The Ecology of the Welfare State: Studying Sarnath
Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri
Saranya Sen,
Assistant Professor,
Department of English,
Purash Kanpur Haridas Nandi Mahavidyalaya,
West Bengal, India.
Abstract: The depletion of groundwater in the capital region of New
Delhi and the consequent community scuffle as depicted in Sarnath Banerjee’s
graphic novel All Quiet in Vikaspuri
is the subject of the paper. The urban ecological crisis is refracted through
the prism of the neo-liberal state policy and is seen as the great galvanizer
of the mass, hitherto pushed to oblivion by the neo-liberal State and
corporates alike, who reckoned the crisis and its perpetrators and resisted
them. The ecological theories of ‘bioregion’ and ‘biophilia’ are brought in to
analyse the community resistance and the role of the State is scrutinized both
in terms of its welfare role and its dwindling into a facilitator of the
corporate profiteering that has a direct bearing on the ecological
catastrophe. The Gaia hypothesis of
Lovelock and Morgulis, the paper proposes at the end, needs to accommodate the
notion of the welfare State to ensure an equitable distribution of the
ecological resources and their protection.
Keywords: Ground water; Unsight; Bioregion; Biophilia; Gaia
Hypothesis; Welfare State
In spite of being the land of many
rivers, India in its modern days has seen bitter feuds over water that often
got the headlines for all the wrong reasons. The international water rivalry
over Sindh and Brahmaputra with the western and eastern neighbours respectively
has kept Indian foreign policy on its toes over decades. Inter-state water
rivalries are also pretty common with the Cauvery water dispute often souring
the relationships between the southern states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and
the State regulated dams and their operations like that of the Damodar Valley
Corporation and the Bhakra Nangal have caused massive outrage and mass
movements in large swathes of the country. Sarnath Banerjee in his graphic
novel All Quiet in Vikaspuri looks examines the crisis in a more
intimate space: the battle over water amongst the citizens of the capital
region of the India, New Delhi. It microscopes its lens on what is termed as
‘the community level water war’ that plagues the lives of the citizens in the
national capital region and makes violence an everyday phenomenon in the
culture, geography and the existence of the urbanscape of the Delhites
(Calamur).
Banerjee’s graphic novel captures the
water crisis in urban India and connects it with the contours of a greater
crisis engendering out of the neoliberal State policies that India toed from
the final decade of the previous century. The issue of the groundwater crisis
and the consequent reduction of the neighbouring communities into warring
tribes is refracted through the prism of macro politico-economics. The novel
opens with the details of the small town of Tambapur where the Government run
public sector unit of Bharat Copper Limited has its plant. The welfare state
run unit not only focuses on the productivity and the profitablility of the
factory and mines but prioritizes the all round development of the employers
and their families as well as the environment of the industrial township.
However, with the new wave of liberalization, privatization and globalization
takes centertage in India’s economic policy making, the global fluctuation in
copper pricing started affecting the plant and its profits. The ministry of
disinvestment had the easiest way out of the crisis. As one of the panels in
the Banerjee’s work has it; the disinvestment minister raises his forefingers
and announces the one pill cure all remedy: ‘PRIVATISE’ (Banerjee 7). What
followed was the multinational takeover and a brutal reduction in welfare
spending and a crass disregard for the environment and the people of the
erstwhile blossoming industrial town. As profits soared for the multinational,
the workers were seen joining an exodus away from Tambapur to join an
ever-increasing retinue of unorganized labourer in adjoining metropolises. In
their place new contract workers were recruited from afar with little to no
commitments of social security extended to them.
One such ill-fated laid off plumber
Girish came to New Delhi only to find that severe water crisis has
overwhelmingly taken over the capital city of India as has the employment
crisis for the likes of him as the city is flooded, not with ample potable
water but a sea of unorganized labourers such as him. The novel, at this point,
takes a critical turn towards localizing a severe environmental crisis.
Tambapur, the site of the factory town, as the story progressed ceased to be a
mere geographic space for the likes of Grirsh. With settled home, aspirations,
entertainments, disappointments and desires it appeared to him more like what
Robert L. Thayer would term as ‘bioregion’: Thayer defines the term as
‘life-space’, a locale where the human, other-than-human and the non-living
cohabit to generate an idiosyncratic human culture (Thayer 3). Therefore,
whenever Girish is reminded of his good old Tambapur days, memories of not only
the space but its vegetation, people and his affective association with them
coagulate into a singular recollection that at times appear to him as some kind
of trick that his mind is playing on him (Banerjee 16). The bioregion of New
Delhi, however, is completely contrary to that of Tambapur. The narrative in graphic
is effectively employed here. Banerjee’s panels of the blooming days of
Tambapur hardly have a loner or an isolated individual, signifying the
camaraderie and the bonding that the chronotope of Tambapur in its heydays
boasted of. On the contrary, the panels of Delhi are full of lonesome
individuals either mired in or battling away battling away unemployment,
corruption or an insensitive system. Be it Girish himself waiting by the
roadside looking for freelance plumbing employment, the elderly man waking up
an hour before daybreak to switch on the booster pumpor the panels introducing
the corrupt Rajan or Miss Carrey who is relaxing by her compound pool and
cannot care less about the depleted groundwater – all are panels highlighting
loners engaged in their private pursuits of persistence, profits or pleasure.
