A graphic tribute to the city by Jai Undurti
At the heart of every city is a story; the seed from which the tree of stone and concrete grows. I started the Hyderabad Graphic Novel project in an attempt to find this seed. A city becomes the stories that people tell— both travellers and those who have made their home there. You could call this a shell of information that surrounds the built environment. A more poetic description is terroir, a French word derived from the wine industry, meaning the ‘taste’ of the soil. The project was a description of this evanescent quality that speaks at once to history and to place.
When I started off, the first question was “why comics?” My answer always was “only comics.” By this I meant that only through this graphical medium could the vanished aspects of the city be brought to life. Reading a well-created comic is a very fluid experience. This is because the graphic medium utilizes the engine of the reader’s imagination in driving the story forward. Just as the engine of market forces pulverizes heritage structures and entire ways of life with them, this imagination is what can reconstruct a disappeared city, building out of the bricks of memory. I was very clear from the beginning that the project would avoid clichés like biryani, pearls, bangles and Charminar. Nothing wrong with them, but enough has already been written. Instead, the project would celebrate the oblique approach. I strongly believe that a city should not be reduced to lazy visual stereotypes. Eiffel Tower always represents Paris, but perhaps this overuse of symbols hides the truth.
Also, the style of art had to be very rooted, very grounded in the reality of Hyderabad. Artist Harsho Mohan Chattoraj’s detailed style was apt for representing the architecture and the people – it is a story where the city is a character in her own right. The Hyderabad Graphic Novel project, to borrow a phrase from critic Gillian Darley is “a continuous narrative —a visual argument with which to confront a critical world.” It is an amalgamation of the built environment, the people who live in it, and the stories they tell, together forming a narrative that arcs over the centuries. In the end, every city is a story.
The writer is the author of Hyderabad: A Graphic Novel, which shall be available in April