [T]his project transformed the long-standing postcolonial anxiety around catching up – the sense of temporal lag imposed first by colonialism and then the gradualism of fifty years of modernist planning after Independence – into a far bolder fantasy futurism’(8). While his book focuses on Delhi, the argument can be extended to other metropolitan cities in South Asia including Calcutta – now called Kolkata – as well. However, in Calcutta’s case, this transformative drive towards a world class state of development has come later than in other cities like Delhi.

4. I will be referring to it by its full name to distinguish this book-within-the book from BOWC, Banerjee’s graphic narrative.

5. The Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist party currently in power in India, have renamed multiple cities, streets, museums, and architectural landmarks in an effort to obliterate Islamic histories. In certain states, the history syllabi in the higher secondary level are dropping key moments from Indian history as well. Sarnath Banerjee himself responds to this crisis in an interview, identifying it as ‘important issue currently in India’ (Asokan).

For more information, see:

Pallavi Pundir, ‘Streets, Buildings, Museums: India is on a Name Changing Spree to Erase the Mughal History.’ Vice World News. 17 September 2020. <https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxz83/india-is-changing-names-of-streets-museums-cities-to-erase-mughal-history>

Gaurav Das. ‘“Rewriting History”: Assam Higher Secondary Council Criticized for Dropping Key Topics.’ TheWire.in. 26 September 2020. https://thewire.in/education/rewriting-history-assam-higher-secondary-council-syllabus-cut-covid-19.

6. For Banerjee’s own art, he admits to be drawing from many influences: “Everything you draw is influenced. It’s like yoghurt. You need a little bit to start the next batch. So there were a lot of people. [Sooni] Taraporevala has been a very strong influence because she had the ability to use her camera to probe into the deeper, funnier, more eccentric aspects of people. Her photos are so narrative. I absolutely love her work.

If I start listing my influences our interview will never end. But I’ll try to tell you some people whom I can immediately think of. There’s of course William Blake, and Goya. And Albrecht Dürer. These are the westerners that I’m absolutely fascinated by. Tintin, without any doubt. In terms of cinema, Alain Resnais; his visual technique, his way of telling stories was very important. Night and Fog is an amazing film.” (Asokan)

So, in effect, every frame of his art also contain the paratextual link to the influences that lead to his specific visual idiom.

7. See Walter Benjamin. ‘The Storyteller’. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rudrani Gangopadhyay

Rudrani Gangopadhyay is a doctoral candidate at the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Her doctoral research is on the media urbanisms in post-globalized India. Rudrani’s research interests include the urban studies, spectrality studies, and visual cultures in the context of South Asia. She has been published in the MELOW Journal of World Literature, the Women’s Studies Quarterly, as well as in the Bloomsbury volume Global Modernists on Modernism. She has forthcoming publications in the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, and the Routledge volume on Historicizing Myths in Contemporary India: Cinematic and Nationalist Agendas. At Rutgers, Rudrani is also the graduate coordinator for the Urban Humanities Working Group housed at the Center for Cultural Analysis and the Critical Translation Studies Initiative.