If the marked difference between the two
bioregions is in the sheer disconnectedness, then that has further theoretical
imports in the ecocritic space. While Tambapur’s memory is always of community
oriented gregariousness, the space of Delhi is manifested with
disconnectedness, distrust towards neighbour and surviving in isolated
habitats. Evidently, the two bioregionalism of both spaces are distinctly
different. The genealogy of this distinction is not obscure at all. While the
first had the lineage in the morale of the welfare state, the second is the
aftermath of the times when the State shrunk and profiteering started
determining the contours of georgics of economy and politics of the nation.
Banerjee’s work thus points at a deeper crisis in the theory of bioregion
itself. While one bioregion may be profoundly syncretic with the environment,
some other may turn out to be painfully alienated from the subjectivity of the
being and the environment. Kirkpatrick Sale in his Dwellers in the Land: The
Bioregional Vision is specific about this alienation and the genesis of the
same. He acknowledges the paradigm of bioregion and in its ideal stratum that
accommodates “rocks under our feet, the source of the waters we drink, the
common insects, birds, mammals, plants and trees; the particular cycle of the
seasons” (Sale 42). What Sale recognizes is the shrinkage that this exhaustive
compass of bioregion has suffered in the hand of what he terms as ‘the
industrio-scientific paradigm’. The profit driven capitalist system of
production with little to no concern for the welfare economics reduces the
individual to the strict squares of productivity and profitability; losing in
the process the essential connect with the biotic and abiotic environment that
one is intimately connected with.
Banerjee’s novel is vivid in its
depiction of this rapid shrinkage of the bioregion of the neo liberal state of
India. Be it the post privatization unraveling of the township of Tambapur, the
graphic references to the build up towards the establishment of the steel
factory on the banks of the Jatadhari river in Odisha or the description of the
establishment of the Uttarakhand hydel project that polluted thirty to forty
tributaries of the Ganga – the novel continually emphasizes upon the gross
disregard that the profit motif nurtures towards anything beyond the
anthropocentric in general and the neo-liberal capitalism in particular. In
fact, this reduction of the human bioregion, the novel records, has its ill
impact on the hermeneutics of individual decisions and macro policy
formulations. Banerjee terms this ‘short termism’ and catalogues a series of
such pronouncements that ranges from sliding down the banister to save time and
dangerously falling off in the process to setting up dams on rivers that
destroy communities in order to produce ‘unjustifiably low amounts of
electricity’ (Banerjee 56).
The consequence of this myopic approach
that prioritizes technocracy and profit over and above everything else, the
novel quite rightly depicts, creates a sea of dispossessed who are forced to
migrate, lose habitat and lead a life marked by severe vulnerability. Be it the
workers who had to leave Tambapur, the contractual workers employed to replace
them with crass disregard for labour laws or the inhabitants of the warring
colonies of the capital city who are robbed off their basic right to have
access to clear drinking water and are forced to literally fight for the same
among themselves – all emerge as blood cousins of whom Rob Nixon terms as
‘unimagined communities’ (Nixon 151). Nixon explains that such communities are
created when the violence and displacement of people affected by mega dam like
large-scale developmental projects are rendered invisible or removed from
national and global cultural narratives. These communities are both physically
displaced and imaginatively evacuated from the consciousness of dominant
publics. In All Quiet in Vikaspuri such unimagined communities are shown
to be no longer on the fringe any more but even the populaces of the highly
urbanized elite ghettos of a capital city are made subjected to the same. There
remains a distinction, however, between the dispossessed unimagined communities
of Tambapur,, Nyamgiri, Kalahandi or Jharia – the reference of whom are
catalogued in a full page panel of the novel (Banerjee 67) and the middle to
upper middle class urban dwellers of Shahpurjat, Indraprasth or Shalimar Bagh.
The former are turned into oblivion by the high and mighty by their ceaseless
pursuit for profit while the latter were at first lulled into the comfort of
being the privileged elite only to wake up to the harsh reality that the
ecological crisis spares no one as their taps dry out and water became a
commodity to fight to the teeth for.
