Barking bad

A word frequently used these days when talking about epochal events in the world of business is ‘disruption’. It is used to describe the actions of new players who not only refuse to play by established rules, but through their very existence, make it difficult for everybody else to stick to ‘business as usual’. If you transpose this concept into the realms of culture and knowledge, you’ll see that some of the most talked-about practitioners do something similar. Johnny Rotten may not have won popularity contests (or awards for his singing), but there’s no denying his disruptive impact on music. Nicanor Parra, the 102-year-old ‘anti-poet’ from Chile, has, through his combative metaverses, permanently queered the concepts of poet and performer.

The late UG Krishnamurti did something similar for philosophy. Through his fierce, erudite opposition to not just the concepts, but also the objectives associated with conventional philosophy, UG pricked the complacency of students and teachers alike. A new graphic novel, This Dog Barking (written by Nicholas Grey and illustrated by James Farley), provides us with a highly approachable (and, at times, brilliant) summary of the ‘anti-enlightenment’ thinker’s fascinating life.

Like a lot of people who went on to investigate the human condition, UG, too, grew up a prodigal child with an unconventional education (in 1920s Andhra Pradesh). Like a Hindu John Stuart Mill, the child had mastered the nuances of dozens of seminal texts before adolescence. Unsatisfied with the answers he found, UG went from teacher to teacher, hopeful that the next one would prove to be the real deal. One of these encounters — with his illustrious namesake Jiddu Krishnamurti, the so-called ‘World Teacher’, has been dramatised to great effect here. Their paths would keep crossing throughout their lives, until UG grew disillusioned one final time.

These meetings are among the best pages of this impressively iconoclastic book. The supposed ‘weirdness’ of UG has been written and drawn in a way that makes him look like the straight guy in a two-person comedy sketch, playing off Jiddu’s highfalutin philosophising. Again and again, UG requests the World Teacher to cut down on the mysticism and give him to-the-point answers. But the reader soon realises that Jiddu’s thought process has crystallised permanently, to the extent that he is utterly incapable of talking sans solipsism and cryptic metaphors.

This signifies the larger problem that UG pinpointed in the trajectory that most 20th-century spiritual movements follow: a centralised ‘enlightened’ leader, whose followers spread the word in mainstream media outlets, and whose ‘ascension’ is cheered on by politicians, actors and hangers-on who hope to gain materially by the movement’s rise (the influential non-fiction book Feet of Clay details the less-than-savoury histories of some of these movements, profiling people such as Shree Rajneesh aka Osho, David Koresh, Jim Jones and others). And so good intentions and intermittently brilliant ideas add up to just another personality cult.

This is why UG, from the very beginning, is adamant about his own worth as a teacher — or lack thereof. Everywhere he travels, he attracts followers who want to listen to him. But he explicitly tells them to go away, to not pay heed to his words. In the titular passage of the book, UG tells them that their questioning him is akin to people “throwing stones at a dog (...) you translate the sound of this dog’s barking into meaningful language”.

As succinct as the writing is, it is Farley’s artwork that elevates this book from good to great-in-patches. Farley is clearly a fan of Robert Crumb and his ‘children’, the numerous artists who found their style drawing for Crumb’s underground magazine Weirdo , a counterculture high-point for ’60s and ’70s comics art. This influence manifests itself in the often psychedelic backdrops against which UG is drawn, masterpieces of groove and shade and diligent cross-hatch. The passage where UG describes his many bodily mutations is as trippy as some of Crumb’s experiments in body horror and the grotesque. As a lot of the book is basically UG talking to a bunch of his followers, the challenge was always going to be avoiding monotony — and Farley does just that, with subtle stylistic variations across different sections of the book.

Finally, a word about the difficulties of creating comics biographies is in order here. Sometimes, a comics caricature can be more honest than a thousand photographs or hours of footage, because irony and meta-awareness are powerful tools. But taken to extremities, the artist can become so wrapped up in ironical representation that historicity and temporal context are sacrificed altogether, at the altar of timeless, one-size-fits-all jokes. In the light of this, ThisDog Barking deserves even greater praise — its artistic restraint is as impressive as its psychedelia, and that’s not a sentence you can write every day.

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