The Once and Future Riot
From the prizewinning author of Palestine
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Publisher Description
From the ground-breaking graphics journalist and author of Palestine, a revelatory investigation of the deadly sectarian riots in 2013 Uttar Pradesh, India, and their urgent global significance today
Compared to other episodes of lethal Indian communal violence, the clashes in Uttar Pradesh in 2013, the Muzaffarnagar Riot, were a relatively small-scale affair. It had happened before and will probably happen again: Hindus and Muslims, armed with guns and swords, riled up by vitriolic rhetoric and a tangle of accusations, turn on one another. The truth fragments along religious lines, both in the lead-up to the rampage and in its bloody aftermath.
Joe Sacco immerses himself in Uttar Pradesh, speaking to government officials, political leaders, village chiefs, and especially the victims, who were mostly landless peasants, in a quest to understand this riot as an archetype of political violence. In the process, he probes the role of savagery in a democracy; the power of crowds, rather than leaders, to influence the course of events; the collision of competing narratives; and the accounts that perpetrators construct to explain away their participation in bloodshed.
Sacco has chronicled the urgent histories that define the world around us, from the Great War to Gaza. Here, the award winning cartoonist turns his masterful visual reportage to a story that is specific to India but with implications and resonance for us all.
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PRAISE FOR JOE SACCO:
'One of the masters of his craft' New Statesman
'A pioneer of the genre' TLS
'Formidably talented.' Independent
'The hands-down boss of his particular corner of contemporary literature' Dazed & Confused
'Sacco's brilliant, excruciating books of war reportage are potent territory... He shows how much that is crucial to our lives a book can hold' New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 2013, in Western Uttar Pradesh, India, two Hindu cousins killed a Muslim man, and an angry crowd killed them in retaliation. This is the conflict Sacco (Paying the Land) investigates in his meticulous and beautifully crafted account of religious and territorial strife. Massive riots ensue; every eruption is connected to a previous event, with Sacco tracing it all the way back to the 1947 partition. He talks to civic leaders and local journalists, as well as to ordinary Jats—a relatively well-off Hindu ethnic group—and Muslims, who are mostly poor. He often expresses cynicism about the stories he hears: "Individual recollections must give way to what can be asserted as the collective truth." In the absence of meaningful intervention by the state, mob-rule rules, the poorest suffer the most, and women become "a battlefield." Though the intricate narrative requires careful reading for the uninitiated (and arguably for those who are deeply entangled, as well), the comics format allows readers to slow down and consider each moment in Sacco's muscular, finely detailed art. As the title implies, Sacco is not particularly hopeful about the future, and he proffers a convincing thesis about how politicians leverage violence to fan the flames of old conflicts that then beget new violence. Paying homage to the importance of seeking truth, however elusive, this timely work is as powerful as it is artful.
