ABSTRACT
In the Indian context, the intensification of globalization in the past two decades has led to a gradual convergence of urban transformations and graphic novels. The structural and cartographical connections between comics and cities have opened new discursive spaces which are nonlinear, connective, and nomadic. These discursive spaces pose challenges to the political and neoliberal narratives which are most palpably felt in the Indian metropolis of Delhi. Masquerading as the most urban phenomena, Indian graphic novels such as Sarnath Banerjee's Corridor (2004) and Vishwajyoti Ghosh's Delhi Calm (2010) offer an embodied approach in which bodies relate to each other in time and space and present the contradictions of the urban experience as they confront each other's vulnerable and injurable beings. I will show that it is in the physical resonance of the drawn bodies and the gestalts of their compositions on the page that the biomorphic (space and time as experienced by the individual) and the social space-time converge. Following Mendieta's approach to phenomenologically conceptualize the world, I will use Banerjee's Corridor and Ghosh's Delhi Calm to depict city-images and embodied urban experiences which lend themselves to newer and critical interpretations of Delhi.
