John Lucas

For last week’s Georgia Straight, I interview Indian graphic artist and comics creator Orijit Sen. We talked about his massive mural in the Punjab, a scaled-down version of which he has brought to Vancouver for the Indian Summer festival. We also discussed his first graphic novel, River of Stories, published in 1994.

Like the fictional journalist at the centre of River of Stories, Sen found himself drawn to the antidevelopment side as he learned more about what was at stake. “Although I tried to give a sense of the arguments the movement was trying to put forward in a kind of rational sense,” he says, “in fact the main character goes from being this person who doesn’t know too much about it, who’s going in as a journalist to report, and who becomes a fervent supporter of it. So it’s the same journey that happened to me personally as well.”

Thanks to some friends involved with an environmental NGO, Sen was the recipient of a grant that allowed him to publish River of Stories. In a delicious bit of poetic justice, the money came from the same government that he was now actively protesting against. “But you know how sometimes the government is: the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,” he says, clearly relishing the irony. “They were supposedly giving money to this NGO to produce environmental literature for young people—so, basically, stuff about trees, plants—obviously assuming that it’s all politically safe stuff.”

Read the full article here.

You can read River of Stories in its entirety here.

If you happen to be in Vancouver, Orijit Sen will be part of a panel discussion called Artpolitik at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts this evening (July 9) at 6 p.m. At 4 p.m., he’ll give a free talk on the scaled-down version of his Punjab mural in the Woodward’s Atrium, where the piece is on display until July 13. See the Indian Summer Festival website for details.