Adventure Comics and Youth Cultures in India 9781138201880

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ADVENTURE COMICS AND YOUTH CULTURES IN INDIA This pioneering book presents a history and ethnography of adventure comic books for young people in India with a particular focus on vernacular superheroism. It chronicles popular and youth culture in the subcontinent from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary era dominated by creative audio-video-digital outlets. The authors highlight early precedents in adventures set by the avuncular detective Chacha Chaudhary with his ‘faster than a computer brain’, the forays of the film veteran Amitabh Bachchan’s superheroic alter ego called Supremo, the Protectors of Earth and Mankind (P.O.E.M.), along with the exploits of key comic book characters, such as Nagraj, Super Commando Dhruv, Parmanu, Doga, Shakti and Chandika. The book considers how pulp literature, western comics, television programmes, technological developments and major space ventures sparked a thirst for extraterrestrial action and how these laid the grounds for vernacular ventures in the Indian superhero comics genre. It contains descriptions, textual and contextual analyses, excerpts of interviews with comic book creators, producers, retailers and distributers, together with the views, dreams and fantasies of young readers of adventure comics. These narratives touch upon special powers, super-intelligence, phenomenal technologies, justice, vengeance, geopolitics, romance, sex and the amazing potentials of masked identities enabled by navigation of the internet. With its lucid style and rich illustrations, this book will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of popular and visual cultures, comics studies, literature, media and cultural studies, social anthropology and sociology, and South Asian studies. Raminder Kaur is Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns (2013) and Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism (2003/5). She is also co-author of Diaspora and Hybridity and co-editor of Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World, Mapping Changing Identities: New Directions in Uncertain Times, Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens and Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics. She has also written several scripts for theatre at www.sohayavisions.com. Saif Eqbal is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He graduated in Political Science from B.R.A. Bihar University, and Politics, and completed his master’s degree (with a specialisation in International Relations) and MPhil from the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is the co-author (with Raminder Kaur) of ‘Gendering graphics in Indian superhero comic books and some notes for provincializing cultural studies’ in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2015).

‘With an irreverent verve wholly befitting their subject matter, Raminder Kaur and Saif Eqbal take us on a magical mystery tour of north Indian superhero comics, a genre which, despite its ubiquity and its tremendous popularity, has until now not been given the dignity of a full-scale analysis. From its humble beginnings to its current multi-mediated Indofuturistic avatars, Kaur and Eqbal offer us a fascinatingly different globalization story. So, get ready: here be superpowers!’ William Mazzarella, Neukom Family Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, USA ‘An enthralling journey into the worlds of the superheroes of north India’s vernacular adventure comics: colourful, larger than life and distinctively desi. Two enthusiasts share their passion, exemplary fieldwork and historical and textual research to make an exciting contribution to our understanding of contemporary popular youth culture in mofussil India, from the golden age of the 1980s action heroes and superheroines to today’s millennial, Indofuturist fantasies. Insightful and enormous fun.’ Rosie Thomas, Professor of Film, Westminster School of Media, Arts and Design, London, UK ‘This fascinating and rich study of the popular visual culture of Indian adventure comics is a timely and well-researched contribution on how India’s socio-economic and political transformation from the 1980s has shaped young readers’ imaginaries of the nation’s position in a globalising world. It convincingly brings to the fore how these ‘superhero’ graphic media reflect complex turbulences related to diverse forms of knowledge production and circulation, to changes in labour and gender roles, and to the different facets and faces of nationalist dystopia and ‘Indofuturism’.’ Christiane Brosius, Professor of Visual and Media Anthropology, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg, Germany ‘A timely volume in our current age of surging nationalism in different parts of the world.The superhero comics in India are analysed visually and verbally to offer critical insights into its youth culture and its complex landscape of desire, action and political conflict. With its focus on the intersection of the transnational and the vernacular, the book enables us to grasp the slippery terrain of South Asian globalization amidst uneven modernity and the reworking of indigenous philosophies for contemporary times.’ Parul Dave Mukherji, Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

ADVENTURE COMICS AND YOUTH CULTURES IN INDIA

Raminder Kaur and Saif Eqbal

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Raminder Kaur and Saif Eqbal The right of Raminder Kaur and Saif Eqbal to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Disclaimer: Every effort has been made to contact owners of copyright regarding the text and visual material reproduced in this book. Perceived omissions if brought to notice will be rectified in future printing. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-20188-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-35868-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43421-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Suraya and Sohana

CONTENTS

CONTENTSCONTENTS

List of figures ix xi List of plates Acknowledgementsxiii   1 Action India

1

  2 The making of modern mythologies

18

  3 The golden age of the Indian superhero

46

  4 Gendering graphics

63

  5 A haven of super creativity

83

  6 The fantastic familiar

101

  7 The state of the nation

116

  8 A forensics of evil

131

  9 Readers’ worlds

152

viii Contents

10 In one of my dreams, I defeated America

173

11 Future presents

196

Glossary of key Indian adventure comic book characters 216 Index221

FIGURES

FIGURESFIGURES

2.1 Chacha Chaudhary (n.d.), Diamond Comics Digest, front cover 2.2 Bela and Bahadur, Jangal ke Chor (Thieves of the Jungle, circa 1986), Indrajal Comics, front cover, courtesy of bahadurbela.com 2.3 Fauladi Singh aur Robot Hunter (Fauladi Singh and Robot Hunter, n.d.), Diamond Comics, front cover 2.4 Vinashdoot (1985), Raj Comics, front cover 3.1 Nagraj in the foreground with his spiritual guide, Gorakhnath, in the background, Nagraj (The King of Snakes, 1986), Raj Comics, front cover 4.1 The superheroine, Chandika, Super Commando Dhruv’s aide (n.d.), Raj Comics, publicity image 4.2 Super Commando Dhruv with a schematic silhouette of Dr.Virus behind him, Code Name Comet (2013), Raj Comics, front cover 4.3 Nagraj and Visarpi recline on Sheshnag (usually associated wth the Hindu god,Vishnu) with allies, Saudangi, Sheetnag and Nagu, as part of the snake’s many heads (n.d.), Raj Comics, publicity image 4.4 The superheroine, Lomri, vanishes from Doga’s view, in Lomri (The Fox, 1996), Raj Comics, p. 19 4.5 The alter ego of Shakti, Chanda, encounters the supreme light of Kali after being thrown virtually lifeless into a remote valley, in Doga-Shakti (1998), Raj Comics, p. 12 4.6 Chanda as Shakti fighting the superhero, Doga, Doga-Shakti (1998), Raj Comics, front cover 5.1 Professor Nagmani inserts a brain-controlling microchip in Nagraj, illustrated by Pratap Mulick, in Nagraj (1986), Raj Comics, p. 28

27

31 33 34

50 64

67

69 72

76 78

95

x Figures

5.2 Nagraj fights an adversary, illustrated by Sanjay Ashtaputre in Nagraj ki Kabra (The Tomb of Nagraj, 1986), Raj Comics, p. 10 5.3 Nagraj fights a demonic octopus, Octosnake, sent by the evil tantric,Vishkanya, illustrated by Anupam Sinha, Vishkanya (Poison Maiden, 1996), Raj Comics, front cover 6.1 The evolution of the supervillain, Mkahamanav, as narrated by Super Commando Dhruv to his friend, Dhananjay, a scientist from the underwater city, Swarn Nagri, in Mahakaal (A Mammoth Death, 1997), Raj Comics, p. 15 6.2 Many avatars of Nagraj in a tilism (labyrinth) along with his assistant, Nagu, in Hadron (2008), Raj Comics, p. 5 6.3 Nagraj confronts the supervillain, Black Hole, in Hadron (2008), Raj Comics, p. 55 7.1 Conjoined temple-mosque on the India–Pakistan border, in Border (circa 2000), Raj Comics, p. 9 7.2 An enemy force running away from the melting ice, in Barf Ki Chita (Funeral by Ice, circa 1988), Raj Comics, p. 30 8.1 The story of a legendary brave Roman soldier who could even defeat elephants as discussed by archaeologists, in Roman Hatyara (Roman Assassin, 1987), Raj Comics, p. 2 8.2 Grand Master Robo and his henchman, Agnimukh, attack Super Commando Dhruv, in Grand Master Robo (circa 1991), Raj Comics, front cover 8.3 The villainous Nagin sucks Nagraj’s superpowers, Nagin (1990), Raj Comics, front cover 8.4 Shakti and Parmanu are crushed by the supervillain, Zero G (1999), Raj Comics, front cover 8.5 Nagraj fights the supervillain, Samrat Thodanga, who has kidnapped the wife of a forest ranger in Tanzania, Nagraj aur Thodanga (Nagraj and Thodanga, 1990), Raj Comics, front cover 8.6 Parmanu attacked by a huge supervillain, Dr.Worm (2003), Raj Comics, front cover 8.7 Advertisement for Raj Comics issues on Dracula (n.d.), Raj Comics 9.1 Retailer of comic books at a railway station in north India (2012), photograph by Saif Eqbal 9.2 The supervillain, Chumba, uses extremely powerful magnets to cut a man in half with the help of his henchmen, North Pole and South Pole. The final panel shows Super Commando Dhruv with his aides, Natasha and Schweta, in Chumba ka Chakravyuh (Chumba’s Trap, 1992), Raj Comics, p. 4 11.1 Comic Con, New Delhi (2017), photograph by Raminder Kaur

96

97

106 109 110 125 127

134

136 137 140

142 144 146 154

163 201

PLATES

PLATESPLATES

1 A reincarnated Hitler sits atop a leviathan monster made out of a mass of human beings while directing his viral formula at the superheroine, Chandika. On the bottom left are the superheroes, Nagraj and Super Commando Dhruv. On the right is the guru, Gypto’s spirit reincarnated in the body of a woman, Tanashah (The Dictator, 1998), Raj Comics, front cover 2 Super Commando Dhruv on a motorbike against Globe Circus burning, Pratishodh Ki Jwala (The Fire of Vengeance, 1987), Raj Comics, front cover 3 Super Commando Dhruv and his aide, Blackcat, stand amidst carnage caused by robots on the loose. Commander Natasha stands aloof in a military outfit while Inspector Steel beats up two villains, Hammer and Farsa (Axe), Rajnagar Reloaded (2016), Raj Comics, front and back cover 4 Doga with smoking pistols in each hand, in Doga Poster (circa 2010), Raj Comics, Collector Edition 5 The villainous Miss Killer confronts Nagraj and his aide, Sheetika, in Mrityujivi (The Living Dead, 2011), Raj Comics, p. 11 6 Superheroes attack Haru, a rival of the gods, Kohram (Mayhem, 2000), Raj Comics, front cover. Clockwise from bottom left, they include superheroes, Shakti, Anthony, Parmanu, Nagraj, Inspector Steel, Tiranga, Doga, Kobi and Super Commando Dhruv 7 Doga accused of favouring one community over another during interreligious riots, in Doga Hindu hai (Doga is Hindu, 2008), Raj Comics, front cover

xii Plates

8 Superheroes – from left to right, Tiranga, Super Commando Dhruv, Parmanu, Chandika and Doga with Nagraj in centre – gear up to deal with beings from deep inside the Earth who exist in darkness, and when on the surface, prowl in our shadows. They are the Negatives led by the villainous General Andhaman, Negatives (2013), Raj Comics, front cover 9 Supervillains and superhero aides surround Super Commando Dhruv, in Maine Mara Dhruv ko (I Killed Dhruv, 1995), Raj Comics, front cover. Clockwise from bottom left, they include Bauna Waman, Barf Manav (Ice Man) aka Dr.Verghese, Chandika, Grand Master Robo,Vanaputra, Lori, Dr. Virus, Jingalu the Yeti, Natasha, Chumba, Kankaltantra, Dhwaniraj, Cadet Peter, Suprema, Chandkaal, Samri, Blackcat and Dhananjay

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book zones in on adventure – specifically superhero – comic books, and how they have carved out new territories, both incredible and wholly believable, in the lives of young people in India from the mid-twentieth century. The authors include Raminder Kaur, a writer and scholar who began reading and researching Indian superhero comics from 2006, and Saif Eqbal, a research assistant and doctoral scholar who has been reading the comics since the age of 6 from the 1980s. We have come together to share our experiential insights and analyses for the book due to the inventive and stimulating appeal of this print media from different yet complementary areas of expertise. We would like to thank all the people who made this project possible – most importantly, to the comic book producers. They include those at Raj Comics who were kind enough to share their time, thoughts and even comics with us in our trips to the outskirts of the state of Delhi.We owe a sincere thanks to Manish Gupta for kind permissions to reproduce the images from Raj Comics in this book, and to Sanjay Gupta and Anupam Sinha amongst others, who talked us through the intricacies of their comic book histories and representations. We would also like to extend our warm gratitude to Gulshan Rai for his advice and permissions to reproduce some of Diamond Comics’ repertoire of superheroism; and to the author and illustrator, Aabid Surti, for his recollections and permissions to reproduce images of the dynamic duo, Bahadur and Bela. Just as significantly, we are enormously grateful to the numerous comic book readers who we encountered, many of whom are now well into their adult years. They expressed several views and opinions that we have tried to incorporate into these pages, keeping their identities and any organisational or institutional affiliations anonymous. Where possible, we have allowed their voices to speak and offer insights on the material. It is primarily for this reason that, while this is a scholarly book based on long-term research, we have tried to write the book in an engaging

xiv Acknowledgements

style so as they too might be tempted to read it, and harbour ambitions to translate it into Hindi in the future. For ease of reading, any vernacular terms cited in the text are transliterated in the Anglicised version rather than presented with diacritics. Our thanks extend also to the manuscript reviewers and editors, Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal for her understanding and patience, and colleagues at the University of Sussex who supported the research. Aside from contributions to travel expenses from the University of Sussex’s Department of Anthropology, this particular research was self-funded, born out of our passion for the project. Earlier fieldwork on nuclear issues by Raminder Kaur was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-000–23–1312, 2006–2008), and a later period by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/HOO/3304/1, 2009–2010) to write her book, Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns. In the book, she discusses the ‘atomic wonderman’, Parmanu, in a chapter that is not reproduced here. A more theoretical version of Chapter 4 was published by the two authors in 2015 as ‘Gendering Graphics in Indian Superhero Comic Books and Some Notes for Provincializing Cultural Studies’ in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 12(4): 367–396. Last, but not least, we would like to thank our dear family and friends who saw us through what seemed like the never-ending task of putting our conversations and thoughts down in black and white, as we tried to capture some of the sparks of energy and enthusiasm that comes from engaging with fabulous worlds of which we are wont to dream.

