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From
Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 32, Dated 11 Aug 2012 |
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Come together, over tea
The Pao Collective, a loosely knit group of friends and artists, tells Shougat Dasgupta, how their distinct sensibilities shaped their forthcoming anthology
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Beyond the mundane Sarnath Banerjee’s Tito Years
Illustrations Courtesy: Pao: The Anthology Of Comics I |
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WRITING, OR at least the Romantic conception of it, is the act of the solitary genius. Inspiration strikes (typically on a long walk, surrounded by nature, or, best, in the midst of a conveniently metaphorical storm), and the poet is driven to create in mad pursuit of his muse. The madness and loneliness of the artist are much cherished clichés, even in this age of creative writing courses in which apprentices pore over each other’s prose, or listen agog as an éminence grise offers advice on how to achieve the holy grail of the book contract.
If teaching writing can seem a forced, even cynical enterprise at US universities where students pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of community, it remains that writers have always found a necessary spur in the company of like-minded colleagues. Even those ur-Romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge had each other, and the likes of Robert Southey and Thomas de Quincey.
I don’t want, with this preamble, to spread rumours about the opium habits of Orijit Sen, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Parismita Singh, Amitabh Kumar and Sarnath Banerjee. It’s only to point out, albeit circuitously, that by coalescing into the Pao Collective, “to bring our energies together, share work, exchange notes,” says the owlish Sen, they are in good, classical company. Four of the five members (Banerjee being somewhere in Europe) are gathered in the People Tree studio. Actually, three: Parismita Singh being temporarily trapped in soggy Delhi traffic on a rare rainy afternoon in this stillborn monsoon. The studio is above the People Tree shop in faux-bohemian Hauz Khas Village. Whatever the pretensions in the winding alleys below, People Tree, a branch of the Connaught Place original, remains true to the singularity of its moving spirits, remains true to oddity. It is a good place to talk about collaboration.
The Pao Collective has just published an eponymous anthology under the aegis of Penguin India, out in bookshops over the next week or two. It is a handsome volume, its cover illustration by Orijit Sen, a nod to Maurice Sendak, the recently deceased author of Where the Wild Things Are, and a representation of the anthology’s conviviality, its affection for difference. A persuasive argument might also be made, though not by me, for its gently ironical, as opposed to satirical, quality. The crowded cover foreshadows the contents within — a collision of styles, ideas, quirks; an overturning of any expectation a reader might have of what a comic can, cannot, should or should not achieve.
What began, Vishwajyoti Ghosh says, “as a work sharing session, learning from each other” grew over five years into the anthology. Seeing Ghosh, Sen and Kumar arrayed before me, each formidably articulate and not likely to concede too easily in argument (and imagining Singh and Banerjee to be the same), the obvious question to ask is how they combined five separate editorial instincts and sensibilities. “One of the things I’m proudest of in this whole process,” says Sen, “is that it’s been a really democratic process.” “Seamlessly democratic, at least among the collective,” agrees Kumar. They talk of the pleasure of doing “a lot of editorial work”, of “mentoring” contributors, of “getting together new collaborations”. They talk enthusiastically too of the intricacies of creditsharing, the differences between the authorship of these highly idiosyncratic comics and what Kumar describes as “your conveyor belt industrial mode of production in which pencilling is done by one, inking is done by another, the idea conceived by someone else.”
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 Click to zoom
Orijit Sen’s Hair Burns Like Grass |
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Authorship, that Romantic obsession, in many of the stories in the Pao anthology becomes co-authorship and it’s a subject that still prompts qualification and clarification among the collective. “Story and art,” says Sen, “is what we settled on but it was a compromise.” “As an editor,” Ghosh asserts, “I would never say ‘story’ and ‘art’, I would just have both the names because the guy who’s drawing is as much a storyteller.” Kumar and Sen both collaborate in the anthology, the latter with the fantasy writer Samit Basu and the former with the Raj Comics superfactory, famous for its Hindi-language superhero series.
