SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW

https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2018.1509536

Graphic Delhi: Narrating the Indian Emergency,

1975–1977 in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm
Preeti Singh
Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper examines the representation of the national Emergency Received 14 May 2018
(1975–1977) imposed by Indira Gandhi through the lens of Accepted 23 July 2018
Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s graphic novel Delhi Calm (2010). Declared on
KEYWORDS
June 25, the “Emergency” refers to the 21-month period when con-
Delhi; Indian Emergency;
stitutional rights were suspended in India, and coercive measures urban comics; Vishwajyoti
brought into play. Drawing insights from postcolonial studies, Ghosh; Indian graphic novel
scholarship on comics and urban literature, I look at how the
spatial form of comics complicates the urban politics of the
Emergency. I delve into the construction of the political subjecti-
vities of Delhi’s citizens through their relationship with the every-
day space of the city to expand on the ways in which the graphic
novel makes possible the representation of urban democracy. To
this end, my paper explores the situatedness of Indian graphic
narratives within discourses of the popular, and the space that the
genre creates for the representation of Indian democracy as a
discourse of the “popular.” Through a close reading of Ghosh’s
multimodal narrative and its engagement with various forms of
mass media such as the radio, print, advertisements, propaganda
posters, and dramatic performance, I look at how the text compli-
cates the narration of time and history of the period. By contextu-
alizing Delhi Calm within the history of the graphic protests of the
Emergency years, this paper demonstrates how the graphic novel
reinvents itself to narrate the history, not only of the period, but
also of the cultural forms that played a significant role in mediating
the Emergency and the subjectivities of its leaders and citizens.

The state of Emergency in India imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi from
1975 to 1977 remains one of the most memorialized events in the postcolonial history
of the nation. One frequently hears references to the Emergency in the critical
moments of the country’s democracy as echoes of the event persist in the socio-polit-
ical and cultural spheres of postcolonial India. Prose accounts of the Emergency
abound, yet some of the most striking criticism of the period has been visual in
nature, with cartoons, caricatures, and other forms of graphic protest at the forefront
of cultural resistance during the 21 months1 of extreme censorship and surveillance.

CONTACT Preeti Singh [email protected] Department of English, The Ohio State University, Room Number
421, Denney Hall, Annie and John Glenn Avenue, Columbus, 43210 OH, USA
ß 2018 South Asian Literary Association
2 P. SINGH

Cartoonists such as Abu Abraham and O.V. Vijayan routinely satirized the excesses
of the period. Abraham’s comic strip “The Private View” and his cartoons, now
anthologized in The Games of Emergency, were a trenchant critique of the establish-
ment, and focused specifically on press censorship and the abuse of presidential ordi-
nances (Devadawson 2014, 145). Vijayan’s cartoons and prose writings, collected in
Tragic Idiom, complicate the relationship between pictorial satire and forms of gov-
ernance (Devadawson 2014, 172). The most recent visual account of the Emergency
is Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s graphic novel Delhi Calm that documents the period through
the eyes of its narrator Vibhuti Prasad (VP). Published in 2010, Delhi Calm strategic-
ally uses the graphic form to narrate the media saturated history of post-independence
India. Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherjee dwell on the connections between postcolonial
textualities and public cultures by “linking forms of the popular to … problematics of
the public sphere” noting that “the reconstitution of new visual grammars, iconographies
and performances appear central to the project of postcolonial public cultures” (Mehta
and Mukherjee 2015, 4). Practitioners of the long-form graphic narrative in India,2 have
grappled with the Indian public sphere, through visual documentations of the Narmada
Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Mission), the many partitions of India, dystopian
accounts of water shortage in Delhi, and the Indian Emergency. While tapping into the
history of pictorial satire and cartooning in India, these artists also borrow from
Western practitioners of the form, yet rather than labor under this anxiety of influence,
graphic artists like Ghosh attempt to develop a distinctively Indian idiom for the form.
Interestingly, this vernacularizing of the graphic narrative for Ghosh is rooted specifically
in the urban life of Delhi whose “streets, transportation and food habits” make the nar-
rative “unapologetically Indian” (Holmberg 2013).
This paper examines the narration of the Emergency in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s graphic
novel Delhi Calm. While cultural material on the Emergency abounds, my choice of the
graphic novel as a representative form is motivated by two interrelated factors. First, I
am interested in the spatial dynamics of the comics form,3 and the myriad ways in
which it informs the representation of the urban politics of the Emergency. I look at
how the “urban form” of comics complicates/enables the narration of time and history
during the period. Second, I explore the situatedness of contemporary Indian graphic
narratives in English within discourses of the popular, and the space that the genre cre-
ates for the representation of Indian democracy as a discourse of the “popular.” In thus
narrating the spatial-temporal dynamics of the Indian public sphere during the
Emergency, how does the graphic novel reinvent itself to narrate the history, not only
of the period, but also of the cultural forms that played a significant role in mediating
the Emergency and the subjectivities of its leaders and citizens?

“Delhi, an Installation, a Facade”: Urban Form During the Emergency

At the center of Ghosh’s graphic novel stands Delhi or “Powerpolis.” “Being here”
claims the narrator, “is a necessity, not a compromise. Connections, clubs, circles, cir-
cuits, opportunities” (Ghosh 2010, 7) make the city, a fertile subject for the exercise of
power. And yet, the narrator’s city is not the “Delhi of white Ambassadors, leather brief-
cases, English-speaking convent schools and stable salaries,” instead “it is a city of
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 3

