‘Absolute Jafar’ marks graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee’s glorious return to long form
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Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking.
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The late Japanese mangaka Tsuge Yoshiharu built a career out of characters who walked themselves into contradictions. “Though I was drawing fact,” he once said of his autobiographical “I-comics”, they differ “from a diary in that one pulls together only the important parts of fact and recomposes those fragments.” Sarnath Banerjee’s comics also revel in such truthful fabrication, except his terrain is not post‑war Japan but the Indian subcontinent and its inherited discontents.
Banerjee’s characters have always been as mobile as the slippery situations and porous panelling they find themselves drawn within. Whether housed beneath the porticos of Delhi’s Connaught Place in Corridor (2004), tracking the conspiratorial history of colonial Calcutta’s infamous duel in The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007), found flailing in an attempt to dig up clues in The Harappa Files (2011), or boring deep into the ground for the river of stories in All Quiet in Vikaspuri (2015), fact and fiction often collapse into the overlapping spectres of history that Banerjee’s whirling dervish weaves into images and text.
As it happens, Absolute Jafar is his first long-form graphic novel in over a decade. He had impishly sworn off the format in between, his work flitting from illustration to animation, fine art to self-styled “radio” and “theatrical” comics, with the...