ABSTRACT
Following Independence, India raced to enter the league of ‘developed’ nations, while, during 1950–1970, a new breed of economists – ‘development economists’ – were intent on guiding South Asia onto the path of ‘development’. In the development discourse, the vagabond was considered a blemish. The structural inequalities immanent in the development regime started to reflect uneasily on the visual register concerning the vagabond. This chapter discusses how the visual register – R. K. Laxman’s cartoons of the ‘common man’, and films such as Awara (1951, Hindi), Shaan (1980, Hindi), and Agantuk (1992, Bangla) – uses the trope of vagabondage as a linchpin of a social critique of the Nehruvian model of development.