Precisely herein, Banerjee’s novel echoes
the spirit that has been valorised by the practioners of the cli-fi or climate
fiction in the twenty first century. China Mieville’s The City and the City (2009)
records the coexistence of two fictional neighbouring cities, namely Beszel and
Ul Qoma, whose inhabitants had been taught for ages not to recognize or
acknowledge each other’s presence. The economic fortunes of the two cities
swing in the classical capitalist boom-bust cycles and a portion of citizens of
both the towns recognise that the elements of nature and animals like ‘pigeons,
mice, wolves, bats’, spread across both the spaces do not abide by the human
dictum of ‘unsight’ or non-recognition of each other (Mieville 112). In All
Quiet in Vikaspuri, the practice of ‘unsight’ is more intimate as the
inhabitants of the same city derecognize the dispossession and hardships of
their fellow citizens, thanks to the unequal distribution of social wealth that
has soothed the conscience of the former into some sort of social amnesia.
Hence, Banerjee depicts the dwellers of the Vikaspuri high rises cannot care
less about the source of their buildings’ water supply or the destination of
the waste that they generate. For everything they have the smug assertion: “the
building provides it” (Banerjee 49).While on the other part of the city, the
Yamuna chokes, “sad, sluggish and thick with industrial effluents” (Banerjee
59).
What Banerjee’s work is conspicuous in
highlighting is the consequence of the retreating of the welfare state. The
disintegration and demise of Tambapur becomes a metaphoric commentary in the
novel on silent receding of that system of governance and its effect on the
most vulnerable class of citizens. The novel ups the ante in the later pages as
it reaches its central crisis in the narrative: the effect of the withdrawal of
the welfare State on the urban middle class, who have been traditionally
considered to be the amongst the most vociferous champions of the of the
celebrated LPG (liberalization, privatization, globalization). The warring
tribes of the urban Delhi are unmistakably hailing from this stratum and it is
the depletion of the groundwater, the contamination of river, the overflowing
sewers that finally make them realize that the State is no longer there to
either provide or protect. Hence what ensues is a twofold privatized
undertaking: the Rastogi search for the lost Saraswati with the aim strictly on
the control of the last source of water in the city; and the marauding civil war
among the citizens of the national capital with the desperation to attain as
much access as possible to the basic natural resources for survival even it
means killing each other.
However, it is this Girish’s search being
commissioned by Rastogi for the lost Saraswati that offers an uncanny way out
of this crisis of alienation. As Girish drills on, he meets several people who
reside in the subterranean quarters beneath the capital city. They are a
disparate lot ranging from erstwhile corrupt bureaucrat, ex-army man, wife of a
foreign consulate official and so on. They are, however, united by the
ecological crisis of the depleted groundwater. As Girish drilled deeper, their
marked misanthropy and sheer disgust for the people above is apparent. Banerjee
is deft in projecting the ‘unimagined communities’ in this way. The
unremembered surplus population thus emerges as the new class altogether;
divided by income stratum, social stratification and economic vulnerability but
united by the ecological crisis. As the water crisis start affecting one and
all, Banerjee’s work as if prophesies, the conventional hierarchies would
collapse and telescope all into what Guy Standing would perhaps call the
ecological precariat, marked by environmental vulnerabilities born in the wombs
of globalization (Standing). Hence the corrupt Awasthy, the carefree Carrey
Jones, the grey market operator Tanker Rajen or the prim Lt. Col. B.K. Gambhir
would later on find a natural camaraderie with who may be referred to as the
water have-nots of the city once they fight against the water mafia Rastogi’s
men at the source of Saraswati.
There is always the other side of the
‘haves’ in the story that records the narrative of inequality in the
neo-liberal system of state administration. Like their hapless counterparts who
lose everything starting from habitat to groundwater, the haves will also have
layers about them, differentiated in a hierarchy of benefits that they derive
from their exercise of exploitation. Banerjee here interestingly chooses a
representative of a nuanced stratum: Varun Bhalla, the intermediary technocrat
who assists the capitalists to takeover state-run enterprises, set up factories
and industry units in environmentally sensitive spots, locating opportunities
of profit for his capitalist masters at the cost of literally everything and
making windfall gains for himself in the process. What the novel shows is that
in spite of all his professional success, Varun remains a terrible loner as
guilt of displacing thousands in order to drive home his projects gnaws him
away in private; so much so that he gradually recedes from his regular
professional assignments into binge drinking and weird hobby of costume
designing with continual hallucinations of the damages his success has caused
to the environment and innumerable human beings. This feeling of shame,
according to Sara Ahmed, works in a fascinating twofold way. While the feeling
of shame makes one painfully aware that what he has done is terrible and hence
he must hide himself from the rest; the feeling simultaneously keeps on making
one conscious of being exposed in the most unexpected turns. Hence, Ahmed says,
the subject in shame would make erratic to and fro between running away from
the site of guilt and rediscovering the wounds of it every now and then and
thereby admonishing himself (Ahmed 104).