“The point of working with Raj Comics,” says Kumar, as if still to convince himself, “is that they do a Raj Comics. You have to let that be, to work within their processes. Part of the joy for me to make the piece that I did was for the two very different authorships to collide. The entire idea of collaboration is a certain loss of vision.” “You choose to lose yourself,” adds Sen. In Kumar’s case, the collaboration is largely successful, a political point made in a taut, muscular, ‘traditional’ comic style. Sen comes off less well, his and Basu’s story treading familiar comic territory but in pedestrian fashion. Sen’s other story in the collection, ‘Hair Burns Like Grass’, a work-in-progress on the life and poetry of Kabir, is astonishing, for me the highlight of the anthology. Sen’s illustrations veer from conventional comic book panels and strips to exquisite full-page and double-page spreads; the writing in English is at once expository and elegiac; Kabir’s poetry is quoted in Hindi, the poet himself (to whom the American poet Walt Whitman owes much), his lines, his spirit, suffusing the world of the story. A particularly beautiful illustration of a kite soaring Google Earthstyle above the city below made me go back to Sen’s much weaker collaboration with Basu to look anew at an overhead illustration of New York City, panning out over the snaggle-toothed skyline.
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Lasting impressions Ambarish Satwik and Pia Alize Hazarika’s Hindus & Offal |
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It is an important benefit of this varied anthology that the moderately attentive reader will spot serendipitous links between stories otherwise entirely unrelated: a flash of pink in the otherwise black and white ‘The Pink’, an entertaining bit of whimsy by Salil Chaturvedi and Priya Kuriyan, attunes you to further flashes of pink in Ambarish Satwik and Pia Alize Hazarika’s curious ‘Hindus & Offal’ and Amitabh Kumar and Raj Comics’ ‘Helmetman in Zamzamabad’. It surely cannot be coincidence, either, that Parismita Singh’s ‘Sleepscapes’, a spare, dystopic dream, is placed next to the lavishly wordy ‘The Afterlife of Ammi’s Betelnut Box’.
The latter story is the sort of slightly tedious family narrative all too familiar to readers of Indian writing in English. It is an anomaly because Indian graphic writing over the last 10 years has been, as this anthology and the Chennai-based publisher Blaft’s recent The Obliterary Journal show, gratifyingly weird.
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Jacob Weinstein and Lakshmi Indrasimhan’s Tattoo |
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“OBLITERATE LITERATURE! Down with novels! Long live comics and picture books and graffiti and wacky art”, (semi) jokes the foreword to the Blaft anthology published earlier this year. The truth is you’re more likely to be surprised by the work of Indian comic book artists, to be confused, exhilarated, amused, estranged, than you are by new Indian fiction in English. And the work is drawn and written for an Indian audience, whatever the global influences.
This is not to say Indian graphic writing is insular — the influences of these mostly urban, middle class artists are as cosmopolitan as any urban, middle class writer — but that it seems more in touch with the concerns, rhythms and frustrations of contemporary Indian life. Vishwajyoti Ghosh, whose story in the Pao anthology, the sly, wry ‘RSVP’, satirises the reliance of a certain kind of Indian cultural figure on the generous grants of Western organisations, insists this is not by design. “Graphic novels,” he says, “don’t have the pressure right now of being published abroad.” “It’s not as though there are big bucks waiting for us abroad,” says Sen. “The whole Manga cult,” he adds, “began with a handful of Japanese artists inspired by American comics in the late 50s who wanted to make Japanese comics for Japanese people and look at Manga now, so there is nothing to say that in India we can’t develop our own very strong, thriving comics culture.”
Sales may not extend yet beyond a few thousand, respectable in any case for books written in English that only came into the public consciousness about a decade ago, but the Pao anthology proves that Indian comic artists are confident in their voices, in the stories they want to tell and the ways they want to tell them. “Now we know how it’s done,” the collective assure me, “the next anthology will be better.” They’ve got a job on their hands.
Shougat Dasgupta is an Assistant Editor with Tehelka.
shougat@tehelka.com
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