His artwork has attracted international attention pretty much throughout his adult life, but it is Corjuem-based Orijit Sen’s acute, sparkling writerly prowess that really wowed me in the brilliantly produced 25th anniversary edition of River of Stories, the first graphic novel from India when it was originally published in 1994, which was re-released at last month’s Goa Heritage Festival in Campal.
In his introduction to the handsome new hardback from Blaft Publications, Sen puts it most pithily about the main narrative of his pioneering book – the ultimately unsuccessful people’s resistance led by the Narmada Bachao Andolan against vast dam projects in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra: “The question that [we] raised so forcefully back in the 1980s: “Development for whom, and whose cost?” remains un-addressed four decades later. The Indian state continues to accelerate policies that usurp the lands, waters, rights and resources of forest-dwelling people, farmers, artisans and others – as it sides more and more nakedly with the interests of large-scale extractive capitalist entities. The idealism and energy of those times seem like part of a collective dream that has dissipated. Or has it?”
A valid question, with uncertain answers, but there’s one thing we can be certain about: this 59-year-old artist’s own flame burns as brightly as ever, and – as happens only with the best – continues to burnish most impressively as he grows older. No less than Arundhati Roy notes in her Foreword, “In the years since this book first came out, Orijit Sen has grown to become one of India’s most valuable graphic artists. He has a fine line and an angry, pugnacious political understanding.”
There are several unusual aspects to River of Stories in its superb new avatar, and the most important is actually appended in the back. These are excerpts from Sen’s sketchbooks, accompanied by the artist’s meticulous explainer. This “road to the river” is an instantly invaluable contribution to our collective understanding of the making of Indian art, derived from the artist’s “most important learnings that I have received from a lifetime spent in reading and making comics and graphic novels.”
Some of these lessons – from Amar Chitra Katha and Tintin – will be familiar to many Indians. Others are distinctively personal: “My father was a cartographer, and I grew up around mapping instruments – going on field trips with him and observing how he plotted landscapes with lines, markings and colour codes. And so geography became an early repository of stories for me. The two-dimensional surface of a map was a veil that only had to be lifted to reveal a brave new world of distant mountains, hushed forests and glimmering lakes.”
Back in 1991, Sen “travelled to the Narmada river valley [with] no clear notion of what I was going to do there, but I knew that I wanted to experience the land, meet the people who belonged to it, sit on the banks of the ancient and storied river, and watch it flow…I attended Baghoria festival fairs, wedding feasts, religious ceremonies and political rallies, journeying on trains, buses, jeeps, bullock carts, bicycles and on foot. Everywhere, I sketched, made notes, took photographs and listened to people’s stories.”
Out of this unformed mountain of experiences came River of Stories: “Gradually, the people, the river, the hills, forests, streams, roads, bridges, plantations, hamlets, houses, tools and objects became internalized as a part of the visual vocabulary with which I sought to fashion the story of the Narmada Valley and the struggle of its people. I laboured not just to capture slices of life, but to absorb entire chunks of lived experience in the Narmada Valley. I felt this was the only way one could tell the truth about a place and its people.” In effect, “my sketchbooks became a series of densely compacted suitcases containing a vast collection of experienced sounds, sights and interactions, in the form of scribbled pages that I would carry back to my studio in Delhi – and unpack in order to use for the telling of my story.”
Make no mistake, it’s extremely rare – not just now, but in any era – to encounter an artist who can simultaneously deploy language and visuals with this degree of facility and precision. That might explain why Sen is regularly hounded by would-be censors, most notoriously in 2016 when two striking nudes were banned on Facebook. In fact - again like only the very best – this artist is by far his own most perceptive critic. See this disarming admission about what he thought about when considering republishing River of Stories: “If I were to create a book like this today, I would do it very differently. There are so many layers that I wasn’t sensitive to back then. I felt a little embarrassed even by the book’s flaws, its unformed-ness. I worried it was callow and perhaps over-eager in its style.”
I also really appreciated Sen’s frank assessment of his own 25-year-old choice of “inter-weaving” the creation myths of the Bhilala Adivasi people of the Narmada Valley, as well as another creation myth of the Apatani people of Arunachal Pradesh “along with visual segments of art inspired by Saora tribes of Odisha and Warlis of Maharashtra.” He explained that “in joining these varied and naturally un-connected works into one continuous thread, my intention was to try and break through temporal and spatial specificities, and present a mosaic of indigenous resistance to the materialistic, exploitative view of nature that we, the so-called educated urban elites with our colonized world view, have adopted as our default setting.”
With palpable feeling, Sen wrote that “I would like to acknowledge here that this approach, despite coming from a place of deep respect on my part, necessitated a kind of appropriation and decontextualization of the original stories and art of these communities. For that, I seek the forgiveness of the spiritual and timeless custodians of these works, and of the Bhilala, Apatani, Saora and Warli people as a whole.”