Sacco, who is credited with pioneering war reportage in comics form, has used the form to report on Palestine and the Bosnian War, and his work has been translated into 14 languages. “About six Indian publishers have approached me about publishing the book in India,” Sacco told The Indian Express, “so I also have the impression that India still contains people who want to preserve the Indian experiment and who will push back against the forces that seek to hinder political self-examination.”
The Once and Future Riot, published in 2025, is a 135-page illustrated account of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar communal riots in western Uttar Pradesh, which left over 60 dead and 40,000 displaced. It was expected to reach Indian shelves by August-September. However, Gaurav Shrinagesh, CEO of Penguin Random House India, told The Indian Express earlier this month that the title had been red-flagged during pre-check and legal scrutiny, including an inaccurate map of India’s borders and unanswered requests for citations. “We are very clear about this: if we know there is an inaccurate map and no changes are forthcoming, we will not do it,” he said.
“The citations never came through because I sent none in,” Sacco said. “My book was thoroughly fact-checked by my editors at my North American publisher, Metropolitan Books,” he said, adding that Penguin Random House India’s actual list of “required” changes went well beyond the map. “Some of these requirements were for me to change quotes from people I had interviewed, including a public figure, so as to mute their rhetoric. I do not change quotes.”
“I was also asked to move a caption down the page and, most importantly, to remove my conclusion that Hindu nationalism is “firing on all cylinders,” he said, adding that he felt that his book was “balanced and fair.”
The litany of changes and concerns from Penguin Random House India ultimately led Sacco to conclude that it did not want to distribute the book, and so he told his agents that he would “not comply with the onerous verifications and requirements, and that’s where I left it.”
Joe Sacco; book cover (inset)
The requirements
The requirements, he says, included Penguin Random House India asking for “consent forms” for use of quotes and “likenesses to be verified,” which was another pain point. “It is standard journalistic practice to obtain verbal consent for interviews and for photographic portraits, and verbal consent was given in all cases. Journalists normally do not use consent forms when doing fieldwork, and so there are none to show,” he said.
In the graphic novel, Sacco writes that he visited Muzaffarnagar a year after the riots that took place in 2013. He admits that he is “already a little late,” but the idea, he says, was to unearth “the idea, the myth, and the imposter that is taking its place.” He was accompanied by a local journalist, whom he simply refers to as Piyush, who doubled as his guide and translator. He was also guided by Dionne Bunsha, American author of Scarred: Experiments with Violence in Gujarat.
Ask him why he chose to report on these particular riots that broke out in western Uttar Pradesh between Jat and Muslim communities months before the 2014 general election, when, in his own words, there have been bigger incidents in the country, and he says it comes down to these incidents being a contained affair. “The Muzaffarnagar riots took place over a relatively small geographic area, one that could be easily criss-crossed, so the fieldwork was manageable.”
In the book, he travels through Uttar Pradesh interviewing officials, political leaders, village heads, and above all, riot victims, most of them landless peasants, treating the episode as a kind of archetype for how political violence takes shape. His methodology was to concentrate on the narratives that communities construct to explain their behaviour. “My work involved listening to what passed as a collective story, which often was replete with obfuscations and outright lies, and putting that story alongside something that approached the actual facts.”
He gives the example of groups “spuriously” claiming that violence didn’t occur in their village. “It was incumbent upon me to find actual victims of that violence.”
The book examines how mobs, more than any single leader, drive the course of such events, how rival communities construct entirely different versions of what happened, and how perpetrators rationalise their own role in the bloodshed, themes Sacco has returned to since his earlier reportage on conflicts from the First World War to Gaza, here applied to a story he frames as distinctly Indian but resonant well beyond it. “I began to understand how violence intertwines with electoral politics in India, and it occurred to me that the same phenomenon was manifesting itself in the United States and in Western Europe. So the book has a universal aspect as well.”
What is in the book
Sacco studies the mechanics of violence, including rumour, mob behaviour, and politicians who gain from communal fear. He draws the lattice of caste, class, gender, and popular narratives and old grievances that, with the right catalyst, make conditions fertile for a riot.
The book opens with Sacco and his driver tearing along Uttar Pradesh’s roads, overtaking trucks, swerving, falling behind, catching up, which is a reflection of the narrative, which moves the same way, jumping ahead to the future riot and falling back to the past, one community’s account overtaking another’s only to be overtaken in turn. Sacco’s linework is dense, filling his panels with the texture of rural Uttar Pradesh’s markets, roads, fields, and barricades so that the political and the everyday sit together. The dense linework pushes witnesses’ faces and their surroundings into shadow, which this writer interprets as a reflection of how the incident has transcended fact and fiction and how the riots continue to cast shadows on the people, not just those involved and affected, but also laypersons such as drivers and journalists.
It has been over 10 years since Sacco observed the riots, so have the concerns he voiced about the shape of Indian democracy abated? “Hindu nationalism is on the rise, and its large Muslim minority must be asking itself how it fits in an India that no longer seems to define itself as a secular state, albeit one that acknowledges the religious sphere,” he says. “This sort of thing can only breed tension between communities and gives advantage to those politicians who know how to play the strings of victimhood and fear. I worry that violence is being normalised,” he clarifies, not just in India but in “other societies that consider themselves democracies.”
For now, Indian readers can still get the book through online platforms that source copies from UK-based wholesalers, a parallel channel outside Penguin Random House India’s control, and at a handful of bookstores that have imported copies directly from the UK rather than wait on the publisher. Whether one of the six publishers Sacco mentions will pick it up officially in India remains to be seen.
Cartoonist-journalist Joe Sacco says Penguin India asked him to change quotes from people he had interviewed for the book. 
Joe Sacco; book cover (inset)
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