India's premier graphic novelist on street hustlers, the perils of cosmopolitanism, and his disinterest in building bridges with the West.
Growing up as a middle-class Indian in the 1990s and 2000s, I had access to two very different kinds of comic books. On the one hand, the Amar Chitra Katha imprint produced hundreds of slim volumes drawn from Indian mythology. On the other, there were western comics with their charming imperial adventurers (Tintin), war-mongering ancients (Astérix), and young American consumers (Archie). Though they represented different cultural universes, these two bodies of work shared one trait: they had absolutely no connection to my life. Indeed, I never imagined the comics would be more than a fundamentally escapist medium for me.
That all changed in 2004 with the publication of Corridor, Sarnath Banerjee’s debut graphic novel. Rendered in a mixture of photographs, drawings, and text, Corridor followed the lives of three ordinary men who whiled away their time in a second-hand Delhi bookstore. The world it depicted—one of roadside hustlers and garish billboards, of liberated college students and their conservative landlords, of trendy parties and shady markets—was, for the first time, entirely familiar.
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While his books vary in terms of formal structure, Banerjee’s central concerns remain constant. Time and again, he delves into the psyche of middle-class India—that fraught zone of consumerist aspiration, post-colonial angst, and conservative leaning—and emerges with reports on its citizens’ yearnings and fears. Yet Banerjee’s books are never didactic. He has a special affinity for the ultra-rich deformed by their own money and addresses dark episodes from colonial history, but his take on these subjects is sly, playful, and at times even absurd.
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Guernica: Corridor is about the lives of three people from very different social backgrounds who happen to visit the same secondhand book dealer in Delhi. The loutish Anglophile middle-class intellectual, Brighu, I understand, but how did you come to write about Digital Dutta, a Marxist IT guy, and Shintu, who comes from a much less westernized background?
Sarnath Banerjee: I have been a loiterer all my life. I’ve met these people. The truth is, you have to lead a certain lifestyle to write a certain kind of literature. Corridor comes out of my sustained experience with Delhi. I think what you’re getting at is less a class thing and more a western versus non-western thing. Because Corridor’s protagonists are all just middle class. You relate with Brighu because he’s an Anglophile, and, as we all know, European and American sensibilities are not underexpressed in our culture. If anything, they are overexpressed, which is why you find Brighu familiar. And the reason you might find Digital and Shintu a little unfamiliar is because I’ve not tried to explain them.
As a non-western artist, you have to ask yourself a question fairly early in your life: do I want to become a bridge maker, do I want my culture to be understood by the west? I have no intentions of doing such things. I’m fine being a little strange to a non-western audience. It doesn’t bother me if my book doesn’t change a generation of American readers, like Jhumpa Lahiri’s books are doing, or Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s books are doing. In order to write universal literature, you have to iron out a lot of particularities. And I’m not interested in making things friendly reading for Americans. We come from huge landscapes: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh. If you put that world together, it’s a lot of people.
Who gives a fuck about New York? What’s great about being in one small section of the bookshop in the Strand? I don’t think it makes me feel any culturally greater. I think that age has gone: of having my work understood in New York, or by an Anglophile Indian for that matter. It’s not my intention to be understood. I will continue writing for a readership that is fundamentally local. Because if you want to produce universal writing, you run the risk of losing your local knowledge. Your views are so universalist that the street aspect disappears.
Guernica: And the street is very important to Corridor. Especially the street hustlers.
Sarnath Banerjee: Hustlers, yeah. Hustlers are lovely people. They have so much personality. They are such charismatic people. But we are all hustlers. Whom I’m especially interested in are the downgraded hustlers. The juice wallah who is also a property dealer who will also fix your erectile problem. These downgraded hustlers are the most charismatic people.
Guernica: You portray them so well: without sentimentality, and yet with great warmth. How did you come up with your unique visual idiom? I know no one who captures everyday Indians like you do. Who were your early visual influences?
Sarnath Banerjee: Everything you draw is influenced. It’s like yogurt. You need a little bit to start the next batch. So there were a lot of people. Taraporevala has been a very strong influence because she had the ability to use her camera to probe into the deeper, funnier, more eccentric aspects of people. Her photos are so narrative. I absolutely love her work.
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