Panel Discussion

The India story told through a collection of striking visuals and recurring comic tweaks.

After the easy-to-read Corridor and the densely detailed The Barn Owls Wondrous Capers,Sarnath Banerjee promised his editor never to write a third. Three years later,here he is with The Harappa Files,a text-and-image collage with no single story thread. Nothing avant-garde,just going back to the old ways of telling pictorial stories, claims Banerjee. A bit like Lisbon Story,the Wim Wenders film on cinema,where a new-age filmmaker drops out and returns armed with a spring-wound,vintage camera to revive the original movie magic.

Forget avant-garde,but which old ways is Banerjee talking about? Societies,including ours,have oral and pictorial traditions of storytelling,mostly non-linear and often complex. These predate the advent of printing and the mass production of books. Our very own repertoire of scrolls,murals and folk tales should certainly tempt the graphic novelist. But to derive a page-turning experience from old-world narration would be a true challenge.

The Harappa Files is complex all right,but there is nothing old about it. If anything,it is daringly new. For the reader predictably so,because that is what she has come to expect in a graphic novel. Even here in India where the genre is barely a decade old,the fare from Amruta Patils Kari to Parismita Singhs The Hotel at the End of the World has freely tried out a range of styles that dare,bare or refuse to do either. The battle-scarred reader who has stayed on isnt easily shocked.

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Despite the authors disclaimer,the genre-savvy reader would read The Harappa Files as a graphic novel. Much of this readership,still urban,will find familiar story prompts here. The multiple Indian settings are mostly metropolitan and the only countryside that pops up is from faraway Congo,where Che Guevara tried to do a Tarzan.

The structural jump cuts arent a big problem either. If a key metaphor is what you want,it is right here: Ginish,one of the Harappan beings,is a psychic plumber who can operate in buildings without blueprints. You need no psychic prowess to get through this novel and as you go along youll hardly miss the blueprint. Striking visuals and recurring comic tweaks prod you on. Even better,the snippets add up to the India Story still so much in the making and about as logic-defying as the H Files itself.

After Lisbon Story,Wenders went on to make films and Sarnath Banerjee is sure to outgrow his premature genre fatigue.