‘A history of the emotions of living in a particular period’: Sarnath Banerjee on ‘Absolute Jafar’
· Scroll
We live today in a world of AI-generated book covers (and, indeed, books), a realm where quick and cheap production triumphs over everything, even if it is at the cost of sacrificing art. From that perspective, Sarnath Banerjee is an exception. His latest, Absolute Jafar, which has everything from an Indo-Pak romance to existential dilemmas, is his most personal work to date.
Visit iwanktv.club for more information.
In an interview with Scroll, Banerjee covered everything from the present and future of the Indian comic industry, through his process of creation, to the meaning of home and the fickleness of memory. Excerpts from the conversation:
How was the process of writing Absolute Jafar different from your previous books?
In the process of writing Jafar, I dived into a past which is faintly recollected but fondly remembered. Writing the book was like a doorway through which I tried to remember how a generation felt during the ’90s and the early 2000s. It is not nostalgia but more an act of reclamation. Reclaiming a “history of emotion” of a people living through a particular time, ordinary stories of extraordinary times.
You describe Brighu’s attempts to pass down stories of jinns, eccentric cousins, and the subcontinent to his son as a “doomed enterprise,” largely because Jafar is, at his core, a Berliner....