pot-bellied enterprises and petty cash, fueled by insecurity” (Ghosh 2010, 10). These
oppositions between class and language resonate throughout the narrative, with accessi-
bility to the city informing the characters’ varying access to power. David Harvey writes
how the very process of urbanization is a class phenomenon where “the surplus has
been extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while control over the use of sur-
plus typically lies in the hands of the few.” In this context of unequal power and accessi-
bility, the “right to the city” lies in the citizen’s ability to “claim some kind of shaping
power over the process of urbanization” (Harvey 2012, 5). Delhi Calm is preoccupied
with ways in which the ordinary citizen charts the official territory of the city, where
the knowledge of “shortcuts” makes it possible for the narrator to negotiate with struc-
tures of surveillance within an authoritative state apparatus.
Abhay Sardesai, commenting on the contemporary scene of the graphic narrative
in India, reads them as “biographies of the cities they are set in” (Sardesai 2013).
While a number of these narratives take up the city as the location for their plot and
action, almost all of them deal with issues peculiar to urbanity. One could cite an
entire oeuvre of graphic narratives with the city as a primary protagonist. Naseer
Ahmed and Saurabh Singh’s Kashmir Pending (2007), Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi
Calm (2010), Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor (2004) and the Barn Owl’s Wondrous
Capers (2007), Amruta Patil’s Kari (2008), and Malik Sajad’s Munnu (2015) are
symptomatic examples of urban literature. As graphic reportage, surrealist trave-
logues, and graphic allegories of protest, these long-form narratives are fictions of
postcolonial cities – Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai, and Srinagar. Emma Dawson
Varughese locates the origins of Indian graphic narratives within the context of the
growth and development of the Indian publishing industry in the post-millenial
moment. “How do patterns of power and visuality in the Indian graphic novel inter-
mesh with the India of today?” (Varughese 2018, x).4 she asks. I argue that patterns
of seeing in the Indian graphic novel can be located directly within the urban mod-
ernity of Indian cities like Delhi that emerges as a site of disorientation and disorder
in the post-liberalization era (Sundaram 2010, 12–13).
Why is it that comic strips and graphic novels across the world obsessed with rep-
resentations of the city to the extent that the latter occupies a more or less central
position in the former? Comics scholars have noted repeatedly that the semiology of
comics is applicable to urban spaces too, where comic book graphics are visible in
such symbols such as road signs, signage, graffiti, and advertising. Scott McCloud in
his pioneering study of the comics form defines comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and
other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information or to produce
an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud 1994, 9). Conscious, however, of the
applicability of this definition to both comics and films, McCloud cites the most sig-
nificant point of distinction between the two. “Space does for comics, what time does
for film” (McCloud 1994, 7) renders spatiality central to meaning making in comics,
just as temporality is to film. In the Introduction to their book, Comics and the City:
Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence, Ahrens and Meteling point out
The reflective and self-reflective aspect of comics and the modern city … abilities of the
medium as well as cityscapes to reflect on the conditions of their historical origin in the
4 P. SINGH

mass culture of urban modernity, their cultural and medial determinations; their spatial
particularities in style, content and representation. (Ahrens and Meteling 2010, 1)
Furthermore, the comics medium, that is, the “intermingling of images and words”
reflects a “semiotic shift occurring in the urban living space at the turn of the cen-
tury” (Balzer 2010, 25). Thus making comics a suitable medium for the examination
of postcolonial urban modernities.
Delhi Calm taps into the graphic narrative’s potential for the representation of
urban modernity by portraying how Delhi and discourses of modernity were at the
center of authoritarian practices during the Emergency. The fascination of Jagmohan,
the president of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), with the “demolition-
artist” and “tyrant-urban planner” (Merrifield 2000), Baron-Georges Haussmann is
well-documented. Haussmann the master architect, commissioned by Emperor
Napoleon III, single-handedly planned the large-scale modernization of Paris, which
entailed not only a transformation of urban infrastructures, but also the construction
of a whole new urban way of life and a new kind of urban persona (Harvey 2012, 9).
Yet this process of transformation was a violent one, where the architect took on the
role of the “autocratic vandal, who ripped the historic heart out of Paris, drawing his
boulevard through the city slums to help the French army crush popular uprisings”
(Willsher 2016). The program for the so-called beautification of Delhi led to large-
scale demolitions of slums, houses, and shops in different parts of the city and the
nearby villages, causing displacement of more than 70 000 people in the region
(Tarlo 2003, 4). It is noteworthy that while the sphere of culture experienced wide-
spread policing during the Emergency, policies of governance in the cityscape also
operated through an aesthetic logic. D. Asher Ghertner talks about city-planning as
an aesthetic mode of governing by pointing out how aesthetic judgements are central
to the delineation of state policy and practice (Ghertner 2011, 279). This cultural
logic of “beautification” in city governance, propagated through the discourse of
development and planning was central to Indira Gandhi’s policies pertaining to Delhi
and their echoes continue to be heard today, with such schemes as the Swacch Bharat
Abhiyaan5 deploying the rhetoric of a “Shining India” for the future. Jagmohan
hoped to do for Delhi, what Haussmann had done for Paris (Guha 2007, 511). In-
charge of slum clearance and resettlement during the Emergency, he was invested in
the romanticizing of the city’s history with complete disregard for the everyday lives
of the poor. In his book Rebuilding Shahjehanabad (Jagmohan 1975, x–xi), Jagmohan
describes the prominently poor, Muslim locality that faced widespread violence as a
“sick, shattered and dismembered city,” “a symbol of national shame.” The rebuilding
of this locality for Jagmohan could not be “an act of isolated civic reform. It involves
the vaster task of restructuring the fundamental forces that govern the lives of peo-
ple” (Pati 2014, 5). This relationship between state imposed development and surveil-
lance in the private lives of people, also informed the systematic project of
sterilization, aimed towards the poorest and most underprivileged sections of the city.
With “Hum Do, Humare Do” as its motto, the volunteers for the sterilization pro-
gram coerced men to agree to a vasectomy for small monetary benefits.
Delhi Calm devotes eight consecutive page-length panels to the slum demolitions
carried out in Delhi. The colloquial speech balloons make promises of urban
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 5

