The signs of post-colonial identity: ballooned words and drawn texts in Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novels

This paper investigates the linguistic and textual strategies through which graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee expresses a sense of post-colonial identity against the backdrop of contemporary multilingual India. Far from being a trivial, marginal genre, comics – with their captivating blend of words and pictures – can chart the tension between the verbal and the visual dimensions and work as multimodal texts, in which various semiotic elements cooperate to organise and create meaning. The paper shows how Banerjee in his three rhizomatic works uses signs as a hybrid communicative code, with iconic, symbolic, and indexical features, to represent the postmodern and postcolonial anxieties of India.