Sarnath Banerjee distils 30 years into a new exhibition

On October 10, Sarnath Banerjee was among the thousands heading towards Parliament Street in Delhi when the artist and graphic novelist got a call from a photographer friend, telling him to come to the INA instead. He reached minutes after activist Neha Bora had been carried away along with dozens of others in buses. Unclear on what to do next, he and his companion decided to stop by the INA market for chhole bhatoore. “We got recognised by some students and protestors, so soon it became a thing where people were just coming and going in waves — fighting the police, eating, chatting and leaving,” he recalls. “It felt electric.”

Days earlier, Banerjee was at the protests at Shivaji Park in Mumbai, but the feeling was different: there, it was as if he was “among friends, like at Shaheen Bagh [during the farmers’ protests]”. In Berlin, where he has lived for almost two decades now, he feels a distance from these emotions, this kind of participation in socio-political life. Now, it is his 13 year-old son whose 5’11’’ frame marches at the front of protests in the city in support of Palestine, while Banerjee paces his large new studio, thinking, writing, drawing, talking with the working class fictional characters that populate his (obstinately separate) graphic novel writing and visual arts practices.

An ill-understood world

Lately, pacing with him has been fictional street philosopher Walter Shirazi, the brown sahib version of Walter Benjamin — who has none of the German philosopher’s delicateness and Eurocentricism — but is as preoccupied with understanding the “mili juli modernity” of a post-globalisation world. Shirazi, of Iranian descent, runs a club for slow cyclers in Berlin and has surmised that it is anxiety, and not love or hate, that is the driving force in society today.

To him, remembering the past is getting harder, and so he does it in drawings that don’t adhere to fact as much as imagination and emotion. These drawings, or “miracle cures”, are their own kind of rebellion.

It is these drawings that form the crux of Banerjee’s first art show in 12 years. Badly Remembered Things consists of drawings and text arranged like a glossary, a lexicon of a world nobody fully understands. Each drawing is a window onto a story the viewer has to finish. But the viewer goes in with the knowledge that here lie 30 years of Banerjee’s own memories: the years of watching Doordarshan, to flying a rickety Fokker plane to Agartala and wondering what lay beyond Dum Dum airport.

Banerjee is clear that remembrance is not the same as recollection. One drawing in the show, titled Delhi Art Week, harks back to a time when Delhi kept its poshest residents humble by regulating water supply. A time when every household woke at four in the morning, carrying buckets and waiting for the tankers to arrive. “Water decided everything,” he says, “from our morning erotica to our evening plans.” It was a time when even Kapil Dev, he says, had to stay home waiting for a phone call and could not go for a walk in Lodhi Garden.

The story reminds him of a neighbour who now leaves his pump running for hours, letting a small swimming pool’s worth of water drain away every day. When a frustrated Banerjee finally asked him to stop, reminding him of the tanker, uncle replied: “Precisely. I do this because I remember those times.” How do you argue with the trauma, or any other feeling, that comes embedded in memory? What can you do but let those feelings — of what it was like to be a child in the days of the Non-Aligned Movement, the last days of Dr. Singh, an autumn afternoon that felt like it should — bleed through on canvas?

It’s not a political agenda

When I ask why he has this love-hate relationship with Walter Benjamin (who he also cited in his 2019 book Doab Dil), he shrugs. “Walter Benjamin, Foucault, these are the cornerstones of Western theory. But I do think there are other prisms to see the world through: the Natyashastra and its rasas, Indian classical music, Chinese opera.” He is blunt about the international reception of work like his. Art that confirms a stereotype travels easily, and art from inside a shared childhood travels badly. “White Europeans won’t get it,” Banerjee says, because it carries a local idiom.

He is also clear about what Badly Remembered Things is not. The collection of artworks is not educational, not didactic, and does not contain a political agenda. “This is not a work of nostalgia either,” he asserts. “It is not an idealised understanding of the past. The past was depraved, casteist and carried gender biases. You only have to look at how they constructed the figure of the Bengali woman in literature — all extremely misogynistic.”

So, is this show a clearing of the decks, of 30 years of memory? Banerjee finds the word clearing interesting: for it makes room and is “a great way to find things” you had given up for lost. But it also “has a viciousness to it”. He thinks of the Scottish Highland clearances and of bulldozers working through slums, and he is aware that a clean slate always has a victim. He is also aware that memory is harder to ossify into a done-and-dusted record.

‘Everything for me is 20 years’

The next project is one he has carried for 20 years: something he likes to call the Insubordinate Textbooks, histories told by a low-level clerk who turns up at crucial moments without any power but with enough access to nudge things along. The name comes from the Victorian women held under the Contagious Diseases Acts (subjected to state-mandated surveillance). But first, he needs funding. “Without that, it’s very hard to continue,” he says. If it arrives, he will disappear for two or three years. He promises it will not take another 12. “Everything for me is 20 years,” he adds. “Nothing kind of happens immediately.”

Badly Remembered Things is on at Project 88 in Mumbai till October 29.

The Mumbai-based independent journalist writes on culture, lifestyle and technology.