transformation, proclaiming that “Delhi will be Paris soon,” as the “Smiling Saviors,”
masked agents of the government, announce plans of demolition: “You will be
delighted to learn that the government and the commissioner have decided to make
this city sparkle! To make Delhi better than Paris! They’ve decided to move the
machines of progress into your undesirable homes” (Ghosh 2010, 191). These
machines work at two levels in the consecutive panels. On one hand, the bulldozers
descend on the people in a remarkable visual representation of progress imposed
from above, and on the other hand, one of the characters stands on the rubble of his
home, holding a radio, listening to the cricket commentary for a game featuring
India and West Indies. While the bulldozer and the radio both stand as icons of
modernity, the cricket commentary serves to highlight and counter the nationalist
narrative of progress and speed.6 Moreover, comic conventions make space for carica-
ture within the representational apparatus of the novel. Delhi Calm utilizes these con-
ventions to render ironic the high-handed rhetoric of modernization during the
Emergency, creating a sense of distance and critique. This verbal irony, finds its vis-
ual accompaniment in the use of masks, as an apparatus of defamiliarization and
irony. The “Smiling Saviors,” contrary to their name, bring news of violence and
destruction to the slums of Delhi, and are an apt visual rendition of the celebratory
rhetoric of modernization and progress that characterizes authoritarianism.
Henri Lefebvre points out how “simultaneity” as opposed to “repetition” is a defin-
ing trait of the urban. “The existence of simultaneity in events, perceptions and ele-
ments of a whole” (Lefebvre 1996, 137), applies unmistakably to the form of the
comic book as montage. A single panel in the comic book can include a multitude of
voices, perspectives, and attitudes existing simultaneously. Sergei Eisenstein in his
“Dialectical Approaches to Film Form” defines montage as an “idea that arises from
the collision of independent shot-shots, even opposite to one another.” This concep-
tion of montage based on Eisenstein’s “dramatic principle” taps into his dialectical
theory of film form which allows for the simultaneous co-existence and representa-
tion of opposing views (Eisenstein 1977). Jason Dittmer discusses this relationship
between comics and urbanities, materialized in the form of montage by noting how
comic book visualities hold out the possibility of introducing a new optical uncon-
scious to geography, one that holds opportunities for more plural, flexible narratives,
to emerge from a singular montage (Dittmer 2010, 223). The comic form as urban
montage then becomes a fertile ground for the staging of democracy, allowing the
representation of politics not only through the depiction of myriad political voices,
but also their constructed mediation through a variety of urban media.
The demolition panels are representative examples of a visual palimpsest on
account of their simultaneous depiction of various media – government propaganda
blaring through loud speakers, the continuous stream of cricket commentary, and
excerpts from print media like the newspaper and legal reports such as the Shah
Commission report of 1989 that delved into the horrors and myriad crimes of the
Emergency. This simultaneous existence of media is accompanied by a juxtaposition
of perspectives – the government’s narrative of progress, the dialogue on ethics
between Parvez and Sabrina disguised as the Smiling Saviors, and the people’s own
narratives of trauma and shock at this sudden violence. At the center of the last
6 P. SINGH

page-length panel, stands a woman caught amidst the rubble of her home and the
barbed wires, crying, “Welcome to the City of Paris!” in stark contrast to the govern-
ment propaganda represented through visual renditions of official documents, that
deny any coercion or violence in the Delhi beautification scheme. The state narrative
claim that “not a single policeman was employed … Official machinery did not
involve itself at all in the shifting” (Ghosh 2010, 194) stands in contrast to the stark
violence of the images. Comic scholars note how the tension between a given plot
and its verbal and pictorial representation constitutes the field of signification for
comics. From its title that highlights the irony of a “calm” Delhi during its most tur-
bulent years, to the eight panels of slum demolition, Ghosh’s novel constantly uses
the contrast between words, plot, and images to stage the visible and invisible history
of violence, during the Emergency years.
While the representation of violence remains central to the demolition panels,
Ghosh’s narrative portrays the looming threat in the lives of Delhi’s citizens, through
its documentation of the everyday life of the city and those who live at its margins.
Delhi Calm begins by situating the individual at the center of political conflict. The
first panel portrays the protagonist Vibhuti Prasad (VP), sitting on a chair, reading
the newspaper, with a map of the world under his feet. Prasad goes on to recount his
morning rituals, “I am an early riser. To get up before the city wakes, suits me”
(Ghosh 2010, 2). Both the image and the text that accompanies it put the protago-
nist’s subjectivity in conversation with the space of the city. This would be the first,
in the many instances of the inclusion of maps in the novel. Theoreticians of map-
ping have repeatedly stressed that the drawing of maps is an exercise in power.
Roland Barthes in his essay “Semiology and the Urban” notes how modern cartog-
raphy is a “kind of obliteration, of censorship that objectivity has imposed on signi-
fication” (Barthes 1997, 159). He goes on to point out, that the oldest maps of the
world were based on oppositions, “hot lands and cold lands, known and unknown
lands … and the opposition between men on one hand and monsters and chimaer-
eas on the other hand” (Barthes 1997, 159). The mapping of power requires a set of
oppositional subjectivities, the necessity of the self and its other that stake their claim
to a territory. The graphic form tampers consistently with this exercise of power, by
allowing the comic artist to inscribe herself in the official narratives represented by
the map, thus writing the everyday in state narratives of space.7 The multimodal
form of the graphic novel allows for the representation of this subjective mapping of
the city, through the inclusion of maps redrawn by the author-artist. Ghosh recog-
nizes the uses of alternative mapping, and the challenge it poses to the discourse of
power in the practice of cartography. In an interview with Ryan Holmgren, he reveals
the “mapping exercises” that he has conducted with migrant industrial workers in
Gurgaon. Gathering a group of workers on a Sunday, he asks them to draw subjective
maps of their homes
They usually draw a map of their houses from memory … They present their map to
the rest of us and tell a story around it. We have been collecting these maps. We now
have five hundred of them. It’s a nice way to get to know where these people come
from. There are pieces that are genuine, there are pieces that are fake, there are pieces
that are copied from one another. We’ve had sessions in which all the maps look alike.
It’s a great window into their world.
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 7

