ABSTRACT
The book’s penultimate chapter turns to Delhi, where contemporary graphic narratives use their infrastructural form to ‘decode’ the Indian capital in the twenty-first century. Exploring the graphic depiction of everyday urban spatial practices, especially pedestrianism and city walking, this chapter argues that India’s urban comics are able to turn Delhi ‘inside-out’, revealing its underlying circuitries and infrastructural wirings—a visual metaphor often adopted by the comics themselves. The chapter also highlights the collaborative networks underpinning much of this artistic production, describing them as urban social movements. Focusing particularly on the work of the Pao Collective, the activities of this loose collaboration of artists can be seen to constitute an infrastructural rewiring of the neoliberal privatisation of Delhi’s few remaining public spaces, processes recently entrenched by the city’s aesthetic aspirations to global status. Through close readings of the work of Sarnath Banerjee, Vishwajyoti Ghosh and the women’s comics anthology Drawing the Line, the chapter argues that Delhi’s urban comics reclaim a more expansive right to the city both through the representation and facilitation of more socially inclusive urban spaces.
