Interviews

Between the Lines with Joshy Benedict

Brilliantly narrated and illustrated by Joshy Benedict, The Pig Flip – translated from the Malayalam by K.K. Muralidharan – is a surreal and narcotic tale of addiction and comeuppance that will linger hauntingly in the mind long after you’ve read it.

Q. The Pig Flip (originally Pannimalath in Malayalam) tells the story of a gambling addict, who is also a remarkable dissembler. How and why did you decide that this addiction would be at the heart of the story?

Joshy Benedict:  Though I didn’t plan this primarily as a story about addiction, it became one of the principal themes in this narrative. People have a strong urge to slide out of the intricate web of societal obligations and demands of relationships. An obsession leading to addiction has facets of a subconscious rebellion one wages against the overall restrictions society imposes on the individual. Indulging in prohibited activities feels liberating but it soon transforms into another enslaving subservience. Even the recognition of one addiction becomes the path leading to another.

The early thoughts of the story saw it as a string of incidents through a man’s symptomatic, unintelligible mutterings, between the beginning and end of his habit of mumbling to himself, undirected words and sounds that emerge and disappear without anyone else hearing them. Disconsolation of all life forms was a background theme from the very beginning.

Q. What were some of the challenges you faced while working on the graphic novel, given the sensitive issue it deals with? Also, how do you think the novel has been carried across from Malayalam toEnglish—what was the process of translating it like?

JB: I wasn’t really thinking about any sensitive issues the story might have to deal with. I was only concerned about the honesty of my voice and art. I consider art as the last bastion of an individual’s honesty.

While writing the story, some of the characters had acquired traits from people I knew from my surroundings. One of them only laughed when I mentioned it to him.

Somewhere on the way it occurred to me that an English version of this story will help it to reach more readers. My command of the English language is limited. Murali’s support in this regard has been invaluable. This was a story he had liked from the beginning. We are from the same part of Kerala and he knew the settings and characters very well. Translation had many iterations through long discussions about the nuances in local language and its universal alternatives. Murali had the challenge of translating the regional Malayalam in and English and balancing the flavours for more universal comprehension. I am very happy how the translation turned out.

Q. The medium of the graphic narrative relies heavily on symbolism. In The Pig Flip too, certain images that look ordinary and everyday represent dense layered meanings. Tell us a bit about masking and unmasking meanings via images (often more than words) in your work.

JB: Yes, it is an important narrative concern, leaving subtle clues and signs along the main narrative, even the ones that may appear accidental, for a discerning reader as underlying pathways to the other layers of the story. I think this is a supremely important aspect of any piece of art. It involves complex chemistry between the artist and the audience. The outcome of this chemistry could dramatically vary from one reader the other. Discovering and traversing these veiled routes and ruminating over them collectively give an inexplicable joy and satisfaction to the reader. I have actively attempted to explore things visually that couldn’t be explicitly said in the text hoping to direct the reader even further out than what is apparent in the illustrations.

Q. A fascinating aspect of the novel is its use of colour to represent the different moods and tones of the protagonist Babycha’s actions.Sometimes colours also anticipate the readers’ response to the action—for instance in the gambling scenes, the colours are darker,whereas in the scenes between Paulikutty and Babycha, the colours are bright and alive. Tell us more about the use of colours in the novel.

JB: I used different colour palettes for different sequences. But the colours are not realistic. For example, you might notice that the characters and their clothes are in the same colours. Light and shadow in these colours give the illustrations a desired level of realistic dimension.

In fact the card games happen day and night. Night was better suited for the story visually and thematically. Without conscious reasoning I had picked the night games.

Q. Recently, Joe Sacco’s Palestine has gone into reprint, in the wake of the contemporary geopolitical conflicts. Graphic novels have a rich history of capturing the nerve of important socio-historical events in their inventive ways. What do you think about the power and influence of graphic mediums, and who are some of your favourite graphic storytellers?

JB:  Of course, art derives energy from history and politics. In The Pig Flip, my area of interest was more around the oddities and absurdities within individuals and their interactions. I have tried to draw parallels in the strangeness in nature and in people.

Buddha by Ozama Tezuka, Yaxin the Faun by Veyman Dimitri and Manuel Arenas, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi are some of my favourite graphic novels.

Q. What are your thoughts on the graphic narratives/novels landscape in India?

JB:  India is a unified collective of an astounding diversity of everything.  I am not sure whether our graphic novels show a proportional representation in quantity and quality of that diversity as much as in literature or cinema. A lot more can happen here. I also believe they should be available in English for people across linguistic and political borders to access them.

In conversation with Kartik Chauhan for HarperBroadcast 

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