Reacting to incidents of discrimination against Somalians living in India, Delhi-based art curator Radha Mahendru and researcher Bani Gill have come up with a semi-fictional graphic novel that raises pressing questions about the refugee crisis.
Titled, "The Horizon Is An Imaginary Line", the book is an illustrated account of a young Somalian woman's encounters as a refugee in India which was released at Khoj International Artists' Association here.
"Khoj has a long practice of community-based work and I approached the refugees living here through them. So, I had this mix of art practice with the global rhetoric of refugee crisis in my mind. After we started researching for the book, I learnt that there are several Somalian refugees living in the area," says Mahendru.
With illustrations by Pia Alize Hazarika, the book includes a series of stories that the authors discovered during their various meetings with refugees in Delhi.
"Through our character Maryam, we reflect on the lived experiences of alienation and marginalization as an 'outsider' on the fringes of an increasingly bordered global. Designed partly as an infographic, the book sets out to dispel myths and assumptions about the refugee crisis and India's ambiguous status within the global refugee regime," says Mahendru.
The project grew from an ongoing engagement of Khoj with the African community living in Khirkee Extension.
Gill, who is pursuing her PhD on migration and has worked extensively with communities, says lack of a strong law creates more problems because most of the people do not know where to go when they face discrimination.
"There are several refugee communities living here but we do not have a refugee law in India which creates problems for many of them since they do not know where to take help from while facing discrimination," says Gill.
The book also contains real-life narratives of Somalians-- Fatima, Koofe and Hafez -- who vividly talk about their sense of alienation in a foreign land.
"Although I came to India when I was 10, I felt like I was on a foreign land. It is difficult especially for women refugees to survive here because of the clothes that we wear and our skin colour," says Fatima.
According to Gill, it was through their narratives and experiences that the semi-fictional character of Maryam emerged.
"At each of these sessions, deeply personal narratives of alienation and limbo came to the fore, as did accounts of struggle and resistance against the status quo of the global refugee regime.
"For many of our collaborators, a lot of whom have grown up in India, speak Hindi fluently and even have access to basic amenities- water, electricity, gas --life is complicated due to their ambiguous legal status," she says.
The stories prompted the authors to engage with graphics which allowed for flexibility in perspective while conveying the emotional struggles of being in a state of limbo.
The book also aims to strike a balance between the statistical data and accounts of personal sufferings.
"There were discussions about the compilation of the data that we collected from ground and experiences of several refugees living in our society. Several disturbing stories which we heard made us think more and more about this crisis," Gill says.
Although, Maryam is a fictional character but she provides a familiar account of being out of her place, in a world that is defined by legal categories, borders and fences, she says.
