‘Someone asked if my book was influenced by Dhurandhar’: author Sarnath Banerjee

Have you ever stepped out of a cinema hall, wanting to run back and catch the next show of the same movie? That’s how one feels after reading Sarnath Banerjee’s latest graphic novel Absolute Jafar (HarperCollins India), a romance between Brighu from India and Mahrukh from Pakistan, which unfolds across Delhi, Chicago, Karachi and Berlin. The trauma that borders cause, moments of tenderness, wacky humour, and cinematic references pull one into the world that Banerjee has constructed.

The public curiosity about the cross-border relationship owes also to the fact that Banerjee was once married to Pakistani artist Bani Abidi. That said, tracking down autobiographical material instead of relishing how the author has transformed it into art is probably the worst way to read this book.

“Even if Absolute Jafar is about many things, such as childhood, the idea of home, relocation, fantasies of urban living, walking, music, clashing modernities, local universes, history of how a people felt at a certain time, the line of inquiry invariably boils down to the Indo-Pak aspect of it,” Banerjee laments. “Someone even asked me if my book, which I started writing seven years ago, was influenced by Dhurandhar,” he adds, referring to the recent Bollywood blockbuster about an Indian intelligence agent who infiltrates Pakistan to dismantle a terror network. Edited excerpts from an email conversation:

Artist and graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee

Q: How does it feel to write an India-Pakistan love story in the current political environment where diplomatic ties between the two countries are at an all-time low?

A: There has never been a golden age of an Indo-Pak love story. The relationship between these two countries has always been tenacious; marrying a Pakistani has never been easy, whether now or earlier. It is impossible to visit each other’s countries. Indo-Pak couples were never meant to live in India; eventually, they had to go to Dubai or Canada. Just like Brighu mentions that he should give TED Talks on how to prevent entanglements between Indians and Pakistanis. It looks nice as a fantasy but the practicalities of it are dire. The endless running from pillar to post, waiting for hours and hours at government offices, visa rejections, having minor heart attacks every time there is a skirmish at the borders, and the administration having great power over your life, etc.

It’s not as if you plan such a thing, marry a Pakistani just to show how radical you are. Love just happens. Ordinary people just want to live ordinary lives, even if they make an unconventional decision. But here they get mixed up in bilateral politics. The marriage feels a bit like an autoimmune disease, even many years after it ends.

Q: Unlike Brighu and Mahrukh, their son Jafar appears completely free from the weight of history and geopolitics. What enables this?

A: He is growing up with an imagination of the ‘other’. Different people, locations, street food, ways of existence and listening to different music. His existence is local and highly actualised. From Fridays for Future to going to pro-Palestine demonstrations in Berlin, from his nani’s poetry club in Karachi to the Saraswati pujo at his other grandmother’s house in Calcutta, from walking the streets of north Calcutta, as if his grandfather owned a homeopathy shop there, to going to marsias in Berlin during Muharram. This gives him a natural ease in dealing with diversity and a strange lightness. This feeling of being intensely local in different places is, perhaps, what is called post-identity. 

Q: Brighu’s father used to play Ustad Vilayat Khan’s music to wake him up. Brighu plays Lucky Ali to wake up Jafar. How did you end up exploring music as a love language?

A: Father-son relationships have changed over the years. Sure, there has always been love, respect, and, sometimes, shared interests such as sports and music, but father and son didn’t share an imagination space. Fathers became tax, job and property advisers. I feel things are different now.

I am no longer a figure of absolute authority to my son; he is not subordinate to my ideas and politics. He challenges them, questions me and, sometimes, calls me out. I feel this respectful insubordination is key to a healthy society. A child mustn’t have to agree to their father’s worldview. As we grow older, we become more conservative, and unconditionally agreeing to such a person’s opinion ensures a conservative society. India is a prime example. Children should be raised to have an independent mind. Yes, they are ours, but also different from us.

Q: What do you think about the possibility of your graphic novels being used to train generative AI models that can later produce new stories and images mimicking your style but customised to user prompts?

A: It wasn’t for no reason that Japanese animator Miyazaki said that AI is anti-life. AI is like the death drag of a middle-aged man who has given up on life. It would take away the last shred of humanity from us and serenade the world to its end. 

AI apologists believe that it would democratise art. They have no idea of what it involves to make art. They think it’s the final product. AI can produce the final product swiftly and perhaps better than any human being. They don’t realise that the final product is the least important part of art-making. It is the process that is the most precious. AI takes away the process, and the pleasures and joys of life. The uncritical champions of AI have outsourced their imagination.

Luckily, my work is not mainstream enough for them to fully get into. I have a very small audience. Currently, AI is only interested in highly distributed, easily available work.

The interviewer is a writer, educator and literary critic. His work has appeared in the anthologies Fearless Love and Bent Book.

Published – March 27, 2026 06:15 am IST