Orijit Sen
Orijit Sen is the man who inspired a whole generation of Indian graphic novelists. He is the co-founder of People Tree, an extraordinary artist, storyteller, activist and social documentarian.
Tell us about your discovery of the medium and how you came to be a graphic novelist.
As a student in the 1980s, at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, I read whatever underground comics I could get my hands on. These included Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. I was blown away by Spiegelman’s Maus, which had just been published by a major mainstream publisher, and won a Pulitzer prize. I always liked to draw and make comics, but it was not considered the regular thing to do. Maus came as a great validation of my artistic convictions! It gave me a huge impetus to pursue my interest in drawing and making comics. Many years later, I met Robert Crumb and his wife and the underground cartoonist, Aline Kominsky-Crumb at the Comic Con India. I told them that they had been my inspiration for many years, and they came over to my studio to see my work. It was a nice epilogue to my discovery of Crumb back in the ’80s.
What are your research methods for building a story?
My first published graphic novel was River of Stories, which came out in 1994. It was about the struggle of the local, largely tribal communities who were going to be displaced by the construction of the Sardar Sarover Dam on the Narmada in Madhya Pradesh. I started researching my story by travelling to the Narmada valley region and meeting people. Most people, including friends and activists in Delhi, did not quite understand what I was doing. This was several years before the publication of Joe Sacco’s Palestine planted the first seeds of journalism through graphic novels. I was drawing and researching, taking photographs. I wrote down people’s stories. People would often exclaim ‘What, comics?’ They’d think I was trying to make cartoons or poke fun at the movement. Some were a little suspicious of my motives.
Visual narratives about dislocated communities bring about social awareness. Have you come across any stories that indicate a change in perception?
The Sardar Sarovar Dam was constructed despite the protests, but the resistance to it helped galvanize the environmental movement in India. My work was part of that process. The relationship between art and social change isn’t a direct cause-and-effect one. It isn’t a short-term thing. Art speaks to the heart as well as the mind, and the way it impacts us as individuals and societies can be very powerful and lasting, but is not necessarily measureable.
Your mural at the Virasat-e-Khalsa tells a story through visuals, light and sound. The scale of it is mammoth. In what ways was this project a challenge and in what ways a pleasure?
In the practice of art, challenges and pleasures have a kind of Yin-Yang relationship: you can’t have one without the other! But speaking more prosaically, the sheer scale of the mural was my primary challenge: it is 20 meters by 75 meters. But I wasn’t interested in monumentality. I wanted to make it intimate, complex and rich with observed detail. I decided to work with a Pahari/Mughal miniature-influenced style that was part of the artistic heritage of Punjab and northern India in general. I had been researching miniature paintings with Dr. B.N. Goswamy and others, and was fascinated by the way the painters had evolved their inventive and highly nuanced visual narrative devices and composition methods. However, most people don’t relate to that kind of art anymore, which is a pity. I combined the structural aspects of miniature painting with a contemporary graphic style of comic books and graphic novels using bold, clear outlines, acute and dramatic points of view and dense, saturated colours. All of this added to the intensely challenging nature of the project, but in the end, provided me the greatest pleasure as well. Keeping my talented team of artists inspired and working long hours at their highest levels was its own kind of challenge. Looking back, the only challenge that I could have happily done without was the constant pressure of deadlines.
Our conversation with Orijit Sen was first published in our Design Issue of 2014. This article is a part of Throwback Thursday series where we take you back in time with our substantial article archive.
Text Rukminee Guha Thakurta and Nityan Unnikrishnan