Liquid History of Vasco Da Gama

One of India’s premier graphic novelists and artists, Sarnath Banerjee is known for works that blend history, mythology and autobiography with incisive commentary on contemporary India.

His exhibit at the Biennale, Liquid History of Vasco Da Gama (2014), is a set of dialogues and conjectures that explore the shadowy world of 15th century Indian Ocean maritime trade through the accounts of the fictional character ‘Digital Dutta’. According to Banerjee, Dutta is an unreliable narrator who works as a clerk and fancies himself to be an amateur historian. He has a tendency to find himself planted in various historical moments– either as a minor character or as an active agent responsible for changing the course of history.

The drawings for this project are distilled from the work of Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a noted historian of the Early Modern Period, and revolve around Vasco da Gama’s various encounters in the Indian Ocean. These ‘diet comics’, as the artist calls them, refer to a large cast of characters adding up to a veritable soap opera featuring pirates, popes, convicts, smugglers, ‘degradados’, famous Omani navigators, unknown Gujarati seamen, mysterious Jews from Poznan, Moors from Calicut, the King of Portugal Don Manuel and Prester John, a mythical Christian King from Medieval European chronicles who was believed to have ruled over a nation in the East.

According to Banerjee, the resultant history is “neither cast in stone nor vulnerable to the charge of manufacturing the past”.