1 ACTION INDIA

ACTION INDIAACTION INDIA

The wandering soul of Adolf Hitler lurks around a portal that connects the world of the dead to the living. It hovers around the body of a boy, Jeevo, who is in an old church in India, the ‘gateway to the paraworld’. The boy is sitting in an ‘invoker machine’ – a contraption designed by his father, an exorcist, to meet with his grandfather’s soul, the late guru Gyoto. Meanwhile, there is a fierce battle going on outside between Indian superheroes and insurgents around a nuclear power plant that violently disturbs the ritual. At a critical point during the invocation, Hitler’s desirous soul overwhelms Gyoto’s.When possessed, the boy euphorically announces:‘I am no more a human Hitler. I’m a spirit endowed with paraphysical powers’ (Tanashah, The Dictator, 1998, p. 34). He adds: I’m Herr Hitler! Adolf Hitler! Remember, how I gave hell to this world. But before I could realise my diabolic dreams, allied forces hounded me and I had to commit suicide. My desire to enslave human race remained unfulfilled. My spirit wandered . . . but now I’ll destroy this world. (p. 38) The powers of the reincarnated dictator are so great that he can even resist the tantric and poisonous snake powers of the superhero, Nagraj, the King of Snakes. Neither are other superheroes any match for his powers – whether it be the highly astute and acrobatic Super Commando Dhruv, or Chandika with her secret alter ego, Schweta – a genius innovator and Dhruv’s foster sister. Declaring that ‘destruction is our common goal’, the dictator makes an alliance with the insurgents who had stolen a ‘mini plutonium bomb’ from the Narora atomic power station. They have designs to explode it on Kashmir Day, a celebration in the border state’s capital in the presence of the country’s political leaders. Hitler/Jeevo takes the extremists to a hidden cache of World War II–era German

2  Action India

arms and ammunition in Kashmir, where he also finds a khaki green National Socialist uniform to don with leather accessories to boot. Now looking the part, the dictator takes the rogues to Afghanistan, where they join Taliban guerrillas and seek another ‘depot of arms’. Little do they know that Hitler/Jeevo’s intent is to find a virus formula in an underground hideout in the region that he could use to continue with his ambitions for global domination. During World War II, Hitler’s scientist, Schindler, had been developing an ‘M- and B-virus’ that could help the dictator to control the minds of others. M stands for the Mother and B the Brood. The M- and B-virus establish a similar relationship that ‘a hen has with her brood of chickens. The brood follows her and blindly obeys her every command’ (p. 69). After Schindler learns of the Fuhrer’s suicide, he too kills himself out of a sense of loyalty, even though he was successful in his experiment. His research lay unknown to the world in his hideout for over half a century. The mission of Hitler’s soul is to find the formula, imbibe the M-virus himself, and inject the B-virus into the atmosphere so as it infects all human brains. When the mother and brood are in bondage, he could enslave humanity and subject it to his whims. After having located the virus formula, Hitler/Jeevo moulds individuals into ‘a monstrous pile-up of people in humanoid shape’ (p. 82, Plate 1). Sitting on top of the mountain of human bodies and surrounded by Nazi tanks, he gloats: ‘As more people join my brood, the stronger I become’ (p. 83). This huge leviathan would make the possessed boy powerful enough to control the planet and even the universe. While in his human form, Hitler would have been able to control only the minds of humans, as a supernatural force his powers are increased manifold to the point that he could give regular form to the irregularity of innumerable souls, dead or alive. As evil reincarnate, his ‘devilish para-powers’ can soak up the energy and power of malevolent spirits. The Hitler monster boasts: I’m a power grid of the energy of millions of spirits and evil forces. It will go on multiplying. All the energy of the souls of living and dead worlds. . . . Evil forces pooling in me. . . . Then sun, stars and cosmos . . . and god. (p. 87) Meanwhile, the superheroes ally with Gyoto’s spirit, who incarnates himself in Jeevo’s mother. They gather their wits to overcome this dystopian threat. As the supernatural dictator sucks up bodies and souls for his leviathan, we can well imagine his frenzied laughter echoing over the rugged mountains and valleys, and ominously expanding into the solar systems to present a challenge to divinity itself.

*** Action comics in India are our remit; young people’s experiences and imaginaries our perspective. We turn to the comic books that have held young minds captive through the genre of adventure, encompassing heroic, superheroic and villainous figures. Although liberally drawing upon historical and religio-mythical narratives,

Action India  3

they revel in new exploits for the modern era. While they may encompass actionbased escapades and detective stories with heroes demonstrating exceptional intelligence among other talents, the core of this book is focused on superhero comics and what they mean for young India. It is often cited that India now has the world’s largest population aged 10–24, and that since the 1990s in particular, it has had a thriving youth culture.1 But there is an important backstory to youth culture, by no means coherent or unified, that goes back to earlier decades from the mid-twentieth century. We trace it through our focus on adventure comics – an ensemble of material that represents a creative transference between indigenous and foreign, familiar and innovative, ancient and topical. Among the escapades, the stories might envelope contemporary concerns such as political insurgency, assassinations, communalism, corruption, smuggling and include striking events such as the 1998 nuclear tests in Pokhran, the terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008, the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, or further afield with the abominable attacks against the World Trade Centre Towers in New York City in 2001, all for and from the perspective of the young. As we can see with the opening tale in Tanashah by Raj Comics, a counterfactual account of mid-twentieth-century history is telescoped onto the South Asian landscape to give superheroism and villainy another edge. Supernatural, meglamaniac and separatist forces are unleashed to plague humanity. In the attempt to defeat them, Indian superheroes are heralded as a national and international force to be reckoned with and written into the pages of world history. Needless to say, in the end, Hitler fails in his spirited endeavours to conquer the globe again.

A view from the global south With its emphasis on Anglophonic material, studies of vernacular language adventure comic books have been conspicuous by their near absence.2 The available work in the interdisciplinary field of comics studies mainly focuses on adventure comics in the US, Europe and Japan, with occasional chapters or articles on comics in other regions.3 With respect to South Asia, the predominant focus has been on religio-mythological and historical comic books, namely the Amar Chitra Katha (The Immortal Picture Story) series produced mainly in English in India. From the late 1960s until the 1980s, Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) has dominated the Indian comic book market. In their heyday, they proved to be tough contenders for foreign competition.With their sanctioned and illustrative stories, they largely focused on tales from religious texts and ancient epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana, folklore as well as on legendary characters, saints and freedom fighters. The comic books have had much success and support, particularly from elder generations intent on the moral, cultural and national instruction of the young. For some time, the popularity of age-old narratives through the comic book form encouraged a national-cultural revival in India and amongst its diaspora. Accordingly, the material has become the focus of much scholarship interested in Indian popular

4  Action India

culture and the way familiar subcontinental stories are reworked for the comic book format.4 But the significant factor here is that ACK comic book readership was largely among affluent upper-caste Hindu boys and girls from metropole and urban areas.5 Moreover, these comic books were predominantly bought by parents to instruct rather than simply entertain their children, and even schools in India have subscribed to the series as a pictorial form of pedagogy. They form part of an adult-orientated literature boomeranged for young people, rather than a literature that necessarily reflects what the young may be most instantly interested in. What needs to be fully taken on board is the proliferating area of action or adventure tales for youth in the global south. Unless they were involved in the craft of their production, sale or rental, rarely did adults take a look into these comics. As a predominant subgenre of adventure comics, superhero comics have played a remarkable role in forging young readers’ interpretive communities. These superheroes follow in the flight paths of American ones like Superman, Captain America and Spider-Man, but with very distinctive features. An extensive focus on the features of Indian or desi superheroism is well overdue.6

Desi superheroism Drawing from the jurist, Learned Hand, who presided over a court case on superhero copyright infringement in the US in 1940, Peter Coogan outlines four features of a superhero.7 Even though Coogan only foreground male paragons, we widen our reference points and analyses on superheroes to encompass female crusaders, but revert to gender-specific terms when there is a need to identify differences between them. The generic traits of superheroes are comparable to those in India. First, the superhero should be a selfless individual with a social mission to eradicate evil and to protect the oppressed. Second, this individual has special powers – mythical, magical and/or technological. Third, the superhero’s nomenclature and the presence of an iconic costume distinguishes his/her identity from the heroes of detective comics or other genres. Fourth, s/he might also have a dual identity, an alter ego. Basing her work on ACK, Karline McLain expands the list to six characteristics for the new-age superheroes, maintaining that they hold true for the Indian case with minor additions or substitutions as the case might be.8 The six features are extraordinary powers, enemies, a strong moral code, a secret identity, a costume and an origin story that sets the stage for further adventures.With this template, McLain takes recourse to the example of the semi-divine Ram, whose main exploits in the Ramayana are reproduced in some of the ACK comic books. She adds that these comics are a combination of ‘sacred and secular, myth and history to produce a national canon of superheroes’.9 However, as McLain herself acknowledges, Ram is not the be-all and end-all of Indian superheroism: Rama is a god in human form, and the Rama comic book is therefore not a fictitious tale of the victory of good over evil but a Hindu devotional story told through the comic book medium.10

Action India  5

Heroic as they may be, the characters in ACK do not necessarily qualify as superheroes as goes the convention in comics studies. Ram is a human deity, whereas Indian superheroes are not divinity or worshipped in the same sense, but bond with the reader through their fantasies of the superhuman. Tales from the scriptures and epics in comic format are not so much the making of modern mythologies, but mythologies adapted for the modern era.11 Vernacular language superhero or adventure comics, in contrast, do present the making of modern mythologies for the Indian context.The stories in these Indian vernacular adventure comics may follow a mythic template of heroes pitched in a battle of good against evil. They may invoke customary ideas to do with ethical conduct as they might also do in ACK. But they are not entirely predictable, underlining their affinity to the revelatory sequence of the modern novel rather than the pre-learnt familiarity of mythic tales.12 As we explore in later chapters, we note the specific features of five main types of modern-day Indian superheroes. In their own ways, they register another pulse on young people’s imaginaries by marvellously addressing historical, religious, mythical, social and ethical discourses along with commentary on new developments in science, technology and politics.They are, as James Lovegrove puts it for science fiction in general, ‘a bellwether of the zeitgeist’.13

Adventures through ‘imagewords’ In its sequence of images interlaced with textual strips, panels or speech and thought balloons, theorists have pointed out the mutual dependence between word and picture. In one of the seminal studies on comics, Coolton Waugh defines them as having a central character who recurs in various issues and through his/her antics becomes cherished by the reader. They are complemented by a sequence of images that might be complete in themselves or a part of a larger narrative, accompanied with text in the illustrations.14 Will Eisner highlights how the repetition of images becomes a style of story telling that creates a ‘grammar of sequential art’, where words become part of the picture that the reader has to analyse in a simultaneous visual-verbal manner.15 Going further, Scott McCloud points out that comic books are not just an object but a medium of communication.16 He settles down to a definition of comics as ‘juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence seeking to evoke an aesthetic response in the reader’.17 While the focus on the ‘aesthetic response in the reader’ is a welcome one, McCloud’s definition of comics is ahistorical, and the elasticity of his definition might even be extended to cave paintings, as Aaron Meskin suggests.18 On another point of validity, Robert C. Harvey submits that McCloud does not place enough emphasis on words and texts as an integral part of the comics, but words are what distinguish comic books from simply illustrative panels.19 David Carrier prefers to call this simultaneity as ‘verbal-visual interdependence’ and an essential part of post-1930s comics, while Kristie S. Fleckenstein sees them conjoined as ‘imageword’.20 Similarly, on the subject of graphic narratives, Pramod K. Nayar describes them as part of a ‘dual narrative strategy of sequential dynamism and iconostasis’.21

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This image-text, sequence-stasis interdependency is not, however, straightforward. Thierry Groensteen prefers to see the relationship in terms of metaphors of multiplicity: one where the story does not read continuously as one might find in a book, but space and time become discontinuous and irreducible to a linear reading.22 This, he argues, is the ‘foundation of the medium’, a foundation that is steeped in diversity rather than grounded in coherence.23 We take these points on board as well as explore the specificities of the ‘aesthetic response’ of vernacular adventure comics among their readers, but we do not limit our focus to a formal analysis of conjoined images, words, balloons, strips, panels and/or pages. Rather, our focus is on the graphic stories, and how these imageword adventures are socially, culturally and politically framed, as much as they frame the social, cultural and political worlds of those who produce and read the comics. The illustrious comic book series provided by Raj Comics has a prominent place in the psyche of north Indian Hindi-speaking children. This is especially the case amongst boys aged between 6 and 16 in the 1980s and 1990s, some of whom have continued to read the comics into their adult years. Based in Burari on the outskirts of the state of Delhi, Raj Comics has played a major role in introducing and energising stories about scientific innovations, philosophies, histories, social issues, current affairs as well as attributes of superheroism and villainy to young people in the Hindi-speaking belt of India. Not only have they been transfixed with the characters and stories in these comics, but the comics’ easy availability at virtually all train and bus stations, large or small, has made them an integral part of the myriad journeys that young people have taken, both physically and emotionally. These journeys range from the ordinary to the fantastic, the stupendous to the ridiculous. They feature adventures with alluring characterisations, heroic and villainous, and those that lie somewhere in between.

Modernities in the backyard Vernacular adventure comics lie at the intersection of metropolitan and mofussil imaginaries – they are not so much about how metropolitan imaginings and outputs such as cinema have represented the rural or mofussil, but how the latter represent modern life in cities across the country and globe through the panels of vernacular comics. These intersections are cross-cut by young people’s more local circuits of engagement, those who grew up in mofussil and semi-urban areas of India that also extend to the outskirts of city centres. As a medium for non-elite or lower middle class youth, they have been sidelined in narratives about globalising India.24 While comic books are a definitively modern form of communication reflecting global trends in graphics, aspects of modular modernity exist only as hints and hybrid transformations within their pages and among their creators and readers. Building upon what Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar calls the ‘ “multiple modernities” thesis’, the production, content and reception of vernacular adventure comics are marked by instances of what we call ‘modernities in the backyard’.25 Multiple

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modernities are not just on a scale of differentials between nations – the axes of the formerly colonising and colonised, the global north and south, and so forth – but also within and across the region and nation. To seek these other ‘modernities in the backyard’ requires going beyond Anglophone literature and the dominant hubs of capital and global cosmopolis in order to allow marginalised material and those that engage with it to speak in their own terms. In this endeavour, we foreground historical, textual and ethnographic material, hoping not to asphyxiate it with too much heavy theorisation. When we do so, we notice how vernacular adventure comics look outward to other times and spaces as much as they turn inward to embrace the lifeworlds of the young reader.They indicate an osmotic seepage of regional, national and global currents and cross-currents that, while having an earlier history that could be traced back to colonial times, for the purposes of our focus on vernacular adventure comics, emerges mainly in the 1970s with earlier precedents in the form of comic strips and illustrated magazines. With the availability of syndicated comic books from the west in India, the relaxing of government control on paper quotas for publishers, and the influence of vernacular pulp literature and Doordarshan state television entertainment programming, desi superheroes such as Nagraj materialised to take on international terrorism in mid-1980s comic books. In their manifold adventures, they are shown navigating fantastic as well as actual territories such as Britain, China, Japan, Myanmar, the US and countries in the Middle East, making foreign lands more imaginable to a young reader who cannot travel abroad. The 1990s saw the marked influence of neoliberal policies and market deregulation with the establishment of new entertainment options in audio-visual and digital formats. These changes led to trans/multinational collaborations, creative start-ups, along with a proliferation of new media, stylistic developments, as well as experimental ways of sharing graphic outputs online for wider audiences. But the competitive drive and availability of new outlets also meant that the struggle for survival became much more ferocious. A handful of vernacular comic book publishers endured, but most were delivered a deadly blow as their erstwhile readers began to turn to other media. By the start of this millennium, Indian comic book houses that survived the lean patch tried to strengthen their national status and export standing. More and more upwardly mobile Indians travelled to the cities and overseas for education and work opportunities, taking with them a storehouse of memories embedded in their favourite comic books. In the process, the vernacular comic books became pricier and less affordable to mofussil audiences who are not able to move on.They became geared towards metropolitan and transnational audiences keen to have a desi riposte to the language of global superheroism.This digest of Indian vernacular adventure comic books, therefore, is not quite a story of globalisation from below, and certainly not from above, but one from a meandering muddled middle that preceded the formal beginnings of neoliberalisation under Finance Minister Manmohan Singh’s policies in 1991.26

