Is history really written by garment exporters? Do men rubbing themselves against flyovers really need organisation? Is education for us what boxing must have been for the black man? Was there a better icon for badminton than Jeetendra?
Sarnath Banerjee바카라™s graphic commentary on contemporary India, The Harappa Files, creates a new way of using text and pictures that makes commentary akin to a strain of virus that explodes in each individual brain in a unique way. The open-ended, elliptical, corrosive and pointless come together in a colloidal suspension of text and image that makes for uneven consumption and some residual grit in the mouth.
A new form, even when described in old ways (a graphic novel or commentary), is always more than a Venn diagram overlap of existing ideas. In Banerjee바카라™s hands, the graphic commentary wriggles itself into adroit new positions that create vignettes of both sharp familiarity and deep surprise. Here Banerjee takes us through the cracks in our time into a succession of bite-sized snapshots that look at us from various vantage points. To be fair, it looks like a lot of random commentaries strung with a transparently insubstantial device but, far from hurting the book, it helps generate a surplus of meanings, including some that might not be fully intended. The drawing is evocative, specialising in creating precise memories of experiences we have never quite had. Together it paints a picture of an India cracking at the pot-belly and creaking everywhere else.
A book that is perhaps not really meant to be read, only inhaled.
