The cartoonist Joe Sacco has claimed that Penguin Random House India were “looking for excuses” not to publish his politically contentious docu-comic.
The Once and Future Riot, already published in the UK and elsewhere, narrates the 2013 riots in the Muzaffarnagar area of Uttar Pradesh in India, in which a fatal street scuffle led to wider clashes between Muslim and Hindu communities, the death of over 60 people and the displacement of 60,000, mainly Muslims.
Reviewing the book for ArtReview, Chris Fite-Wassilak praised it as not ‘so much a history of a single catastrophic event as it is a portrait of how people justify hatred and rationalise cruelty.’
Sacco says that the publisher asked for the line ‘and just since the BJP [Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party] has taken power, that Hindu hegemony has been firing on all cylinders’ to be removed. The artist says he was told it could be ‘inflammatory’ and likely to cause ‘religious offence’.
In a five page editorial feedback – unusual for a book already published in other territories – Sacco was also asked for proof he had the consent of people he had spoken to while reporting the book to be quoted, and consent to depict subjects in his drawings.
Talking on a podcast for the Indian news site The Wire, Sacco said “The main thing for me was changes that seemed like editorial changes they were asking for, which were removing quotes, removing quotes about public figures, removing quotes from a public figure I talked to, even to the extent of move this caption down the page. And I mean, there were like four or five things that were called requirements that I simply wasn’t going to do.”
Sacco said he was told that the map inside the book was inaccurate, but claims internal politics might have also led to the book’s cancellation, noting Penguin India is also the publisher of Modi’s two volume autobiography A Story of Hope and Human Endeavour.
Penguin Random House India chief executive Gaurav Shrinagesh told the Indian Express this week that The Once and Future Riot failed its ‘pre-check and legal scrutiny process.’
