Joe Sacco's Graphic Reporting on Communal Riots in India: A Masterclass in Comics Journalism

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. When Sacco came again, this time to Muzaffarnagar in 2014 to research a communal riot, the stint was less eventful. The riot itself had happened a year back in 2013 and the dust had somewhat settled. Sacco couldn’t have chosen a better time to come. UP was under Samajwadi party’s Akhilesh Yadav . The rival BJP had swept the parliamentary elections with 71 out of 80 seats in UP, propelling Narendra Modi to power in New Delhi. Sacco landed in a not so polarised no man’s land — between a CM unsure of another term and a PM on probation. This was a refreshing window of uncertainty when officials and political groups were waiting and watching, in no hurry to take sides. More so, at the district level and lower, where Sacco was mining memories and there were people ready to talk. Rather than targeting the rival, you see insiders from both camps freely sharing scepticism about their own leadership. A local Muslim group is no longer sure if the Mulayam (Singh) party is keener to protect them or keep them on tenterhooks. A Hindu hardline leader is far from enthusiastic about the new BJP PM. Madan, a local journalist, talks about “lots of liberal people in the middle, with the extremes on each end. But if something happens, you will find no one left in the middle.” Organised groups arrive with visible authority. A five-time village chief accused in the riot turns up accompanied by a group of supporters who sit silently behind him, ‘a solid wall of blank faces’ as his solo voice delivers the ‘collective truth.’ And, of course, money talks the most. The air is thick with charges of bribes, of a lakh of rupees or two, officials demand out of the Rs 5 lakh compensation sanctioned to riot victims. Meanwhile, the displaced cling to resettlement camps braving the hissing slithering snakes, more fearful of returning to their home villages. The camp itself vanishes when the authorities want to. Towards the close of the book, there is a half-page picture of what remains of one such relief shelter — a large road-side tract of land with nothing on it except the telltale tyre tracks of a bulldozer, the state-run vehicle that has since burned up more of the nation’s fuel than rockets. There isn’t anything like a closure to the story. You know the gripping narration is over when Sacco signs off at page 135. Cartoonists hate to say goodbye. They don’t necessarily leave you with a sign of hope or despair. But they seem to say what they want to in the dedication. Sacco dedicates this book “to the hardworking rural journalists of India.” Rajinder Puri dedicated many of his books “to the young people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.” The young love comics, and have no qualms about picking up their history from a cartoonist. A pity Joe Sacco wasn’t published with conviction here.