A strangely familiar world greets me on the cover of Sarnath Banerjee's The Harappa Files. There are two boys, in karate gi, one with a tiffin-carrier in hand and the other with a thermos. A woman, one chappal-clad foot flying towards the reader and a no-nonsense expression governing her face, holds their hands. The image is in colour, set against a brown backdrop. It is a sight that one might see in contemporary India, but it is more likely than not that today the three would be in a car, windows rolled up, FM radio on, perhaps with the children playing with handheld devices. Anyone who lives above the lower-middle class these days would like to have all those things – commodities that have created a rift with their own lives from three decades past.
The image resonates with India's children of the transition, those who were born in the 60s and early 70s, who experienced neither the excitement of the wave of independence nor the cataclysm of the wave of liberalisation. Most goods were out of reach, creating a longing for unavailable things advertised at the backs of imported comic books – shoes, jeans, cassette tapes, Twinkies, a Charles Atlas bodybuilding kit, x-ray glasses. In the first anthology from the graphic-novelists' group The Pao Collective, Sarnath Banerjee (born 1972) recalls his desire for Nike shoes. A relative from abroad brings our hero his used pair. The hero's father, "in one sweep of anger, disgust and embarrassment," throws them away. Then, one night, our hero spies his father, "an open copy of Sportsworld by his side, a size 3 Bata keds in his left hand and a clumsily held paint brush in his right. Blue ink on white canvas. Cheap bastard." Cheap, but nonetheless loving and – much like the erstwhile Indian government – desperately using techniques of reverse engineering and import substitution to generate commodities for a generation that seemed to want more regardless of the costs.
When liberalisation struck in the 1990s, most of the children of the transition took to it well. The upper ranks of the social pyramid would have had an easy time anyway; success was preordained for them, as were trips abroad that allowed access to foreign goods. Just below them, those who had relied upon relatives from abroad or on 'fancy markets' in major cities could now go to mid-market malls for their loot – and at least touch it. The vast bulk of the population – those who walked, for instance, and those who farmed the land – made few gains, and indeed lost a great deal in the new era. For them, the goods were a rebuke, the malls temples in which they had become untouchable. Liberalisation came, goods arrived, capital was freed from regulation, but the State did not disappear. Its bureaucratic apparatus now moves rapidly for those who oil its gears with 'donations', but lumbers to a halt before the entreaties of the poor.
Tiresome offices with babus sitting behind ponderous nameplates and copious amounts of self-assurance – this is how the ordinary chap sees the State. Banerjee draws the bureaucrat as a gargoyle, one of whom is S S Sivakumar, "a petty bureaucrat in the Department of Surplus Emotion and Nervous Breakdown". In 1951, cartoonist R K Laxman inaugurated his Common Man, the ordinary chap of the old era, to bear witness to the limitations of the new democracy. "I had to create this mythical individual in a striped coat, with a bushy moustache, a bald head with a white wisp of hair at the back, a bulbous nose on which perched a pair of glasses, and thick black eyebrows permanently raised, expressing bewilderment," wrote Laxman. "He voyages through life with quiet amusement, at no time uttering a word, looking at the ironies, paradoxes and contradictions in the human situation." Banerjee does not have a figure like this to be the sentinel. Nonetheless, his India, with its committees and bureaucrats, its filing cabinets and triplicates, comes at you with equal parts Kafkaesque gloom and Laxmanian humour.