Sarnath Banerjee with Zasha Colah

Through his drawing-based lectures, Sarnath Banerjee explores the intersection between comics and theatre. When a comic book is staged well, it can produce unexpected experiences—melancholy, unease, joy, longing, and disquiet. Through these picto-textual performances, Banerjee seeks to record the emotional history of our times. Using ordinary micro-encounters that arise from geographical and cultural dislocation, he aims to explore the spontaneous experiences that emerge when specificities meet and modernities collide. A section of his work addresses the poorly understood political and social rifts between the diaspora and the newly arrived.

Banerjee believes that performativity is at the heart of comic-making. In comics, text and pictures, seldom explain each other; rather, they are in opposition. This creates something entirely uncanny, often beyond the imagination of the creator. As with theatre, makers can rarely predict the psychological states their work will evoke. While writing a comic, the author performs a place, a city, people, and their lived and un-lived fantasies. These stories are Banerjee’s way of coming to terms with the panic of the foreign and the cold dread of home.

Sarnath Banerjee, *1972 in Burdwan, India. Places of belonging: Delhi. Book: Doab Dil, 2018.