Friends, two new images from Sarnath Banerjee and an interview, an edited version of which has already been published in First City. Sarnath is known as India’s first graphic novelist, and Corridor is known as India’s first graphic novel. In between Corridor and his second book, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, Sarnath set up Phantomville with Anindya Roy. Phantomville is a publishing house that produced India’s second graphic novel (The Believers). Then Sarnath’s second novel, Barn Owl, technically India’s third graphic novel, came out. Phantomville has now come out with it’s second book, Kashmir Pending, India’s fourth graphic novel. Just setting the series straight for the news media.

NEW IMAGES (CLICK ON THEM FOR FULL SIZE)

Sarnath is working on a series of drawings on small businesses that have disappeared or disappearing, including this man who made theatrical props for a living.

***

1. Could you talk about this choice to make graphic novels, why you choose to tell stories through that medium? What’s exciting about comics, to you?

I stumbled upon comics in the early half of adolescence. Abandoned it in the later half and focussed on biochemistry, women and a career in television. Faced with lack of success in all three, led me to seek out other forms of expression. A brief interest in doing documentary films and music videos led to more disappointments and then came comics. It was always under my nose, except I had the double chin of youth to prevent me from looking at it.

Ya now I’m excited by it, it’s the canoe to carry me through turbulent waters, to the other side. It’s my only way to tell stories unless I tell it in person, pointing a gun at the listener.

2. Do you see yourself as a storyteller or as an artist?

Storyteller mostly, weekends I pretend to be an artist.

3. Do you think that some themes can only be negotiated via comics as opposed to the more ‘conventional’ modes of narrative? Or that comics allow a kind of multiple layered narrative that’s not easy to come by?

Well good comics can. There are also mediocre comics, although there is a higher degree of mediocrity. Reading graphic novels is not like reading Thomas Mann, you don’t have to spend half a lifetime reading it and then realising what was the big deal.

Comics leans on brevity of expression, suggestive communication, economy of words, it is intolerant to verbal diarrhoea

(Do you think that comics are non-mainstream, by nature subversive and hence certain themes or a kind of humour naturally follows?)

Sometimes.

4. I’m very intrigued about the creative process of working out a comic, from what starts it, to its end blurb. Do you work through a script before you start drawing? Do you work with pencil or start with ink right away? What do you feel about hand drawings versus computer and photoshop effects?

Rehman, my wife’s family cook, an old opium-head wakes up everyday at 6.

After prayer, tea and morning ablutions, when he enters the kitchen he gets a shell-shocked look. As if he is a first year medical student entering the anatomy class for the first time and doesn’t know what to do with the cadaver that lies before him. The kitchen appears like Frankfurt airport. So he picks up an onion and chops it into half. He proceeds to slice a lemon, toys with the tomatoes, torpidly runs his fingers through the zeera and watches water boil. For a bystander it looks as if he is faking it, that he’s never been inside a kitchen let alone ever cooked. As the sun goes higher in Karachi, Rehman’s brain slowly thaws, like the mince he has taken out of the freezer. His movements get surer and faster. By afternoon, he is belting out the best Shammi Kebabs in the subcontinent. There is always the fear of opening one’s mouth in my in-laws house, lest someone thrust a kebab inside it.

What the kitchen is to Rehman, the white page is to me.

Currently, I am going through a period of confusion, until now I used the language of comics with mathematical precision. The visual narrative was calibrated, almost like an architectural blueprint, I worked and reworked on them till I was satisfied, however now I am making the form implode within the page. My new works, Harappa Files and Bachelor of 21 dreams, are drawings in response to the text and vice versa. This is a deviation from my usual approach, of starting with the text and image together and Rehman-like, cook them as I went along. In my new approach, I am trying to open the grammatical regimen of comics, which I have great respect for. I am going to give a jolly good bash at subverting the rules, if it doesn’t work I will retreat.

5. How important is the entertainment value, or working out a philosophy while you’re drawing/ telling stories? Is that more of a concern than how it turns out visually?

There is definitely a strong need to work out a conceptual framework, that’s a bi product of my disastrous education. The final product (for reasons of communication or entertaining, or creating a psychological state) and the theoretical framework needn’t contradict each other. Although, most of us create intuitively, often not bothering to ask questions like “why we do what we do”. However sometimes, when the work is complete, it can be enlightening if not self-indulgent to light a cigar, sit in a comfortable sofa and look at past work with the cold eyes of coroner.

6. As for comics versus graphic novels - is it a mass versus niche argument built into such terms of definition? How do you see it?

Graphic novel is a subset of comics. Both are forms, language, tools to tell narratives visually. They are not genres; genres decide the class of readers.

7. About the moral universe of comics… do you agree/ disagree that one exists?

(If there’s one, how has it evolved in your works? Also, do you think this has lead to the evolution of stereotypes?)

Huh?

My moral universe is very elastic and reflects in my comics as well as life style.

8. Do you think that working with comics requires a certain discipline/ economy (about words, images, colours) - more than another narrative form or art may?

Like I said, it’s a calibrated art form, at least the way I practice it. It is like those miniature painters in the Ottoman Empire. While doing comics you have to have the vision of a chartered accountant, the patience of a bank teller, the charlatanism of an aqua-guard salesman. All this mad-creative-genius- male artist myth is about 5 percent of the work.

9. Your influences? Favourite (eternal) comics?

Mystic sufi music and Zen Buddhism, just joking.

10. As a comic artist, do you feel you know your readers more intimately (because I guess, comics presuppose a certain familiarity… umm use an informal, conversational logic that works itself out)? Who do you imagine your readers to be, or is it something that you haven’t thought about?

I had a certain idea of an ideal reader when I started of, I don’t anymore.

11. What do you find tough to draw?

I can’t draw dogs. Also have problems drawing conventionally cute people with regular features.