The graphic novel When We are Strangers begins with the 1946 Calcutta riots, with an unusual friendship and with an act of love — stealing back from the colonial rulers what they had openly stolen.The book foregrounds Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, popularly Bacha Khan among the Pathans, whom he organised to lead the Khudai Khidmatgar movement, and their beliefs, such as a “living faith in God” and non-violence. But it is the younger Sita and Mahmud, respectively a Gandhi follower and a student at Khan’s Azad School, who take the story forward.Largely in monotone, the novel has a kind of simplicity that may not be striking to those who grew up with more crowded works in Manga, or the Marvel and DC comics. But it successfully contrasts Gandhi’s small build with Khan’s stature — a visual encapsulation of their unique bond. The red shirts of the Khudai Khitmatgars, meanwhile, embody a spirit that can shake empires.It all begins during the riots, when Mahmud and Sita sneak into the then British-controlled Indian Museum, stealing back what they can find of the Hastnagar Buddha. This is identified as their first step in imagining a shared, azad future.The 1946 Calcutta riots were not simply communal. They were also, as Janam Mukherjee says in Hungry Bengal, “a much more specific, localised battle for the control of city blocks, alleyways and neighbourhoods” and the culmination of a “brutalisation of consciousness” during the 1943 Bengal famine.The famine followed the fall of Burma during World War II, as the British, fearing that the Japanese army would advance on Calcutta after replenishing in coastal Bengal, destroyed boats and confiscated foodgrains. This context makes Sita and Mahmud’s act of stealing back from the British more than balancing the scales — it’s also about the two coming together in the anti-colonial struggle while retaining their religious identities. They recognised that their struggles were the same and their futures intertwined. This was at the core of much of the Subcontinent’s national movement, no matter how fractured it remained along religious and caste lines.At a time, when that imagination has largely been constricted by majoritarian politics, the friendship between Gandhi and Khan, Mahmud and Sita, recognises what once was made possible by a shared struggle. The book, while examining these past instances of solidarity, seems to be attempting to chart a way forward but its historical focus is also its limitation when it comes to finding the answers.Story continues below this adPartition changed the Hindu-Muslim dynamics that once existed in the Subcontinent. What followed was a narrowing of identities that were allowed to flourish across nation-states, something that can be attributed to a failure to imagine a country where all were equal.Algerian psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon offers a way of thinking about this paralysis: Independence can’t be seen as an “exorcism” and for a society to be truly independent, its people must have the “material means” to bring about “the radical transformation of society”. Fanon’s name comes up in the book’s second chapter along with Gandhi’s but his philosophy is not expanded upon. That may seem confusing but then, in the end, when Mahmud and Sita challenge their own teachers, in the face of the British administration’s negotiations with them, the Gandhi-Fanon reference becomes a little clearer.