Spaces as Distasteful in Bengali Detective/Superhero Comics: Reading Selected Texts of Narayan Debnath.mp4

Scholarships around comics in India have seldom focused attention on vernacular comics produced from Bengal. An instance of colonial cultural borrowing, the form entered the indigenous literary world of colonial Bengal in the form of mass-produced literature. The notion of "good taste", which is frequently equated with education, morality, social class, and cultural capital, has functioned as a potent tool of exclusion, perpetuating power dynamics by marking distinctions between "high" and "low" culture (Arnold, Bourdieu). The mushrooming of vernacular presses at Battala (Northern parts of the city of Kolkata) catering to popular taste and its circulation of low-brow literary outputs (calendar arts, sensational chapbooks, dime novels and comics) among the masses was sharply contrasted with the Bhadralok novelistic publications. Comics published from these disreputable publishers were scorned and frowned upon as dis-tasteful by the bhadralok. The socio-ideological fissure between literature from below and elite publications at the heart of the urban space of colonial Calcutta helped certain groups assert their superiority while gatekeeping access to cultural spaces.

This paper concentrates on the figure of the detective and superman as depicted in two Bengali comics by Narayan Debnath- Batul the Great, a superhero comic and Goyenda Kaushik, detective comic, both based in the postcolonial urban space of Kolkata. Upholding the intriguing overlaps between the figures of the superman and the goyenda (detective) and the nineteenth century Parisian flâneur, this paper underscores the “distracted gaze” (Benjamin) deployed by the protagonists to excavate the dis-tasteful aspects of the urban space. We aim to demonstrate that the detective and the superman, while fighting crime in a realistic and urban context, observe the dis-tasteful and desultory sides of life. The superman and the detective like the flâneur are inevitably drawn to spaces like arcades, alleyways, and backstreets—liminal zones where the "low life" is most visible. These spaces are not just sites of observation but also spaces of resistance, where alternative forms of life flourished beyond bourgeois respectability. These figures are seen traversing “territorially stigmatised” landscapes teeming with sordid personalities and their gaze is riveted by contrasts between luxury and decay, beauty and squalor. In the postcolonial nation-space, we argue, their observations harnessed in a previously trash genre serve as trenchant critiques on social inequalities and contradictions of modern cities where opulence and poverty coexist in close quarters, giving rise to the propensity to commit crime.