Voicing the Slum

The 1947 Partition of India, ostensibly along the lines of religion, into India and Pakistan resulted in one of the largest and most rapid migrations in human history. Following this, Delhi, the capital city of the country, has been flooded with a stream of refugees, reinforcing the already existing urban slums. This paper, thereby, examines the complex representation of urban slums in India while responding to recent renewed interest in popular culture and visual studies and to revived debates surrounding the relationship between 1947 Partition memoirs/memories and the urban blight of the slum subalterns. By addressing the graphic narratives This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition: Graphic Narratives from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh (2013) by Viswajyoti Ghosh and Delirious City: Polity and Vanity in Urban India (2019) by Gautam Bhatia, the research centers on how historical influences have shaped the current conditions in the slums and, in turn, how they contribute to puncturing the silence that has long obscured the voice of the slum dwellers. The research here centers on an examination of the modes in which the city, nation, and changing contours of urbanity in Ghosh and Bhatia’s graphic narratives offer a point of entry into a dynamic and novel politics of possibility and the extent to which they do so. Through explorations of the narrative genre, narrative voice, and aesthetic representation, the paper demonstrates how these graphic novelists, as social chroniclers, challenge the idea of voicelessness and (in)visibility, whether of colonial historiography or state policy within the context of contemporary urban slums, and how popular culture can effectively portray displacement and its historicity.