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Young spheres of action So how have adventure comics helped forge youth cultures in India, ahead of and in conversation with film, televisual and other media? What characterises these comiccentred cultures of (re)creation, representation and consumption? How were they influenced by, and simultaneously distinct from adult-centric cultures? What do the alluring and almost magical qualities of superhero comics conjure up amongst their readers, past and present? And what light does a focus on fabulous fiction bring to young people’s dreams and fantasies? By tending to these questions in this book, our research adds substantial depth and dimension to the available literature on post-1990s youth in South Asia. There is now a well-established literature on the sociology and anthropology of childhood and youth, as is indicated in the numerous books and journals available on this theme.27 In their particular ways, they concur that these are historically and socially constructed categories. In India, childhood has received the most attention in terms of psychoanalytical, historical and sociological analyses.28 It has been distinguished from the lives of teenagers and those older. Acknowledging that adventure comics may be targeted at a more narrow age bracket, when it comes to superhero comics, people from across the above age ranges read them. Our adoption of the terms, youth or young people, is therefore amoeboid. As goes a common Hindi idiom – thora adjust hua – it is ‘a little adjusted’ to accommodate the consumers of comics throughout the decades. They range from those aged between 6 and 16 when Indian superhero comics proliferated, but they also extend to those who recall, treasure and continue to read comic books into their late teen and adult years – kidults, for want of a better term.This is necessarily a lens on the horizon of then as much as it is on the filters of now, as we try to ascertain young people’s worldviews from former decades. Such a then-and-now lens defies the stiff parameters of age-specific youth cultures as it does legislative calibres that stipulate children or minors become adults at the age of 18.29 Our focus on young people is therefore elastic, filtered and fractured, embracing children, teenagers and young adults, and affected by cleavages to do with class-caste, region, religion and/ or ethnicity to a greater or lesser extent. When we need to emphasise the younger end of this continuum or to differentiate them with regards to parents and guardians, we will use the term, children. Otherwise, we will use generic terms such as young people or youth to include older readers who construe superhero comics as both history and nostalgia, archive and alive. Through their varied optics, we will be able to glimpse the Golden Age of Indian superhero comics in the 1980s and 1990s, and their part in making the cultures of young people when comic book circulation and readership was at its zenith, as well as reflect on more recent trends. When it comes to studies of youth cultures, a debt needs to be paid to their emergence in mid-twentieth-century Britain with the rise of cultural studies. There was a concerted effort to move beyond economic production as the historical dynamic of capital to the role of consumption in forging new identities. Alongside was a drive away from the Frankfurt School’s legacy of high and low/mass

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culture binaries towards a Gramscian focus on the contradictions and contestations of marginalised and subaltern cultures. By the 1970s, several perspicuous studies emerged that foregrounded working-class and lower-middle-class youth cultures.30 Progressively, the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality with respect to class formations became an integral part of such works on popular culture in the global north. While a focus on youth had powered research on popular culture, when it comes to considering South Asia, it is studies of public culture that have ignited specific studies on youth cultures – less so subaltern or popular culture studies.31 Public culture – conceived as a contested ‘zone of cultural debate’ following Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge – was taken up to explore the mediated inflections of postcolonial cultures.32 But the fallout has been that young people seemed to have slipped away as a specific point of reference. Directed at mainly adults or families, young people in early public culture studies have been seen more as appendage than as agents.They were either subsidiaries to be orchestrated or a part of the silent and suppressed. When they appear with respect to public culture, it is as post-1990s children of liberalisation largely located in the throes of metropolitan and urban heartlands.33 Accordingly, youth culture is seen to be ‘invented’ or only emergent in 1990s India, particularly through young people’s engagement with politics and the consumption of mass media such as music, television and films in a refracted mirror of the west.34 This invention of ‘new youth cultures’ is premised on the commodification and (inter)national visibility of the urban middle classes. But what were ‘old youth cultures’ about? What did young people do before or in areas away from the metropole heartlands, where there is little electricity or entertainment outlets, when television sets were sparse and going to the cinema difficult? How can we conceive of young people before the era of neoliberalisation – as subjects to be socialised, consumer adults-in-waiting, or as budding agents who enacted their own wills on their environment and created their own spheres of action, real and imagined? Did youth even exist before the 1990s in the sense that we understand the term today?35 A focus on vernacular adventure comics enables us to address these questions. In doing so, we emphasise the more fluid cultures of young people as opposed to youth cultures in an invented sense.The task is to deconstruct the commodified notion of youth cultures, and to revisit culture as constituting the lifeworlds of young people in all their acquiescent and antagonistic multiplicity akin to the emphasis in early studies of youth culture. This is not to say that there was an entirely alternative subculture or resistive representational field for young people, only that there were different circuits and agonistic relations with respect to mainstream culture.36 While by no means the sum total of their lives, adventure comics are an important fragment of what young people could call their own cultural circuits.37 Even though they might have sourced money from their family members to buy or rent the comic books, the cultural circuits remain peripheral to the world of adults. Following Roseann Liu et al., we see youth as ‘creative cultural agents in their own right’.38 Through considering the available material, we can begin to appreciate

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what the cultures of young people might have looked like since the mid-twentieth century. Through analyses and interpretations of the vivid tales in these comic books, we can begin to develop an intimate analysis as well as a broader overview of their expressive articulation along class-culture dynamics. On a related note, the Indian middle class is often distinguished between its ‘old’ and ‘new’ avatar, the former with its emphasis on the salariat civil servant; the latter with its more entrepreneurial spirit enabled by state deregulation particularly from the 1990s.39 As we cross historical eras, youth too might be given their old and new inflections. Those that bought vernacular adventure comics would be largely from mofussil middle classes – those who live in small towns and semi-urban areas where the vernacular is preferred over English. While they range from the lower middle to relatively more comfortable classes, they are distinct from the jet-setting cosmopolitan lives of social elites or metropolitan middle classes who, as Leela Fernandes states, play the most ‘national visible role as the agents of globalization in India’.40 These visible agents might well dismiss the mofussil middle classes as provincial and immature – in a word, ‘backwards’ in not just a socio-economic sense. This indeed has been the rap for their literature, vernacular adventure comics cast off as disposable and derivative: ‘a slavish imitation of foreign comics’, as one Indian commentator put it.41 Aspersions about the ‘copy-cat’ qualities of subcontinental superheroes are likewise apparent among those placed in other regions of the world, vernacular comics having been viewed through a very myopic and partial lens.42 Without prejudice, we concentrate on young people from mofussil middle classes as the most pervasive readers of these vernacular comics. They are mainly from low- to mid-level income backgrounds whose families have enough to invest in their education rather than have to put them to labour. Some children might even have a small amount of pocket money. They read vernacular comics while ‘waiting’ or doing ‘timepass’ as Craig Jeffrey describes lower-middle-class young people who aspire to get a salaried post.43 But the waiting trope need extend to their younger years during their period of schooling – the vestibular play area next to the waiting room presided by their anxious guardians. Readers might include the children of small shop and business owners and managers, petty agricultural landlords and people employed in the public sector and private-public enterprises such as Indian Railways and Coal India Limited. On the subject of caste, readers are generally from middle-order castes such as Other Backward Castes (OBC), but lower castes and Dalits too are present. Indeed vernacular comic books have found favour across a broader range of readership rendering caste of minimal use to our study.44 The readers might also extend to children from lower-working-class and rural families when considering rental outlets for adventure comics that end up being recycled for another entertaining lease of life, thus implanting rhizomatic roots and shoots to our enquiry.

The scope of the research Fieldwork for the book was conducted from 2010 until the present day in annual bouts of month-long fieldwork with producers, distributors and readers, with an

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earlier period of research that goes back to a year in 2006. This was pursued through participant-observation, focus groups and semi-structured interviews in mainly Hindi with a degree of English code-switching, as is colloquially common. Most of those consulted were young males in the age range of 15–37, but we also talked to some female comic readers. With an array of comics in hand as flicking points of reference – ‘comic book elicitation’ – we conducted about 30 interviews with under-18-year-olds, and 70 interviews with students and professionals in three north Indian districts.45 Most were conducted together in south Delhi, with a few conducted individually in Muzaffarpur district in Bihar and Dhanbad district in Jharkhand. Some of our interlocutors we returned to on subsequent occasions with more extended conversations on superhero comics. Many of the young people living in south Delhi were recent migrants from other north Indian states, from whom we attained further insights.Virtually all had grown up reading superhero comics in states otherwise designated by the acronym, BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh), or ‘sick states’ playing on the Hindi term for sick, bimar.46 In 2000, Bihar was split into two with Jharkhand as a new state. These states including their capitals were particularly run-down in the 1980s and 1990s.These were the decades when many of the youth grew up – a period when the regions were undeniably ‘underdeveloped’, and where superhero comics had a pertinent role in providing outward-bound flights of fancy and fantasy. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with about 20 senior people for their historical recollections and abiding interests in comics, plus about 30 people who made, sold or rented out comics, some of whom were avid young readers themselves. These more structured occasions were supplemented by participantobservation and chats over chai around tea stalls, retailers, college and university campuses, residences, comic book fairs and events, and train stations and journeys. These transport hubs were in fact the site of thousands of migrants who travelled to Delhi for work and education every day, particularly from the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. Since the late 1990s in particular, owing to a lack of higher education and work opportunities, and considering the rise of violence and yet decline of policing in mofussil regions, families in these north Indian states began to encourage their older male children to migrate to the cities with an anticipative ticket to upward mobility. As the first authored volume on vernacular adventure comics in India, we admit that there is a lot to cover and not enough space to do so. The book is only a study on the changing facets of mofussil middle-class youth cultures in so far as they relate to adventure comics – how this media reflects, refracts and (re)produces their social worlds. Vernacular adventure comics are windows on much larger historical and socio-political contexts, some of which is necessarily the subject of further research, and some for which there exists plentiful other work signposted in the endnotes. Even though we begin with a national overview of adventure comics as they relate to young people’s cultures throughout the last century and end with a focus on their orientation today, the main address is superhero comics that circulate in the Hindi-speaking belt of north India. There are other more specific histories

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to be done, particularly to do with comics in Bengali and south Indian languages, a detailed study of which is outside the scope of this book.47 The next three chapters cover the lay of the land, concentrating on the main figures and narratives of adventure comics in India. By outlining the Nascent, Golden, Dark and Platinum Ages, we provide a necessary postcolonial corrective to assumptions about their singular development in the global north. In Chapter 2, we introduce and situate the rise of adventure comics in India in a context of incipient trends in colonial and post-independent contexts from the mid-twentieth century. A history of the rise of comic books is drawn out with a focus on indigenously produced comic strips and ‘pocket books’ such as those published by Diamond, Indrajal, Tulsi and Manoj Comics. This is supplemented by a focus on early adventurous crime-fighters such as the masked Phantom (later Indianised as Vetal), the avuncular Chacha Chaudhary with the ‘brain faster than a computer’, the dacoit-fighting Bahadur with his kung fu aficionado and cohabiting girlfriend, Bela, and the emergence of fantastic India-grown superheroes such as the robot with feelings, Falaudi Singh, and the friendly blonde alien,Vinashdoot. Along the way, we highlight how artists such as Pran Kumar Sharma carried over skills acquired in calendar arts, developed in ACK magazines, and then deployed in early adventure comic books, bringing several traditions of artistry together. We consider film veteran Amitabh Bachchan’s foray as his superheroic alter ego, Supremo, along with his pet falcon and talking dolphin in comic books devised specifically for children. We also learn about television programmes and how they sparked a thirst for Indian extraterrestrial action. They included Indian-produced and syndicated programmes such as the US series Star Trek, along with the broadcasting of major events such as Rakesh Sharma’s journey into space as part of a 1984 joint programme between the Indian Space Research Organisation and Soviet Intercosmos. We concentrate on these earlier episodes of heroism before they firmly shape-shifted into desi superheroism in the 1980s. Chapter 3 plunges into what we have called the Golden Age of the Indian superhero at a time of increasing political and economic turbulence. Light will be shone on the brahmand rakshak, or protectors of the universe, so we can begin to appreciate characteristics of the foremost superheroes. They include ‘mythomodern’ protagonists such as the muscular snake-like psychic, Nagraj; (extra)ordinary superheroes such as the former circus artiste and now quick-witted superhero, Super Commando Dhruv; transhuman superheroes such as the automated police officer, Inspector Steel; forest guardians such as the synergetic Kobi and Bheriya; and enraged avengers such as the dog-masked ‘angry superhero’, Doga. Chapter 4 highlights the need to gender graphic narratives. We consider how women such as Chandika and Schweta are portrayed in superhero comics, before focusing on attributes of masculinity or, more to the point, hypermasculinity and their symbiotic relations with representations of femininity in their more mundane, superheroine or villainous forms. With a focus on Raj Comics’ unique series dedicated to the superheroine Shakti, who owes her spiritual-physical powers to the omnipotent Hindu goddess, Kali, we end by looking at how indigenous

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philosophies are reworked for contemporary times in the struggle against gender inequality and violence. Chapter 5 takes us to Burari, a fairly ordinary place on the outskirts of the state of Delhi that has the unique and perhaps surprising claim to be north India’s historic heart of supercomics creativity.We reflect upon some of our conversations and observations with an eye to considering the recent history and creative energies behind Raj Comics. Honing in on early superhero comics and characters, we outline the key creators’ contributions in this ‘mofussil hub’ as a distinctive expression of ‘modernities in the backyard’. From Chapters 6 to 8, we analyse the main themes of superhero comics, beginning with cultures of fabulous science. These provide the spine to Indian superhero comics that include a debt to developments in modern science along with inventive or miraculous ideas that have their provenance in Indic religion, mythology and folklore. With such resources, all kinds of creative possibilities are imagined, phenomena that one of our interlocutors described as ‘scientific magics’. The scientific magics may manifest themselves in the origin stories of protagonists, good or bad, in the struggles and battles between such characters, and as part of gadgets, events and the environment that they inhabit and seek to alter. In the process, we revisit science fiction as it is widely understood in the west with some significant modifications that we elaborate in terms of the ‘fantastic familiar’. Chapter 7 examines conceptions of the nation and state as manifest in superhero comics. The ‘truth-seeking’ superhero executes various tasks to protect the nation, and in the process, engages with (and sometimes even disengages from) the state apparatus such as the police and the army.This range of ‘in/exclusion’ extends from, first, the superhero who personifies both the nation and the state together. Second, the superhero might disengage from the state in a mission to provide a corrective to corruption that festers in policing and bureaucratic institutions, but s/he may continue to form an alliance to valorised aspects of the state apparatus, as with the army fighting for the country. Third, there are times where the superhero might disengage altogether, even from the holy grail of the army, and be foisted into the spotlight as a vigilante or outlier, yet one who has a popular sovereignty as the apex of a divorced yet pure patriotism. Chapter 8 moves our focus to the darker terrain of dystopia and horror, and how like a double helix, current and imminent threats to cherished social values and national security rotate around each other in the superhero universe. As an ‘essential evil’, criminals and dictators, aliens and mutants, mythological and folkloric demons, even Dracula and ancient Egyptian mummies, are liberally scattered across the comic books. Without such dark forces, there would in fact be no superhero. Chapters 9 and 10 take us to young readers’ interpretive communities with a focus on the reception of superhero comics when they were growing up, mainly in the 1980s and 1990s.48 We begin by considering in more detail consumption patterns and alternative youth cultural circuits of superhero comics that have generated a diversity of meanings and conceptual mappings. The subsequent sister chapter takes us deeper into the subterranean worlds of comic book readers’ dreams as

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conjured up by the title sourced from one of our interlocutors: ‘In one of my dreams, I defeated America’. The ‘dreams spectrum’ – whether they be as aspirational ambition or as somnolent journey – manifests itself in the way comic books catalyse young people’s fantasies about personal powers, super-intelligence, outstanding technologies, vengeance, justice, geopolitics, romance, sex and the incredible potential of masked identities enabled by the internet where and when it became accessible from the mid-1990s. We end with Chapter 11 that charts what we have described as the current Platinum Age. This is a fiercely intensive neoliberal period accompanied by the development and maturation of new superhero ventures, production technologies, television, film and transmedia projects, trans/multinational collaborations, and the consolidation of comic book creative talent in diverse fields in a contested zone where other forms of media – audio-visual-digital – vie for monopoly in transnational spheres. Describing the phenomenon as Indofuturism, we address some of the new characters and themes that have crystalised as part of narratives of millennial desi superheroism when Hindu nationalism is on the resurgence, adding saffron hues to graphic ventures. With our multifaceted approach entailing histories, textual and contextual analyses, and excerpts of interviews with the creators, retailers and readers along with their views, reviews and reveries, we hope to provide an exciting and incisive documentation of a hugely neglected modern history of Indian young people’s lives.The adventures play a potent part in stimulating imaginaries of all kinds while combating modern fears and anxieties through super/heroes ready to defend their principles, beliefs, nation and planet. As such, they are an essential avenue to the psychosocial worlds of youngsters. If not always the case in the present era due to the onslaught of multiple entertainment channels, there is no denying that adventure comic books form an integral, diverse and vibrant part of the history of youth cultures in the subcontinent.

