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ABSTRACT
This paper interrogates the value of silence, located within liminal spaces in Sarnath Banerjee’s Doab Dil (2019). Structured as an informal graphic essay, Doab Dil proffers ironic commentaries on nature, culture, cities, the countryside, history, fiction, work, sleep, insomnia, popular culture, and the quest for meaning in life. In the process, Doab Dil combines text and drawing to construct a postmodernist intertextual mural of juxtaposed quotations, descriptions, and metaphysical reflection on the values of contemporary culture. At the points of these juxtapositions, liminal spaces are created that are characterised by a dense silence. The centrality of the liminal in the creative imagination of Doab Dil is evident in the title that signposts the fertile tract of land found at the confluence of two rivers. Recollecting Homi Bhabha on the liminal as a horizon of possibilities, this paper explores the ways in which the poetic representation of liminality constructs political spaces of critique, which draw on the silence between confluent thoughts on diverse themes for critical reflection. Through literary criticism, the paper investigates the poetics and politics of possibilities in Doab Dil positioned within liminal spaces, and the role of silence as a representational strategy for a metaphysical commentary on reality.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The term transmedia narratology has been used by Marie Laure Ryan to indicate narratives that develop new lives across media platforms and build new narratives from their predecessors’. Such a conceptualisation of transmediality is relevant to the understanding of Doab Dil (2019) that was first presented as museum installations by its author at Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, in Mumbai in February 2019 (Lobo and Banerjee n.pag.), and then published as a book. The physicality of experiencing the content in space and time presents a qualitative contrast to the experience of reading it. Doab Dil, in its structure, tries to recreate the mood of browsing that would have been integral to experiencing a museum exhibit. At the same time, as a text, it problematises the hegemony of the word through its representational strategies of muralistic delineation that foster critical reflection.
2 Bruce Robbins, and Paulo Lemos Horta, “Introduction”,In Cosmopolitanisms, ed. Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 1–19.
3 Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 226–52.
4 Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009).
5 Edward Said, “Introduction: Secular Criticism,” in The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 1–30.
6 Gunther Kress, “Multimodal Discourse Analysis,” In Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. James Paul Gee and Michael Handford. (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 35–50.
7 J. Lobo and S. Banerjee, (15 March 2019). “Sarnath Banerjee on subverting 'truth-manufacturing industries' with fiction, and the therapeutic power of imagination”. Firstpost. https://www.firstpost.com/living/sarnath-banerjee-on-subverting-truth-manufacturing-industries-with-fiction-and-the-therapeutic-power-of-imagination-6251971.html. Last accessed on 27th September 2022.
8 Banerjee’s works have, in the past, engaged with the question of culture, as well as the relationship between western and non-western societies. Speaking of the Corridor, Banerjee indicates that while some characters in the novel who straddle the Indian and Western ethos in their lifestyles are easy to identify with, others like Digital Dutta are more difficult to comprehend because they are realistic at a local cultural level. He states, at this point, that keeping their identities localised and unexplained is necessary to capture the uniqueness and difference of their lives that is, in effect, a core value of hybridity. Banerjee’s remarks on the Corridor apply to Doab Dil as well, where he expands his canvas from the local Indian to the local across world culture. The representational politics of its expansive theme as well as its treatment within the liminal zones derives from this hybridity of visualisation and tonal memory.
9 Banerjee is hailed as one of the foremost Indian graphic novelists who defined the genre through his metaphysical texts. With the subtitle in Corridor, proclaiming its identity as a graphic novel, Banerjee shaped the discourse of novelistic representation in India, locating his narratives within the experiences of a middle class neo-liberal population that struggles with questions of ethics, identity and finding one’s place in the glocal world. His novels are characterised by protagonists who are thinkers, not always successful, sometimes cynical and always insightful. Characters embark on personal quests for meaning, as they navigate the power structures and social hierarchies that they are a part of and, sometimes, party to. All Quiet in Vikaspuri, for instance, pits subaltern narratives against hegemonic discourses of power as one character who is the cause of a larger systemic conflict, reflects on the evils of neoliberalism that fuelled his actions and greed. Though he recognises his culpability in the unemployment and dislocation of a large number of factory workers, his lone philosophical musings in a multicrore flat in Gurgaon, an expensive suburban locality of Delhi in India, captures the irony of his guilt and the luxury that he now enjoys to reflect at leisure on his actions. Significantly, a common thematic thread that runs through Banerjee’s works is cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity and tensions caused by neoliberalism in the metros in India, an awareness of life and reality as transient, and always changing, as is the ironic-compassionate approach to his protagonists who struggle to make sense of this constant change. Doab Dil is characterised by these themes as well, and crystallises the concerns in its abstract reflection, which are concretised by fragments of thoughts from politics, philosophy, history, and intertextual references to treatises, novels and popular culture.
10 Sarnath Banerjee and Ratik Asokan. “Sarnath Banerjee: The Full Texture of a City”. Guernica, https://www.guernicamag.com/the-full-texture-of-a-city/, 1st April 2016. Web. 27th September 2022.