These windows into the workers’ world open into Gurgaon, the satellite metropolis
that has come up on the outskirts of Delhi in the past two decades. The creation of
such a metropolis is in fact directly responsible for the production of both migrant
and revolutionary subjectivities in the region that has become the center of repressive
corporate policies, extreme urban segregation, and workers’ rebellion. Mapping in
Delhi Calm follows a similar pattern of recording the subjectivities of the citizens
through the representation of the embodied experience of place.
Some of the most prominent graphic narratives of the past few decades feature
maps redrawn by the artist, to challenge official narratives of colonialism and ter-
ritoriality. In Delhi Calm, the imposition of pencil sketches highlighting the short
cuts that the citizens adopt and the insertion of drawings of people who are
affected by state altered geography, allow for an alternative narrative of space,
from the point of view of the citizens who occupy them. Two page-length panels
consisting of a stenciled cut of a topographical map of Delhi are the prime
instance of mapping in Ghosh’s novel (Ghosh 2010, 58–59). Depicting the army
with their guns and telescopes, both pages portray the military looking down at
the peasants, while the latter look up in various poses of defiance, anger, and fear.
The map continues on to the next page, where the figures of Jayaprakash Narayan,
Sanjay Gandhi and many others central to the politics of the Emergency are
inscribed within its frame (Figure 1).
A road runs through the map, representing the division between the agents of state
sanctioned violence and those at its receiving end, denoting the fissures that exist
between the people, their leaders and those that mediate structures of power in a
democracy. Military boots fly amidst the clouds, as a statue of Gandhi dots the land-
scape of Delhi. I would argue that the graphic artist’s redrawn maps become key
instances of simultaneously representing and interrupting the dynamics of power that
characterized the period. Moreover, these map palimpsests insert the citizen’s subject-
ivity within the geographical limits of the nation.
The road running through the map traces the passage of a toy car, and is a com-
pliment to another panel that portrays Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay or the Prince in
the novel playing with his toy car at home (Ghosh 2010, 153). This panel is a refer-
ence to Sanjay Gandhi’s obsession with the idea of launching his own small private
car for the common citizen in the market. The Maruti car was seen as the pet project
of Sanjay Gandhi, who after having apprenticed with Rolls Royce in England,
returned in 1968 and took on the project of starting a small private car. The acquisi-
tion of resources was often high handed, with farmers’ land forcibly bought off at
throw-away prices and small traders forced into buying shares of the company. The
“tale of Maruti,” Coomi Kapoor writes in her book Emergency: A Personal History, “is
replete with examples of extortion, string pulling to bend rules, and blackmail”
(Kapoor 2015). The Shah Commission established to investigate into the excesses of
the Emergency, concluded that the demolitions in Delhi were intended to benefit
Sanjay Gandhi, his cronies and relations, with “no better justification for the oper-
ation than that the structures in question caused Sanjay Gandhi to slow down his car,
as he drove to his Maruti factory or to his mother’s farmhouse in Mehrauli” (“The
Wrecking of Delhi” 1978, 1019). Ghosh caricatures Sanjay as the “prince,” and while
8 P. SINGH

Figure 1. Ghosh (2010, 58).

he remains absent from the map, the toy car, inscribes the history of Maruti, in the
violent urban politics of the Emergency years.
While the state turned legal records into works of fiction, Delhi Calm provides the
reader with semi-testimonial accounts of the Emergency years. Ghosh portrays the
common man in a shifting relationship with centers of power by giving us forms of
testimony that make visible the relationship between the state and its subjects. I want
to emphasize how the narration of testimony and witnessing in Delhi Calm is medi-
ated specifically through urban markers. Windows of houses and buses are repre-
sented in the form of a comic panel through which the protagonist looks at the
unfolding of events in the wake of the Emergency. At the beginning of the novel, a
page-length panel shows Vibhuti Prasad looking down upon the city, with the speech
balloons voicing the contradictory discourses emerging from the prevailing political
situation. The difference in the size of speech balloons in the panel is telling, for the
loudest one proclaims the situation peaceful thus contradicting the actual state of
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 9

Figure 2. Ghosh (2010, 5).

affairs of increased surveillance, suspension of rights, and the discourse of national

security. The “unique, spatial grammar of gutter, grids and panels suggestive of
architecture” (Chute 2016, 4) allows for the spatial representation of the relationship
between the public and private space by inscribing the narrator-protagonist within a
frame that could be read as symptomatic of the private sphere, while the public
sphere remains scattered, uncontained, both in the formal and political sense of the
term. In a similar representation, Delhi’s citizens are portrayed through the windows
of a bus (Figure 2) (Ghosh 2010, 5). The panel is divided into three horizontal parts.
The upper segment reads “Daftar” (office), and the lower part carries instructions
“Keep Quiet. Keep Distance.” The medium part of the panel represents the office
goers with gags. These panels, symbolic of the censorship that the Emergency
imposed on people, counter the discourse of the latter as a situation necessitated by
popular demand. The precariousness of life during the Emergency gets imposed on
the urbanscape too. The city as VP puts it, “stares at me suspiciously as a new neigh-
bor, not sure whether to smile but constantly gauging. I am surrounded by invisible
eyes … trailing me step by step” (Ghosh 2010, 9). The city thus, becomes a mirror
of its citizen-subject, reflecting his insecurities, precariousness, and fear. Through this
association, it is rendered into a subject in its own right.
10 P. SINGH

