It is the fourth day of the conflict in West Asia when Sarnath Banerjee and I finally speak. He is supposed to fly to Berlin later that week–to work on an illustrated book on mosquitoes and how they challenged the British Empire–but a postponed court hearing has thrown everything into uncertainty.
“I was told: whatever flight you get, just get yourself there,” he says. He, too, is eager to leave as his son, whom he co-parents, awaits his return in Berlin. “It seems like everything is happening at the same time,” he says, and then, with the weariness of a man who is simultaneously a father, a litigant, and a witness to the world catching fire, exclaims: “What’s happening with the world!”
This state of being suspended between cities, hearings, the ordinary and the catastrophic, and the real and the imagined, is the territory of his new graphic novel, Absolute Jafar. It follows the protagonist, Brighu, through the labyrinths of Delhi and Berlin, the swamps of Indian bureaucracy and India-Pakistan relations, and the indignity of proving that you belong.
Banerjee is well-versed with this condition. He was born in a military hospital in Burdwan, West Bengal, he was shaped by New Delhi – and now shuttles between the Indian capital and Berlin. He is, in the most lived sense, an expert on what it means to be perpetually unmoored.
On turtles, fish, cheetahs and falcons
Animals are a recurring motif in Absolute Jafar. (Courtesy: Sarnath Banerjee)
Ask him what animal best represents the Indian courts–the book is full of animal symbols, and incidentally bureaucracy travels on the fish of the mystic Jhule Lal–and pat comes the response. “The courts would be on a turtle. It takes its own time. It teaches you the humility of waiting. Or maybe even a plant. You feel like a benign gardener, you have sown your gladiolas and you are just waiting for them to flower. You cannot rush it. You cannot make water boil faster by standing next to it.”
He calls these “life lessons”– the kind that should be administered early to impatient people with road rage or those who are rude to waiters. “Being in unfamiliar circumstances, being humiliated, failing. These are all ways in which you grow,” he says.
He mentions a drawing he did years ago of someone in scuba gear, diving into a small pond, over and over. “Deep diving your own little puddle. You are all geared up and you are just diving into that same pond again and again,” Banerjee says. He made a little frog to go with it. The literal, ‘kuen ka mendhak’ to drive home the message. “But that is what Delhi was, from the outside–these men, particularly men of a certain class, who had never been socialised outside the parameters of their own social construction.”
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The Last Migrant
A sketch from ‘Absolute Jafar’ of a lone cheetah standing against the dying light is called, ‘The Last Migrant.’ (Courtesy: Sarnath Banerjee/Harper Collins)
The cheetah at the heart of Absolute Jafar is the heart of the graphic novel. Banerjee found the image while thinking about the cheetahs reintroduced to Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. “Beautiful, sophisticated, but fragile,” he says. “Like some human beings. Their only fault is that they are not opportunistic go-getters. And those people are getting a beating in the world currently.”
When he drew the lone cheetah in the dying light of the Kuno forest, he says, he was almost moved to tears. “There is so much disquiet in that picture. And it is not the usual bourgeois love for animals, not some homocentric approach. I could just feel it.” The cheetah is the migrant par excellence, not the migrant as activist or symbol, but the migrant as a creature of particular, unheroic vulnerability. The Last Migrant. The one whose only fault is refinement.
The book is also an Indo-Pak romance, and a meditation on who gets to find a house in south Delhi. It is about the small, precise failures of imagination that make ordinary life so difficult for some people and so frictionless for others. Banerjee draws a parallel with Germany, where he lives with his son. “You tell a German person that one of the biggest problems for migrants in Germany is dealing with the administration. And the response is, ‘oh, it’s hard for Germans also.’ It is exactly like when I tell someone that Muslim people have problems finding an apartment in Delhi, and they say, as a Punjabi man when I was 18, I also found it difficult. Not even having the imagination to understand. I am not talking about empathy. I’m talking about just a small auto ride from here to the southeast. Just imagination.”
A deficit of imagination
This failure of imagination is the subject of his 2025 Berlin Biennale installation, Critical Imagination Deficit. Banerjee gave a keynote address on it at The University of Art, Berlin, in the middle of the Gaza crisis. In these politically sensitive times, he chose his words carefully. After all, he has seen firsthand what happens to those who are outspoken. “But we also have to say what we have to say.” So instead he spoke of children in a playground in Germany, how protective Germans are of their children, how vivid their imagination of what safety looks like, and the absence of that same imagination for a child elsewhere, “whose life is so uncertain that she doesn’t even know whether she can finish the Lego set before the sirens approach.”
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Europe, he says, has lost its capacity to imagine other worlds. “In every university and humanities department, there is this big fetish for critical thinking. They have all read Deleuze (the French philosopher). They are all critical thinkers, and in an argument they say things like, ‘that depends,’ ‘you are generalising.’ It is precisely the fact that they speak on behalf of a received imagination – a received knowledge and a received idea of criticality – that marks the failure of their critical imagination.”
The politics of walking
Walking, in Banerjee’s telling, is political. “You walk in different geographies differently. You walk in Delhi as if you are the grand wazir of a badshah, not a worry in your head, not knowing that there is a possibility of being beheaded in future. Your ancestors built the city, you have a natural claim to the tea shops, the flower shops, everybody around. So everybody in Delhi is a badshah of their mohallah.” Bombay, by contrast, is “a geography of love. Loved ones, loved people” Berlin, which is home for him now, requires a different kind of navigation. Marzahn, in the east, was once synonymous with neo-Nazi violence. “There’s no violence anymore. I have never had any racial encounters there. But there is that old fear.”
