Harappa between the lines

Nikhil Gulati and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer provide a clean but unconventional look at history

The people of the Indus and the birth of civilisation in South Asia

Authors:  Nikhil Gulati  and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer 

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 192 (Hardcover)

Price: Rs 510

Ligne claire or the “clear line” sub-genre of comic art was pioneered by Hergé, renowned author of The Adventures of Tintin. The term was coined in 1977 by another follower of the unique drawing style, Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte. Today, even as the term has expanded into a broad category of comic art styles, two central aspects remain — cartoonish or abstract-seeming characters set against detailed but clean-drawn backgrounds.

Of the several comics artists who have adopted and adapted the ligne claire to their style of graphic narratives, I am mostly reminded of American comics artist and scholar Scott McCloud, when I pick up The People of the Indus by Nikhil Gulati and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. McCloud is best known for his work of graphic scholarship, Understanding Comics, in which his comic book avatar — a casually dressed man with none to minimum facial details, except a pair of big glasses — takes the reader through the history of sequential visual art. Gulati’s narrator is nearly identical to that of McCloud. He begins similarly featureless in the face, except for those big classes, but gets a nose, eye dots, and a mouth, as the work progresses. The guided tour this narrator takes us on is also quite reminiscent of the American author’s approach.

A lanky, scruffy-haired, jeans-and-kurta-clad figure, the narrator is also the central character in the graphic non-fiction. Like a professor of history, he walks us through painstakingly recreated images of artefacts, maps, and archaeological sites and he fills in about the complex histories behind each of these. He points at precise locations, walks through archaeological remains of vast cities, and guides us through museums and archives related to the Harappan Civilisation.

As if leading a class with live PowerPoint presentations, scenes from Harappa and Mohenjodaro’s daily lives play out as he describes their social practices, customs, and occupations. The eye for details in reconstructing cityscapes, a signature of the ligne Claire, serves Gulati well as he steers his narrator through the lanes and alleys of the Indus Valley cities in their heyday, as well as the ruins of today.

Gulati’s mise-en-page presents a healthy balance of the familiar and the innovative. He knows when to keep to a waffle-iron grid, and when to break out. Massive splash pages are quickly followed by a grid of smaller panels when the author has introduced us to one of his prime arguments and then wants to break down the constituent parts of this argument. Thus, on pages 118 and 119, a composite splash page (a single page-length panel but with two or more images in it) on the migration of languages and cultures from Europe to Asia, is followed by a six-panelled page on the different similarities between culture and languages across the two continents today.

Overall, the presentation is clean, classic, and conventional. The reader will not find it difficult to traverse the imagescape that Gulati lays down. And this book has a far wider audience than the handful of graphic-lit enthusiasts who will pick it up. Such a clean presentation can come in very useful in introducing complex concepts, histories, and analyses to younger audiences. It’s engaging, and not at all gratuitous — for a history that is hinging on the reconstruction of the specific styles of potteries, textiles, and other artefacts to distinguish between micro- and macro-cultures.

In terms of history itself, Gulati and Kenoyer have tried to remain comprehensive but neutral. It’s helpful that the Indus Valley is constantly located within the larger world that it was a part of. The narrator asks fundamental questions about why it was so different from other early civilisations such as those in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia? What’s the mystery between their non-indulgence in warfare? He also touches upon the controversial questions of how the Indus civilisations ended and/or interacted with the Indo-Aryans, presenting a complete array of the various arguments and counterarguments, without clearly preferring one above the others.

Gulati and Kenoyer collect and present a real treasure trove of facts, but they manage to do so without making the reader feel burdened by them.

For me, the silent interludes between the long didactic chapters are the clincher. They are also the aspect of the book that lifts it away from the shadow of graphic scholars like McCloud and others. Gulati gives us small 6-7 page long, speechless narratives trying to imagine what life would have been like in the Indus Valley cities. We have short mundane scenes, with children and families and traders, which reconstruct human behaviour from the author’s daily experience, and the world itself from the reconstructed archaeological findings.

The lack of speech is both interesting and respectful. The author doesn’t try too hard to cull words from people dead for more than four millennia. The lack of speech also prevents the reader from getting distracted by unnecessary details and instead focuses on the world that’s presented — the cities, the jewellery, clothes, vehicles, etc. It’s a window into a distant world and it need not be complicated by parallel oral narratives.