Notes 1 See below and Monica Das Gupta, Robert Engelman, Jessica Levy, Gretchen Luchsinger, Tom Merrick, James E. Rosen (2014) The Power of 18 Billion, Youth, Adolescents and the Transformation of the Future, New York: United Nations Population Fund. www.unfpa. org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/EN-SWOP14-Report_FINAL-web.pdf. Accessed: September 9, 2017. 2 A parallel argument has been made for literature in general when English-language books have received more transnational attention in the west. See Pamela Lothspeich (2009) ‘The Mahabharata’s Imprint on Contemporary Literature and Film’, in Popular Culture in a Globalised India, eds. K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, Abingdon: Routledge. When we invoke west/ern in this book, we rely upon Stuart Hall’s notion of it being both a geographical and powerful discursive space that connotes power and privilege as well as, in this case, hedonism and excessive materialism. (1992) ‘The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power’, in Formations of Modernity, eds. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben, Cambridge: Polity Press in association with the Open University. 3 As Charles Hatfield reminds us: ‘the heterogeneous nature of comics means that, in practice, comics study has to be at the intersection of various disciplines’ (2010) ‘Indiscipline, or, the Condition of Comics Studies’, Transatlantica: American Studies Journal, 1(1–18): 1–2, http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/4933.

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Comics in other regions are foregrounded in John A. Lent, ed. (2015) Asian Comics, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi; and Islamic perspectives in A. David Lewis and Martin Lund (2017) Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam and Representation, New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press. Analyses of international or transnational comic books are provided by Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn, eds. (2010) Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives, Jefferson, NC: McFarland; Daniel Stein, Shane Denson and Christina Meyer, eds. (2013) Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, London: Bloomsbury; and Rayna Denison and Rachel Mizsei-Ward, eds. (2015) Superheroes on World Screens, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Otherwise, comics studies scholarship has highlighted issues to do with cultural diversity in the west, as with Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague, eds. (2014) Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels, New York: Routledge. 4 See Karline McLain (2009) India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings and Other Heroes, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; and Nandini Chandra (2008) The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Kathas, 1967–2007, New Delhi:Yoda Press. Other accounts include Frances W. Pritchett (1996) ‘The World of Amar Chitra Katha’ and John Stratton Hawley (1996) ‘The Saints Subdued: Domestic Virtue and National Integration in Amar Chitra Katha’, both in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, eds. Lawrence A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley, Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press; Sanjay Sircar (2000) ‘Amar Chitra Katha:Western Forms, Indian Contents’, Bookbird, 38(4): 35–36; and Gaurav Puri (2009) ‘Reading History in Comics: A Case Study of Amar Chitra Katha Visionaries’, dissertation, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. 5 McLain, India’s Immortal Comic Books, p. 22. 6 There are occasional articles and chapters on Indian superhero comics as exemplified by Aruna Rao (2001) ‘From Self-Knowledge to Superheroes: The Story of Indian Comics’, in Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines, and Picture Books, ed. John A. Lent, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press; Sandya Rao (2007) ‘The Globalization of Bollywood: An Ethnography of Non-Elite Audiences in India’, The Communication Review, 10: 57–76; and Nandini Chandra (2012) ‘The Prehistory of the Superhero Comics in India (1976–1986)’, Thesis Eleven, 113(1): 57–77.There are also transnational perspectives provided by Shilpa Dave (2012) ‘Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translating/ Transcreating of American Cultural Narratives’, in Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives, eds. Denson, Meyer and Stein. There are brief mentions on the Raj Comics superhero, Nagraj, in Suchitra Mathur (2010) ‘From Capes to Snakes: The Indianization of the American Superhero’, in Comics as a Nexus of Cultures, eds. Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn. There is also a chapter on the superhero, Doga, in Gyan Prakash (2010) Mumbai Fables, New Delhi: HarperCollins; and a chapter on the ‘atomic wonderman’, Parmanu, in Raminder Kaur (2013) Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns, New Delhi: Routledge. 7 Peter Coogan (2009) ‘The Definition of the Superhero’, in A Comics Studies Reader, eds. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press, p. 77. See an important corrective by J. L. Bell (2009) ‘Judge Hand in the Land of Superheroes’, April 29, http://ozandends.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/judge-hand-in-land-of-superheroes. html. Accessed: November 20, 2017. 8 McLain, India’s Immortal Comic Books, p. 1. 9 Ibid., p. 3. 10 Ibid., p. 2. 11 See Richard Reynolds (1994) Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 12 See Umberto Eco (1972) ‘The Myth of Superman’, transl. Natalie Chilton. Diacritics, 2(1): 14–22, p. 15. 13 James Lovegrove (2012) ‘The World of the End of the World’, in Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: The Sub-Genres of Science Fiction, ed. Keith Brooke, London: Palgrave MacMillan, p. 102.

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14 Coulton Waugh (1947) The Comics, New York: The MacMillan Company, p. 14. 15 Will Eisner (1984, 1985) Comics and Sequential Art, Fort Lauderdale, FL: Poorhouse Press, p. 8. 16 Scott McCloud (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: HarperCollins and Kitchen Sink Press, pp. 2–23. 17 Ibid., p. 199. 18 Aron Meskin (2007) ‘Defining Comics?’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65(4): 369-379, p. 370. 19 Robert C. Harvey (2009) ‘How Comics Came to be:Through the Juncture of Word and Image from Magazine Gag Cartoons to Newspaper Strips, Tools for Critical Appreciation plus Rare Seldom Witnessed Historical Facts’, in A Comics Studies Reader, eds. Heer and Worcester, p. 25. 20 David Carrier (2000) The Aesthetics of Comics, Pennsylvania, PA: Penn State University Press, p. 26; Kristie S. Fleckenstein (2003) Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. 21 Pramod K. Nayar (2016) The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique, New Delhi: Routledge, p. 21. See also Chapter 11. 22 Thierry Groensteen (2007) The System of Comics, transl. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press. 23 Ibid., p. 9. 24 On a useful summary of globalisation and consumerism and its relevance for ‘non-elites’ in India – those who stand between the affluent and the poor - see Steve D. Derne (2008) Globalization on the Ground: New Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India, New Delhi: Sage. 25 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (2002) ‘Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction’, in special issue, ‘New Imaginaries’, Public Culture, 14(1): 1–19. See also Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds. (1993) Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 26 As such, the book adds to studies of globalisation, notable among which are Arjun Appadurai (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press; William Mazzarella (2003) Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Christiane Brosius (2010) India’s Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity, New Delhi: Routledge; and the edited decennial volumes by the Association of Social Anthropologists published by Routledge in 1995. 27 See, for instance, Philippe Ariès (1996 [1962]) Centuries of Childhood, New York: Knopf; Allison James and Alan Prout, eds. (1990) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, London: Falmer Press; and Robert Levine and Rebecca S. New, eds. (2008) Anthropology and Child Development: A Cross-Cultural Reader, London: Blackwell. 28 See Sudhir Kakar (1978) The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press; Ashis Nandy (1984–1985) ‘Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood’, Alternatives, X: 359–375; Satadru Sen (2005) Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India 1850–1945, London: Anthem Press; and Sarada Balagopalan (2014) Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India, London: Palgrave MacMillan. 29 This is another colonial hangover from the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890. 30 See Simon During, ed. (2007) The Cultural Studies Reader, London: Routledge. 31 On the relevance of this material for wider debates in comics studies, cultural studies, anthropology and postcolonial studies, see Raminder Kaur and Saif Eqbal (2015) ‘Gendering Graphics in Indian Superhero Comic Books and Some Notes for Provincializing Cultural Studies’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 12(4): 367–396. On another view on the debate between public and popular culture, see Christopher Pinney (2003) ‘Introduction: Public, Popular, and Other Cultures’, in Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, eds. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Action India  17

32 Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge (1989) ‘Why Public Culture’, Public Culture, 2(1): 5–9, p. 6. 33 See Ritty A. Lukose (2009) Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; and Mark Liechty (2003) Suitably Modern: Making Middle Class Culture in a New Consumer Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. On an overview of diverse youth cultures, see Mary Bucholtz (2002) ‘Youth and Cultural Practice’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31: 525–552. 34 Vamsee Juluri (2002) ‘Music Television and the Invention of Youth Culture in India’, Television and New Media, 3(4): 367–386. 35 See Liechty, Suitably Modern, p. 209. 36 See Pinney, ‘Public, Popular, and Other Cultures’, p. 7. 37 Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus propose that ‘cultural circuits’ be envisaged with regards to five elements of any cultural text or artefact: its representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation. These elements all play a part in comic books circuits, but are not a structuring device for this book. (1997) Doing Cultural Studies:The Story of the Sony Walkman, London: Sage and The Open University. 38 Roseann Liu, Amanda Snellinger and Elizabeth Lewis, ‘Youth’, https://culanth.org/ curated_collections/7-youth. Accessed: December 20, 2017. 39 There is a vast literature on the highly plural and complex dimensions of the Indian middle classes. See, for instance, Pavan Varma (1998) The Great Indian Middle Class, New Delhi:Viking Publishers; William Mazzarella (2005) ‘Indian Middle Class’, in South Asia Keywords, ed. Rachel Dwyer, www.soas.ac.uk/south-asia-institute/keywords/file24808. pdf; Leela Fernandes (2006) India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press; and Brosius, India’s Middle Class. Most concur that the neoliberal era has led to the emergence of a professional, consumer-orientated ‘new’ middle class quite distinct from earlier models associated with Nehruvian India before neoliberalisation in the 1990s. 40 Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class, p. xiv. 41 Cited in Rao, ‘From Self-Knowledge to Superheroes’, p. 59. 42 See Raminder Kaur (2011) ‘Atomic Comics: Parabolic Mimesis and the Graphic Fictions of Science’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(4): 329–347. 43 Craig Jeffrey (2010) Timepass:Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 2. 44 See Liechty, Suitably Modern, Chapters 8 and 9. 45 On the comparable method of photo elicitation as used in interviews and ethnography, see Heidi Larson (1988) ‘Photography That Listens’, Visual Anthropology, 1(4): 415–432; and Daniel Harper (2002) ‘Talking About Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation’, Visual Studies, 17(1), www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/methods/harper.pdf. 46 See Ashish Bose (2000) ‘North-South Divide in India’s Demographic Scene’, Economic and Political Weekly, May 13–19, 35(20): 1698–1700. 47 On other regional comics, see Jeremy Stoll (2017) ‘Comics in India’, in The Routledge Companion to Comics, eds. Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook and Aaron Meskin, New York: Routledge, p. 90. 48 On the emergence of reception studies of comic book readers in the west, see, for instance, Matthew J. Pustz (1999) Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi; Benjamin Woo (2011) ‘The Android’s Dungeon: Comic-Bookstores, Cultural Spaces, and the Social Practices of Audiences’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2(2): 125–136; Mel Gibson (2012) ‘Cultural Studies: British Girls’ Comics, Readers, and Memories’, in Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, eds. Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, New York: Routledge; and Ofer Berenstein (2012) ‘Comic Book Fans’ Recommendations Ceremony: A Look at the Inter-personal Communication Patterns of a Unique Readers/Speakers Community’, Participations: A Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 9(2): 74–96. There are, hitherto, no such studies on readers in South Asia.

2 THE MAKING OF MODERN MYTHOLOGIES THE MAKING OF MODERN MYTHOLOGIESTHE MAKING OF MODERN MYTHOLOGIES

Being in a village, we didn’t have access to the English dailies. So, I was never really exposed to the Calvin and Hobbes or Garfield. . . . My eyes would only hunt for the latest issue of Chandamama when my Dad took me to a bookstall in the railway station during our trip to my Uncle’s place in Hyderabad. And I would read it throughout without leaving a word. It gave me an undefinable amount of pleasure and satisfaction, . . . I was so enamoured by the stories about a princess choosing the groom from a set of suitors through some uncanny tests that I used to fancy the idea of choosing my groom in the same way. It’s a different story that I came to terms with reality once I grew up, but as a child it was so exciting to think of such an affair. (Sangeetha Kodithala, 2008)1

It is generally agreed that the Golden Age of superhero comics spanned the late 1930s to around 1950 in the west.This was undoubtedly a time of much economic and political turbulence as well as global warfare that led to the rise of incredible crusaders in the world of fiction: Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman to name just a few.2 Following an interregnum in the early to mid-1950s came the Silver Age covering the period from around 1956 to around 1970, precise dates and terms being a moot point.3 This Silver Age saw a great deal of artistic advancement, leading to the establishment of new talents in comic book creation and the emergence of cynical and conflicted superheroes.This era was followed by a rather bleak Bronze Age until the mid-1980s that saw a drop in comic book interest, on the one hand, and the exploration of social issues and darker terrain, on the other. This was then succeeded by the current Modern Age, or continuing the metallic metaphors, the Iron Age, marked by massive multi- and transmedia proliferation, new comic book collaborations and outlets, and if we were to consider the graphic novel, even a revival of sequential art in the book form.4

The making of modern mythologies  19

For India, any attempt at a periodic outline of the growth of adventure comics is going to produce very different results. For a start, the Golden Age for superhero comics needs to be seen as beginning around the 1980s.5 But there was much that preceded this decade, spanning the colonial to the post-independence era that we describe as the Nascent Age. This Nascent Age accommodates the ascendant popularity of adventure comic books and antecedents to Indian superhero tales. The decline of the Golden Age is signalled around the end of the 1990s when the proliferation of other media led to the shrinking and, for some publishing houses, even closure of comic book production. Gulshan Rai, founder and managing director of Diamond Comics, described the period from 1997 to 2003 specifically as ‘the dark age of Indian comics’ in which sales dropped by as much as 90% and at least 50 Indian comic publishers closed shop.6 This Dark Age did not, however, signal a definitive death: when fast-forwarding to the first two decades of the new millennium, we see a resurrection in sequential art interest. With media diversification and collaborations in new-fangled ventures, companies that survived the Dark Age along with newly formed graphic enterprises went on to create many innovative characters, themes, outlets and collaborations where superhero tunes got bolder and louder in a country that aspires for cultural and political greatness. This entailed a revisiting of themes developed in the Golden Age for wider transnational, multi- and transmedia platforms along with a spurt of new stories relayed in new styles. We refer to this as the Platinum Age – not as jaded as the Silver Age of the US, but not as widespread as the Golden Age for it being a relatively specialist and privileged field for those with sufficient capital and for those that survived the neoliberal maelstrom. Nor is it quite the Modern Age as described above, for India’s superhero media is more emergent and intermittent than established and extensive when compared with the US. Throughout, young people’s comics interfaced with other media in what Arjun Appadurai and Carole A. Breckenridge have called an ‘interocular field’ of diverse dialogical media.7 Due to the particularities of the postcolonial predicament that saw, on the one hand, domination by the west and, on the other, a quest to assert indigenously produced superheroes that could compete with those in the west on their own terms, we have then a schema for Indian superhero comics that goes from a Nascent, Golden, Dark to the Platinum Age. Of course, the fit is not perfect, and these ages are broad sweeps across a complexity of currents. Nevertheless, they provide useful hooks with which to hang our gear and settle into a brief history of adventure comics in India.

