Sarnath Banerjee, is best known for his incisive portrayal of South Asian characters in his graphic novels and serial graphic publications. But a conversation with him quickly reveals his multifaceted search for purpose and the right medium to express the mystical cities and apparitional characters that, it would seem, took up residence in his imagination and were struggling to come out and speak to all of us. At once, a science communicator, filmmaker, historian, anthropologist - artist – Sarnath cuts a rather enigmatic figure. Apparitional, like so many of his characters. Sarnath spoke to me from Berlin, where he lives with his young son, while dreaming and telling the stories of places and people in South Asia that doggedly occupy the landscape of his fertile imagination.
Sarnath Banerjee, is best known for his incisive portrayal of South Asian characters in his graphic novels and serial graphic publications. But a conversation with him quickly reveals his multifaceted search for purpose and the right medium to express the mystical cities and apparitional characters that, it would seem, took up residence in his imagination and were struggling to come out and speak to all of us. At once, a science communicator, filmmaker, historian, anthropologist - artist – Sarnath cuts a rather enigmatic figure. Apparitional, like so many of his characters. Sarnath spoke to me from Berlin, where he lives with his young son, while dreaming and telling the stories of places and people in South Asia that doggedly occupy the landscape of his fertile imagination.
Where dreams come from, is a podcast featuring successful people from around the world who have pursued their dreams to arrive at a station in life. I'm your host, Sanjeev Chatterjee. I'm a professor of cinema and journalism. And in my creative life, I make documentary films. I started this podcast to explore what it takes for people to follow their dreams, even while being true to who they are, at least who they believe they are. My guest today shall not bannerjee is best known for his incisive portrayal of South Asian characters in his graphic novels, and serial graphic publications. But a conversation with him quickly reveals his multifaceted search for purpose and the right medium to express the mystical cities, and aberrational characters that it would seem took up residence in his imagination. And we're struggling to come out and speak to all of us. At once a science communicator filmmaker, historian, anthropologist, artist sharna guts, a rather enigmatic figure apparitional. Like so many of his characters, Shannon spoke to me from Berlin, where he lives with his young son while dreaming, and telling the stories of places and people in South Asia that doggedly occupy the landscape of his fertile imagination. Shanna Banerjee, welcome to where dreams come from. Pleasure. Could you please try to see if you can recollect your early memories of growing up in Kolkata,
Unknown:very straight, normal, middle class as in highly protected childhood? No big ups and downs, just like one long an event for childhood in a very exciting city. Of course, that city was resplendent with all sorts of things that bring a lot of joy museums and zoos and a lot of my childhood was spent also in Delhi is good when other neighborhood lots of cousins. Yeah, extremely mediocre and beautifully dull. childhood.
Sanjeev Chatterjee:Would you say that you are one of those Indians who actually was able to take advantage of the experience of a joint family.
Unknown:I think my father's was the first in his generation. He and his brothers started with embracing a nuclear family sensibilities. However, the roots were very strong. So lots of cousins would come by all the cousins would gather in Delhi, the small, three bedroom, government housing kid, whenever would become the size Australia, I don't know how that happened. One bed would become the size of a Victorian Memorial where parallely five or six events are happening all at the same time. It's like a Edo period Japanese Tea House drawing was simultaneous. Simultaneously, everything's happening all at the same time. Somebody is reading Tintin, somebody is eating bond, somebody discussing the new sister in law who's walked in, and she's left handed and perhaps actually influenced by the devil, you know, that sort of that whole landscape got expanded was a very collapsible landscape. But you know, I come from a long line of so called safe hands, everyone worked as administrators. So when I tell my son that expectations are generally low, so you can relax. See are very ordinary, normal, highly protected, comfortable, comfortable lifestyle, generally, but nothing, nothing to sort of, you know, nothing dramatic ever happened.
Sanjeev Chatterjee:In the safe hands here, one could interpret it as risk averse.
Unknown:I like that word risk averse is like sort of these new words that are thrown into our vocabulary. kind of make it gentler. Of course, there was a sense of people who are not risk averse, such as family members who have migrated to America, for example, and where adventure happens where, because people, you know, migrants would also kind of mythologize and also therefore, justify their migration that you know, people are so honest in America, that you know, you keep your money back, you come back after one week, the money wise, right, exactly right there, which I kind of actually believe also on America because I lost my mobile phone once in a parking lot in Austin, and I found it and I was thinking of these stories. So yeah, so the idea of risk averse, meaning, yeah, we had we heard of like these galavanting members of the family who traveled here and there and kind of made a life elsewhere. But for us, it was just Calcutta. I mean, my mind you are very cool. While in Calcutta, there was Parsees, the Jews, the Anglo Indians. So, you know, I grew up in Calcutta where you hardly ever actually had to speak any Bengali to get by, of course, I'm dreaming that language. But yeah, it was a very cosmopolitan, Calcutta. I don't know how it is. Now, I'm curious
Sanjeev Chatterjee:to know, as you look back, what are the remnants of those influences in you today?
