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HomePageTurnerAfterwordHow to take Indira Gandhi to millennials? A graphic biography of course

How to take Indira Gandhi to millennials? A graphic biography of course

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I feared that a graphic biography of Indira Gandhi would end up being considered a mere ‘Spark Notes’ version of an authoritative biography, rather than a serious one in its own right.

In the two years that the artist Priya Kuriyan and I worked on our graphic biography of Indira Gandhi, two sets of reactions from people were most annoying.

“A biography of Indira Gandhi? In this climate? Why?”

The second, a shade more creative, interpreted “graphic” as “sensational”. “Is Dhirendra Brahmachari in it?” they asked, eyes glinting at the prospect of gossip.

I responded with a smile to the first, deliberately refusing to rise to the bait. The second, though, I subject to a deadpan monologue: “Do you know what a graphic novel is? Like Persepolis? Though that’s a memoir… This book will be much like that. Only, instead of a novel it’s a biography.”

*

In March 2016, when our publisher decided to pair up Kuriyan and me for a graphic book in time for Indira Gandhi’s birth centenary celebrations (she was born in November 1917), there was that business of uncertain territories: we knew in our heart of hearts that graphic biographies were not a thrilling genre, tending to be the kind of books parents and pious relatives gifted unsuspecting youths rather than ones the young pored over with zero prodding. Could graphic biographies be made page-turners?

Then there was the other fear that kept me awake on the nights I wasn’t up researching the nuances of Mrs Gandhi’s richly lived life: That our biography, told in the 160 full-colour pages our publisher had granted us, would end up being considered a mere ‘Spark Notes’ version of an authoritative biography, rather than a serious one in its own right.

On the mornings after, though, galvanised by the coruscating fears of the night, I would spend hours attempting to uncover a new angle, a funny anecdote, a fresh perspective. I haunted the libraries of the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust and Teen Murti. I made a list of questions to ask Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. With great generosity, PGV brought alive for us a little-known Indira Gandhi, through memories, sometimes quirky, sometimes moving, of the quotidian and of the serious, and as she walked us through the rooms, we could see the museum at 1 Safdarjung Road morph back into Indira Gandhi’s home, lived-in and buzzing, people coming in and out, corners and corridors redolent with details.

We visited Allahabad, her birthplace. I took copious notes; Priya made hundreds of sketches. A pellmet here, an overhanging verandah there. And finally, on the train ride back, I posed the fundamental question to myself and Priya: why does Indira Gandhi, who has inspired the greatest number of biographies (more than Nehru, as it happens), need a graphic biography after all?

And then, long story short, after several months of hair-tearing, there was a moment of illumination.

If each biography must speak to the generation it is addressed to, the question we needed to answer was not what Indira Gandhi needed, but what worked for millennials. QED. To a generation that’s sated on videos 24×7, visuals would speak better than text. But given the decades they are away from her times, would we not need a framing device to provide a context to the visuals that told her story?

That’s where my novelist’s pulse began to race. Almost overnight, a whole world, borrowed from Priya’s and mine, came into being. A young Indira Thapa, growing up in a hardy urban gaon in Delhi, in love with the politics and drama of her government school; her much-loved teacher Miss Reema Das, who glides out of a red Nano carrying answer-scripts and books, and savours stand-up at night; and a flaky artist, Priyadarshini, who is working on a graphic biography of Indira Gandhi, which has stuttered to a stop in spite of the ministrations of her bossy, if beloved, publisher.

When I outlined this, ramblingly, to Kuriyan over the phone, there was a moment’s silence. “So it’s meta-…” she said, finally, and then, “I love it. Maybe, somewhere, the two narratives could meet? There is this book I’d read…”

We are in business.

*

As the narrative took its final form, the prose chapters about Indira Thapa and Priyadarshini Chatterjee interleaved the graphic biography of Indira Gandhi.There were all these real and fictional people – Sardar Pal Singh, a cab driver who recounted the 1984 riots, Dhol Bahadur Thapa who remembered the war of 1962, and Gurmeet, Mala, Nafisa and Ravi, who articulated the Emergency – framing Mrs Gandhi’s story (which, too, is not only her story but also that of Jawaharlal and Kamala, Feroze and Sanjay and Rajiv, P.N. Haksar, R.N. Kao, Jayaprakash Narayan, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and P and R, the grand-children).

In one fell swoop, I realised how, by foregrounding oral history in our biography, we had included the parents (and grandparents) of our readers, the millennials, whether they loved or hated Mrs Gandhi. And that tied in serendipitously with something else.

There had, after all, been a third set of reactions from people when Kuriyan and I mentioned our project. For everyone who mocked our foolishness in this political climate, and everyone who wisecracked about the graphic in our exercise, there would be two or three or four or five who would fall silent for a moment or two and then say: “You know, there was this one time I met Mrs Gandhi…”

They would tell their Mrs G story; I would start scribbling in one of my many notebooks; Kuriyan would sketch their faces. This graphic biography is theirs too.

Devapriya Roy is the author of two novels, The Vague Woman’s Handbook and The Weight Loss Club. Her account of travelling through India on a very, very tight budget, The Heat and Dust Project: The Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat, was co-written with Saurav Jha. Indira, by Priya Kuriyan and Devapriya Roy, is now available online and in bookstores.

Images courtesy: Westland

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