A Graphic Novelist Captures the Paradoxes of Living in the

New India - The New Yorker

In his four books to date, the graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee has asked what the country risks losing in the course of its rapid
economic transformation. Above, a page from his most recent book, All Quiet in Vikaspuri, which was published in India in
2015.

Photograph Courtesy Project 88, Mumbai

Theres been talk of a New India ever since the countrys economic liberalization took place more than two
decades ago. But the term has always meant different things to different people: an India with potentially the
worlds largest middle class, a global India with an exploding youth demographic, an ascendant India that can
serve as a counter to a rising China. To critics, claims of a New India are contradicted by the persistence of
poverty, entrenched structural inequalities, discrimination against minorities, and the repression of free speech.
Champions of the New India, by contrast, like Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party, point to a culture of enterprise and opportunity that has made entrepreneurs of even Indias
slumdogs.
Is the New India a nationalist myth, or has the country been substantively transformed? For the Berlin-based
Indian graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee, both narratives contain some truth. In his 2011 book The Harappa
Files, Banerjee describes the country as one on the brink of great hormonal changes... a fast capitalizing
society that suffers from bipolar disorder. His four books to date have told stories of everyday Indians, from
urban neurs and government bureaucrats to psychic plumbers whose powers are well suited to the many
buildings that have sprung up in India without blueprints. Whether hes observing the transformation of Delhis
historic Hauz Khas village, studded with ancient tombs and mosques, into a wealthy residential area or the

global Brooklynication felt from Bombay to Berlin, hes always telling the story of his countrys abortive
coming of age.
Banerjees success as a graphic novelist is, itself, a product of forces that have taken hold in the New India. As
economic growth has fostered a new middle-class Anglophone reading public, interest in genre ction has
exploded. Indian readers of English can today nd homegrown works of chick lit, techie lit, detective ction,
even what the scholar E. Dawson Varughese has called crick litction about cricket. India has long had a
small but vibrant tradition of comic-book publishing, exemplied by the popular Amar Chitra Katha series, but
today most major and independent Indian presses publish in the genre, while others are entirely dedicated to
the graphic form. And, where popular titles of the past tended to depict Indian gods, fables, and folklore,
todays artists are interested in exploring the experience and contradictions of living in India now. When
Banerjees rst book, Corridor, about the patrons of a secondhand bookstall in Delhi, was published by
Penguin Books India, in 2004, it was heralded as the countrys rst graphic novel. In fact, that distinction
belongs to Orijit Sens 1994 book The River of Stories, which chronicled the controversial construction of
dams on the Narmada River. But, while Sens book was published with the help of an environmental-action
group and had a limited release, Banerjees books, published by Penguin and HarperCollins India, have given
momentum to a new generation of Indian graphic novelists.

Banerjee in Berlin, 2013.

Photograph by Amin Akhtar / laif / Redux

Banerjee, who is forty-four years old, was raised in a middle-class family in Kolkata (known at that time as
Calcutta). He told me that he was a protected and bookish child. He did his undergraduate work in
biochemistry at the University of Delhi, then earned a masters in image and communication from Goldsmiths,
University of London. Before making graphic novels, he worked on documentaries for Business India TV and
contributed illustrations and comics to prominent Indian publications. In 1999, a MacArthur Foundation grant
gave him the time and resources to work on his own book. (In 2002, Banerjee and a business partner, Anindya
Roy, founded a comic-book publishing imprint called Phantomville; it closed in 2008 owing to nancial
difculties.) Corridor, which quickly gained a cult following, was a bawdy portrait of the new Delhi, told
through the intersecting stories of ve men looking for texts, love, and aphrodisiacs in the aisles of a bookstall
in Delhis iconic Connaught Place commercial district. Banerjees readers recognized the daily travails of
characters like the books narrator, Brighu Sen, a young urbanite and self-described collector in search of an
obscure book, James Watsons Double Helix, or Digital Dutta, a Marxist computer engineer in pursuit of a
visa to work in the United States.
To tell his stories, Banerjee, who has been based in Berlin since 2011, draws upon the visual and textual
vocabulary of Western modernism: fragmented narratives, alternative endings and beginnings, repetitions,