Unknown:Well, it definitely is an encyclopedia of characters that have grown up with like, you know, from eccentric uncles who who constantly came up with business ideas which failed, or sellers appointments for that particular kind of eczema that happens from traveling in a particular kind of tram line. As a Calcutta Boy, you would know that theoretically, we have climbed we've scaled a key to mount Godwin we have played tennis with Yannick Noah, we have danced with etc. Duncan in our in our head, we've like you know, we've pretty much done everything and childhood, I remember with all these sort of minor obsessions of theoretically going to the absolute end of my interest and then coming back and, and, and but not having the resources to actually go fully into river rafting, or any of these adventures. All this sort of, you know, become like, a mess of characters inside my head, like literally like a rupture of, you know, like coming out like bus. And also Calcutta was like, full of spectral being like being a colonial city, you know, like that whole Belvedere place where Philly Francis and Warren Hastings had had their dwell. And many years later, Victorian Albert, trying to find out these dwelling pistols while writing a book on 18th century Calcutta. All this sort of, you know, created just such a rich landscape. I mean, when I read some of the sort of South American writers like subjective herbal annual, or voice from Argentina, these sort of, you know, these great old cities where everything sort of rubbed shoulders in different people, different time spaces, stuff like that, and all that is definitely the encyclopedia or the dictionary that I continuously done again and again, to get get my ideas and thoughts.
Sanjeev Chatterjee:As you were speaking, I was I couldn't help but think that the characterization of what seemed to me at the beginning this delusion of grandeur in people's lives that can easily destroy lives to versus the same experience transforming it into something like magic realism.
Unknown:surreal is a word which I'm more comfortable with because not necessarily everything kind of for me turns into magic realism, but there is definitely a realistic aspect of like trying to understand this sort of delusion of crankier of 18th century Calcutta and all its eccentricities the excesses of of you know, of one's I mean that who likes the sound of breaking glasses and he realizes the more expensive the glass, the better it sounds when it breaks through he started importing glasses from Belgium from wherever they make glasses and then he would have his feet on dairy run over those glasses so he could enjoy her the beautiful immaculate sound of breaking glasses or you know the two feedings I mean there's you know, one had a had a handsome with one horse, the other one had Abraham he got two horses as come competition. Then the first one went and got three horses, and they realize is ridiculous to have a small Hans Bruin being driven by four horses when he decided that he's going to finish this competition. In 18th century Calgary, there was a zebra German horse carriage running on the streets of Calcutta. So you know, just this delusion of grandia created kind of these eccentricity. And that is what makes that city never for me a sterile landscape. You know, I mean, I've been living in the west for so long, but you know, I just still haven't somehow got used to the sterility of being a poly so called Big touted to be like the big amazing cities of the world. For me, I like to see sterile landscapes.
Sanjeev Chatterjee:Sorry, as a young boy, how did you manage your mind being inhabited by these apparitions?
Unknown:Well, I mean, I've forgotten most of it. But now that I have a eight year old child who had to put to bed every night with stories, that's what I apply my stories the most, which is to put my child who like any child growing outside his eye outside South Asia, there's always a risk of losing their context and then they grew up with a very pastiche or, or a childhood, which is very identity politics based where you have to kind of carve out your own world in in a in a primarily sort of either white or whatever where they are inhabiting and, and somewhere down the line, you try to instill some of the particularities that you've grown up with, you know, in search of those particularities. I have to revisit my own childhood by telling him the stories about my own particularities and also a strange enough the particularities of his other culture that he comes from, which is a city not unlike Calcutta at all, both the cities have a Racecourse, both the cities have got their ghosts, we have our colonial ghosts, slightly sophisticated. And this other city has its origins, we have our cowboy Chucky, the dark rain bearing clouds that are coming up, they have the queta wind that comes and sweeps through the city of Karachi. So I try to incorporate both these both these worlds into into the into mice, my son's mind, I do fantasize that he's going to end up spending a lot of time in Calcutta, and in Karachi, which he does often. So in the process of doing that, I relived some of these stories, not just through my books, but just you know, just orally telling him these stories to stand up to the sort of tide of Western or European modernity being thrown in your direction that that you are at the end of the day, you are a postcolonial human being, I don't wake up in Calcutta or Delhi, no one in Calcutta in Delhi wakes up feeling postcolonial. Of course, I mean, it is perfectly legitimate world of literature that comes when there's racism, discrimination, collision between the East and West, it's not part of my heritage, but having your own own specificity, which means your own modernity is very important. And that is, it's a failed, it's a failed project for me to try to instill in that in my son, who is who lives primarily in the German world. But it gives me a lot of confidence of, of being a fairly self actualized person that everything does not have to be weighed and measured. And compared to like how Western modernity we are just very comfortable with Western modernity, which is that it's not ours. That's at least how I feel.