11 Sarnath Banerjee, Corridor: A Graphic Novel. (Delhi: Penguin, 2004).
12 Sarnath Banerjee, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers. (Delhi: Penguin, 2007).
13 Sarnath Banerjee, The Harappa Files. (Delhi: Harper Collins, 2011).
14 Sarnath Banerjee, All Quiet in Vikaspuri. (India: Harper Collins, 2015).
15 Corey K Creekmur, “The Indian Graphic Novel,”In History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
16 Ulka Anjaria, ed. History of the Indian Novel in English. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
17 Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta, “Introduction,”In Cosmopolitanisms. ed. Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta. (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 1–19.
18 Raiford Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz, eds. Popular Culture: A Reader. (London and New Delhi: Sage, 2005).
19 Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge. (Massachusetts: Polity, 2019). Rosi Braidotti, through her work on posthumanism, interrogates the constructed nature of truth and reality, and its subsequent effect on human experience. While the structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to truth, knowledge and power emphasised textuality of reality, post-truth approaches outline an age that is marked by ambiguity, wherein knowledge is not true but falls just short of a lie. For Richard Keynes, a similar articulation of ambiguity is projected as a core characteristic of this age, which withholds certainty. Keynes sketches the various domains of influence of this concept, which include social and cultural lives, journalism, art, politics, academia, Hollywood, narrative myths and ethics, among others. Representations become a powerful mode, therefore, through which post-truth works. For Braidotti, this post-truth age leads naturally to the condition of “posthumanism” (Braidotti) where we are constantly challenged to rethink the humanist dimensions of our identities. None of these experiences are characterised by certainty, and for Braidotti, are the defining features of an historical age that is a work-in-progress, a liminal zone of fluid present and speculative future that blurs the boundaries between the biological, the digital and the physical.
20 Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (London: Vintage, 2018).
21 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
22 The structure of Doab Dil evokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the novel as polyphonous and heteroglossic, containing multiple voices and generating multiple meanings, respectively. Though not a novel, Doab Dil’s expansive thematic scope demonstrates a variety of aspects of contemporary culture. This culture is hybrid, pulsating and dynamic, multicultural in its ethos and spirit. Inevitably, plurality and the dynamics of intertext inform its structure, evoking multiplicity of voices, perspectives and interpretations to reality as projected through representation.
23 Fragments comprise a literary genre with multiple functions. Fragments could be segments from a complete work, or extracts used for specific purposes. Writers have also consciously constructed literary works to appear as fragments, using the flexibility of incompleteness afforded by the genre to comment on, and critique themes. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is perhaps the most well-known literary example of a fragment that extols the power of the imagination. The poetic power of the work derives from its stature as a part of a larger dream that could be construed as the muses speaking through the poet. Other genres of fragments that embody philosophy include aphorisms and epigrams that are literary in their stylised engagement with epistemic, metaphysical and ontological themes.
24 Guy Elgat, “Aphorisms and Fragments,”In The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Barry Stocker and Michael Mack. (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
25 Henry David Thoreau’s Walden celebrates the power of nature as force of life, through reflections on the simplicity of living in natural surroundings. Part memoir, and semi-autobiographical, the work has also been characterised as a manual for self-reliance, a spiritual quest, a social experiment and a declaration of independence. Walden comprises one of the core works that shaped the American Transcendentalist tradition of the 19th century, extolling the power of nature to uplift and heal humans.
26 Digital Dutta is an IT professional who is also a Marxist. The combination of a modern profession in software and technology that reinforces class hierarchies conflicts, in the creation of this character, with his Marxist ideology that enables him to see the hegemonic control of discourses on the desirable life, profession, dreams and means to achieve these ends. Much of Digital Dutta’s inner conflicts stem from the conflicting values that he embodies as a middle class upwardly mobile professional in India. His quest for sleep, in this case, could stem from the tensions between his desire for upward mobility and the means to this end, which contradict his Marxist beliefs. Choosing the right path, for Dutta, is difficult, presenting existential crises.
27 Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806) was a Japanese artist, printmaker and painter, known for his masterly works of ukiyo-e, an important art genre during the Tokugawa period (1603–1867) in Japan. The ukiyo-e were paintings in wood blocks, characterised by pictures of women in groups, with a style that was equally realistic and decorative. Bijin-ga is the name given to pictures of beautiful women depicted in the ukiyo-e tradition. Utamaro departed from this prototype by choosing to paint women in half-length single portraits with sensuous details.
28 Sarnath Banerjee, in an interview with Guernica in 2016, discusses the process that he undertook to become a graphic novelist. A major challenge that he encountered was drawing his novels. In this context, Banerjee indicates his own practice and immersion in this Japanese tradition of mastering an art, where the gap between the hand and the mind dissolves. What remains, instead, is perfection where there is automaticity in execution of the lines and figures that captures to exactitude the image in the mind. Recounting his rediscovery of boxes full of rough practice sketches that eventually enabled him to develop his distinctive style in Corridor, Banerjee underlines the power of repetitive practice in perfecting his art, achieving a mastery that enabled him to create the graphic novels that today represent a distinct flavour of life in Indian metros and a narrative of the middle class.
29 Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1916).
30 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. (Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981).