IN CONVERSATION
Visual vocabularies
LAKSHMI INDRASIMHAN
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Sarnath Banerjee on his new graphic novel
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A combined language of words and pictures: Sarnath Banerjee. Photo: AFP
Built around the myth of the Wandering Jew, and set in Calcutta, London and Paris, Banerjee's The Barn Owl's Wondrous
Capers unravels stories within sto
ries, revealing a host of unusual
characters and situations.
What was the inspiration for the book?
Much of my interests have been fake documentation, fake history. Who writes history, questioning history, the best way to lie or twist history. It gives you an excuse to do a bit of amateur detective work: finding out a certain kind of costume looked like, or what Philip Francis's duelling pistol really looked like, or what was the most famous perfume of that particular time. For me there was a lot of visual research. It's never really sitting down with a computer and writing the screenplay down in a clear crystalline way — I mean I always want to do it, but that's something that goes against the process of comic book creation.
There are two tasks required in making a comic, the writing part and the drawing part. How does it unfold for you usually?
My little obsessions, my knowledge, the little trivia that I've acquired, forms and gives structure to the project. When I'm articulating those thoughts it comes in a language that is a combined language of words and pictures. It never really comes as disembodied words or pictures in an ideal situation. A lot of comic book practitioners say that at the heart of comics lies this contradiction of the words and the drawings, which together create a psychological state that is more immersive, an atmosphere that is out-of-body, unexplained and intuitive. There is no strict rule that I have to be contradictory, but with practice and drilling you understand how to use very disparate narrative text and images to create a situation. Fundamentally, I am also trying to reach a situation where the story seems like it is being told to you, a pair of hands gesticulating, something that simulates dining table conversations. The conversation starts off in a desultory fashion, and then becomes quite focused, and then suddenly it seems like everyone is really into the conversation.
There seems a significant difference between the quasi-historical, anecdotal subject matter of Barn Owl and the classic male solipsistic art-comics. You still have the personal within the story, but what are you more interested in?
I like to have several degrees before the autobiography takes over. I try to resist it. I have a certain nervousness of being autobiographical. Regarding the meshing of history with the non-history, with personal experiences, that is something I'm very interested in, and keen on exploring in this and future books. There's the great story of Mohammad Bin Kasem, whose limbs were broken and he was sown up in a goatskin because he had deflowered two young girls who were meant for the Sultan. I'm interested in the personal story of the man who was doing the sewing up. The only chapter that was autobiography was the elevator, and story of the twelfth floor. I needed to validate that experience by keeping it truthful. The building exists, and the events there really happened.
What was your process of research?
The teashops, the butcher, the radio repairer, the poster makers all have these little histories. Much of the Barn Owl's Stories are gathered by just wandering around. And this contrasts with the research that happened in England, which was the organised attempt to gather the scandals of the East India Company. I ended up reading a lot of the low journalism of the time: party invites, gazettes. If you look at a mainstream book, you are climbing the wrong tree. Because much of your history is oblique and can only come through Mirza Ramzan who used to make the uniforms for the East India Company, or through the details of how the opium trade worked between the Zoroastrians and the Chinese. It's very time consuming but very pleasurable. The end product, the details give you ideas about how the larger narrative works.
What do you think is the connection between our modern Indian repression, and the very bawdy stories we find in your book?
I sort of celebrate my repressed Bengali society. Repression is cool. It evokes imagination. It has a lot of hypocrisy, which adds up to a lot of meaty material about life. Corridor and Barn Owl are full of repressed people. People have lots of sex, but still repressed sex. If it's an ode to anything, it's an ode to pulp literature in Bengali, and all the yellow literature. Detectives, killings and all that 19th to 20th century literature. I can't apologise for my low culture obsessions.
What visual vocabularies interest you?
I really like Gustave Doré. A lot of my characters look like Doré's Munchausen. I tend to gravitate towards the big noses, because I don't have one. The big influences are Poe, Count Potocki, and a reduced Don Quixote. You have all these influences and try to write like them and fail miserably, and that's how style emerges. Other influences are music. I'm into ragtime, Scott Joplin, syncopated music. If you read the book it is also syncopated. You'll see that where magical things happen, they are told in the most commonplace way. But, a toast-making restaurant becomes a very celebrated revolutionary thing that you get to indulge in. I'm very wary of philosophical ideas about books. I'm more interested in anecdote, story, and plot. I like tight writing.
There is a lot of interweaving structuring in the book. Do you plan it out in advance, or does it unfold as you proceed?
It's all mapped intricately before hand. The map itself changes and is dynamic. You write a few pages and then it changes the larger thing. There are all these strands and if you lose your central focus, then it's as if you're doing the tango and you've made your partner spin and you've forgotten all about her. The Barn Owl rounds off stories, as compared to Corridor which was much more experimental. A complicated world, but easy to navigate. Like Paris. A city for children.
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