elisions, mixed-up chronology. His 2007 book The Barn Owls Wondrous Capers, for instance, chronicles an
unnamed narrators search for an eighteenth-century book of scandals, written by an Indian version of the
Wandering Jew of medieval Christian mythology. It skips around in time from Lubeck, 1601, to St. Albans
Abbey, 1228, to twenty-rst-century Kolkata, with detours to the library of Walter Benjamin, the grave of the
Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and a Southeast London pub. But Banerjees work is also dense with
references to contemporary Indian culture. His style is collage-like, consisting of black-and-white ink sketches
interspersed with photographic images drawn from magazines, advertisements, and lm posters and stills, as
well as color panels and newspaper clippings. His texts are casually multilingual, including phrases of Hindi,
Urdu, and Bengali without translations into English. They describe products, like Boroline antiseptic cream or
Vicco Vajradanti toothpaste, that were made in India long before Modis Make in India campaign. They
include inside jokes about ethnic rivalries (Parsis are honest, unlike Marwaris and Sindhis) and invent forms
of employment, like telephone sanitizer, that would make sense only in India. (To date, there are U.K. and
French editions of his books, but none have been published in the United States.)
Because the graphic novel is a relatively new form in India, Banerjee has said that he draws inspiration largely
from visual artists and lmmakers: the documentary photographer and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, the
lmmakers Sai Paranjpye and Basu Chatterjee, as well as Francisco de Goya, Albrecht Drer, and Alain
Resnais. (In addition to writing graphic novels, Banerjee makes drawings and lms that have been exhibited
around the world. In 2012, he was commissioned by the Frieze Foundation to create a Gallery of Losers for
the London Summer Olympics.) Banerjees work has often been described as autobiographical, but he told me
that he considers himself a documentarian, one who records the tonal as opposed to the informational
content of the world. He outs the realist impulses that animate the work of many well-known graphic novelists
in the West, and when he does recount true stories, like that of the rst dissection of a human cadaver in
India (a brief episode in Barn Owl), it is with the intention of complicating, not conrming, history.
Banerjees most recent graphic novel, All Quiet in Vikaspuri, for instance, depicts an apocalyptic battle for
water in the drought-plagued city of Delhi. Published in India in 2015, the book begins by chronicling the
privatization of Bharat Copper Limited, a ctionalized version of the government-owned rm Hindustan Copper
Limited. One worker displaced in the process is a plumber, Girish, who goes to Delhi to look for work. There,
hired by a seemingly benevolent entrepreneur, Girish is charged with drilling far enough below ground to locate
the Saraswati River, a body of water mentioned often in the ancient Sanskrit Vedas, but which no longer
exists. During his quest, Girish encounters numerous people who have been banished below earth for the
crime of wasting water, such as Jagat Ram, a scapegoated employee of the Delhi Water Board, and B.K.
Gambhir, an army colonel who was caught stealing water from his neighbors tank. Girish eventually nds the
Saraswati, but on returning from his quest discovers that Delhi has descended into an epic water war led by
the entrepreneur Rastogi, who turns out to bea disaffected businessman trying to inate real-estate prices.
When Vikaspuri was published in India, many critics referred to it as a dystopian story. In fact, despite its
labyrinth of underworld denizens, the books plot echoes the costly, distracting, and almost certainly futilerealworldeffortsof Indias Hindu-nationalist government to locate the Saraswati, as if unearthing a mythical river of
the past will symbolically secure Indias future. In a series of essayistic panels in the second chapter of
Vikaspuri, Banerjee explores the concept of short-termismwhat he describes as the constant talk, in
India, of building new institutions without restoring the old. Short-termism is prescribing strong antibiotics for
mild illnesses, and building golf courses in Gurgaon when theres a water shortage in neighboring Delhi. Its
India getting ready for the 2010 Commonwealth Games by covering all that is crappy with marble. As in all

his work, Banerjee is concerned with what the country risks losing in its rushed transformation into a New
India: the old institutions and remedies that are being thrown out with the proverbial bathwater.

In All Quiet in Vikaspuri, Banerjee includes a series of panels about short-termismwhat he describes as the constant talk,
in India, of building new institutions without restoring the old.

Photograph Courtesy Project 88, Mumbai

Banerjee closes that series of panels with a group of wine-drinking, cigarette-smoking middle-class Indians
debating the origins of short-termism. Is it a South Asian disease, or a by-product of Hindu fatalism? Does it
reect Third-World uncertainty about the future? Does it result simply from living in India? Here, Banerjee
seems to be pointing a self-deprecating nger at the audience that has fuelled his own successthe
cosmopolitan middle classes that have often been complicit in the corporate recklessness undergirding Indias
recent economic growth. These are the readers who can move comfortably between Delhi shopping centers
and Frankfurt Airport, between textual references to Jean Baudrillard and Pankaj Mishra, between high
literature and comic strips. By depicting them as a gaggle of ineffectual ponticators, Banerjee suggests that
they might not be much better than the greedy businessmen who hope to grow rich chasing imaginary bodies
of water and driving up the price of real estate. Someone, his novels remind us, is living in those tony new
buildings and taking solace in the same old myths.