The Nascent Age As forerunners in visual panels, some historians point to the development of scroll paintings as in Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Bengal and Andhra Pradesh.8 This was indeed the rhetoric picked up by cultural revivalists who tried to indigenise the

20  The making of modern mythologies

comic form as chitra katha or ‘picture story’.9 But illustrated Indian scrolls did not come with textual narration, and they formed one element of a larger performative tradition. Rather, cartoons and strips with their characteristic speech balloons and/or pithy captions only became available through newspapers and magazines. These include the Delhi Sketch Book published from 1850 to 1857 and the series of Punch journals across the country from the mid-nineteenth century.10 Awadh Punch, for instance, followed the satirical style of the original Punch published weekly from London and introduced Urdu-language political cartooning in northern India in 1877. Adapting western styles, Indian artists did away with much of the grotesque art of the earlier political and social caricaturists and combined individual whims with travesty and socio-political satire in their cartoons.11 A strident mark was made by Chinnaswami Subramania Bharathi with his Tamil-language cartoons reproduced in the journal, India. From his southern production house in the then French colony of Pondicherry, Bharati’s cartoons banked on narratives from Hindu mythology that came with a vociferous critique of British colonial rule to the point of demanding political freedom. Bharti’s India closed shop in 1910, however, due to a lack of funds that was a consequence of the British colonial administration banning distribution to the rest of India in March of that year.12 Although bordering on the ludicrous, such satirical representations were addressed primarily at an adult and metropolitan readership. During the colonial era, story books for children such as Indian  Fairy Tales  (1880), Old Deccan Days (1881) and Legends of the Punjab (1883–4) had been produced in the subcontinent.13 From the early twentieth century, western comic books began to be brought to the subcontinent by the British and Indian elites for their children. By the 1940s, there was an irregular supply of comics through US and Commonwealth soldiers stationed in South Asia to fight the Axis powers during World War II. Some of these comics landed in the hands of other Indian children.14 One septuagenarian writer and artist, Aabid Surti, recalled how he joined other children in chasing after trains with foreign soldiers for ‘food and chocolate’. On one of these chases, a soldier threw out a copy of Mickey Mouse that the children fought over such that Surti got a page of the comic book. Even though he could not read English at the time, he was inspired by the illustrations and started copying them. As we shall see below, he later got involved in the emergent Indian comic book industry. By 1947, children in India began to be recognised as a distinct audience for illustrated literature.15 While the educational media was concerned with inscribing children into the project of nation-building, as is patently evident in school text books and even Amar Chitra Katha comics, adventure comics up until the 1980s did so only scathingly.16 The emphasis in the latter was on a thrilling tale implicit with a moral instruction of sorts, rather than stories explicitly geared towards nationalcultural development. As a result, while adventure tales commanded a lot of interest among children, they did so only begrudgingly among parents and pedants. The monthly children’s magazine, Chandamama (Moon Uncle), was introduced by filmmaker B. Nagi Reddy, shortly before India’s independence in July 1947 in the city of Madras (now Chennai). The Telugu and Tamil-language magazine was

The making of modern mythologies  21

among the first to introduce young Indian readers to the electrifying world of nonreligious heroes in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Strictly, it was a magazine with illustrations as opposed to a serialised comic strip, and it was subsequently published in about a dozen other languages including Hindi and English to cater to diverse audiences across the subcontinent. This ‘harbinger of pictorial storytelling’ included a wide range of tales from Indian epics, folklore and The Arabian Nights with their magical never-never lands, stories that were also reflected in the B- and C-class circulation of early Indian cinema.17 The tales of King Vikram of Ujjain and his dealings with a ghostly spirit known as Vetal (sometimes spelt Baital or Betaal) was particularly popular. Vikram-Vetal was adapted from the Sanskrit work, Baital Pachisi, and has become one of the longest running series in the subcontinent.18 From the mid-1950s, Chandamama presented heroic figures through adaptations of the Greek epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Renamed Bhuvan Sundari (Unearthly Beauty) and Roopdhar ki Yatrayein (The Journeys of Roopdhar), the stories were abridged translations of the original Greek epics, beginning from the ninth year of the Trojan War. Translations of foreign literature have a particular resonance in our project. They presented characters with Indian identities yet located outside the familiar pantheon of a mainstream Hindu religio-cultural world, making for new and riveting tales for their young readers. At a time when illustrated magazines were rare, children treated them as if they were precious treasure. On a trip to his uncle’s house in Kelakodige in the south Indian state of Karanataka, A.V. Krishnamurthy recalled his delight when he and his brother came across old issues of Chandamama: There were no other children in the house and only uncle and aunty lived there. Looking at our misery uncle handed over to us two volumes of bound magazines. When both of us opened the bound books our joy knew no bounds. They contained the old issues of Chandamama bound in a serial order! Thereafter we never knew how our time went. We savored the stories just like two hungry pets. We were not fully through all the issues in two days when our mother came to take us back to our home.We requested our mother to ask the uncle for permitting us to take the books home. We wanted to return them after reading all the issues. The uncle was a reserved person and even our mother could not talk to him freely. But knowing the fascination of children for Chandamama she did not want to disappoint her young sons. She asked the uncle gathering all her courage at a time. And lo! We heard him giving his permission subject to the condition that the books would be returned intact. Mother extended her guarantee on our behalf. We carried the two books as if we were carrying treasures home! We walked the three-mile distance as if we were floating in air! [sic]19 The illustrated stories held young people’s imaginations captive to the point of obsession.The illustrations added to their joy such that they felt like they were ‘floating in air’.

22  The making of modern mythologies

It is an affection that lingered into their more mature years where illustrated literature serves as a storehouse of memories, fantasy and abiding fascination, as might well be the reason behind the uncle’s need to keep them intact. Krishnamurthy continued with a detailed description of what he read in Chandamama: There would be one main serial story generally of the adventure category. These stories would run for as many as 18 issues. The other serials would be in the range of two-nine episodes. In this category fell ‘adventures of Sindabad-the great sailor’,‘Alibaba and forty thieve’,‘Allauddin and his magic lamp’, ‘Bhuvana Sundari’ and ‘Roopadhara’s Travels’. . . . Coming to the main serial stories, the first of such stories I read was by name ‘the story of triplets’ (avali makkalu in Kannada) followed by ‘the rare pillar’ (Apoorva Sthamba), ‘The comet’ (Dhoomakethu), ‘the God of crocodile’ (Makara Devathe), ‘the three wizards’ (Moovaru Manthrikaru) and ‘the bronze Fort’ (Kanchina Kote). All these were stories of adventure and maintained our curiosity till the last episode. Each episode would end at such a point in the story to keep us waiting on our feet till we read the next episode. We had to wait for another month keeping our fingers crossed [sic].20 Nobody quite knew what was to happen next in an adventure tale, nor the next episode as fans are kept waiting on their feet holding out for their heroes. One memorable story was about a hard-working and honest young man, Somanna, who lived in a village at the centre of which was a large banyan tree. Capturing the mutual transference of the magical and the mundane, the story went as follows: One evening Somanna was sitting alone below the tree. He suddenly finds a beautiful young woman in front of him. He speaks to her and is smitten by her. . . . Ultimately Somanna gathers courage and conveys his feelings to her. She agrees to marry him subject to the condition that he would never ask her about her origin and background. The marriage takes place and the couple enjoys the marriage-bliss quite for some time. A son is born in due course adding to the happiness of the family. One evening Somanna finds a group of people having some serious discussions standing near the banyan tree. He comes to know that the road nearby was being widened and it required the cutting down of the banyan tree. He feels very dejected as he is attached to the tree sentimentally. When he comes home he finds his wife in a very melancholy mood. Somanna tells her about the development; but he finds her already aware of it. He found her more sorrowful than himself. Hardly within a few days the road-widening work starts and a team arrives to cut the big tree. Somanna sees the team start cutting the tree with their axes and rushes home to tell his wife. To his shock he sees her writhing in pain! She now reveals to him that she was the soul of the banyan tree! Somanna understands the situation. He rushes back to the site and requests

The making of modern mythologies  23

the team to stop cutting the tree. His request falls on deaf ears. Within a few minutes, to his horror, the tree is brought down. He rushes home to find his beloved wife dead and son weeping inconsolably.21 The team tries to move the huge log of the tree to a cart to carry it away. They try to pull the log on to the cart with the help of ropes. But the log doesn’t move. Even their efforts to move it by an elephant fails. In the meanwhile Somanna reaches the spot with his young son. The child starts crying on seeing the log as if it sees the dead body of its mother. Finally it touches the log and calls its mother loudly. To the surprise of every one present there, the log moves! The team is able to load it on the cart. The story ends at this point. It had a great effect on us at that impressionable age. The soul of the banyan tree appeared in our dreams for many a days! Such illustrated tales took children on an enthralling journey to an enchanted world that seeped into their sleep (see Chapter 10). But they also filtered concerns that rallied around them – in this case, about the violation of the environment and tradition in the speed to modernise. While moral instruction was implicit in the stories, national-cultural development was not. What resonated for this reader as a child contrasted markedly with the post-independence policy to develop India through science, technology and industry. Magic still mattered.22 Parental conventions or ‘moral universes’ might also be questioned in these unpredictable adventures.23 Chandamama enthusiast, Sangeetha Kodithala, elaborates: We Indians do not discuss morally grey issues and most of the times kids are reprimanded for asking an innocent question about a dilemma, something as silly as ‘Why shouldn’t I take a chocolate when the neighbour Aunty offers it?’ or something serious (to the kid at least) like ‘Why should I lie about my age when the bus conductor asks for it?’ And somehow, I felt Chandamama used to . . . highlight many such dilemmas and provide smart answers to them. It had the usual ‘neeti kathas’ [ethical stories] and also stories with messages of wisdom – in stories with Kings trying two suspects and finding the convict through a smart test, or the famous Vikram-Betaal stories which provided answer to questions with any level of complexity of moral conflict [sic].24 The pulp literature addressed ethical complexities that might seem trivial or irritating for an adult but important to how the child navigated his/her social world. Such moral dilemmas and instruction were complemented with the device of play and entertainment on a platform that did not then make children feel lectured to or patronised, but fully engrossed as if they were on equal footing in a stimulating conversation that valued their unique perspectives. Lest it be forgotten, the stories were from an imagined child’s perspective, for, in the end, they were all produced by adults, albeit adults who sought to understand them. Later, several comic strips emerged that were interleafed in newspapers and magazines as with Dabbuji, a simpleton lawyer who interferes in everyone’s business,

24  The making of modern mythologies

created by Aabid Surti in 1956. Shuktara (Evening Star) was a monthly magazine that came out in the early 1950s in Bengal with playful characters such as the boys, Hada and Bhoda.25 Khilauna (The Toy) was one other monthly magazine produced by the Delhi-based Shama Group from 1947 up until the 1980s.26 In a schematic two-coloured series of red and green, it provided Urdu versions of American comics such as Richie Rich, Archie, and Tom and Jerry. It also contained a new comic strip called Hilal (meaning crescent moon in Arabic) with the brave character, Miyan Faulad. Introduced in the 1950s, he may be considered as among the first newly invented comic book heroes in the subcontinent. Miyan Faulad was created in the likeness of the popular villain-bashing actor of the times, Sheikh Mukhtar. Kitted out in a checked shirt and pants, he was strongjawed and had the muscular body of a wrestler. In an interview in 2012, Suraiya, now in her 60s, recalled of the comics: Miyan Faulad’s adventures would mostly deal with real life crimes. There were many kidnapping-related adventures where Miyan Faulad would rescue children from kidnapping. There were different types of kidnappers then: some would kidnap for ransom, while others would kidnap children for making them beggars or selling them to beggars. There would be a kind of kidnapper called Lakarsungha – a man who steals a child by making it smell (sunghna) a small stick, lakri. Faulad would rescue children from them and then he would also stop smuggling and, if I remember right, robbers too. Another outstanding crime-fighter was The Phantom. First invented by Lee Falk in 1936 in the US, he is a mysterious masked figure dressed in a purple body suit and hood topped with stripy blue and black pants. He had appeared in the subcontinent in the 1940s through The Illustrated Weekly of India. In 1964, an offshoot of the Times of India Group, Indrajal, took up the comic book’s publication first in English and, two years later, in Hindi and other regional languages making them more accessible to young people. The Phantom swiftly became one of the most widely read western superhero comic books in the subcontinent. He was renamed Vetal or Chalta Firta Pret – meaning the Phantom who walks – to suit Indian readers. Vetal had become a generic name for ghosts, spirits or phantoms, but the stories in Vikram-Vetal recounted above had little to do with the comic book, Vetal. The popularity of The Phantom/Vetal owed to the novelty of his adventures and the ease of conversion of characters and sites for Indian readers. The Phantom may have been a mascot of colonialism, a white man located in dark lands (first Africa and then a place in Asia), but along with an Indianised name, his adventures became relevant and engrossing. In a circuitous spiral, Falk had himself drawn upon and adapted the primitive and exotic for the depiction of alien worlds in the series. This ‘exotic’ then reclaimed and adapted the created world for Vetal while keeping the primitive intact. To these ends, The Phantom’s base in the fictional country of Bangalla recalled Bengal. His father’s slayer, Ramalu, became Rama. The Singa Pirates became the Pirate Singh Brotherhood. The Bandar pygmy friends, taken

The making of modern mythologies  25

originally from Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, retained their intrigue as Othered primitives in the jungle.27 Unlike the rarity of imported digests and comic books like Tintin, The Adventures of Asterix, Archie and Commando that circulated amongst the wealthy cosmopolitan elites in India, Indrajal’s foray into comic book production made western comics translated into vernacular languages more accessible to the gamut of middle classes, even more so if they were resold, rented or shared.The journalist, Manan Kumar, recalls: It was the first serious effort directed towards the evolution of comic culture in India. Well within the buying capacity of middle class children, Indrajal Comics made foreign comic heroes like ‘Phantom – the ghost who walks’, Mandrake the magician, and Flash Gordon household names in India.28 Diamond Comics began the publication of The Phantom comics in digest format from the 1970s along with licences for Flash Gordon, Mandrake, James Bond, He-Man, Tarzan, Spider-Man, Batman, Archie and Garfield. Other Indian publishing houses followed suit with the translation and transmogrification of several western comics. By the 1980s, Dolton Comics (DC) was set up by Dolton Publications in Chennai. They were an offshoot venture of Chandamama Publications, who had bought the licence from the US owners, DC Comics, to reproduce stories about superheroes like Superman, Supergirl, Batman and Robin, Batgirl, and Green Arrow. Available in Hindi and English, the comics would often contain short one- to twopage comic strips in between the main superhero story. Known as ‘gap fillers’, they afforded an experimental place to test out new stories and characters, some even depicting dogs as heroes. So great was the wondrous impact of the comics on youngsters that one enthusiast recalled how he grew up thinking DC stood for Dolton Comics, not its more internationally famous American progenitor standing for Detective Comics.29 Where the tales came from did not matter. What was originally foreign began to be adapted as their own.

