Apanjandrum harangued at half kumbh, Allahabad, in January 2007, what many have been saying before and after, “Westerners have no moral beliefs, no family bonding, no benignity.”
Cut to October 14, 2014. A hotel in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh. I woke up in the middle of the night and overheard my companion talking to someone on the phone. He sounded emotional and close to tears. The next day, my travel companion told me he had been talking to his mother. It was her 86th birthday and the mother and her 54-year-old son were missing each other.
The Maltese-American graphic journalist Joe Sacco was in Muzaffarnagar to research a book he was planning on the August-September 2013 communal riots, which had claimed over 60 lives and rendered 9,000 families homeless. Close to 50,000 of the riot-affected took shelter in makeshift camps. Sacco had read about the violence and the shelter homes in some American newspapers.
I had been introduced to Sacco by the essayist-cum-novelist Pankaj Mishra in 2010. Sacco had been commissioned to write a piece on India by a French magazine. I was at the time doing a series of reports on the Musahar Dalits of Kushinagar and he joined me.
The Musahars were not easy to interview. A deep distrust for everything kept them from sharing their stories with rank outsiders. Initiating a conversation with them, Sacco had this permanent disclaimer: “I am neither a politician nor a public servant. I am a journalist and I want to write about you.”
It took them days to open up to him but once it happened, Sacco was an insider in the dark huts of those who were outsiders in their own village of Gurumiha Mafitola, barely three kilometres from the spot where Gautam Buddha delivered his last sermon.
The Musahars would invite Sacco into their shanties, hug him and talk to him for hours. The rich of the area disliked a foreigner trying to probe what they perceived as a local issue. One youth was particularly contemptuous. He would warn people to stay away from strangers. Then the worst happened. A local panchayat leader called me up one morning to say, “Please stop visiting our village. We don’t want you to write about poverty here.”
The end result of this trip was Sacco’s Journalism, a book that went on to make waves. French filmmaker Yann Arthus-Bertrand made a documentary on the Musahars, which was screened at the UN headquarters. A retired schoolteacher from New York adopted a Musahar family...
Sacco joined me again in 2014 when I was writing about the shelter camps of Muzaffarnagar, where thousands of riot-hit families were living. Erected on government or private lands, these camps were run by community leaders.
Mostly known for covering strife-ridden areas and making Palestine, The Great War, Footnotes in Gaza and War on Gaza, Sacco was not apparently in a war zone in Muzaffarnagar. But once we started to delve into the riots, we both realised that we were not in a peace zone either.
This feeling grew with each passing day.
Sacco was transparent with his interviewees. Before starting a conversation, he would say, “I respect your feelings and want to be brutally honest in presenting your views and remarks. Can we talk about the riot?”
He moved forward if someone said “no”, but spent lots of time with those who agreed to talk to him.
We met dozens of community leaders, alleged rioters as well as victims, lawbreakers and lawmakers. There was no one truth about the riots, and a lot of what they said we had no way of cross-checking. But Sacco insisted he must have
the other side’s views because he didn’t want to compromise his journalistic ethics.
These iterative conversations and penchant for transparency, however, didn’t always endear him to people. A section seemed to equate him with the American State. They dubbed him “George Bush” and pummelled him with a volley of questions.
Sacco was unfazed.
At night, he drew the scenes we had witnessed. By way of reference, there were scribbles on his notepad and also photographs which he had taken using his small camera. Sometimes he wanted to go back and interview the same person again.
“I have missed asking him many questions,” he would regret.
I would caution him, saying, “If someone attacks us, the entire world will know that an American journalist was injured in West UP.” His reply, “Even if that happens, I will never blame the attackers.”
We met the riot-hit families and the alleged perpetrators, the public officers equipped with the right to remain silent and the politicians, who appeared ready for more mayhem to protect their community.
We met all kinds of people. There was this sadhu who claimed he didn’t visit Muzaffarnagar during the communal violence, but we later came across a video of him from the same time making an inflammatory speech to a huge gathering in Muzaffarnagar. He had even been arrested for it, though let off on bail later.
Armed with several notebooks, newspaper clippings, pictures and videos of violence, Sacco returned to Portland, US, after two weeks. Our email exchange continued.
Sacco worked on The Once and Future Riot for 11 years. For that period of time, he kept asking questions, checking and cross-checking every detail.
He was not sure for many years whether it would become a standalone book. He told me once that he would incorporate whatever he had collected from Muzaffarnagar and turn it into a chapter in a book on instances of sectarian violence across the world. Only by 2023 had all that research and investigation assumed the shape of a complete book.
The people we had met have found place in the graphic novel, as have I.
Today, when Sacco’s book is all set to be published in India, I am reminded of something he asked the day we set off for Muzaffarnagar in 2014. With a book on Gandhi in his hand, he had asked me, “Why didn’t India learn to live together even after decades of Independence?”
He tried to work out the answer the next many years. And more recently, when he was on his way from Spain to the UK to promote his book, he wrote to me from Madrid airport, “There was a lot of interest in the book, perhaps because I left a lot of questions open.”