Sanjeev Chatterjee:When did you start doodling drawing, whatever it is what occasion that
Unknown:people of our generation, you don't have parents who who take us for piano classes. Mother thing to do in Calcutta is to take your child to academic Fine Arts and Lady Renouard she was that time the head and extremely amazingly beautiful and dignified woman. Very kind and very nice, but told my mother that your son does not really actually have any real talent in drawing, perhaps tabla might be one thing he could try out. And then later on, when I was studying biochemistry, I had a lot of these chemical biochemical pathways and also protein folding and how like gene and protein were made, and everything was like a little story or like a little soap opera built around like the Calvin cycle or the photosynthetic cycle or how acids are made. So you know, any, like years of like drawing more as a kind of communication way bigger, I couldn't really draw away but I still don't really draw very well, a mediocre, but I can kind of get my thing out.
Sanjeev Chatterjee:And you're studying science, is that something you were really interested in? Or is that a direction that was prompted?
Unknown:Why I read a again, a very short story where the evil German scientist tried to recreate evolution in a test tube. And he stole Professor shampoos formula. And when the you saw the whole primordial, soup producing salamander, which became like apes, and then eventually the man that was created, was shown who himself was very besotted by that story. And the this German scientist was a biochemist, or two or something. And then I read the life and works of severo Ochoa, the Spanish biochemist and Pb medawar. And things that I did not understand. But I was just like, kind of got into the whole glamour of biochemistry and I single minded Lee wanted to study biochemistry and eventually become a biochemist. I like the dream to it. And then, of course, as in when I regressed in that world, I realized that I'm not I'm not cut out to be a researcher, I can't spend my entire life studying one protein, that's when I decided that I'm going to bail out of my masters and and study something else,
Sanjeev Chatterjee:which is what what did you study and where?
Unknown:Well, I went to England. And I studied, basically visual anthropology. I studied history of image and it was a half practice. I did an AMA from Goldsmith's college,
Sanjeev Chatterjee:what was the first expression of that particular kind of blood point in your story of saying that, Okay, I'm going to be a scientist, and then real Realizing that you're better off being a science storyteller.
Unknown:I wish that there was like, one significant event that that did the turnaround. But I would probably think that there was must have been some series of events. I mean, I joined television. And I did my first big documentary on mobile gas tragedy 12 years after the tragedy, where I saw the whole story through the point of view of the man who had done all the autopsies, the night of the Bhopal gas tragedy, Dr. satpathy, and realizing the power of sort of spinning text and image, you know, like, to kind of create like something, I was not very good filmmaker. So I just realized that I needed to kind of, you know, figure out my own way of telling stories. And for a long time, I was saying, to figure out, what would be the best way I did music videos. Also, by the way, I did advertisement, my whole slew of things before I arrived at the idea of like, going right back to where I started,
Sanjeev Chatterjee:which is drawing in you also worked in advertising in England. And that's where the project about losers came about,
Unknown:always fancied the idea of having an advertising agency that is going to advertise out of fashion ideas, and out of circulation and celebrities out of circulation, political movements. So I was like, you know, I was just generally hanging around making toast for my son before going to school when I got this email from the London Olympics, saying that, like, Look, we've review been nominated, but you have to come up with the proposal because it's, it's really a big project, you know, like, so I sort of said that, okay. I mean, it's about Olympics. So it must be should be must be about losing. Because one of the best things or Olympics is where people lose and various ways in which they lose because you went on in one way, but you lose in most amazing ways. So their characters are like boxers who get into the boxing ring, and their primary job is to avoid a punch or a pole vaulter who is a steadfast pole vaulter. But sometimes when he's about to, like, you know, jump the ball, he realizes that perhaps he's chosen the wrong sport, or a high jumper, whose whole life is about being light. So he reads light, literature, he reads, it's light food. He everything about him, he doesn't take anything very seriously. And in a party, when people asking what do you do? He said, I jump in and says, No, seriously, is it? No, seriously jump? That's what I do. But the only time he feels a bit heavy is seeing that one bronze medal that he's won at school. After that he hadn't won anything. So it's full of like these characters like that. There's a there's a Armenian guy who, as a child would pick up heavy refrigerators, but only when no one is watching. So obviously, he could not perform very well, at the Olympics. And these these were massive posters, billboard posters, all across Islam. So my cousins were like, whoever lived in London we're passing through, I'm extremely proud. And suddenly, I got legitimacy as someone who arrived boomba has arrived. That's my nickname. So so it was good.
