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

Abstract

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’.