For all the global fame he has earned for his unique brand of ‘comics journalism’ Malta-born American Joe Sacco checked one more box on his overloaded CV when Penguin Random House India pulled his latest The Once and Future Riot.
There was some criticism of the weak-kneed publisher. Instinctively, however, much of the blame went to the usual suspect: the Hindutva-seeped establishment under whose watch anybody would be scared of publishing such a book. It is, after all, about a major communal riot, in fact the biggest since Gujarat, 2002. The book also makes dire prognostications about where Hindutva might take India. Let’s get the facts sorted first. India does have an unhappy if occasional history of banning books. But Sacco’s isn’t banned. The publisher’s action was pre-emptive, lily-livered and probably predicated on the hope that in the popular opinion, especially in the liberal chic that populates the litfest circuit, the blame will automatically go to the Hindutva establishment. It was Penguin Random House that blocked it and sent out a five-page note of amendments that Sacco declined. Other Indian publishers are chasing Sacco. And as he told Himanshi Aggarwal of ThePrint, he wants his book to go out to the largest numbers in India.
