A border is usually imagined as a line on a map. In Absolute Jafar, Sarnath Banerjee shows how that line can enter a marriage, a family and even a child’s idea of home. His sixth graphic novel follows Brighu Sen, an Indian man who falls in love with a Pakistani artist, marries her, moves to…
Vinu P is a “corpse collector”; that is, he retrieves the bodies of those who die “unnatural” deaths—victims of accidents, suicides, and abandonment, and so on—and assists the police in the enquiries that follow. This being India, where Vinu lives and works in Kerala, what might elsewhere be considered the duties of a first responder…
Few institutions in India have shaped the imagination of the nation as profoundly as the railways. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong places this vast network of tracks, workshops, stations and employees at the centre of a sweeping narrative that follows one woman’s life alongside the evolving story of modern India. Moving from the decades after Independence to the…
Our Madhopur Home is a multigenerational family saga narrated through an unusual and carefully balanced set of perspectives, most strikingly that of Laura, the family’s Labrador who observes: “this is not just my tale but also a narrative of bonds and relationships on a broad canvas,” and that the story of the Madhopur home is…
“The story here,” Indian Dalit author Kalyani Thakur Charal writes in the introduction to Andhar Bil, “centres round my village, my childhood, my beloved Andhar Bil which has a close, intimate relationship not only with me but also with numerous boys and girls of my village.” Drawing on her lived experience of loss, uprooting, and…