Made in India adventure Formerly with Amar Chitra Katha, cartoonist Pran was prominent among those who helped break the monopoly of syndicated adventure comics from the west. Not to be confused with the stock-in-trade Hindi film villain, he was otherwise known as Pran Kumar Sharma. Pran had already given India its first comic characters with the teenage Dabu and his mentor, Professor Adhikari, in 1960. Dabu was an intelligent boy, mostly depicted in the act of reading about or discussing his queries on science with a lean and bespectacled, white-haired professor. Pran followed such characters with others including the ‘house-heroine’, Shrimatiji. Named Sheila, she was created in 1968 with her stories revolving around a labyrinth of issues that an Indian housewife might face such as problems with her children, husband and jealous neighbours.

26  The making of modern mythologies

In 1969, Chacha Chaudhary and Sabu, a duo who combined brain and brawn to fight the iniquities of society, was unleashed onto comic land by Pran, first as a cartoon strip produced by Mayapuri Group’s magazine, LotPot.30 With a name encapsulating ‘rolling with laughter’, LotPot catered specifically for children. In his first comic, Chacha Chaudhary and the Pocket Thief (1971), the unlikely hero was depicted as an elderly rural man. Chacha Chaudhary was later adopted by Diamond Comics and released as a comic book in 1981, a change of ownership that also led to him being transformed into a respectable urban man whose role was to teach family, cultural and national values to the younger generation (Figure 2.1). His movement from the village to the town paralleled urbanising trends in India along with increasing migration from rural sectors. Accordingly, Chacha Chaudhary and his coterie took on the moral dilemmas and criminal dangers of urban settings from the 1980s, although the places did not acquire a high-rise and fast-paced metropolitan ambience until the rise of superhero comics later in the decade. Despite his stupendous talents, Chacha is a somewhat demure character, with a snow white six-inch wide moustache. He is dressed in a white shirt, blue or green trousers, a black Jodhpuri waistcoat and a traditional red turban as worn by the Jat elders of Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh.31 His loyal companion is Sabu, a good-natured 15-foot-tall power-pack. The friendly giant comes from the planet, Jupiter, and was lured to stay on Earth through the delicious draw of Chacha Chaudhary’s wife’s cooking, particularly her flatbread, paratha and sweet halwa. Sabu is a hearty eater, consuming up to 108 chapattis and up to 20 litres of milky lassi a day. Anytime the hulk of a man gets angry, a volcano erupts in the distance, and he would cry ‘Ha-Huba’, as he performs his extraordinary feat. Chacha, by contrast, is an easy-going man who solves all problems presented to him with a sharp intellect, never resorting to extreme violence or guns. At the most, physical violence consists of the irrepressible Chacha using his bamboo stick to whack an enemy, often Raaka, his powerful and scheming archenemy. Sabu’s brain is small, however, and it is only through Chacha as his companion guide can the duo be synergised as a ‘symbiotic superhero’. Even though computers were not widely available in 1980s India, they certainly gripped the imagination. Moreover, India’s economic or indeed computational deficit did not seem to matter when Chacha’s brain was deemed the more superior: ‘Chacha Chaudhary ka dimag computer se bhi tez chalta hai’ (‘Chacha Chaudhary’s brain runs faster than a computer’). Whenever intellect and strength was not enough, Chacha would bring out his magic lamp, The Chirag. On rubbing it, the lamp would release a ‘Jinie’ who would help him solve any unsurmountable problem that arises through supernatural forces. Concepts aside, the expansion of comic books in the 1970s was greatly aided by the material availability of more paper. Paper quotas and other restrictions on the print industry were relaxed after a Supreme Court case led by Bennett Coleman and Co. against the Indian government in 1972.32 Following this impetus and the success of Chacha Chaudhary, character-based comics became commonplace. These included from Diamond Comics: Billu, in 1973, a fun-loving teenager whose

The making of modern mythologies  27

FIGURE 2.1 

Chacha Chaudhary (n.d.), Diamond Comics Digest, front cover

acts generally land him or others in hilarious situations; Pinky, in 1978, a naughty girl aged around 10 who causes problems for people around her; and in 1981, Raman, a clerk whose life moves around day-to-day middle-class lives presented in a humorous light. Another favourite for young children was Tinkle, launched in 1980 by Anant Pai and published by India Book House and then from 2007, by Amar Chitra Katha Media. The magazine contained several adventures on characters such as Suppandi, Kaalia the Crow, and Shikari Shambhu. But apart from Chacha Chaudhary and his ‘faster than a computer’ brain, his giant alien assistant, Sabu, and their

28  The making of modern mythologies

huge, immortal enemy, Raaka, none of the other characters had any superhuman powers. Magic was, however, abundant in early Indian-produced adventure comics.Tauji (meaning paternal elder uncle) was created around 1979. He is a powerful magician who carries around an otherworldly dwarf, Rumjhum, in his pocket, and a small and handy jadui danda (magic stick or wand).This danda could perform miracles and deal with villains and demons on Tauji’s command. Although the creative personnel were not named, the comic book was under the editorship of Diamond Comics’ Gulshan Rai. The publication house also produced Chacha and Bhatija (paternal younger uncle and nephew) in 1978. This duo used to solve problems with the help of a very powerful djinn, a supernatural creature from Islamic mythology and theology. Other comics would contain tales similar to those found in Panchtantra, an ancient compilation of animal fables with human virtues and vices to impart moral instruction, while relaying exciting new adventures for children. Indian characters and plots in early adventure comic books were tamed to suit a more reserved temperament, favouring the use of intelligence to conquer threats, and only depicting ‘sanctioned violence’ as in battles retold from history, myth and legend.33 Any battle outside of this authorised world for young people was deemed gratuitous violence. Accordingly, the stories in the comics were relatively benign, a trait that was approved by adults who might buy them for their children. In fact, those creatives who had been displaced and deeply affected by the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 were actively against the representation of violence. Pran, who illustrated Chacha Chaudhary, was one of these artists who was forced to migrate from Kasoor District in what is now Pakistan in 1947. When working in India, he did not depict gore, explicit violence or murder in any of his comic books. Gulab Kapoor was another who produced the illustrated magazine with comic strips, Madhu Muskan (Sweet Smiles, 1972) – when it came to a scene where he could not avoid representing blood, he preferred to paint the seeping fluid white.34 As with the reticence to depict partition violence in popular film until latter-day decades, so was the case with the representation of any kind of violence in early Indian adventure comic books, particularly as they were orientated towards children.35 It was almost as if subcontinental comics culture continued the Gandhian refrain of restraint and non-violence after independence/partition: not to mean an abstinence from violence altogether, but to advocate the spirit of intelligence and moral righteousness to overcome crime and tyranny. As is vividly clear in Chacha Chaudhary, the emphasis was on intellect, wit and wisdom. He might raise his walking stick on occasion, but otherwise, villains were rarely met with guns. The limited inclusion of mild violence was invariably instigated by external forces – aliens from Jupiter or demonic enemies in India’s underground or mythic vaults.

From pocket to comic books New vernacular publishing houses had set up in the 1980s to first produce what came to be called ‘pocket novels’ – that is, books around 6 by 4 inches in size, cheap to produce and small enough to be inserted into the pocket. Manoj, Tulsi,

The making of modern mythologies  29

Nutan, Raja Pocket Books among numerous other regionally based ventures that have since disappeared all took root in this period catering for both adult and younger audiences. Most of these stories were spy thrillers or detective stories woven around the Indian crime scene. Some of them were adaptations of foreign literature such as James Hadley Chase’s crime novels that became as popular in India as they had become in his native British homeland for their adventurous and romantic content. A memorable thriller or in Hindi, jasoosi, was Wardi Wala Gunda (The Goon in Uniform, circa 1993) by Ved Prakash Sharma. Sharma had established Tulsi Pocket Books, whose Tulsi Comics was to later pose some competition to Raj Comics until its demise in the late 1990s.36 In Sharma’s story, a police inspector who had cultivated his image as a ruthless law enforcer is himself revealed to be a man of criminal mentality. He would do anything for a price but never lets anyone dominate him. Ultimately, after he becomes a chief minister of an Indian state, he is murdered. The dark terrain of such cheaply produced pocket novels was toned down and adapted for bal (children) pocket books. They contained exploits of child or adult detectives without, of course, any form of gory or racy adult content. As opposed to the specifics of superheroes, they featured highly intelligent and dynamic heroes along with secret agent duos. While these detective stories were developed as pocket novels, by 1985 they had made way their way into comic book serialisation with panels of illustrations to accompany the tale. In some of the comics, the protagonists were depicted as children, and in others as grown-up soldiers, detectives, or lawyers out to pursue social justice as with Colonel Karna produced by Manoj Comics, and Detective Kapil, an internationally renowned detective, produced by Chitra Bharti Kathamala of S. Chand and Company. Nutan Comics’ Bhootnath was a mix of strongman and crime-fighter, wearing nothing but a mask, shorts and a cape. Lamboo-Motu was another popular detective duo produced by Diamond Comics. As the names suggest, Lamboo was the taller of the duo while Motu was short and rotund. The duo was inseparable. While they lived together, they would aid Inspector Uncle in their fight against crime. Some were presented as a Hindu and Muslim spy-duo to convey the message of a secular brotherhood (bhai-bhai). They included Diamond Comics’ Rajan-Iqbal from 1978 and Manoj Comics’ Ram-Rahim that appeared around 1980, children managed by a Bengali Intelligence Chief, Mr. Dubey. Clearly, they echoed the mainstream national narrative of ‘unity in diversity’ while ridding the country of villainy imagined as selfish, opportune and traitorous.37 Most of the child detectives’ adversaries were criminal gangs, smugglers or enemy countries. For their heroic endeavours, they began to use guns and grenades to fend off violent insurgents, including tiny ‘capsule bombs’ that they could hide in the sole of their shoes. The heroes could speak several foreign languages and had passports to travel anywhere. They had immense control over their minds and bodies, and began to show signs of superhuman qualities as with the duo, Ram-Rahim, who could both hold their breath underwater for up to 15 minutes.

30  The making of modern mythologies

Zero to hero to superhero By the beginning of the 1980s, the world of children-oriented media was virtually flooded with publication houses borrowing liberally from each other in India as well as those comic books from abroad. Among these, Bahadur (The Courageous One) was a pioneering invention among Indian comic book heroes. Created in 1976 by Surti, who we have already encountered above, and the illustrator, Govind Brahmania, Bahadur is an intelligent and courageous man but without any extramortal superpowers. He is young and energetic with a live-in girlfriend, Bela, a graduate, kung fu expert and the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Such informal relationships were little seen in mainstream media at the time. With her martial arts prowess, Bela would support Bahadur on occasions and was capable of handling goons herself (Figure 2.2). She was not just frippery to the side of the main action, but became a central part of the main action. This would then make Bela amongst the first newly created heroines in Indian comics. She was introduced in the third comic book in the series, Safed Bhoot ka Adda (The White Ghosts’ Den, circa 1976), and remained unmarried as his girlfriend till the last Bahadur comic in 1990. Together the duo tackled dacoity that had reached atrocious heights in 1970s India. Bahadur was created as the son of a dacoit, Bhairav Singh, who had been shot by a policeman,Vishal. Bahadur grows up to seek revenge on his father’s death. But when Vishal shows Bahadur the victims’ corpses of his father’s exploits, the hero has a change of heart. In one of the dacoits’ raids, he puts up a struggle and his mother is shot. Her dying words to him were to take a vow to fight the dacoits and protect the villages in the region. Consequently, Bahadur became a law-abiding agent and set up NASUD, alluding to Nagrik Surakhsha Dal or Citizen’s Security Force. Surti had in fact developed the character on a request from A.C. Shukla, the manager of Indrajal Comics. The publisher had wanted an Indian character that could become as popular as The Phantom, Mandrake, Flash Gordon and Tarzan, the premiers in the adventure comic scene in India at the time. Surti responded by creating a hero who fought dacoity in the notorious Chambal Valley in central India. The character certainly recalls the actor Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘angry young man’ in the ‘curry western’ blockbuster Sholay (Flames, dir. Ramesh Sippy, 1975). But when asked about this, Surti maintained that this was an era when the Chambal region was already a hotbed of dacoity, and many films had been made on the topic including Mother India (dir. Mehboob Khan, 1957). The influence was the other way, he asserted, made clear when he came across lines from his comics in several films. One memorable one was where the mother says ‘I wouldn’t wipe the sindoor [a sign of marriage] off my forehead until I take revenge for your father’ – a line that he said he had penned in one of his early comics. The intention of Bahadur’s creators was to combine elements of the west with those from India, which is patently clear in the hero’s signature outfit – a saffroncoloured kurta top along with a pair of jeans. Surti recalls: A kurta and saffron were symbols of Indianness. And jeans were a Western import and indicated progress. Hence, the combination. . . . In fact, I have

and Bahadur, Jangal ke Chor (Thieves of the Jungle, circa 1986), Indrajal Comics, front cover

FIGURE 2.2 Bela

Courtesy of bahadurbela.com

32  The making of modern mythologies

showed Bahadur and his girlfriend, Bela, in a live-in relationship – something unheard of in those times. But it was very well accepted by the audience.38 In keeping with changing times, in the 1980s Bahadur’s small town, Jaigarh, grew into a modern city, and his appearance too changed. By 1986, under the creative charge of a new writer, Jagjit Uppal, along with Brahmania as illustrator, Bahadur sported a neater and more generic urban look with short hair, his kurta replaced with a tight pink pullover, as he took on new challenges to do with espionage in India. Although there had been earlier Indian superhero forays in other regions, as with Baatul the Great created by Narayan Debnath in 1950s Bengal, they were not issued in a dedicated comic book. This was to change in 1978 with the introduction of an extraterrestrial protagonist with superpowers: India’s first home-grown comic book superhero by Diamond Comics (Figure 2.3). Named Fauladi Singh (literally, Steely Lion) and illustrated by Rajiv, he appeared as a ‘protector of mankind’ in Fauladi Singh aur Jadui Anda (Fauladi Singh and the Magical Egg). He was invented as a ‘robot with human emotions’, and his main task was to protect the Earth from alien invasions. His superpowers included the ability to fly and shoot laser beams with gloves that could fire rays of energy. He had the capacity to perform interplanetary and intergalactic feats. He is either portrayed in wrestler’s trunks with a striking moustache or a pink and yellow body suit. His mentor was Dr. John, an exceptional scientist who lived on an island in the Indian Ocean, invisible to everyone else. He is aided by two robotic allies, Bharat and Antrikshak, along with Lamboo, literally meaning tall guy and an allusion to the popularity of the lanky film star, Amitabh Bachchan. Ironically, in the comic book, Lamboo is the name for Fauladi’s nine-inch assistant who shrunk after drinking an unknown potion in Dr. John’s laboratory. Of particular interest was the depiction of fabulous science and territories in Indian comic books, a topic that we concentrate on in Chapter 6. As one reader recalled, he was drawn to Fauladi’s comics as ‘no other comics at the time were doing intergalactic wars’. Fauladi’s success as a Diamond Comics superhero was complemented in 1984 by the patriotic revolutionary, Dynamite, and the dare-devil Abhay, along with his state-of-the-art technology and divine alter ego, Agniputra. Ordinarily a text and exam competition book publisher, S Chand and Company had set up a comic book subsidiary, Chitra Bharti Kathamala, around 1980. Anupam Sinha, who was to become a key figure in the development of Raj Comics, created Space Star when he was earlier with this company. This was a series about a super spacecraft responsible for the security of Earth and its 150 self-sufficient space cities of the future. The spacecraft was led by the exceptionally brave Captain Gaurav, who would take part in intergalactic adventures very much like Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise in the US series, Star Trek. Manas Putra (literally, Son of Mind) was another of Sinha’s developments based on an earlier creation by Kaushalendra Singh Ghuraiya.39 He is an enemy of the

The making of modern mythologies  33

FIGURE 2.3  Fauladi

Singh aur Robot Hunter (Fauladi Singh and Robot Hunter, n.d.), Diamond Comics, front cover

enemies of humanity. As an extremely powerful intergalactic warrior, he owes a debt to the influence of US science fiction stories, He-man and Star Wars, with some distinctive Indian touches. He is the adoptive son of Sarvashaktiman Mastishk (The All-Powerful Brain), a resident of India, and endowed with exceptional powers by his foster father if ever he lands in trouble.

