In The Moral Contagion (HarperCollins), written by historian Julia Hauser and illustrated by graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee, the images are not simply illustrations of the text. They are singing their own song. In the book, which traces pandemics through different countries and different eras, Banerjee’s artistic licence—queering up an emperor known to have a former sex worker as queen who keeps him sleepless; his genteel, cosmopolitan Arabs versus snooty European Christians—provides the reader with two ways to read the book. You can immerse yourself in Hauser’s narrative, made out of the many accounts of a disease. With Banerjee’s illustrations you can discern other details, and notice his points of emphasis in the way he portrays the histories of the ‘little people’. Contagion is also another example of the rigorous research that Banerjee brings to his books. “The history of objects, how you find them, and dig them up, in fact could be a book,” he says. “Comics make you chew, it’s art that can’t be done in a hurry.” Excerpts of a conversation:
The collaboration between Julia Hauser, a historian, and you, a graphic novelist—was it a match made by agents?
Julia and I met in Delhi so this collaboration happened quite organically, no agent set this up. I found Julia’s way of storytelling, which is both critical and light, and her idea of a moral history of the plague and how it shaped contemporary morality, fantastic material to work with.Working with history has, in fact, never been far from my practice. My character Digital Dutta in Corridor finds himself in awkward situations in historical events, for example, when Barin Ghosh (Indian revolutionary Aurobindo Ghosh’s brother) is making bombs at Maniktala Anushilan Kendra, he is part of that…. Julia has both historical intuition and historical instinct and these things come with years of practice. I’m not interested in pop history. This work is a kind of connected history; I come from the world of speculative history. But the collaboration had best be between writers as I myself write, otherwise I would have ended up correcting somebody’s work, which shouldn’t be happening.
I liked the subjective way in which the story is told. What aspect of it drew you to work on it?
I liked the approach Julia has taken with Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron [100 tales told by a group of young women and men who move to a villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death] as the organising principle of the book. She has put herself as a character in the stories, something I insisted she do. It was good of her to agree to that.
But what is Julia doing naked in Boccaccio’s bedroom?
That was me introducing a bit of erotica. The whole thing starts in the bathhouses and Julia’s writing style is also full of eros, so I just inserted her in Boccaccio’s bedroom and Julia had no problems with that. So, you have Bocaccio in a delicate morning light with Julia waking up.
What have you discovered about yourself as an artist while doing this work?
I learnt a lot while doing this project, in which we were working with snatches of an incident of an episode of history, the plague, and expanding it visually. To create those worlds, for example, of Bombay in the time of the bubonic plague of 1896 or the Chinese ghettos of California in 1899, where in a clear act of racism, Chinese people were cordoned off because it was thought they were bringing the plague; or the race to the treatment for plague, you have to go through a lot of pictures and bring a lot of rigour to your research. Otherwise, you will create only an illustrated text not a parallel visual narrative.
For those reading, there is the text of course but it is the images and the text together that bring out a history of sensation, of feelings, creating a cognitive state of what it could be, at a certain period in time. This requires labour. And it’s beautiful labour. You are never 100 per cent on top of your work or 100 per cent the master of your craft—designers or architects are like that. We comic-book writers are always learning, inventing. You can never be a grandmaster of your craft. Grandmaster is death. For this book, for example, I learnt how to draw Byzantine jewellery.
Another thing I found interesting is the fact that characters in the book are quite het up about the origin story of the plague virus not dissimilar to the conversation in India during Covid-19. Also, the class angle to it.
It was Julia’s thing linking plague to Covid-19. Diseases certainly have a class, though Covid killed all kinds of people. However, people made a virtue of social restrictions, some said things like ‘I haven’t met anyone for six months’ – sure you did that because you could. My neighbourhood chaiwallah, when food ran out, walked from Delhi to his village in Purnea (Bihar). We cannot imagine this. When I was in Berlin, we lived in a bubble of eight people and we even had a New Year party with those eight people. So, Covid brought out the dirt and ugliness in our society and I’m glad it did.
What are you working on next? Delhi figures prominently in your work—is the next book going to be another Dehi novel?
The working title of it is Absolute Jaffa. They are micro episodes of a collisional life, like when us — i.e, people from the Global South with our own specificities — find ourselves in western cities. Especially in central Europe you find people whose understanding of your specificities is zero. They understand you as a stereotype. It’s a slightly autobiographical story. It is about moving out of Delhi and also about the disquieting effects of dislocation to Berlin. Both people here and there are born on different sides of history and somehow trying to get them together is a failed project. We will be we, and they will be they.
