‘A history of the emotions of living in a particular period’: Sarnath Banerjee on ‘Absolute Jafar’

We live today in a world of AI-generated book covers (and, indeed, books), a realm where quick and cheap production triumphs over everything, even if it is at the cost of sacrificing art. From that perspective, Sarnath Banerjee is an exception. His latest, Absolute Jafar, which has everything from an Indo-Pak romance to existential dilemmas, is his most personal work to date.

In an interview with Scroll, Banerjee covered everything from the present and future of the Indian comic industry, through his process of creation, to the meaning of home and the fickleness of memory. Excerpts from the conversation:

How was the process of writing Absolute Jafar different from your previous books?
In the process of writing Jafar, I dived into a past which is faintly recollected but fondly remembered. Writing the book was like a doorway through which I tried to remember how a generation felt during the ’90s and the early 2000s. It is not nostalgia but more an act of reclamation. Reclaiming a “history of emotion” of a people living through a particular time, ordinary stories of extraordinary times.

You describe Brighu’s attempts to pass down stories of jinns, eccentric cousins, and the subcontinent to his son as a “doomed enterprise,” largely because Jafar is, at his core, a Berliner. From that perspective, is Absolute Jafar also an attempt to archive these fantasies of a fading home – for Jafar, or even for your own son – in a form more durable than oral storytelling, which risks evaporating in the Berlin air?
Yes, very well put. It’s especially interesting because my own past is transformed. Like the Hindi poet Kailash Vajpayee said, “waha pe waha jaisa kuch bhi nahin” – there, nothing exists that resembles “there.” Many people feel that about their home. It feels like a different place inhabited by different people, as if they had lived someone else’s life, as if the past feels improbable.

It’s the same for Jafar, for the Delhi or Karachi that is mentioned in the bedtime stories is not the same. It can be very disconcerting when you actually confront it. However, Jafar is not just about archiving the past; it is also about anchoring the present. Because I feel we are constantly haemorrhaging the present into the past. We are piling up the past.

While capturing Delhi’s absurdities, you also render the city in deeply romantic colours through lines like “The mornings were lazy, afternoons erotic, evenings breezy, and nights mysterious.” Could you talk about your personal relationship with Delhi, and how, if distance has altered that gaze?
Someone said a city doesn’t exist until someone writes about it. When you visit an unfamiliar city, say Algiers, you sometimes feel you have been there before. It’s like nostalgia for things that never happened to you. You feel a strange longing for the human activities that are unfolding behind those white curtains of the Villa Blanc, gently bellowing in the Mediterranean breeze. Every house represents an episode from the TV serial Humlog. An Algerian Humlog.

For me, cities are people, with conflicts, dual personalities, paranoia, joy, anxiety, and doubts. In reverse, people are also cities.

Living in a place can also cause blindness; Paul Nash warns us of this blindness caused by the daily humdrum. One needs imagination to re-enchant a city, sometimes with the assistance of literature and art.

Despite the exponential growth of manga and mainstream comics in India, the Indian graphic novel scene still appears largely stagnant. This is striking, especially given that Indian works often offer higher quality at lower prices. Why do you think this condition persists? And do you see any real possibility of a structural cure?
Manga became a global thing because of its internal consumption. Only after it was popular in Japan and Korea, among its local readers, did it achieve success in the West. Also, the best-selling mangas are the ones coming from anime. Indian readership in English has always been a little star-struck by the West, something to do with confidence, and possibly has roots in colonialism.

We seemed to have come around it in the early 2000s, but somehow slipped back into the old pattern during Covid-19, especially among younger people. Culture is either west-approved or nationalistic. It is also linked to a large population of them wanting to leave India. The desire was there even before, but it wasn’t as strong as it is now.

Indian graphic novels and the Indi-comics movement have always explored the local. They do it with the same sophistication as any other advanced comics culture, and are very high quality, as you mentioned. Indi-comics people also have a steady and sizeable follower base. But it will never become mainstream, nor does it want to.

Most practitioners in our field have gone through a process of self emancipation that their work would not really hit the popular pulse. The comics produced are deeply felt, specific, and based on particular experiences, which will appeal to a smaller audience. We have practice with that, and, in a twisted way, some of us like that. I feel most of us don’t really want to become influencers.

