In his four books to date, the graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee has asked what the country risks losing in the course of its rapid economic transformation. Above, a page from his most recent book, “All Quiet in Vikaspuri,” which was published in India in 2015. Photograph Courtesy Project 88, Mumbai

There’s been talk of a “New India” ever since the country’s economic liberalization took place more than two decades ago. But the term has always meant different things to different people: an India with potentially the world’s largest middle class, a global India with an exploding youth demographic, an ascendant India that can serve as a counter to a rising China. To critics, claims of a New India are contradicted by the persistence of poverty, entrenched structural inequalities, discrimination against minorities, and the repression of free speech. Champions of the New India, by contrast, like Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, point to a culture of enterprise and opportunity that has made entrepreneurs of even India’s “slumdogs.”

Is the New India a nationalist myth, or has the country been substantively transformed? For the Berlin-based Indian graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee, both narratives contain some truth. In his 2011 book “The Harappa Files,” Banerjee describes the country as one “on the brink of great hormonal changes . . . a fast capitalizing society that suffers from bipolar disorder.” His four books to date have told stories of everyday Indians, from urban flâneurs and government bureaucrats to psychic plumbers whose powers are well suited to the many buildings that have sprung up in India without blueprints. Whether he’s observing the transformation of Delhi’s historic Hauz Khas village, studded with ancient tombs and mosques, into a wealthy residential area or the “global Brooklynification” felt from Bombay to Berlin, he’s always telling the story of his country’s abortive coming of age.

Banerjee’s success as a graphic novelist is, itself, a product of forces that have taken hold in the New India. As economic growth has fostered a new middle-class Anglophone reading public, interest in genre fiction has exploded. Indian readers of English can today find homegrown works of chick lit, techie lit, detective fiction, even what the scholar E. Dawson Varughese has called “crick lit”—fiction about cricket. India has long had a small but vibrant tradition of comic-book publishing, exemplified by the popular Amar Chitra Katha series, but today most major and independent Indian presses publish in the genre, while others are entirely dedicated to the graphic form. And, where popular titles of the past tended to depict Indian gods, fables, and folklore, today’s artists are interested in exploring the experience and contradictions of living in India now. When Banerjee’s first book, “Corridor,” about the patrons of a secondhand bookstall in Delhi, was published by Penguin Books India, in 2004, it was heralded as the country’s first graphic novel. In fact, that distinction belongs to Orijit Sen’s 1994 book “The River of Stories,” which chronicled the controversial construction of dams on the Narmada River. But, while Sen’s book was published with the help of an environmental-action group and had a limited release, Banerjee’s books, published by Penguin and HarperCollins India, have given momentum to a new generation of Indian graphic novelists.

Banerjee in Berlin, 2013. Photograph by Amin Akhtar / laif / Redux Photograph by Amin Akhtar / laif / Redux

Banerjee, who is forty-four years old, was raised in a middle-class family in Kolkata (known at that time as Calcutta). He told me that he was a “protected and bookish” child. He did his undergraduate work in biochemistry at the University of Delhi, then earned a master’s in image and communication from Goldsmiths, University of London. Before making graphic novels, he worked on documentaries for Business India TV and contributed illustrations and comics to prominent Indian publications. In 1999, a MacArthur Foundation grant gave him the time and resources to work on his own book. (In 2002, Banerjee and a business partner, Anindya Roy, founded a comic-book publishing imprint called Phantomville; it closed in 2008 owing to financial difficulties.) “Corridor,” which quickly gained a cult following, was a bawdy portrait of the new Delhi, told through the intersecting stories of five men looking for texts, love, and aphrodisiacs in the aisles of a bookstall in Delhi’s iconic Connaught Place commercial district. Banerjee’s readers recognized the daily travails of characters like the book’s narrator, Brighu Sen, a young urbanite and self-described collector in search of an obscure book, James Watson’s “Double Helix,” or Digital Dutta, a Marxist computer engineer in pursuit of a visa to work in the United States.

To tell his stories, Banerjee, who has been based in Berlin since 2011, draws upon the visual and textual vocabulary of Western modernism: fragmented narratives, alternative endings and beginnings, repetitions, elisions, mixed-up chronology. His 2007 book “The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers,” for instance, chronicles an unnamed narrator’s search for an eighteenth-century book of scandals, written by an Indian version of the “Wandering Jew” of medieval Christian mythology. It skips around in time from Lubeck, 1601, to St. Albans Abbey, 1228, to twenty-first-century Kolkata, with detours to the library of Walter Benjamin, the grave of the Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and a Southeast London pub. But Banerjee’s work is also dense with references to contemporary Indian culture. His style is collage-like, consisting of black-and-white ink sketches interspersed with photographic images drawn from magazines, advertisements, and film posters and stills, as well as color panels and newspaper clippings. His texts are casually multilingual, including phrases of Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali without translations into English. They describe products, like Boroline antiseptic cream or Vicco Vajradanti toothpaste, that were “made in India” long before Modi’s “Make in India” campaign. They include inside jokes about ethnic rivalries (“Parsis are honest,” unlike “Marwaris and Sindhis”) and invent forms of employment, like “telephone sanitizer,” that would make sense only in India. (To date, there are U.K. and French editions of his books, but none have been published in the United States.)

Because the graphic novel is a relatively new form in India, Banerjee has said that he draws inspiration largely from visual artists and filmmakers: the documentary photographer and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, the filmmakers Sai Paranjpye and Basu Chatterjee, as well as Francisco de Goya, Albrecht D_ü_rer, and Alain Resnais. (In addition to writing graphic novels, Banerjee makes drawings and films that have been exhibited around the world. In 2012, he was commissioned by the Frieze Foundation to create a “Gallery of Losers” for the London Summer Olympics.) Banerjee’s work has often been described as autobiographical, but he told me that he considers himself a documentarian, one who records the “tonal” as opposed to the “informational” content of the world. He flouts the realist impulses that animate the work of many well-known graphic novelists in the West, and when he does recount “true” stories, like that of the first dissection of a human cadaver in India (a brief episode in “Barn Owl”), it is with the intention of complicating, not confirming, history.

Banerjee’s most recent graphic novel, “All Quiet in Vikaspuri,” for instance, depicts an apocalyptic battle for water in the drought-plagued city of Delhi. Published in India in 2015, the book begins by chronicling the privatization of Bharat Copper Limited, a fictionalized version of the government-owned firm Hindustan Copper Limited. One worker displaced in the process is a plumber, Girish, who goes to Delhi to look for work. There, hired by a seemingly benevolent entrepreneur, Girish is charged with drilling far enough below ground to locate the Saraswati River, a body of water mentioned often in the ancient Sanskrit “Vedas,” but which no longer exists. During his quest, Girish encounters numerous people who have been banished below earth for the crime of wasting water, such as Jagat Ram, a scapegoated employee of the Delhi Water Board, and B. K. Gambhir, an army colonel who was caught stealing water from his neighbor’s tank. Girish eventually finds the Saraswati, but on returning from his quest discovers that Delhi has descended into an epic “water war” led by the entrepreneur Rastogi, who turns out to be a disaffected businessman trying to inflate real-estate prices.