Urban comics and social justice: restructuring neoliberal spaces of Delhi in Sarnath Banerjee’s all quiet in Vikaspuri

ABSTRACT

The present paper seeks to focus on one of the prominent aspects of South Asian comics; the nature of urbanity, through a study of Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri, a narrative primarily set in Delhi. Banerjee’s Delhi is the space of the capitalists, urban planners, and corrupt policies; in short a ‘social product’, as Henri Lefebvre had formulated. The paper will examine how Delhi, in Banerjee’s comics, is symptomatic of various states of discriminatory infrastructural development, failure and violence endemic to the system, as in many other emerging South Asian cities. It will further investigate the dynamics of uneven development and urban inequality of Delhi to argue the emergence of new socio-spatial and economic trajectories in post-liberalisation India. The paper seeks to argue that through the multiple references to pulp fictions, mythic and hybrid spaces, Banerjee maps the nuanced changes in urban lifestyle and the more liberal shift towards exclusionary spatial practices such as ‘short-termism’, but also present alternative histories and regional resistance of the lived space that go against the planned space of the city. Finally, the paper will borrow insights from theorists such as Sanjay Srivastava, Ananya Roy, David Harvey, and others to argue how social and spatial justice can be achieved through urban comics that, according to Dominic Davies, helps to restructure ‘more socially and spatially just cities’.

KEYWORDS:

• Comics
• city
• space
• infrastructure
• Delhi
• neoliberal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The gradual and accelerated rate of urbanisation across the globe, whereby distinctions between rural and urban are being blurred rapidly, cities lose their materiality, unique identities becoming nodal points in technologically interconnected global territories. Lefebvre’s hypothesis of society being ‘completely urbanised’ is the crux of this phenomenon.

2. Refers to the increasing urbanisation in the under developed and developing countries. Factories and work spaces are being set up and shifted to the urban areas of the developing countries, which are witnessing massive migration to the leading cities. As a result, shanty towns; the favelas in Brazil, the bustees in India – are springing up, severely affecting the socio-economic and ecological dimension of these countries.

3. Accroding to Ghertner, ‘a world-class city is an idealised vision of a modern, privatised, and slum-free city assembled from transnationally circulating images of other so-called global cities’ (23). Aimed to draw investment and capital, such cities are made to look infrastructurally spectacular, with advanced access to urban services for valued consumers.

4. Urban informality is largely associated with slum life, poverty, and informalization of labour. But for Roy, ‘it is a mode of the production of space that connects the seemingly separated geographies of slum and suburb’ (2011b 233). For more reading, refer to AlSayyad (2004).

5. Following Srivastava, gated communities in Delhi have at least three significances; less confidence in the state led security system, the middle class’s imagined threat from the urban underclass, and formation of highly regulated private spaces to counter that threat.

6. Partha Chatterjee’s idea of civil society and political society is particularly important here to consider the segregational nature of Indian urbanisation and how cities are modelled for the citizens. While the civil society, closed urban elite groups, ‘will appear as the closed association of modern elite groups, sequestered from the wider popular life of the communities, walled up within enclaves of civic freedom and rational law’, the political society’s ‘very livelihood or habitation involve violation of the law’ (2004, 4, 40). Banerjee’s comics registers sharp criticism of such distinctions and discriminations at the level of modelling modern cities.

7. According to Hindu mythological understanding, the universe has a three layered structure consisting of swarg lok or upper world (the realm of the God), martya lok or surface world (the realm of the mortals), and patal lok or lower world (the realm of the demons). Banerjee’s reference to paatalpuri sums up a realm inhabited by (water) criminals and wrong-doers.

8. Narada is the divine sage who appears in several Hindu religious texts as an excellent musician and storyteller. Empowered to visit several realms, Vishnu Purana recounts the story of Narada’s visit to patal lok, which he described as more exquisite than the upper world or swarg.

9. A process of reading visual narratives that manipulates the eye movement to disrupt the traditional reading order. According to Postema (2013), such a process keeps one very aware that one is reading, and consequently creates awareness of the normal process of reading that usuallygoes unnoticed” (66).

10. Bharatiya Janata Party, the right-wing political party backed up by the Hinduatva organisation RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), formed the government in 2014 and since then have been an open advocate of neoliberal politics. Measures such as foreign direct investment, changing city’s names, demonetisation, massive architectural and infrastructural makeover projects have been carried out to establish the idea of ram rajya or a perfect state of affairs. These measure have largely restructured the socio-spatial and economic trajectories of the nation-states in maintaining and aggravating certain social hierarchies and inequalities.