Joe Sacco traces anatomy of Muzaffarnagar riots with care, without closure
Joe Sacco’s The Once and Future Riot, which has been withdrawn in India by its publishers, captures the aftermath of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh, with care, without closure
Joe Sacco's graphic novel traces the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots through the lens of comics journalism. (Express Photo/amazon.in) Even a prolific cartoonist like Rajinder Puri, not known to shy away from anything political, was wary of commenting on communal riots. The topical news cartoon has no space to reflect on the collective violent outburst. Pithy punchlines made under the day’s deadline could, in the middle of conflict, be grabbed by either side to further polarisation.
It took Joe Sacco to break this self-imposed cartooning reticence. Now we see how a riot in India could be talked about in book-length cartooning with precision, empathy and, most of all, perspective. Like every chronicler of Hindu-Muslim strife, Sacco goes back to the birth pangs of the two nations — the trauma of millions displaced like the Karachi-born Puri. Sacco does it early on, on page 7, in a masterly stroke that sums up the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent in one page. He doesn’t dwell on it, urges you to read on.
This urge to narrate without a pause marks Sacco’s graphic reporting that has come to stay as ‘Comics Journalism’. The whole book is one straight flow. One chapter ends and the next begins without much ceremony on the same page. The page itself is packed. Sacco seems to share the familiar horror vacui (the fear of vacant space) seen in masters such as R Crumb. His basic page spread is too crowded to accommodate text. He finds space for commentary and conversation by packing words into little rectangles and shrunk speech balloons, strewn like pinned up notes on a bulletin board. The enhanced page looks breathtakingly detailed with lined faces, clenched fists and every strand of dried wild grass woven into basket chairs inked in rigorously. Too many props, too few words, no horizon line, no plumb line and no neat panelling. The stories Socco tells bleed across panels and layers.
You learn to handle disorder, if you have done most of your work in zones of conflict, some chronic enough to have spilled over from the last century to this. Sacco has travelled, sketched and reported major global conflicts for over three decades — from Israeli-occupied Palestine in the 1990s, Bosnia in 2000 and Gaza in 2009. When he turned to India, he was already a veteran graphic reporter. He came first in 2010 to Mayawati’s Uttar Pradesh to report “not just abject poverty but real hunger” among Dalits in Kushinagar. Higher caste groups kept chasing him out. His contingent had to make multiple short duration forays into villages to do what he calls hit-and-run journalism.
Muzaffarnagar riots victims evicted from Loi village relief camp (Photo: Gajendra Yadav)
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