34  The making of modern mythologies

Picking up on the fascination with space travel, Raj Comics came out with Vinashdoot (The Messenger of Destruction, circa 1985). This superhero is a masked blonde alien, with a green outfit topped off with red pants boots and gloves (Figure 2.4). He had fallen to Earth in a meteorite along with his mechanical horse, Chetak, after his planet, Jupiter, was destroyed by wars. Once landing on Earth he

FIGURE 2.4 

Vinashdoot (1985), Raj Comics, front cover

The making of modern mythologies  35

makes India his home. His powers arise from his x-ray vision, the ability to fly unaided, and to shoot rays with his hands. Another chief novelty of the 1980s was the introduction of the stand-alone superheroine, such as Makdi Rani (Spider Queen) produced by Manoj Comics around 1980 and Gufeena produced by Fort Comics around 1986. Makdi Rani wears a blue figure-hugging spidery outfit with a spider mask topped by a gold crown. Departing from the Spider-Man character in the US, she is a scientist and has the powers to fly. Gufeena is an alien princess from planet Muler who can also fly. When her planet was attacked by a neighbouring planet, she had to flee to avoid imminent capture. She ends up on planet Earth, pairs with a female thief and together they embark on numerous adventures while fighting crime. Children’s novels had phased out by the late 1980s, partly due to the availability of such Indian comics as the colourful action-packed stories became more attractive to youngsters. In this transitional period, Raj Comics had emerged as a subsidiary out of Raja Pocket Books and proved to be a resilient innovator of superhero and other kinds of adventure comics in India. Raj Comics had tied itself up with A.H. Wheeler and Co., a publishing company that has a monopoly of book stalls at railway stations across India. As a result, their comics became widely accessible in the Hindi-speaking belt of India. The company was founded in India in 1887 and operates in over 250 railway stations in what is now 17 railway zones across the country. Teaming up with them formed a highly effective marketing strategy as stations are intensive hubs for human traffic as well as affording ample time for pulp possibilities during waiting and travel periods. As train journeys and travel plans were often delayed, one of the easiest ways to manage restless children was to hand them a little pocket money to buy comics. They were also sold at newsstands, kiosques, specialty shops, eateries or other mundane outlets leading to a widespread reach. Consequently, the innovative flare of Raj Comics captured the largest share of the superhero comic book market in India from its very early days. By the early 1990s, major comic publishing houses were coming up with their own brand of superheroes such as Angara, Jambu and Tausi all produced by Tulsi Comics, a subsidiary of Tulsi Pocket Books. Angara, meaning Cinder, was a product of the medical genius of a scientist, Dr. Kunal, who created him with the powers of seven animals. Jambu was a humanoid supercomputer created over a period of three years by a scientist, Dr. Bhava. Tausi was a shape-shifting snake with brown scaly skin similar to the Raj Comics serpentine superhero, Nagraj, who we shall concentrate on in the subsequent chapter. As another mythical king of the land of snakes. Tausi, however, wore a traditional Indian dhoti around his waist. There were several other comics around this period that revealed direct copies of other superhero tales as transpired with Nagesh by Radha Pocket Books. Nagesh had a very similar storyline to Raj Comics’ Nagraj, to the point that the latter took the former to court and, in 1997, won on grounds of plagiarism.40 This was one of the first litigation cases in comic book publications in India, demonstrating that the Indian comic business was getting very serious.

36  The making of modern mythologies

India galactica There are a number of factors behind the rise of superhero comic books that were to do with the combined force of inspiration and environment. Aside from the availability of western and Indian adventure comics in the subcontinent, the Indian government’s approach to the communications industry began to show signs of change in the 1980s under the rule of Indira Gandhi’s and most markedly, Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress governments. From 1984 a technology adviser, Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda, popularly known as Sam Pitroda, was brought in to promote a communications revolution through increasing privatisation. Both an engineer and a business executive, Pitroda advised Rajiv Gandhi as to the potential of technology for the social good – stretching from telecommunications, literacy programmes, immunisation, water and agriculture. Once the privatisation process was initiated, it permeated other sectors too. Businesses – including those involved in publication – were in a position to take more risks. Superhero escapades were greatly inspired by state-run Doordarshan television broadcasting of phenomenal events and the programming of syndicated science fiction series. It is not insignificant that in the year of the Asian Games held in India in 1982, Doordarshan not only went national but also live and in colour, making for an even more electrifying medium of entertainment where the infrastructure permitted. Another key televised event was Rakesh Sharma’s journey into space in 1984 as part of a joint programme between the Indian Space Research Organisation and Soviet Intercosmos. Mindful of the appetite for advanced technologies and adventures in space, the broadcaster began to provide western science fiction in its weekend slots to add to its usual fare of agricultural, educational and development orientated themes that had marked the history of the public service broadcaster from its first experimental telecast in late 1959. Syndicated programmes from 1983 included He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Knight Rider, Giant Robot, Spider-Man, and Star Trek.41 This was along with the serial telecasting of the Indian-produced Vikram aur Betaal from 1985, Ramayana (1987–88) and Mahabharata (1988–90) among many others.42 This decade also saw the broadcasting of Indian-produced science fiction as with Indradhanush (Rainbow) in 1988 that conveyed stories about a few boys who assemble a computer that connects them to intergalactic and time-travel adventures. Raju aur Udantastari (Raju and the Flying Saucer, circa 1988) reveals a spaceship that lands on Raju’s terrace, who goes onto befriend the aliens. Space City Sigma (circa 1988) was India’s response to the popularity of Star Trek with its bizarre aliens and amazing displays of science with its space ships, laser guns, transmitters, teleporters and automatic doors.43 It was under Rajiv Gandhi’s leadership that television sets and series became more widespread throughout the subcontinent. Even when television sets were only within the purchasing reach of the comfortable classes in the 1980s, they became the centre of communal gatherings in homes and in more public areas, affording entertainment for viewers from a wide variety of backgrounds wherever and whenever there was electricity.

The making of modern mythologies  37

As Sohini Bagchi recalled of her childhood: ‘Star Trek was one big wonder that gave me the opportunity to explore a fantastic universe teeming with exotic life – my love for aliens began with them!’44 Another enthusiast, Sundar, reflected on how Star Trek crossed not just galaxies, but also language and class barriers: [It made] such an impression, in fact, that even the ghat kids [migrants from the mountainous ranges] in the neighbourhood who didn’t understand a word of that show were making their communicators with a couple of matchbox covers and some rubberband. They taught me how to make them. I’m sure a lot of you readers had these cool communicators made of Ship Matchboxes. If you didn’t, you REALLY missed out. There is NOTHING like a kid opening up his communicator and then saying something Marathi into it.45 Sundar gives a sense of how lower-class children availed of the entertainment and even taught the more affluent children in Mumbai some tricks of the Starship Enterprise, albeit with match boxes and rubber bands. He continues: The second [Star Trek] episode screened (or maybe it was the third?) was just before we were beginning our summer trip to Madras. It was the one with that scientist who lives with his wife on this deserted planet, performing some experiments or some shit like that. The away-team comes there to investigate a bunch of bizarre crew deaths, and it turns out that the scientist’s wife is the alien beast that needs to suck the salt out of everyone.That was the first really scary monster I saw (Well, other than the whole Evil Dead movie, which left us shitting blood for a week) and that bothered me for a while. Funny how kids’ imaginations can make them totally ignore the zippers in such shitty costumes [sic].46 Young people’s intrigue in the alien, bizarre and horrific eclipsed all other details. It was an appetite that was only occasionally whetted by Indian popular film – the most famous from the decade being Mr India (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 1987). In comparison, comic books took up children’s fascination for fantastic fiction with repeated élan. More filmmakers entered the relatively cheaper publishing field producing comics based on serialised photographs on their films.When it comes to collaborations for illustrated comic books, Supremo, the alter ego of Amitabh Bachchan, stands out.The series was produced by Star Comics under the banner of India Book House and created by Pratap Mulick over two years from 1982, along with narration provided by the well-known poet, scriptwriter and film director, Gulzar. Mulick had earlier worked as an art director for Amar Chitra Katha, and later went on to develop Nagraj, who we shall focus on in later chapters.47 Entitled The Adventures of Amitabh Bachchan, the actor was presented as his alter ego, Supremo. As this persona, he wore oversized dark sunglasses, a red skinhugging costume, and in line with Indian sensibilities at the time, a wrap-round

38  The making of modern mythologies

cloth over his modesty. He carried a revolver and wore a locket not unlike his screen persona,Vijay, in Deewaar (The Wall, dir.Yash Chopra, 1975). He also came with a pet falcon and a talking dolphin who would provide a combined surveillance and conveyance system whenever the need arose. Interestingly, Bachchan as Supremo was not an ‘angry young man’ as his popular screen persona at the time proclaimed, but a wealthy yet morally righteous man who collaborates closely with his young assistants, Vijay and Anthony, named after Bachchan’s favourite screen names. Every back page in the Supremo comic book contained a letter purportedly by Bachchan saying that he wanted to share a secret with the children – he was indeed the film star in the comics and, in his time off, he became a superhero. He intimated a hush-hush world for the sole purpose of engaging children that adults would not fully grasp. While he did not actually get involved in the content of the comics, Bachchan did ask to see the script for prior approval with the request that the comics be sent out to hospitals, orphanages and welfare organisations to entertain children. A memorable story was Jadu ka Farsh (The Magic Floor). Amitabh Bachchan is shown in a slick suit on a film shoot. He is informed by his falcon to visit his island as a plane has crashed on it. He rushes to the island and tries to save the pilot, who dies muttering ‘magic floor’. He finds a map that leads to a series of adventures, after which a showdown occurs between Supremo and a gang led by a mad man called Scorpio. They had been kidnapping Indian nuclear scientists in order to sell weapons to dictators, and had imprisoned them under a moving floor of an empty house. Supremo, with the help of his young assistant, Vijay, manages to release them and emerges victorious. The next day, Bachchan is told by his director that Supremo has saved the Indian scientists. In typical nonchalant style, the actor coolly asks the director to start shooting, once again, keeping his secret identity away from the world of adults. According to Supremo’s creator and the editor of the magazine, Movie, Pammi Bakshi, the superhero was named after a film shoot in Goa when the actor, Randhir Kapoor, called Bachchan ‘the Supremo’.48 Bakshi had earlier thought that Bachchan was mainly popular amongst adult audiences before she overheard some children’s banter. Bakshi recalled: One day, I saw some children playing in my building. They wanted to be superheroes – some wanted to be Superman and some Batman. But when Amitabh’s name was dropped, all of them started fighting as every child wanted to be Amitabh Bachchan.49 Even when pitted against a US-dominated superhero universe, the children all wanted to be an Indian film star. Two main points are served here. First, that the line between heroism and superheroism, real-life actor and fictional crusader, was hard to delineate even if Supremo kept them separate. Second, patriotic pride meant

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that it was those who could be Indian contenders as superheroes that young people held supreme. In retrospect, while Fauladi Singh might be seen as India’s first locally produced superhero, this robot with a human heart, like the other extraterrestrial superheroes that came after him such as Vinashdoot, were still viewed as ‘outsiders’ to India. They were not culturally embedded like Amitabh Bachchan. Fauladi remained a robot and Vinashdoot a blonde-haired alien reminiscent of Flash Gordon. Despite their Indian producers and use of the vernacular language, the characters were not Indian enough. In that sense they were more nascent than fully qualified desi superheroes.

