Sarnath Banerjee, who pioneered the graphic novel form in India did commit one mistake. If not in his debut work Corridor, he kind of excelled himself in his second novel, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, a rollicking, lip-smacking, throat-bursting satire on babu life in 19th century Calcutta that was full of the clever, rip-roaring humour that Sarnath has made his own.

Barn was loosely based on the mood of a seminal work on Calcutta’s low, colloquial life in mid-19th century — Hutum Panchar Noksha, written by a distinguished man of letters, Kaliprasanna Sinha. Banerjee’s novel about the despondent native elite who, flushed with wealth, invented the most absurd and obnoxious ways to get rid of it, so embodied his signature style and tenor that it was always unlikely that Banerjee will be able to surpass it anytime soon.

No wonder the prologue to his latest, The Harappa Files says, “After writing Corridor and The Barn, Banerjee went through a period of silence wondering about the point of it all. Having promised his editor never to write another graphic novel, he returned to her office three years later with a manuscript of ‘loosely bound graphic commentaries’.”

This may be true or may well be part of Banerjee’s tongue-in cheek-way to explain the architecture of this book, which he calls ‘the old way (s) of telling pictorial stories.’ Either way, after Barn, it will be no disservice to him or his art to call The Harappa Files somewhat of a disappointment. This is never to say that the book cannot stand on its own. In fact, it does and does quite well. The picture stories, or the portmanteau narrative form that he employs, frees Banerjee from the logic of the novel’s continuous narrative and arms him to the tee to poke fun at individual characters and situations which, his fans and readers will be happy to know, he does with characteristic relish and abandon.

The book begins with the 33rd meeting of a secret think tank which goes by the name of GHRRR or Greater Harappa Rehabilitation, Reclamation and Redevelopment Commission. This think thank consists of the “colonels and admirals of society who operate from the nether regions of the government’s subconscious.”
Monastic followers of French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might protest here saying that there is nothing called the subconscious (and instead only the ocean like unconscious and what we call consciousness) but that is not the point here. The point is that the country is on the brink of great hormonal changes, the enormity of which must be recorded and preserved. Hence, one Sarnath Banerjee is summoned by the GHRRR to pen the types and mythologies that are seriously endangered. It is similar to reading the social mythologies in ways made fashionable by French cultural theorist Roland Barthes, only that Banerjee laces the idea with an unfailing sensibility that is both witty and astonishingly perceptive. The result is thoroughly rewarding.

It is impossible here to go deeper into the actual samples of his pictorial stories but it will suffice to say that you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, can identify with more than a few of this samples from your neighbourhood, or even from the topography of our collective pasts.
But Mr Banerjee, be rest assured, GHRRR is welcome to record India’s million stereotypes but given its famed syncretism, India’s stereotypes are surely going to survive much more into the future than we could imagine, even if the hormonal changes lead to a menopausal stasis.

The Harappa Files | Sarnath Banerjee | Harper Collins | 2011