Sanjeev Chatterjee:So what was the first book,
Unknown:also the corridor was came out of my friend Andy and I used to bike around the whole city, we were working as video editors, and buying a cheap, Thunderbolt beard. And then coming back to the city and looking for a place where there's some light, where you can sit and have a drink, but the only place where there was light was the emergency room outside of the hospital. So we sat there and drank beer. And also, I remember, Delhi has this sort of mystical city in mysterious mystical city where suddenly in a farmer's party Murari walks in, and then you have a long conversation where it and say that more I haven't seen him for a long time. He said, Yeah, I've been away for a while. And then you come to the horse and said, Look, I guess who I met just now coming straight from the fall. He said, you might say, yeah, memorize been dead for five years, but he just has so much FOMO that he can't even like miss a deli party. So, you know, deli for me was a was a magical city and I met all the important women in my life in Delhi, most of them not all, including my ex wife, the Eros the desire that in that city is just phenomenon and it's of course also the city where I came of age. So I just wanted to celebrate it somehow. And I was desperately looking for a language to celebrate it and Anna character, it's a multi plot based around the second hand bookshop and cannot place run by a guy who seems to have some uncanny ability to know what people want to read. Which direction of life they want to go to? He was effectively a life Sherpa. Also, I got a MacArthur Fellowship by that time. And I was researching aphrodisiacs. Bengalis, they're weak in their constitution. So, they have to occasionally go out and look for enhancement. So I was looking at all these guys in Old Delhi these all these are games who are selling sex stuff, I got money to research that from MacArthur Foundation Chicago to do this research and and make a graphic novel out of it. So that also becomes like a very primary aspect of the book. So I had to kind of imagine also I say various sexual ailments and and go and talk to them. I have extremely charismatic guys from like, Peshawar, Lahore, they have ancestry very colorful ancestry from has me from Yeah, Delhi is just a party, it just refuses to Delhi just refuses to feed.
Sanjeev Chatterjee:I'm just through this conversation trying to wrap my head around the landscape of your imagination. So how does this affect your relationship to people you meet you come across, people are always trying to flock together with like minded like people? Are they scared? Or they? Are they reverential? Are they amazed? What is your experience, you
Unknown:know, right after the plague, the church became very strong and notions such as monogamy, notions, such as anti other you know, or or casual mingling of people bought houses, prostitutes, basically, the church had like enormous power to describe the morality and now also with COVID, you see that it's becoming a virtue that I only hang out with my bubble of people, I've just taken my my bundle of my five kids and gone to Brandenburg in a little like a house. And there I'm really living like, in a rural world and a rural setting. And there's a lot of this romantic stuff that is going on in Berlin is just like, it's a, it's become like a virtue, you know, I live in a city which, which also produces amazing numbers. I mean, I work with a amazing Iranian artist, and illustrator, there is there is a larger world that I inhabit. So there is a lot of desire and Eros in these encounters, you know, I've given up that intellectual aspect, I'm not very good at analyzing, analyzing, so very instinctive and a lot of it is about the history of feelings, how you felt in a certain way at a certain time, how did that afternoon that topic afternoon in Delhi, when nothing moves, and you are stuck in boeotia as of a road, trying to get a bus to come and how did it feel you know, trying to recapture that all that comes from like a lot of meeting people you know, a lot of being out an income did not come from like reading 20 books, or stuff like that. My heart My heart breaks that my child is growing up this world where they are stuck in this situation zoom calls and classrooms and it's great for people who live in their little like Thomas Hardy life and and you know, write about past reality and like inward philosophical stuff like but I'm a I'm a street level writer, you know, everything happened, I cannibalize people that I that I need. I eat them up, and then I write them down. And yeah, it's going to be a crisis. It sits there. It's already started affecting mental health. And I don't know where we're going to go with this.
Sanjeev Chatterjee:Cheryl bergy, thank you very much for taking this hour to speak with me.
Unknown:Thank you, Sanjeev It was a thing. Essentially, I said things I haven't said before, which is good. Thank you.
Sanjeev Chatterjee:Charlotte. bannerjee is among those to whom their dream came early. However, the path to it was quitters. It is clear from this conversation that is self evaluation of mediocre skills in every field he tried. Even the one he chose drawing did not stand in the way of his dream, to share the stories in his head with the world. Maybe this is what we would call resilience for media for change. I'm Sanjeev Chatterjee