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. * 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
