For his 2011 book, The Harappa Files, artist and graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee created a fascinating character called the ‘5-Minuten Frau'. She had short, poker-straight hair. We never really saw her face across the eight-page graphic commentary. “No matter who she sleeps with, the five-minute woman reaches climax within five minutes of having sex. One can even time her, like a trusted packet of instant noodles,” the accompanying text read.
That character was built around a receptionist who fronted the editing studio in Delhi that Banerjee worked in several years ago, he tells me over a Skype call from Japan. “She had many affairs, usually with married men, most of whom felt protective about this fragile Punjabi girl who came from a middle-class family in Rajendra Nagar. They were concerned that they would break her heart. But Pammi (not her real name) was as detached as a Hinayana monk. It was the men who needed emotional protection,” he says.
Across his graphic novels, large-format panels for galleries, and public installations like the Gallery of Losers (supported by the Frieze Foundation) that was displayed on billboards in East London during the 2012 Olympics, runs a peculiar brand of drollery and whimsy. And yet, underneath the snarky treatises, there are deeply embedded socio-psychological and cultural themes. From the delicate ego of the Indian male to the obsession with “extra-curricular” activities amongst mothers of all school-going children in Kolkata, Banerjee is a valuable social commentator.
This year, the now Berlin-based artist has been spending time in Japan to create “a mythical campaign about the island of Shodoshima using the brief given by its mayor.” I'm not sure if the mayor himself is real or mythical, though. Several years ago, when he had just conceived The Harappa Files, he'd told me it was based on a research file by a secret think-tank called the Greater Harappa Rehabilitation, Reclamation & Redevelopment Commission. I had foolishly believed him until I saw the book (the name of the think-tank should have been a giveaway). In Banerjee's world, the real and the mythical are separated by a fine, porous veil. Both worlds feed the other.
Which is why his series on ‘real' women, which he created on invitation for Vogue's eighth anniversary issue (themed India Cool) is particularly intriguing. Banerjee's Women I Know is meant to be an ongoing series in which he proposes to draw cool women he knows. He spoke to Vogue about the genesis of the series, the importance of collaboration and why he doesn't miss the world of publishing. Edited excerpts:
Tell me about the genesis of the Women I Know series. How did you decide on which women you would feature? What was the most important criteria for the women to make the cut? I think it came from talking to you when you commissioned the new work for Vogue and insisted on having a new work. Since I turned forty, three years ago, I need a bit of pushing and prodding. These days, coming up with an original idea is like squeezing the last dollop of paste from a crumpled tube of Colgate.
Why are you interested in drawing women? They say, at the end of a relationship there is atleast a recipe. In my case there's been much more. My personality has been reshaped by my encounters with women. They provide artistic and philosophical counselling, career, health and financial advice, parenting guidance and answer the deepest existential questions. They challenge me. They give me joy and beauty. I do have a few male friends, but with them I mostly talk about relationships, heartbreaks and rejections. A large part of my social share is women. Which is why it is most troubling that my books have been accused of, quite rightly, not having enough women. With this series, which is sort of a ‘veritable directory of cosmic women,' I'm trying to depict them the way I see them and the way they describe themselves. The text is a mix of facts and fancy, a series of surreal introductions. It is actually a very simple idea, the personalities themselves make it magical. These are women who I know and have known for a while and find terrific. I think the coolest people in the world are the ones most hidden. They describe themselves in the most interesting manner, they are self-depreciating, funny, eccentric and I get to spend some amazing afternoons in their company, drinking tea, talking, drawing. Can you think of anything better?
You have developed colourful female characters before, like ‘5-Minuten Frau'. That idea about fact being stranger than fiction… were these real life women more compelling than your fictional ones? That character was built around a receptionist called Pammi, as you know. She had a healthy, if not voracious, appetite for sex. She would forget the names and faces of her temporary lovers, although, she would vividly remember the tiniest detail of the hotel rooms where she met them. The women who I am involving in this series are all completely real. And they're very colourful.
In the 2011 exhibition curated by Himali Singh Soin at Exhibit 360 in Delhi, Words: A User's Manual, your installation was based on exchanges with women who told you about things they'd lost. Are you increasingly drawn to collaborative work, especially with women? Increasingly, I feel my imagination has been overstretched, I have put out too much. Now, most things I say sound lumbering to my ears. I feel the need for life-sherpas. Collaboration is the key. Whether it's working with a psychiatrist who is trying to find the source of conservative behaviour among middle-class Indians, collaborating with a historian to dispel the myth of Aurangzeb or exploring the 15th century Portuguese trade route with another, these are the things that interest me more than writing anything that has me in the centre. For that exhibition, Himali had prodded me to get into collaboration with several people. The exchanges I had were perhaps better than the final outcome. In the end, there's just the chat.
You started off as a graphic novelist, and have now for all purposes moved on to the contemporary art space. How do you reconcile the bookmaker and artist in you? Writing books has become unsustainable. The current publishing world with its 10 percent royalty business model cannot sustain the production of books that are non-commercial. There is a severe shortage of quirky, original ideas. The kind of money that you get from writing is so ridiculous, that if you have a child, or live on your own earnings, it is absolutely nonsensical to write books. I suppose writers of best-sellers would disagree. There will also be a market for vanity books. Ex-actors, CEOs, motivational speakers, sports and fashion people will continue to share their wisdom on various things. But my kind of people will run out of steam. Perhaps it's for the greater good. I live mostly on art commissions, although, I am, as they say in Bengali ‘jatey lekhok' (a writer by caste).
You are ready with a new book, All Quiet in Vikaspuri, which is set in Delhi. You've now been away from Delhi for several years. How is it to write about a place when you're physically removed. Was it more interesting this way? All Quiet in Vikaspuri is about the fictitious yet very real looking Water Wars of Delhi. Neighbourhoods fighting neighbourhoods. Jangpura against Defence Colony, Gulmohar Park against Gautam Nagar, Kalkaji against Greater Kailash. It is also the myth-of-origin of a character that has appeared in my work before, the Psychic Plumber, who in this book, journeys to the centre of earth in search of the mythical river Saraswati. The book addresses the issue of a growth-obsessed society, corporate greed, and the politics of thuggery. My physical removal from Delhi has had many complicated effects on me. There's always the fear of turning into an NRI writer, I sometimes feel that I am not part of the immediate emotional landscape of the country. At the same time, distance has given me the bigger picture and made my eye for details sharper. Also I feel, if one is in the act of producing a work of reflection, it is useful to have cultural vulnerability. Which in my case is attributed to living in a foreign society, in other cases it could be being a minority. One has to contextualise oneself always. In Delhi, I was becoming a smug bastard.