You’ve worked across graphic novels, multimedia installations, and collaborative projects like Water Wars with Abhijit Banerjee, a multi-character soap opera. Do you see these as variations of the same artistic journey, one impulse taking different forms, or as fundamentally different paths? Is there an art form you feel drawn to but haven’t explored yet?
The comic is a compositional form. You can deconstruct Jafar chapter by chapter, theme by theme, and see a tonal variation. The next few years, apart from earning money (which I do by teaching), I want to spend some time understanding Indian and Chinese classical music and traditional theatre, perhaps Kabuki. I feel the future of my work is in the past. Recently, Ruchir Joshi compared Jafar to a rendition by Mallikarjun Mansur. While I thought he was taking the piss, which he very well might be, I believe him even if for a moment, it is the ultimate praise.

AI has disrupted the world of storytelling as we’ve known, in both visual and linguistic terms. Publishers are increasingly opting for cheaper, often substandard, AI-generated art simply because it eliminates the need to pay artists. How do you see this shift affecting the ethics and aesthetics of storytelling? And have you encountered this pressure yourself?
No, not yet. I do comics because of the slowness of the form and the labour it involves. Doing comics is good for my heart. The process gives me great pleasure and protects me from the digital toxicity that has pervaded everything from travel to dining to learning to leisure – even dating has become like finding a sofa on eBay. We have entered a world that is optimised for a future that will never come.

With AI, rather than embracing it, I am swimming against it. Going back to doing things more slowly, taking an interest in traditional things, being productive but not producing as much.

Apart from the environmental and human cost, what scares me about AI is that, as Indians, we are quite unprepared for it. They speak of AI being a democratising project; contrarily, I feel, it would produce a small class of thinkers who are going to drive the system. But most people would be at best DTP operators and, at worst, expendable. Our education system is not producing creativity, and I am a little worried.

This technophilia needs to be balanced with the humanities. Because it’s the latter category that would become the future bosses.

In many ways, your stories feel like stories of movement; composed of fragments, glimpses, and vignettes. Is that intentional?
I have a fragmented, deconstructed imagination; perhaps this is how comic narratives work best. It doesn’t provide the smooth, linear narrative of a novel or a film where a director decides what you need to see and for how long. Movies bring you closer to an emotional state, using sounds, editing, and an illusion of reality. Reading comics is harder work, for it is a collaboration between the creator and the reader; the images and text are symbols that the reader then processes and makes a reading of her own. How deep that reading is depends on the reader. There are no comics without the author-reader collaboration.

I’ll contradict myself in the very next question. Your work also has an eerie sense of stillness holding everything together, a combination of thehraav and a suspenseful hush. Is that silence something you consciously cultivate?
Comics is a medium of absence. Silence is the language of comics. When you are silent, you hear the murmurs of the universe. All the things that you never say are perhaps more important than what you say. In a words-only book, in order to create silence, you have to describe it, you have to say that “a strange disquiet fell upon Almora”; in comics, you show it, perhaps even amplify it, by using disconnected picto-textual compositions.

What is your definition of home?
Writing Jafar was an attempt to understand that. I used to check the weather report of Delhi every night after we moved to Berlin in 2010. There was a tendency to compare it with things back home. It took me several years to warm up to Berlin. Great events have happened to me there, perhaps the most important being the birth of a child who lives in Berlin. Nowadays, when I get off the BER airport and take the S bahn to home after a long break, I feel a great sense of home.

I have also started to appreciate the understated nature of Berlin, its various communities, the eccentric music venues, the Kurdish falafel places. That people who are constantly struggling with finance yet finding creative ways to hang out, winter dinners, potlucks, long walks through the city forests, picnics, being out in the streets, in demos. The society seems to work despite the government policies.

What are you reading currently?
For a few years, I have been mostly reading Bengali books and Hindi books in translation. I’m reading Chilekothar Shepai (The Attic Foot-soldier) by Akhtaruzzaman Elias, a work of political imagination, set in Bangladesh before its independence, a brutally funny account of a man slipping into madness. A book that can be compared to The Tin Drum. I’m also reading Kirtihaater Karcha by Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay and Raag Darbari by Srilal Shukla, translated by Gillian Wright. Along with that, there’s also the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé’s Crossing the Mangrove.

I’m working on a collection of short interconnected narratives based on micro stories of migration, Butoh Biking Club. It’s about the lies people tell about migration, the self-mythologisation, where the members slowly bike the perimeter of the abandoned Nazi airfield of Tempelhof, and the one who takes the longest time wins.