“This is a Democracy!”: Performing “New India” on the Streets

In a number of panels featuring the day after the declaration of Emergency, the pro-
tagonist Vibhuti Prasad finds himself in a disturbing landscape dotted with “Smiling
Saviors.” Visually, the smiling saviors are represented as part human, part puppet,
agents of the government, dedicated to “ensuring a healthy, smiling nation.” Asking
citizens to “keep smiling and stay disciplined,” the masked men promise to be “just
around the corner for any help you may need” (Ghosh 2010, 13). Within the same
panels, Vibhuti Prasad converses with the statue of a “freedom fighter,” convinced
that it is staring at him. Accusing him for being “a mute performer on state dole,
parroting its meticulously crafted messages,” VP is plagued by the sense of being
watched in the spaces that were once familiar to him. The masked and gagged citi-
zens dotting the urban landscape of Delhi create a sense of political and personal
defamiliarization. This relationship between the now unfamiliar city and its precar-
ious subjects is portrayed through a variety of formal features. Ghosh utilizes the
multimodal structure of the graphic novel to include a variety of media – posters,
truck art, bus tickets, newspapers, and air balloons that make up the demos in the
urban landscape. At the same time, the use of masks to represent the agents of the
state is a play on the trope, most likely familiar to the reader of comics, through Alan
Moore’s iconic V for Vendetta (Moore et al. 1989), where the protagonist V, a
masked fighter, takes up arms against a totalitarian government in futuristic Britain.
Ghosh, on the other hand, complicates the role of the hero/superhero, who in comic
convention, plays both the savior and the vigilante. Paul Williams and James Lyons
propose the term “demo-graphics” to describe the interrelationship between democ-
racy and graphic narratives, and the myriad ways in which the latter enables the rep-
resentation of the “demos” as the space of the everyday (Nayar 2015). I want to
emphasize, that while the form of the graphic novel makes possible the representation
of the “demos,” the comic genre conventions and production politics of the graphic
novel, especially in India, play a major role not only in the representation of democ-
racy, but also in the production of the myriad subjectivities of its citizens-subjects.
The graphic novel’s relationship with democracy may be understood in terms of
its positioning within the discourse of the popular. Charles Hatfield in his study of
comics subculture notes how the graphic novel helped comics gain scholarly legitim-
ization and thus stands poised at the margins/subculture and the academia, problem-
atizing any reductive assertions about the form’s democratic nature (Hatfield 2005,
xi–xii). Within postcolonial discourse, the Indian graphic novel is seen as an alternate
to the discourses of tradition, often associated with the popular Amar Chitra Katha
comics. However, Mehta and Mukherjee propose Ranajit Guha’s idea of the “third
idiom” as an alternative to the polarizing discourses of tradition and modernity, and
emphasize on the need to read South Asian popular culture as part of the self-repre-
sentation of those who sought to depict their tradition as being defiantly resistant
to change (Dalmia and Sadana 2012, 4). The history of political cartooning and
caricature in India is an excellent example of the third idiom. OV Vijayan, one of
India’s best-known cartoonist, notes how Indian political caricature was an exotic
import of Western political caricature. He writes
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 11

The genesis of our newspapers is Western and colonial. The moral code of Bentick,
which outlived its noble intentions, is still pursuing us as a colonial liability. David Low
straddled the British media like a colossus during the eventful years of the Second
World War. It was but natural that the colossus of the British media became our
colossus too. A historical cartoon within a cartoon. (Vijayan 2006, 12)
For this reason, writes Vijayan, the responsibility of the Indian cartoonist to be at
once politically meaningful, and skeptical of herself, is greater than the Western car-
toonist, and the failure to do so, risks our media into becoming an accomplice in
colonialist traditions.
These formal disjunctions between “high culture” versus “popular culture” or
between “indigenous” versus “colonial art,” play out in the Indian graphic novel, at
the level of the subjectivity of its characters, who stand in the liminal space of the
demos and the state, and whose relationship with the system remains unpredictably
fluid.8 I call such characters the “rogue” subject of the Indian graphic novel, borrow-
ing from Derrida’s theorization of rogue democracy and its subjects (Derrida 2005).
During the emergency, when sovereign power is paradoxically cited as the will of the
people, reflecting their need for “law and order,” the rogue complicates this under-
standing of the people’s will, by exposing how the latter is informed by the desire to
negotiate power and survival. The character of Parvez is an instance of a roguish
character, whose many contradictory identities include a civil service aspirant and a
student of history, unemployed small-town youth, an English teacher in the ironically
named “Shine Tuition Center,” member of the revolutionary Naya Savera Band, and
a masked Smiling Savior, a collaborator with the government in power, rendering
him into a fraught site for the debate over democracy.
Interestingly, the role of the collaborator in Delhi Calm is described in terms of
the urban spaces that he inhabits. Parvez comes from Jamalpur where his identity is
that of “Mr. Good English” (Ghosh 2010, 27). He hopes to be a civil servant in a
safari suit. Much like the protagonist VP, Parvez too wishes to leave his town behind
and move to the metropolitan center of power. His association with the English lan-
guage is a signifier of modernity and his aspirations for economic mobility. Parvez’s
failure to qualify the civil services exam leads him to a number of odd jobs to earn a
living. He drafts love letters, tenders, and matrimonial ads and emerges as a small-
town star. When Parvez finally lands a job at Shine Tuition at Jamalpur, he becomes
a member of the Naya Savera Band by default. While the tuition claims to teach
English in 60 days, its members embark on their agenda of change in the villages, on
the weekends. During the Emergency, Parvez switches from a member of the resist-
ance against the state to being one of the smiling saviours, while continuing the
underground work of resistance. “Joining them was the only way to protect myself.
Muslim, bachelor, activist are the usual points of suspicion … the keep quiet mask
doesn’t suffocate anymore, it protects us from suspicion” (Ghosh 2010, 184, 187).
Parvez’s “smiling mask,” is at once indicative of the performance that is required
of every individual in the public sphere and a symbol of anonymity, which gives indi-
viduals the space for protest without being recognized. Emma Tarlo provides a com-
plex picture of this social performance, when she cautions the reader against
assuming a binaristic, black and white stand towards the oppressor and the victim,
the legal and the illegal at the time of the Emergency.
12 P. SINGH

