Guardian of the ambiguous

Springtime in Delhi is a splendid fugitive. Between a dreary winter and a blistering summer, spring is brief but beautiful — sunny and bright, prone to bursts of colour. Writer and artist Sarnath Banerjee knows this. It doesn’t cheer him up.

In full colour: Berlin based Sarnath Banerjee is currently working on a children’s book set in Karachi

“It’s awful in Berlin, ya. It’s raining heavily here. We have to just stay in and invent things to do,” he tells me over the phone from the German capital, where he stays with his six-year-old son, Mir.

Banerjee (47), who divides his time between Delhi and Berlin, recently released his latest book Doab Dil , in addition to opening an exhibition titled Spectral Times at the Bhau Daji Lad museum in Mumbai. Now back in Berlin, he is settling into its rhythms while simultaneously resisting its demands. “People of colour who are successful here, whether they’re a curator or an artist, they do explainers. They explain their situation, context and history to the West,” he says in a slow, distracted drawl. “If you are brown, then you have to be an angry brown artist whose art is a political comment on injustice. I’m not really interested in all that.”

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Neither is he interested in careful calibrations of identity formation, currently in vogue. He caricatures how some artists define themselves as “Malay-Chinese-Tamilian-Muslim from some tribe that is being harassed by the mainstream government”.

The “Other” in Berlin, he says, is currently the Middle East. “There’s a whole Arab thing going on, but the problem is not their [the European art establishment’s] curiosity — the problem is that Europeans still need other Europeans to interpret the rest of the world for them,” he says.

Banerjee doesn’t seem to remember it, but we have had this exact conversation before. Last year, he and a few of us who lived in the same neighbourhood in Delhi were returning from a mutual friend’s party in a shared cab. Halfway through a sentence about how European cultural institutions are moulding the work of artists of colour to produce a certain kind of output, he abruptly stopped the cab to get off at one of CR Park’s local markets. When asked if it wasn’t a tad late in the night for grocery shopping, he replied that he was going to play carrom with a few of the vegetable vendors. He never finished his sentence.

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Born in Kolkata, Banerjee studied biochemistry in Delhi University, following which he pursued a Master’s in image and communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. His first graphic novel Corridor (2004) established him as a formidable alternative voice in literature. This was followed by The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007), The Harappa Files (2011) and All Quiet in Vikaspuri (2016). In between the novels were intriguing art excursions, such as Gallery of Losers , which celebrated all those who didn’t win at the 2012 London Olympics.

“I’ve always been a reader of fiction. My mother, well — books were narcotics for her,” he says as he describes a childhood immersed in reading Kishor Sahitya literature — a genre for early teens. “It gave us Byomkesh, Feluda, flights of fancy, fantasies, ghosts, adventures. And if you read that language — my God! It’s like molten chocolate,” he emphasises as he describes the stories of Bengali authors Leela Majumdar and Bibhutibhushan Banerjee. “This is the literature I was weaned on. Somewhere down the line, the imaginations of the child and the adult mixed.”

A graphic artist and writer such as Banerjee is a difficult interview subject. I get the distinct suspicion that he is wandering about in his thoughts even as he speaks, sauntering between topics with disconcerting felicity, as though any coherence in overall meaning and structure is merely incidental. As I sit with my interview transcript, trying to put together a logical structure to the conversation with Banerjee, I am left with tenuously connected vignettes, images and impressions of contemporary life as observed by someone with a particular affinity for the absurd.

And I realised — oh, this is exactly what happens in his latest book.

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In the introduction to Doab Dil , Banerjee’s fifth book, he says, “Three years ago, I went through an intense period of non-fiction, a genre I had wholly avoided until then.” Doab — the fertile tract of land between two converging rivers — described by the author as “the rich...populous tract where civilisations are born” is used as a metaphor for the unpredictable, joyous magic that happens when text meets image.

Across 11 chapters — that range from ‘Gardens: A Place of Inquiry’ to ‘Dark Arcadias’ to ‘History’, with the final one titled ‘Doab Dil Desert Island Disc’ — Banerjee sews together impressions from history and literature with his characteristic style of imagery. Vividly drawn men and women inhabit landscapes of solid colours, performing something benignly weird with a deadpan expression.

Text flows freely into the frame, unhindered by the need to belong with other elements on the page.

