Those were wonderful wonderful times. The middle of the 18th century. Calcutta, the second city of the British Empire, was an extension of the first city in many ways — in its riches, its arrogance and its excess. Except that in Calcutta these great imperial values included even the despondent native elite who, flushed with wealth, invented the most absurd and obnoxious ways to get rid of it. Sarnath Banerjee’s second graphic novel, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers has many of these babus, emboldened by their colonial dispensation, trying desperately to rival each other in the wealth-squandering game. But the novel is not just about the frolics of these babus, which form only its humorous interludes.

At the heart of Banerjee’s quirky narrative is Digital Dutta, last seen in the writer’s first novel Corridor — torn between omnipresent Karl Marx and elusive H1B visa, who had shown signs of prodigal greatness. Here he is in full bloom, back in his ancestral, gargoyle-guarded house in present-day North Calcutta, wandering between his truant mind and Roland Barthes.

Narrator Sen, who also makes a return from Corridor, receives as inheritance an original leather-bound 18th-century journal called ‘The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers’, penned by Abravanel Ben Obadiah Ben Aharon Kabariti, a Jewish trader of Syrian origin, who just wandered into the imperial city. He befriended the rich and bribed the poor to get a fly-in-the-wall view of their life. Then with diligent detail and observation, he recorded the exploits of the colonial gentlemen who melted in the Calcutta heat by day and soaked in female flesh by night. But the book is lost before Sen gets his hand upon it and thus is set into motion an absurd tale about scandals and the eccentric life of the foppish men, both white and that of colour, in the mid-18th century and present-day Calcutta, recorded in turns by Abravanel, and Dutta, Sens’ accomplice.

Banerjee’s narrative is inspired by the 18th-century chapbook literature of Grub Street in London. The chapbooks were cheap sketches that took a caustic look at the rentier class — their habits, hypocrisy and hormones. Later, when the experience of colonisation had effected great changes in the oriental mind of a babu where Western arrogance resided with oriental cockiness, the chapbook culture arrived in Bengal, looking to satire the flip-flops of quicksilver one-upmanship. The seminal example of this form was a book about low, colloquial life in mid-19th century Calcutta called Hutum Panchar Noksha (Barn Owl’s Sketches) written by a distinguished man of letters Kaliprasanna Sinha. Banerjee’s novel and the title are inspired by this fascinating book in many ways, except that the lost journal simultaneously chronicles the legend of the wandering Jew; their incredible quality of appearing surreptitiously in history’s dark corners and changing its course, often unwittingly.

The black and violent humour that is the staple of graphic novels is not eschewed in Banerjee’s book. The fundamentals of the genre are in safe hands no doubt. In fact, his irreverence gives his narrative an insidious and erudite edge. Banerjee’s drawing lines are not always perfect, the faces are sometimes repetitive, his storytelling sometimes self-indulgent. But his wit keeps the tale alive, justly aided by his pregnant frames, which often narrate a sequence of their own, running parallel to the text. Barn is a major improvement on Corridor, mostly for its cheeky insights into history and it’s unmaking, as if it’s an amateur digital film. One might be a little disappointed by the ending. Otherwise, Barn is an intelligent take on the wonder that was Calcutta.

The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers | Penguin India | 2007 | 280 Pages