The targets of the sterilization campaign were not innocent victims; many became
“pragmatic opportunists”, reaching out for benefits and rewards. Many among the poor
became “motivators” persuading others to get sterilized and secure some promised
governmental benefits. Some like the astonishing Ganga Lal, “subaltern producer of
paper truths” … acquired great skills in manipulating, to their own profit, the
Kafkaesque bureaucratic machinery for producing documentary proofs of
entitlements … the most frightening aspect of oppressive regimes is their ability to draw
all kinds of people, through fear or greed into participation. (Tarlo 2003, 97)
Parvez’s character represents precisely these contradictions, in his aspirations, his
politics, and his narrative trajectory. Cristel Devadawson notes how the dignity of
political satire lies in its ability to rise above the partisan. In the traditional political
cartoon, this non-partisanship presents itself, in the caricaturing of both sides, but in
the graphic novel, which makes greater space for character development, the charac-
ter of the rogue acquires the narrative function of interrogating democracy.
The creation of citizen-subjects during the Emergency takes place at many levels.
The politics of self-disciplining finds extensive visual and textual demonstration in
Delhi Calm. The declaration of the Emergency by Indira Gandhi is cited as the
“necessary response to the deep and widespread conspiracy which has been brewing
ever since,” thus necessitating the introduction of “certain progressive measures to
benefit the common man and woman of India” (Ghosh 2010, 3). The need to govern
citizens for their own benefit is synchronous with the propaganda for self-disciplining
in the Emergency. Foucault in his theorizing of governmentality, notes that every
government has a dual implication, the governing of self and the other. Leela Gandhi
delves into the paradox of this ethic of self-cultivation in a democracy, noting how
sympathizers and advocates of anti-democratic programs, especially extolled an ortho-
dox askesis of self-consolidation and perfectionism, distinguishing rare individuals
from the common lot (Gandhi 2014, 1–2). Ghosh renders this political rhetoric ironic
by presenting it through advertisements of everyday products. In an advertisement
for butter, he provides the reader with the hilarious tagline, “Butter to make your life
better: Apply and feel the change in your life” (Ghosh 2010, 220). Ironically enough,
the butter is named “Ego Licks,” a not so subtle reference to the culture of syco-
phancy in Gandhi’s regime.
The aesthetic and political representation of the self is synchronous with Ashis
Nandy’s delineation of Indira Gandhi’s regime as an “exercise in monopolizing charisma”
(Nandy 1980, 122). While political cartoonists of the time, caricatured this charisma on a
regular basis, Ghosh’s novel resorts to an extended visual allegory to develop the subject-
ivity of the most prominent participants in the Emergency. Indira Gandhi is allegorized
as Moon and her younger son as the Prince. Yet the allegory is interrupted through the
use of a variety of narrative forms that prevent a reductive reading of the nation as
Indira. One of the most striking examples of this merging of forms is a full-length panel
that juxtaposes the news hour, fairytale, and the children’s story: “In total silence, she
arrived. As the twilight dissolved into another melancholy evening, little Moon stepped
out to play with the stars” (Ghosh 2010, 39), thus laying bare the constructedness of the
political narrative of the Emergency. Moreover, Ghosh inserts an interesting visual detail
in the representation of the characters of the leaders. He introduces each of these charac-
ters by visually chronicling their embeddedness in a news media, revealing the mediated
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 13

nature of their identities in the political discourse of the time. Indira Gandhi’s story is
framed as a narration in the aforementioned panel, by the “United News Division,” Jaya
Prakash Narayan or JP is introduced through the “Inquilaab Gazette” and Sanjay Gandhi
is framed within “New India News.” This visual commentary on the media and its con-
struction of political identities is followed by a demonstration of how Indira Gandhi’s
personality emerged in school curriculums. Two consecutive page-length panels demon-
strate first, a school teacher repeating the national rhetoric of the Emergency, a childlike
story of a “peaceful nation” threatened by “evil characters,” followed by a panel depicting
the “smiling saviours” playing the drum and tambourine, in exaltation of Indira (Ghosh
2010, 124–125). Much like the identities of those occupying its center, Delhi too emerges
as “an installation, a façade … the grand hotel where deals are brokered, truths pro-
duced … an arrival lounge for ambition, cast in red sandstones and white cotton”
(Ghosh 2010, 20). Yet, synonymous to the duality of the characters who negotiate the
space between state authority and resistance, the city too retains its everyday spaces
of subversion.
Ghosh’s novel consistently draws attention to these dualities at the level of the
text. The co-existence of allegorical tropes alongside a multitude of narrative media
complicates what Fredric Jameson terms “national allegory” (Jameson 1986).9 In rep-
resenting national allegories as always framed within textual politics, Ghosh’s graphic
novel, creates a vivid visual-textual discourse on democracy.

“Nothing Like This Ever Happened”: The City as Archive

The last, page-length comic panel in Delhi Calm portrays among the minarets of the
mosques, the temple peaks and chock-a-bloc roads, a billboard welcoming people to
New Delhi, proclaiming, “Do Not Talk About- Emergency, 84 Delhi Riots, Babri
Demolition, Gujrat Riots … ” (Ghosh 2010, 246). The list gradually fades away as the
narrative reaches its end. Pondering over the continuing relevance of political carica-
ture, Christel Devadawson discerns the necessity of contemporaneity for caricature to
be effective. Since the cartoon’s effectiveness depends on the reader’s identification
with the subject, public memory is crucial for the cartoon to be successful in its cri-
tique. This need for contemporaneity presents the difficulty in graphic caricature, for
representing the past, or anticipating the future (Devadawson 2014, 251). However,
scholars of graphic narrative make a strong case for the documentary function of
comics as a witness to the past. Hillary Chute writes how comics as a drawn form is
successful in making visible the materiality of history. Furthermore, the spatial struc-
ture of comics, “places pressure on traditional notions of chronology, linearity and
causality,” by challenging the notion of history as a closed discourse or a progressive
one (Chute 2016, 4). As I write earlier in the paper, the simultaneity that Lefebvre
cites as characteristic of the urban form is a necessary feature of the comics form too,
making for the co-existence of a variety of disparate time-frames. Thus, while Delhi
Calm focusses exclusively on the period of the Emergency, this last frame represents
the history of traumatic events through the urban framework of the city of Delhi,
even when at least one of these events – the Babri Masjid Demolition does not take
place in Delhi. Here, the significance of the capital city is not merely as a backdrop/
14 P. SINGH

