Penguin pulls plug on Joe Sacco’s e book on Muzaffarnagar riots | India Information
3 min learnNew DelhiJun 6, 2026 04:21 AM IST
Joe Sacco, the acclaimed graphic novelist whose illustrated dispatches from Gaza, Palestine, and the Balkans have explored new aspects in battle journalism and comics reporting, turned his unflinching eye on India in his newest work, The As soon as and Future Riot. In 135 pages, it chronicles the 2013 Muzaffarnagar communal clashes that left over 60 useless and 40,000 displaced.
Readers in India hoping to seek out it at their native bookstore will likely be dissatisfied: Penguin Random Home India has pulled the plug on distributing the title, The Indian Categorical has learnt.
The e book, printed final 12 months, was anticipated to hit Indian cabinets by August-September. However, Gaurav Shrinagesh, CEO of Penguin Random Home (PRH) India, confirmed that the title was red-flagged throughout a pre-check and authorized scrutiny course of. “We had highlighted sure issues on the Joe Sacco title however they (Penguin UK) didn’t get again to us,” he stated. “One drawback was a map within the e book displaying inaccurate boundaries of India. Apart from that, we had raised some content material questions and requested for citations which by no means got here.”
The writer added, “We’re very clear about this: if we all know there may be an inaccurate map and no adjustments are forthcoming, we won’t do it. We’ve determined there will likely be no distribution of the e book attributable to these crimson flags not being attended to.”
What number of content material queries had been raised past the map challenge stays unclear.
The e book is offered in India on some on-line platforms which supply copies from UK-based wholesalers — a parallel distribution channel that PRH India has no management over. Some South Delhi bookstores, uninterested in ready, have imported copies immediately from the UK.
Sacco, who devoted the e book to India’s “hardworking rural journalists” — a number of assisted him as translators and researchers and in addition function in its pages — visited Muzaffarnagar a 12 months after the riots. In a latest interview for Prism journal, he mirrored on what drew him to the story. “It’s a query of wanting on the lies and presenting them as lies,” he stated. “‘She stated, he stated’ just isn’t journalism. That’s simply quoting individuals. On this case, it was potential to make an effort to seek out out what really occurred.”
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Within the e book’s closing chapter, “The Future Riot,” Sacco dwells on the politics behind the riots. The 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots occurred simply months earlier than the 2014 common elections. “Communal violence, deliberate or not, can confer some electoral benefit,” he writes, “and bloodshed, correctly framed, is nothing however a political constructing block.”
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