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The Indian freedom struggle is an event that is both over-determined and under-determined. Books – both laudatory and critical – abound about the Indian National Congress-led political movement for independence. Certain events and characters – the Revolt of 1857, the Dandi March, the Quit India Movement, the revolutionaries of the 1920s and 1930s – Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad and their compatriots – have achieved the status of legend. But at the same time, other events and characters remain obscure.

How many people know, for example, that the Indian communist movement and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were both born, almost together, in the first decade of the 20th century, in a Savarkar-run house in London called India House? Until recent books by Kavitha Rao and Ole Birk Laursen, the contributions of the Indian anarchists – Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, M.P.T. Acharya and others – were virtually unknown.

The Indian freedom movement is like one of those back-lanes in a city, parts of which, at night, are cast in an almost blinding illumination, and parts in deep darkness.

Abeer Kapoor (writer) and Ujan Dutta (illustrator)Zoraver and the Lost GodsBloomsbury Publishing (September 2025)

Abeer Kapoor’s Zoraver and the Lost Gods brings the lens of fiction – specifically, the graphic novel – to one of those areas of darkness: the first decade and a half of the 20th century, leading up to the Great War. While the British Empire justifies its rule through modern technological superiority, free trade and the civilising mission, it turns out that what the Empire is actually run on is a set of ancient technologies and magical objects that it has systematically excavated and stolen from its colonies.

A secret department within the British government – with its origins in the days of the East India Company – is tasked with hunting for these artefacts, often using native informants – sniffers – for the task, many of whom do not survive, and the remaining are almost permanently broken. Yet, underground Indian resistance to this project has been surging as well.

Into this world of intrigue, violence and plunder steps Zoraver Khan. After his studies at Cambridge are cut short by personal loss, and a love affair shattered by religious difference, Zoraver returns to British India and turns to conning gullible British officers through a fake antique business. Through this, he is eventually head-hunted and recruited as a sniffer.

Swiftly, Zoraver finds himself enmeshed in the British quest to discover secret weapons before the advent of the War, the infiltration of German spies, middlemen and traitors, and the underground resistance movement, traced back to the enigmatic figure of Dadabhai Naoroji. Throughout this, Zoraver must keep himself alive and do his real duty, even as he seeks to discover the truth of his own family history.

The graphic novel format of Zoraver and the Lost Gods allows its writer and illustrator to blend a number of inter-genre elements that come together, sometimes chaotically, but in myriad fascinating ways.

Historical personages (Ajatashatru, Akbar) mix with pure myth (the seemingly magical Ajatashatru’s Ring is an object of competition between the British and the Germans), and real people from the freedom struggle (Naoroji, General Dyer), located within the real political geography of the late-19th and early-20th centuries (the foundation of the Congress, conflicts within the Princely States, and Anglo-German tensions in the build-up to the War with India as a battleground) find themselves in entirely fictional and other-worldly contexts.

Historical fiction would be too narrow a term to do this justice; historical fabulism, perhaps, or a blend of historical fiction, magical realism, spy thriller, even the ghost story. Much of this would be exceedingly difficult to hold together in prose style, but the sparse, almost minimalist renditions by illustrator Ujan Dutta make it come alive.

There are allegories and underlying messages too. For a story in which imperial plunder is an overriding theme, we get some pleasantly sharp jabs at imperial museums and museum collections; Zoraver’s failed romance feels a harbinger to the violence of love jihad conspiracy theories today; and we are reminded repeatedly that the Empire could not have survived as long as it did without collaboration.

Given the complexity of colonialism as a phenomenon, one might object that world-building that locates the power of colonialism in the collection of a set of magical artefacts feels a little too pat – almost reductive. Rebecca Kuang’s popular novel, Babel, has been critiqued on precisely this ground – that it fails to do justice to the structures of colonialism by reducing them to magic – a process, almost, of mystification.

This, however, is a minor quibble, as Zoraver and the Lost Gods does not style itself as an indictment of colonialism; it is, first and foremost, a gripping adventure story that blends multiple genres and makes them stick within the format of the graphic novel. On that count, it succeeds splendidly.

Gautam Bhatia is a lawyer.

© The Wire