setting to traumatic events, but also as the archive of public memory. Directly below
the billboard are various architectural figures rising from the shadows. For a familiar
reader, these figures are immediately recognizable as the Qutub Minar, the Lotus
Temple, and the India Gate. The bottom of the page shows Delhi’s everyday traffic
framed against billboards of “Pepsi,” “Coca Cola,” “Sony,” and “LG.” The simultan-
eous presentation of modernity and tradition, of trauma and tourism, makes the city-
scape the archive of their contradictions and co-existence.
In a similar move, Delhi Calm not only provides the reader with the picture of a
turbulent time in Delhi but also narrates this time through references to popular cul-
ture. Along with catalogues of lost books, films, and songs, Ghosh depicts an episode
of forced sterilization with a scene from Sholay, a popular Indian film. Here the bid
to reach the right number of victims of sterilization is juxtaposed with the famous
“Kitney Admi The?” (How many men were there?) dialogue from the film. The back-
drop of the scene is set in a similar melodramatic framework with commentary like
“Sounds of footsteps, followed by a haunting track, followed by silence” (Ghosh 2010,
182). The representation of historical trauma through the multi-modal archive of
popular culture is unique to the vocabulary of comics. Jared Gardner thus compares
the graphic storyteller to Benjamin’s “ideal historian”. For Benjamin, the “emergence
of new media in the twentieth century” required the development of a new language
to record the present as it moves into the past.” In this quest for an authentic past,
Benjamin calls for the development of a new form that moves beyond the purely text-
ual, a form that taps in the resources of new media in the twentieth century to repre-
sent the past in a series of images, “at the moment of its articulation” (Gardner
2006, 789).
Devadawson questions graphic caricature’s ability to give voice to the silenced,
since its success depends on the identification of its readers. How then does political
caricature make visible those who have been carefully kept away by the state, from
public memory? “We find that we cannot depend on the genre to introduce us to
individuals, institutions or crusades with whom the state and state sponsored media
have not already made us familiar” (Devadawson 2014, 251) she concludes. Ghosh
tackles this dilemma, by caricaturing public figures, while using the visual markers of
the gag and masks to reveal the multitude of roles that were taken on by the silenced.
Moreover, the novel form itself is devoted to the development of character, and has
its origins in traditions of the picaresque. The graphic novel, by bringing together the
novel and comics form, allows for character development, while retaining the political
critique of cartooning.
Gardner writes about the archival energy of comics which in turn resides in the
figure of the comics creator as urban archaeologist and obsessive collector. The char-
acters in comics replicate this mania for collection in their relentless search for for-
gotten artefacts. Calling the collection mania of comic characters “modernist laments”
of culture, Gardner notes that these characters are marked by a shared fascination
with “everything trashed, misplaced or perished” (Gardner 2006, 791–792). The figure
of the collector is ubiquitous in the Indian graphic novel, where his obsession with
collectibles hinges on his narrative function as an archiver of the past. Speaking from
the margins of urbanity, the figure of the collector represents a version of history that
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 15

has been lost in official records. Delhi Calm invests its narrators – Parvez and
Vibhuti with this archival advantage, especially with respect to their positioning in
the city. They know the shortcuts, the places one could hide to get past agents of the
state and in exceptional situations the ways around them. Vibhuti Prasad tells Parvez
that he is putting up in Lajpat Nagar, in a locality where all “the partition refugees
live and make merry,” while Parvez himself lives in Daryaganj, Delhi. The latter occu-
pies the margins of the Shahjahanabad fort and during the time when New Delhi was
coming up, it formed the buffer space between Old Delhi and New Delhi.
The development of character in the graphic novel is made complex by the ability
of the comics medium to blur the lines between the reader, the protagonist, and the
storyteller, thus rendering it into a radical medium of reportage. In telling the story
of an event, the protagonist in the graphic novel writes himself effortlessly into the
political story. Vibhuti Prasad, while recording the events of the Emergency, reports
on every item from his morning ablutions to his evening poetry with rum sessions,
and these private details fit neatly within the public narrative of the Emergency years,
the political atrocities, and the devaluation of lives. VP’s initial disappointment
regarding his monthly salary and how it would suffer from the declaration of the
Emergency at the “end of the month,” points out how the marginal characters in
Ghosh’s novel are rendered into time keepers. The urban subject as collector and
time keeper counters the official narrative of time during the Emergency, where the
latter is rendered into a tool of oppression.
A famous reminder is a comment by a British newspaper which approved that
“trains were running on time” in India under the Emergency, to which Abu Abraham
scathingly responded in his article “The State of Humour.”10 Yet even as the
Emergency is lifted, and the protagonist fades into the darkness, he leaves the reader
on a cautionary note, “Let calm prevail, for it’s too early. Still too early to be sure.”

Notes
1. The Emergency came into effect on 25 June 1975 until its withdrawal on 21 March 1977.
2. I occasionally use the phrase “long form graphic narratives” to denote both fiction and
non-fiction book length works in English.
3. Throughout the paper, I use the terms “comics” to denote a medium or language, as
opposed to a comic book, graphic novel, or graphic narratives that connotes an
aesthetic artefact.
4. This quote is from the Introduction. The page numbers from the Introduction are in
Roman numerals.
5. The Swacch Bharat Abhiyaan or the Clean Indian Scheme is a flagship scheme of Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Started on 2 October 2014, the SBA has been
posited as one of the largest cleanliness drives in the world, with a workforce of around
3 million employees, directly or indirectly attached to the scheme.
6. The game of cricket in India is a legacy of British colonialism, even as cricket matches
and related commentary in India, is steeped in an overt nationalist rhetoric.
7. This inscription of the artist in the narrative is inherent in the very form of the graphic
narrative. In her Introduction to the “Graphic narrative,” Hillary Chute writes how the
“foregrounding of the work of hand” renders the graphic narrative into an “autographic
form in which the mark of handwriting is an important part of the rich, extra-semantic
information a reader receives.” See Chute and DeKoven (2006, 767).
16 P. SINGH

8. For the relationship between character subjectivity and the postcolonial underpinnings of
the Indian Graphic novel, see Singh (2016).
9. Jameson makes the case for third world texts to be understood as national allegories.
10. Meanwhile we should be grateful for any scraps of humour that come our way. The prize
for the joke of the year should go to the Indian news agency reporter in London who
approvingly quoted a British newspaper comment on India that “trains are running on
time,” not realizing that this should be the standard English joke about Mussolini’s Italy.
When we have such innocents abroad, we don’t really need humorists (Abraham 1977a).