A djinn walks in Karachi, the protagonist Brighu, walks with his son, the eponymous Jafar, on his back. (Courtesy: Sarnath Banerjee)
He walks fast–”with great purpose and great speed,” he says, “things just zip past me”–and he has lost friends who have tried to keep up. But he is equally alert to the walks he cannot take without calculation, without rerouting. He remembers being a student in England during the British National Party years, turning down a street and seeing three men smoking–probably fine people, he says, short hair, normal–and taking another road entirely. “So walking is very politicised. It depends on the place, your location, your identity. “To be able to walk is a privilege,” he wryly adds, “which most privileged ones deny themselves.”
The Indian graphic novel
Banerjee has been described as the pioneer of the Indian graphic novel, a label he wears lightly, preferring to name members of the “cohort.” His debut, Corridor (Penguin, 2004), was perhaps the first self-described Indian ‘graphic novel’, as opposed to a graphic novel by an Indian with American or Japanese sensibilities, that was published by a mainstream publisher, and around it gathered a generation: Orijit Sen, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Amruta Patil, Parismita Singh, George Mathen (Appupen). “It was just a shelf of Indian comic books that were talking of local concerns instead of global trends, not inspired by manga or Franco-Belgian comics, but just very much our own stuff. A khuddari (self-respect).”
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For a decade, he says, they had their modest shelf of the Indian graphic novel, and then it disappeared. “I was in complete financial ruin after writing these comics for over two decades.” Then there was what he calls the “brahminical aspect” of Indian literary culture, the pedigree system that has always looked down on visual storytelling. And then the deluge of Japanese manga, Western graphic novels, and an internet that makes every teenager a citizen of Osaka or Gotham before they have finished reading the city they live in. “That tiny voice that appeared for those 10 years is not represented anymore. We occasionally find a book by me or by Amruta or by Vishwajyoti. But that shelf is not there anymore.”
It is not, however, all doom and gloom. He finds hope in Generation Alpha, the 11 to 17-year-olds who are, he says, “blunt, kind, just, beautiful people navigating tragic times with a certain lightness.” They read multigenerationally. They are out on demonstrations with their parents. They are not defined by the digital isolation of the generation just above them, the Covid cohort whose socialisation was so badly fractured. “I don’t know how they are doing it,” he says of the Alphas, “but they are doing it.”
A return to tradition
Sarnath Banerjee, the author of Absolute Jafar, in his flat in Berlin. (Source: Sarnath Banerjee)
Meanwhile, he is turning towards tradition through Indian classical music, Kabuki theatre, and Chinese opera, whose sound “does wonderful things” to him. In that spirit, his son, who already knows how to sew, hopes to learn the art of cutting from a masterji the next time he visits Karachi. “I told him if you learn how to make a good blouse and petticoat, your life will always be secure,” he half-jokes. In the age of AI, skilled handwork is protection. “The future of comics is not in comics but outside comics. You cannot improve your filmmaking by just watching films. You cannot make your writing better by just reading. There are other things you need to infuse your form with,” he says.
Comics, he contends, belong to neither the art world nor the literary world. The art world does not read — or rather, reads only when forced to write a proposal, he says, at which point literature shrinks to a ‘text.’ The literary world, for its part, cannot tolerate images breaking the flow of prose, and so relegates comics to the children’s shelf. “If the river is unbridgeable, why try to become a bridge?” he says.
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“The comic book world is an isolated world without patronage, without money, without fellowships.” This, he has decided, is not a tragedy. “The most politically radical thing to do right now is to have a day job. You free yourself from the art establishment, the literary establishment. You are not trying to influence anyone. You are not there to create a movement. You are just doing something that gives you enormous pleasure, and giving it to a small group of people who also get enormous pleasure.”
The cover of Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel Absolute Jafar. (Source: Harper Collins)
There will not be another graphic novel soon. This one, he admits, financially “exhausted me.” He has jobs to do, a child to take out for sushi once a month if he can manage it. He owns a flat in Delhi, which gives him the freedom to work on comics –”if I had to pay rent in India along with Berlin, I don’t think I would be able to do comics. I would be doing XR (extended reality) and VR (virtual reality) or whoever knows what.”
The last image in Absolute Jafar is of the cheetah, alone, in the dying light. The world, on the day we speak, is on its fourth day of being on fire, no end in sight. The court is on holiday, and the flight to Berlin is still uncertain. Banerjee walks fast. He walks with great purpose and great speed through cities that no longer quite belong to him, and things just zip past. He discovers things in that raftaar, in that velocity. All one can really do, he seems to have concluded, is keep moving, “even if it does not take you anywhere.”
Absolute Jafar is published by HarperCollins India.
Animals are a recurring motif in Absolute Jafar. (Courtesy: Sarnath Banerjee)
A sketch from ‘Absolute Jafar’ of a lone cheetah standing against the dying light is called, ‘The Last Migrant.’ (Courtesy: Sarnath Banerjee/Harper Collins)
A djinn walks in Karachi, the protagonist Brighu, walks with his son, the eponymous Jafar, on his back. (Courtesy: Sarnath Banerjee)
A sketch of Thugs Bar in Broadway Hotel from the graphic novel, Absolute Jafar. (Source: amazon.in)
Sarnath Banerjee, the author of Absolute Jafar, in his flat in Berlin. (Source: Sarnath Banerjee)
The cover of Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel Absolute Jafar. (Source: Harper Collins)