Pages from Corridor, India’s first graphic novel in comic book format. Picture by Pabitra Das

He’s not the guy-next-door who’s just come out with this new book (India’s “first graphic novel” no less). Sarnath Banerjee, author of Corridor, is a lot leaner, meaner and deeper, if you please, with long hair, moustache-less pointy beard and dollops of in-your-face attitude.

His CV bears the stamp of institutions like the US-based MacArthur Foundation and Bangalore’s Indian Foundation of the Arts, has a degree in image and communication from University of London, spent six years making ad-films and music videos and did feature-writing stints with newspapers. Not bad for someone who has just turned 31.

In Corridor, a 112-page paperback comic book from Penguin, Banerjee tells “stories emerging from living in an urban space”. There are characters as varied as Jehangir Rangoonwalla, a know-all bookseller in the heart of Delhi’s Connaught Place, Digital Dutta, a software expert who lives in his head “exploding the midfield alongside Garincha” or “climbing Mount Everest several times”, and newly-married Shintu looking for aphrodisiac drugs in the bylanes of old Delhi.

Much of it is autobiographical, admits Banerjee, who spent his school life in Calcutta, later moving on to Delhi and presently shuttling between the two and London.

It’s not art only for art’s sake for Banerjee, who stresses that sales are just as important. “The reader I have in mind is post-literate with an understanding of literature, music and cinema,” he says. And Calcutta — “a city of quiz and cuisine” — is the place where he expects to find most of them.

Comics means serious business for Banerjee. Influenced by creators as widely placed in time and geographical locations as Alan Moore, Marjane Satrapi, Will Eisner, Joe Saccho and Art Spiegelman, he is determined to stick to the medium, reinventing and expanding it as he continues. Other influences are just as varied, including Premendra Mitra’s Ghanada, works of 14th Century Arab traveller Ibn Battuta and assorted jazz and ska music.

“Comics performances” — a blend of moving panels, music and storytelling — is something he’d like to dabble in, as also graphic journalism (“imagine an interview interpreted in comics”). These days, he’s busy completing his second comic book, tentatively titled Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (after Hutum Pyanchar Noksha) about the 18th Century eccentricities of feudal Calcutta and is working on Route 36, a multi-plot located on the upper deck of a double-decker night bus in London.

Also keeping him busy are the book launches in various cities, including Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. To Banerjee, more lucrative than the money he hopes to make by selling the book is the prospect of the scene opening up in India for “graphic novels”.

The success of this book will help, he feels, more writers to come out with serious, original work in the medium. Some are already on the way, like his contemporaries, Delhi’s Arijit Sen (working on his River of Stories) and Mumbai’s Rajesh Devraj. Banerjee is happy to be the first among them.

— SUBHAJIT BANERJEE