Unlike his previous novels, the chapters follow no overtly evident connecting structure, no overarching narrative; there is no omniscient narrator guiding the reader towards a shared understanding. In doing so, he mirrors the late German philosopher Walter Benjamin, whom Banerjee calls “the foot philosopher and solemn investigator of futile things”. In the chapter ‘Deep Topography’, Banerjee writes, “[Benjamin] weaved together a dinge welt, a seemingly disparate set of everyday objects that assumed significance and deeper meaning via association and a close, atypical reading.”

Discussing the structure of Doab Dil , Banerjee says, “The connection is phantom, as you may have realised. The connections happen inside you, so there is no single reading of the book. The human mind always connects things with each other in its own personal ways. The narrative just begins with studying gardens as a place of enquiry to a place where class is understood and where boundaries are made.” Using the example of Jane Austen’s protagonists in Pride And Prejudice , whose romantic fate is sealed on the vast rolling grounds of Darcy’s estate, Banerjee says, “It’s in a garden where Darcy and Elizabeth recognise each other’s class and go, ‘ Arrey , you live in Panchsheel Park? I also live in Panchsheel Park! Chalo , let’s get together.’”

Banerjee says he has kept the connections “deliberately amorphous” because he has stepped down from the world of graphic novels. He points out that All Quiet in Vikaspuri — that predicts a dystopian yet entirely plausible drought in Delhi that triggers a war — is his last graphic novel. “ Doab Dil is by no means a graphic novel, rather it’s a more inventive juxtaposition of text and image that draws on a formidable literary and artistic heritage,” he says. From the Shahnameh , an epic poem written by Persian poet Ferdowsi, to the Pattachitra tradition in Orissa, to the Renga , a form of Japanese collaborative poetry of short, interlocking verses, Doab Dil is rich with artistic confluence.

He doesn’t foresee himself making another graphic novel — “Unless I get paid a lot,” he adds the caveat. “It’s so disheartening to work on graphic novels; compared to the effort you put in, what you get paid is jacks**t. I’m surprised people still do it. Unless they’re doing it for vanity,” he surmises. “A lot of writing in India is unfortunately vanity writing.”

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These days, Banerjee’s chief interlocutor, critic and co-conspirator is his son, Mir Ali, whose custody he shares with his ex-wife Bani Abidi, a Pakistani artist, also based in Berlin. Two of Banerjee’s novels are dedicated to Mir, a fact he is very proud of. “He’s a very vain young man,” the author says fondly, discussing how Mir even dictates stories to him. They record a radio show together in which Mir takes on different personalities in each episode. “Sometimes he is Chef Ali — or Shefali — who runs a restaurant that serves only crocodile-based dishes,” he says. “Crocodile eyeball pakora is supposed to be the top thing on the menu,” he adds.

He is currently writing a children’s book based in Karachi about jinns, something he’s excited about since it’s always been difficult for him to write about Pakistan as an Indian. “Writing for children has sharpened my own skills because with children, you have to be bulls**t-proof. They’re terribly smart and they don’t care for flat, sterile language,” he says. “Also, kids love being persuaded by a story. This seduction in storytelling is something I first encountered in Leela Majumdar’s writing, and later with my experiences with Mir.”

Apart from the book, Banerjee has his hands full with various collaborative projects. He’s going to be a Visiting Belknap Fellow at Princeton University in the US this year, where he will be working with historian Gyan Prakash on, among other things, interesting ways in which history will be taught. He is expected to embark on another project with the economist Abhijit Banerjee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Enchanted histories, urban angst, postcolonial chaos and an unremitting love for wandering are among the various predilections that have come to define Banerjee’s curious and compelling oeuvre — but an equally enduring one remains the sly observation and caricature of Bengalis. “First of all, I would politely deny that,” Banerjee says. “A lot of these characters are drawn from real life, and like most Bengalis, it’s probably true that I also will die of a heart attack thinking it’s gas.”

But he insists he cannot claim to know Bengalis. “I used to think I knew them, I used to think that Bengalis resisted mainstream thinking, they would refuse to be swayed by jingoistic rhetoric. But I recently went to Kolkata and found that Bengal had become the cow belt,” he says. “So do I know them? Yes. Do I want to know them better? Well, not as a mission in life.”

As the interview winds up, he makes plans to meet when he returns to Delhi, but it’s safe to say he will forget — unless one ambles through the lanes of CR Park, where one may or may not run into Banerjee at the snack stalls at Market No. 1, and he may or may not say with great certainty something like, “White people don’t understand food, yaar. You want to play carrom? Come, I have some friends here.”

Rihan Najib

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