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank G.J.V. Prasad (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) for motivating
this paper and the South Asian Review blind reviewer for their extensive comments. A version
of this paper was presented at the Delhi Chapter of the Conference on Planned Violence:
Postcolonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature held in 2014 at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
I am grateful to my co-panelist Vishwajyoti Ghosh for his encouragement, and kind permis-
sion for using the images included in the paper.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor
Preeti Singh is a graduate student in the English Department at Ohio State University-
Columbus, specializing in Postcolonial Literature and Critical Media Studies. Her current
research focuses on the representation of the Indian Emergency in a range of cultural narra-
tives. Her M.Phil. dissertation from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi examined the
emergence of the Indian graphic novel in the past two decades and its representation of post-
colonial subjectivity. Preeti’s academic work has appeared in The International Journal of
Comic Art and the Journal of Drama Studies.

References
Abraham, Abu. 1977. “The State of Humour.” In The Games of Emergency: A Collection of
Cartoons and Articles. First Bell Books ed. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House.
Ahmed, Naseer, and Singh, Saurabh. 2007. Kashmir Pending. New Delhi: Phantomville.
Ahrens, Jorn, and Meteling, Arno, eds. 2010. Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print,
Picture and Sequence. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group.
Balzer, Jens. 2010. “Hully Gee, I am a Hieroglyph!: Mobilizing the Gaze and the Invention of
Comics in New York City, 1895.” In Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and
Sequence, edited by Jorn Ahrens and Arno Meteling, 19–31. New York: The Continuum
International Publishing Group.
Banerjee, Sarnath. 2004. Corridor. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Banerjee, Sarnath. 2007. The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Barthes, Roland. 1997. “Semiology and The Urban.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in
Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach, 158–172. London: Routledge.
Chute, Hillary. 2016. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics and Documentary Form.
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.
Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven. 2006. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” Modern
Fiction Studies 52 (4): 767–782.
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 17

Dalmia, Vasudha, and Sadana, Rashmi, eds. 2012. The Cambridge Companion to Modern
Indian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Rogues. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Devadawson, Christel R. 2014. Out of Line: Cartoons, Caricature and Contemporary India.
Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan.
Dittmer, Jason. 2010. “Comic Book Visualities: A Methodological Manifesto on Comics,
Montage and Narration.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. New Series 35
(2): 222–236.
Eisenstein, Sergei. 1977. “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form.” In Film Form: Essays in Film
Theory, edited and translated by Jay Leyda. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Gandhi, Leela. 2014. The Common Cause: Post- Colonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy,
1900–1955. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gardner, Jared. 2006. “Archives, Collectors and the New Media Work of Comics.” Modern
Fiction Studies 52 (4): 787–806.
Ghertner, Asher D. 2011. “Rule by Aesthetic: World-Class City Making in Delhi.” In Worlding
Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Roy, Ananya, and Ong,
Aihwa. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ghosh, Vishwajyoti. 2010. Delhi Calm. New Delhi: Harper Collins.
Guha, Ramachandra. 2007. India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy.
London: Macmillan.
Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New
York: Verso.
Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson, MS: University
Press of Mississippi.
Holmberg, Ryan. 2013. “Inverted Comma: An Interview with Vishwajyoti Ghosh.” The Comics
Journal. http://www.tcj.com/inverted-calm-an-interview-with-vishwajyoti-ghosh/
Jagmohan. 1975. Rebuilding Shahjehanabad: The Walled City of Delhi. Delhi: Vikas Publishing
House.
Jameson, Fredric. 1986. “Third-World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism.”
Social Text 15: 65–88.
Kapoor, Coomi. 2015. Emergency: A Personal History. Gurgaon, Haryana, India: Penguin,
Viking.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. “Urban Form” In Writings on Cities. Translated by Eleonore Kofman
and Elizabeth Lebas, 133–138. Oxford: Blackwell.
McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins.
Mehta, Binita, and Mukherjee, Pia. 2015. Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities.
New York and Oxon: Routledge.
Merrifield, Andy. 2000. “Benjamin and the City of Light.” The Nation. https://www.thenation.
com/article/benjamin-city-light/
Moore, Alan, David Lloyd, Steve Whitaker, and Siobhan Dodds. 1989. V for Vendetta. New
York: DC Comics.
Nandy, Ashis. 1980. “Indira Gandhi and the Culture of Indian Politics.” In At the Edge of
Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture, edited by Ashis, Nandy. New Delhi: OUP.
Nayar, Pramod K. 2015. “Postcolonial Demo-Graphics: Traumatic Realism in Vishwajyoti
Ghosh’s Delhi Calm.” In Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities, edited by Binita
Mehta and Pia Mukherjee, 131–141. New York: Routledge.
Pati, Sushmita. 2014. “Jagmohan: The Master Planner and the ‘Rebuilding’ of Delhi.” Economic
and Political Weekly XLIX (36): 48–54.
Patil, Amruta. 2008. Kari. New Delhi: Harper Collins.
Sajad, Malik. 2015. Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir. London: Fourth Estate.
Sardesai, Abhay. 2013. “The Rising Graph of the Graphic Book.” Art India: The Art News
Magazine of India.
18 P. SINGH

Singh, Preeti. 2016. “Hippies, Rogues and Urban Losers: Subjects of the Indian Graphic
Novel.” International Journal of Comic Art 18 (2): 258–279.
Sundaram, Ravi. 2010. Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism. London: Routledge.
Tarlo, Emma. 2003. Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. Berkeley, NC:
University of California Press.
“The Wrecking of Delhi.” 1978. Economic and Political Weekly 13 (25): 119–121.
Varughese, Emma Dawson. 2018. Visuality and Identity in Post-Millenial Indian Graphic
Narratives. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, Macmillan.
Vijayan, O.V. 2006. Tragic Idiom: O.V. Vijayan’s Cartoons and Notes on India, edited by
Sundar Ramanathaiyar and Nancy Hudson-Rodd. Kerala: DC Books.
Willsher, Kim. 2016. “Story of Cities 12#: Haussmann Rips Up Paris and Divides France to
This Day.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/31/story-cities-12-
paris-baronhaussmann-france-urban-planner-napoleon