Where did our irony go?

In his latest work The Harappa Files, India’s best-known graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee tackles our collective loss of fantasy as a nation

What’s your latest book The Harappa Files about?
First I want to talk about people who don’t read graphic novels. Why should they? When I wrote Corridor, I had to go out and tell people what I do. I think there are certain pertinent stories, certain details in our society that can best be told through words and images together. Words or images by themselves can’t communicate what they can communicate together... when you bring them together, they transform and you create a sort of chemical change. Some people get it, some don’t. I know a lot of intelligent people who just don’t. They could have read Plato and Archimedes but they don’t get graphic novels. Initially I tried to explain graphic novels to people, but then I stopped being an evangelist now I say my work is widely read in a narrow circle.

A lot of people feel it’s your best book so far…
Thank God! You don’t want to get worse and worse. Like Salman Rushdie…

When did you conceptualise and start working on The Harappa Files?
It takes a long gestation period. Anything that’s worthwhile takes a lot of time. It’s only when you are 90 years old that you can write about your childhood. Five years ago I started working on the concept of ‘loss of fantasies’.When you are a self-mythologising machine you have all these fantasies. But it’s not just the individual loss of fantasy but the national loss of fantasy that I am talking about. I am the guy with a pin, who’s saying let’s not get self-delusional because if you do, you lose one of the most important facilities of being an Indian, which is your irony, which the Indian middle class has lost anyway. We as a generation have become unfunny — the first thing about humour is to make fun of oneself.

The format of the book seems different from your previous books. Was this a conscious decision?
It was a torture. I got comfortable with the graphic novels. It was a craft I already knew, I wasn’t going beyond that. I’ve also never been convinced to write a novel. I don’t like the monogamousness of the thought, the linearity of it. So I decided I’ll implode and explode, build words around the drawings. I decided I was going to use design and arrangement. You arrange and rearrange things. That’s what I did; it could have been a complete failure.
While there was ridicule and satire in your earlier works directed at society and bureaucracy, in Harappa there’s a lot of anger and disillusion. It’s funny and whimsical but also your angriest piece of work.

A classic graphic novel reader doesn’t stop at words and imagers, but goes deeper. He has an inventory of his own memories and connections and can dig deeper into the novel... luckily the only antidote for anger is humour. But that anger is one aspect of the work. The tone of the book isn’t of anger. Harappa is a lot about fettishisation. For example, it has a piece abut the Indian fettishisation of Che Guevara. If I ask someone where Che is from, I might hear ‘Cuba’. And if I say, ‘no Che’s from Argentina, he was a doctor’, they’re shocked. ‘But he died in Cuba!’. No, he died in Bolivia. So it’s this self mythologising of our society that I am talking about.

There are a lot of images from the past in the book. There is a hint of nostalgia...
I am completely anti-nostalgia. Actually the stories in the book are more like a collection of bad things. I am talking about all the horrible things of growing up. Even though they are horrible, they are mine. Come on, a pair of Nike shoes was the pinnacle of our aspiration, which is pretty pathetic. We watched Krishi Darshan and Chitrahaar; travel was elitist and people came back with fancy ideas. They’d bring their film collection and be so proud about it; now one can just download movies. In a strange way the world has become horizontalised. I’ve simply pulled out objects from our past and done a slight analysis. You are stuck with an unreliable author. It’s an emotional history of an individual person. You’re writing for yourself.

What’s the process of working on your idea?
I move from idea to idea. I don’t work with individual images or drawings. Music is one of the most important ways of thematically starting to do some work, for me. I also like the folk forms that came from America, the blue grass guys, Woodie Guthrie, who kind of told stories.

What kind of books do you read?
I read like a maniac. My wife and I will soon have leave our flat because we don’t have enough space for ourselves. Well I don’t really read a lot of Kafka and Borges, the two authors that I apparently emulate, or I read them late. I like a lot of crime and detective stuff. My generation had read English, August, which had become like a primer. Among recent Indian writers I like Samit Basu, Altaf Tyrewala, Palash Mehrotra, Siddharth Chaudhry; solid writers. My influences don’t come from literature or even films. Photography — yes. Street photography of Walker Evans. I can give you a list of 20 people who have influenced me musically. Dance lately. Modern dance and choreography. History of ideas, history of objects — history has been a big influence. You can throw in Edgar Alan Poe.

Some of the images from the book have been acquired by collectors. How did that happen?
Once you’ve decided the theme, you are sorted and you started working on it. My current theme is reviving dead museums and the other one is doppelganger — two identical images that are placed near each other, and with a slight change in one, the reality itself changes. I am represented by a gallery and so the work’s going to be sold. But I also have the rights to reproduce these works. Then I spend a year or two and compile these works and it could perhaps been a novel.