Bhalla’s guilt trip, interestingly, runs
parallel to the recipe for resistance that Banerjee proposes in his work. This
runs in a twofold way as well. While being isolated and alienated by the
designs of the neo-liberal economy, the subjects would at first find themselves
either resigned to this state of alienation, taking it as their inextricable
damnation or finding this seclusion to be even desired. However, soon this
would seem too much for all and the ecological crisis of depleting to
non-existent groundwater calibrates them into an uncanny unity. The hideout of
the subterranean Delhi becomes the veritable battlefield of guerilla warfare
where a hidden Phillippa or the recluse Col. Gambhir unite against Rastogi’s
army, thereby establishing an unprecedented unity among the commoners above and
below. The ecological crisis and the consequent resistance thus finally
galvanize the mass into people.
This marks a clear graduation from
Thayer’s notion of bioregion as it incorporates within it what Sara Ahmed would
term ‘economy of affect’ (Ahmed 15). Here the emotional affects circulate
within the society and state mechanism generating a surplus of response that
often catches the power structure off guard. The have-nots of the Vikaspuri
refused to slip their bioregion from their fold to the control of the ensemble
of a neo-liberal state and corporate behemoths. Precisely herein the mere
reference to bioregion transcends to the affective terrain of what E.O. Wilson
would call ‘biophilia’ and Yi-Fu Tuan would term ‘topophilia’: the feeling of
oneness with all living forms of the space and in turn, “an affective bond
between people and place or setting” (Thayer 4). This brings the narrative of Banerjee closer
to the Gaia hypothesis formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. The
hypothesis proposes that the earth is at once a sentient and self-acting system
in which all organisms – living or non-living – are intimately connected to
attain and maintain optimal condition of living (Lovelock). The people of
Vikaspuri who are projected so far as not only self-centred but so hateful to
each other that the water crisis brought them to kill one another, now fight
unitedly against their oppressor in order to maintain the talismanic optimum
living condition.
Still Banerjee’s narrative remains one of
moderate optimism and not a whole hearted clarion call to the dawn of a new
dawn of sorts, even after the popular uprising that it depicts. The system
apparently has not changed much and the miraculous quick fix of the discovery
of Saraswati, the readers would more or less agree, evidently would not last
long. What Banerjee emphasises is the absence of this desired system: one that
would ensure a somewhat equitable distribution of natural resources and the
social wealth while warranting a fair access to education, upliftment and
employment to the citizens. The memory of Tambapur reminds us that this system
is the good old welfare state. At the end of the narrative, the State resurface
obliquely as we are told that Rastogi is duly imprisoned in Tihar but it is
evident that the State is not doing much to protect the sources of water or
ensure its proper distribution. It would not be surprising if water mafias are
waiting in the fringes, patiently looking for the dust of public fury to settle
down before they make their move with someone like Varon Bhalla as their
broker.
With his loud silence on critical issues such as these,
Banerjee’s excellent craft as if incorporates the welfare state itself in the
scheme of the biophilia. The retrogression of the State in neo-liberal economy
has proven to be disastrous to the people and the environment alike. The mass
movements as the one of Vikaspuri would, in Banerjee’s design, at best would
remain a documented uprising and not one that would cause any fundamental shift
since there are miles to go before the citizens recognize the significance of
the welfare state in the design of their topos and ecology.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Banerjee, Sarnath. All Quiet in Vikaspuri. Harper Collins, 2015.
Calamur, Jaydev. “The Great Indian Water War.” Published on March 11, 2018. Accessed on December 2025. DNA. https://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-thegreat-indian-water-war-2592674
Lovelock, J.E. and Lynn Morgulis. “Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: the Gaia Hypotheis”. Tellus. vol. 26, Nos. 1-2, February 1974, pp. 2-10. https://tellusjournal.org/articles/10.3402/tellusa.v26i1-2.9731
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Mieville, China. The City & The City. Macmillan, 2011.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Standing, Guy. “The Precariat: Why It Needs Deliberative Democracy.” Open Democracy. 27 January, 2012.https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/precariat-why-it-needs-deliberative-democracy/
Thayer, Robert L. Life Place: Bioregional Thought and Practice. University of California Press, 2003.