Guilty pleasures Wherever one looks, the development of young people’s media has not been without a great level of moral opprobrium, castigation and legislative measures. More widely, post–World War II debate raged on the topic of errant youth being overly influenced by rapacious media. This was particularly the case for comic books as, when compared to other media, they could be easily produced and even slip from the censor’s gaze.50 With the increase of horror and violence represented in comics, orthodox adults got very concerned. In 1954, the US Senate subcommittee’s interim report, ‘Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency’, came down heavily on the extreme end of adventure comics, especially those that depicted horror, violence and sex.They had indicted them as a cause of delinquency and violent behaviour in children.51 There was not much difference in the debates surrounding such comics in India at the same time. By 1955, the first ban on the import of horror comics was on the table. The directive was to ‘save youths from becoming criminals and corrupt [sic]’, a view that many parents and ‘heads of educational institutions’ shared, deeming the material as suspect and offensive to their sense of moral probity:52 Commonly known as horror comics these publications portray the commission of offenses, acts of violence or cruelty, incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature or glorify vice in such a way as would tend to corrupt the youth in general.53 Debate had also erupted in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Indian parliament, with politicians demanding that not only the import but also the production of certain categories of comics be controlled. Home Minister Govind Ballabh Pant cast aspersions on ‘horror comics’, stating that they: had ‘caused enough of horror and damage in other countries’. Their publication was particularly reprehensible as they were meant for the use of children and young persons whose susceptibilities and impressionabilties at that age

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made them easy victims to the influences which were borne upon them by ‘horror comics’ and literature of that type [sic].54 There was a massive gulf between concerned adults and what they considered as ‘victim’ children viewed as yet-to-be civilised Others with soft and supple ‘susceptibilities and impressionabilties’. The discourse continues metropolitan elite opinion on the infantilisation of the ‘Indian masses’ deemed as intellectually deficient when engaging with provocative media.55 When applied to children, the discourse is both softened and sharpened: while optimistic with the register of potentiality, it is also heavy with expectations and anxieties about cultivating the next-generation nation. In their protective paternalism, some politicians promoted the idea that alternative ‘literature should be produced to satisfy the “curious mind” of children’. A Communist party member, Dr. Rama Rao, even suggested that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, affectionately known as Chacha (Uncle) Nehru, should try find time to write books for children to put them on the right path.56 Such high-level debate on a specific kind of comic books reflected aspersions of western/ised comic books associated with adventure in general. At a time of high Nehruvian developmentalism where children were viewed as citizens-in-themaking, adventure comics held little favour. Not only were they seen as too close to the influence of the west, but they also distracted from the greater goal of children’s education and the wider project of Indian nation-making. Very rarely did a public spokesman come out to valorise the positive characteristics of comic books until the development of the Amar Chitra Katha oeuvre. This too saw a chequered and sceptical start in the 1960s. But the sentiment was short-lived, for the combination of attractive graphics and narratives on stories from Indian classical texts, folklore and the biographies of historical, legendary and religious figures along with a moral, educational and nationalist remit in Amar Chitra Katha gradually found favour across the pedagogue’s and even politician’s board.57 Adventure comic books continued to be seen as dubious detraction, however – a sentiment that was to energise a highly contested yet ambiguous public debate. The debate was hotly charged in that the more conservative adults linked comics with errant influences and morally debase values. Others of a more liberal persuasion were ‘cool’ in that they saw the debate in a more discerning way, even as irrelevant or blown out of proportion. Occasionally, it was not always clear whose side anyone was on – whether adventure comics were hot and bad or whether they were cool, incidental and perhaps even insignificant.The frontline was itself dispersed and fuzzy. Two examples might suffice as a measure of the resilience of the morality debate that has not receded but only transferred to different kinds of media.58 One example is from the 1960s and another from the 1990s. In a newspaper opinion section in 1962, Sakuntala Bhalla, a teacher at the time, reflects on ‘panicky parents’ who had instructed her with statements like: ‘I would like my child to be saved from the dangers of living in this age of comics’.59 She observed how ‘some parents

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regard their child’s interests in comics as a form of mild delinquency and depraved taste catering to low intelligence’.60 For the parent, it did not matter what kinds of comics – they were all caricatured as iniquitous. For Bhalla, however, she observed the potential of comics for providing entertainment while imparting cultural and national values, and that parents should ‘handle this problem more dispassionately and less hysterically’. While children might read and exchange comics on the sly, they had even come to accept their parents’ views: ‘the comics had not only created an anxiety but also a conflict of values in their minds’.61 In another case, one of our interlocutors, now a human rights official in Delhi, narrated an incident around 1990 where his father was called in by a frantic school principal. The school was in a village in Faizabad district in the state of Uttar Pradesh. It was affiliated to the right-wing Hindu culturalist organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, where much emphasis was given on moral and religious education, and where copies of Amar Chitra Katha would not entirely be out of place for their contribution to a Hindu-dominated cultural revival.62 The principal told the boy’s father that his son has been found with ‘seriously objectionable material’. Imagining the worst, his father was somewhat relieved to learn the seriously objectionable material was only a Raj Comics superhero issue. In this case, it was the pedagogue who held the comics as a massive affront. Even though he was rebuked by both adults, the child, while intimidated, found the incident quite amusing, certainly in his recollections.

You are dismissed! While coming to appreciate Amar Chitra Katha as a cultural institution, learned adults dismissed adventure comic books as substandard, trivial and derivative. They were seen as essentially outside of the corseted ideals of Indian culture.Views about the west as prone to violence, excessive hedonism and a suspect moral compass deeply coloured their opinion of these comics as western/ised despite their production in India and the inclusion of ethical, educational and/or patriotic themes that we further examine in later chapters. Adventure comic books became either forbidden or tolerated in a concessionary manner. Consequently, children saw them as a guilty pleasure, with comic books circulating where possible in surreptitious ways, and mostly outside the purview of orthodox teachers, parents and other figures of authority. Throughout, children are treated as if they are placid, passive and to be protected. To this day, adventure comic books for young people still circulate in a fug of moral ambivalence for some families. Among the most controversial are superhero comics. One axis of concern about such comics is to do with the irresolvable question of western and Indian, superheroism seen as simply and somewhat erroneously associated with the US.The other relates to a perception of this media as mere entertainment with little to instruct young people, and made worse by a surge of graphic violence from the 1980s that detracts young people from their edifying development. But this is a view that is now beginning to show signs of change as icons of

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Indian superheroism and ‘muscular nationalism’ has gripped the public imagination in the new millennium.63 Moreover, it is a view that is dismissive of young readers’ priorities and interpretations, to which this volume has a particular commitment, and into which we further delve.

Notes 1 Sangeetha Kodithala (2008) ‘Childhood with Chandamama’, http://sangeethakodithala. blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/childhood-with-chandamama.html. Accessed: July 20, 2014. 2 See Richard Reynolds (1994) Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 8–9. Earlier adventure comic strips and comics existed, but with the release of comics on Superman, 1938 marked the rise of the superhero. 3 Ken Quattro (2004) ‘The New Ages: Rethinking Comic Book History’, https://web. archive.org/web/20150905115607/http://www.comicartville.com/newages.htm Accessed: July 17, 2018. 4 See Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones (1985) The Comic Book Heroes: From the Silver Age to the Present, New York: Crown Publishing Group. On graphic novels, see Gretchen E. Schwarz (2002) ‘Graphic Novels for Multiple Literacies’, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 46(3): 262–265; Stephen Weiner (2003) The Rise of the Graphic Novel, New York: NBM; Douglas Wolk (2007) Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, Boston, MA: Da Capo Press; Douglas B. Fisher and Nancy Frey, eds. (2008) Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. 5 This was at a time when young people were moving away from the relatively more predictable and pedagogical style of comic books such as Amar Chitra Katha. See Karline McLain (2009) India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, p. 47. 6 Manoj Sharma (2010) ‘The Return of Indian Superheroes’, Hindustan Times, February 14, www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/the-return-of-indian-superheroes/storyyOOLF47FdwD52hhHdYWqSK.html. Diamond Comics is an offshoot of Bhartiya Bhandar Pustakalaya that began operations in 1907 and was re-established in India after partition in 1950 under the banner, Punjabi Pustak Bhandar. Later, under the banner, Star Publications (P) Ltd., it branched into publication and exports, and in 1978 began to publish comics in India under the name, Diamond Comics (P) Ltd., with paperback fiction and non-fiction under Diamond Pocket Books (P) Ltd. See www.smelisting. com/company/diamond-comics-pvt-ltd/products/diamond-comics-pvt-ltd. Accessed: August 7, 2014. 7 Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge (1995) ‘Public Modernity in India’, in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, p. 12. 8 The scroll would have up to 50 panels narrating an episode or the complete story. See Aruna Rao (1995) ‘Immortal Picture-Stories: Comic Art in Early Indian Art’, in Asian Popular Culture, ed. John A. Lent, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. See also Varsha Naik (2013) ‘Comics Through the Years’, DNA, June 26, www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/reportcomics-through-the-years-1853173; Aparna Menon (2011) ‘Ancient Audio Visual Entertainment’, The Hindu, December 5, www.thehindu.com/features/kids/ancientaudio-visual-entertainment/article2688875.ece; William Dalrymple (2008) ‘All Indian Life Is Here’, The Guardian, August 23, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/ aug/23/art.ramayana. Accessed: July 20, 2014. 9 See McLain, India’s Immortal Comic Books, pp. 42-43. 10 Ibid., p. 43. See also Partha Mitter (1997) ‘Cartoons of the Raj’, History Today, 47(9): 16–21; and A. R. Venkatachalapati (2006) In those Days there was no Coffee: Writings in Cultural History, New Delhi:Yoda.

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11 See Partha Mitter (2013) ‘Punch and Indian Cartoons: The Reception of a Transnational Phenomenon’, in Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair, eds. Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler, Heidelberg: Springer. 12 Subramania Bharati (2012) Panchali’s Pledge, transl. Usha Rajagopalan, Gurgaon: Hachette Book Publishing. On other early twentieth-century cartoon strip illustrators, see Jeremy Stoll (2017) ‘Comics in India’, in The Routledge Companion to Comics, eds. Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook and Aaron Meskin, New York: Routledge, pp. 87–88. 13 Partha Mitter (1994) Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 127. 14 Cited in Aruna Rao (2001) ‘From Self-Knowledge to Superheroes: The Story of Indian Comics’, in Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines, and Picture Books, ed. John A. Lent, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, p. 38. After making contact with Aabid Surti in 2012 for an elaboration, however, we learnt of another version of events reproduced here. 15 See Supriya Goswami (2012) Colonial India in Children’s Literature, New York: Routledge. 16 McLain, India’s Immortal Comic Books, p. 27. 17 www.wishberry.in/blog/history-of-comics-in-india/. Accessed: January 9, 2018. On cinema, see Rosie Thomas (2013) Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. 18 Baital Pachisi translates as the 25 tales of the Baital (Ghost or Spirit). According to one, Katha Sarit Sagar (Ocean of Stories that Flow in the Form of Rivulets), a king was approached by a tantric or sorcerer for help in catching a dangerous spirit from a samshan, a haunted place where Hindus cremate their dead. The king catches him and the spirit agrees to come with him if he listens to his stories and answer his questions. Duly the king answers the questions, and Baital would fly back to his hideous adobe. For his twenty-fifth story, the king is not able to answer his question. Nevertheless, Baital is impressed by the king’s tenacity, takes a liking to him, and allows itself to be taken to the tantric. On the way, the spirit tells the king that the tantric actually intends to sacrifice the life of Vikram. The king then saves himself from the tantric’s clutches by killing him. 19 A.V. Krishnamurthy (2014) ‘The Chandamama – Childhood (Part I)’ http://avkmurthy. blogspot.com/2014/01/the-chandamama-childhood-part-i.html Accessed: July 17. 2018. 20 Ibid. 21 A.V.Krishnamurthy (2014) ‘The Chandamama – Childhood (Part II)’ http://avkmurthy. blogspot.com/2014/01/the-chandamama-childhood-part-ii.html Accessed: July 17. 2018. 22 See Suvadip Sinha (2017) ‘Magical Modernity: The Fallacy of Affect in Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik’, Cultural Critique, 95: 101–130. 23 On the ‘moral universe’ as invoked in Hindi cinema, see Rosie Thomas (1995) ‘Melodrama and the Negotiation of Morality of Mainstream Hindi Cinema’, in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, p. 157. 24 Kodithala, Childhood with Chandamama. 25 On the history of comics in Bengali, see Ryan Holmberg (2013) ‘Bengal’s Drighangchoo: An Interview with Deeptanil Ray’, December 13, www.tcj.com/bengals-drighangchooan-interview-with-deeptanil-ray/. Accessed: December 20, 2017. 26 Zubeida Mustafa (2013) ‘Writing for Children’, Dawn, July 3, www.dawn.com/ news/1022341. Accessed: July 20, 2014. 27 Kai Friese (1999) ‘White Skin, Black Mask’, Outlook, April 19, www.outlookindia.com/ article/White-Skin-Black-Mask/207314. Accessed: July 20, 2014. 28 Manan Kumar (2003) ‘Today’s Comic Culture in India’, ABD (Asia-Pacific Cooperative Programme in Reading Promotion and Book Development), 34(1): 6–7. 29 http://bookscomics.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/098superman-covers-hindi-indrajal.html. Accessed: July 20, 2014. 30 Mayapuri Group is one of the oldest publishers in India. It was established in 1882 as Arorbans Publishers in Lahore, and changed its name in 1947 when it was relocated to India after partition. www.mayapurigroup.com/. Accessed: July 20, 2014.

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31 See Nandini Chandra (2012) ‘The Prehistory of the Superhero Comics in India (1976– 1986)’, Thesis Eleven, 113(1): 57–77. 32 Supreme Court of India: Bennett Coleman & Co. & Ors vs Union Of India & Ors on 30 October, 1972, 1973 AIR 106, 1973 SCR (2) 757. https://indiankanoon.org/ doc/125596/ Accessed: July 17, 2018, 33 For our purposes, we view myths as stories rooted in religion and folklore passed down the generations. Legend applies to people who may have actually lived and whose characters and associations are amplified to the point of being heroic. History applies to events that can be positioned in calendrical time but we do not maintain that this is then more important than other narratives of the past. See Roy Willis (1981) A State in the Making: Myth, History and Social Transformation in Pre-Colonial Ufipa, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 34 Alok Sharma (2017) ‘Amazing Stories, Terrific Heroes’, Hindustan Times, December 17, pp. 16–17. 35 See Raminder Kaur (2017) ‘Skipping Memories on Partition and the Intersensory Field in Subcontinental Britain’, Third Text, 31(2–3): 387–418. 36 Sometimes it is difficult to ascertain the year of publications as not all comics carry dates. Available dates in different lists may well contradict each other. We have tried to check our assessments with the available lists and, where dates are not available, we have provided approximations based on material analyses and contextual evidence. 37 See Anto Thomas Chakramakkil (2017) ‘The Polemics of Real and Imagined Childhood(s) in India’, International Research in Children’s Literature, 10(1): 74–88. Secularism as it is implicit here refers not to the European understanding of non-religious, but multi-religious equivalence as idealised by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. See Rajeev Bhargava (2000) Secularism and its Critics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 38 http://dara-indrajal.blogspot.in/2008/06/indication-of-return-of-first-indian.html. Accessed: November 13, 2017. 39 Sinha describes his contribution as: ‘50–50! I had to rewrite and characterise on original script’ (Facebook correspondence, August 5, 2014). 40 Sanjay Gupta, interview at Raj Comics, Burari, July 7, 2014. See Raja Pocket Books vs Radha Pocket Books, 1997 (40) DRJ 791 at the Delhi High Court, New Delhi. 41 Most syndicated programmes were imported from US. Giant Robot, a manga and tokusatsu (live action) television series, is one of the exceptions that was originally produced in Japan in 1967. 42 On the Indian television epics, see Arvind Rajagopal (2000) Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 43 Shantanu (2009) ‘Doordarshan: Nostalgic Reminisce’, https://shantanuy.wordpress. com/. Accessed: December 20, 2017. On earlier ventures in Indian speculative fiction film, see Raminder Kaur (2013) ‘The Fictions of Science and Cinema in India’, in Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinema, eds. K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, Abingdon: Routledge; and Iain Robert Smith (2015) ‘Tu Mera Superman: Globalization, Cultural Exchange and the Indian Superhero’, in Superheroes on World Screens, eds. Rayna Denison and Rachel Mizsei-Ward, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 44 Sohini Bagchi (2012) ‘Star Trek and Reminiscence of Doordarshan Days’, http://pearl­ ofthoughts.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/star-trek-and-reminiscence-of-doordarshandays/. Other programmes shown on Doordarshan in the 1980s are listed here http:// oldidiotbox.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/hello.html#.U5rR2nFwbIU. Accessed: July 28, 2014. 45 Sundar (n.d.) ‘TV Shows Broadcast on Doordarshan in the 1980s’, www.pha.jhu. edu/~sundar/tp/serial.html#s. Accessed: July 28, 2014, author’s emphasis. 46 Ibid. 47 See McLain, India’s Immortal Comic Books, pp. 72-73; and Pao Collective (2007) ‘Raj Comics: A Brief Overview’, http://paocollective.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/raj-comicsa-brief-overview/. Accessed: June 12, 2014.

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48 Atul Sethi (2012) ‘Where Are the Indian Superheroes?’, http://blogs.timesofindia.india times.com/Past-Prism/where-are-the-indian-superheroes/. Accessed: June 23, 2014. 49 N. Patcy (2009) ‘Remembering Amitabh, the Supremo Superhero’, www.rediff.com/ movies/slide-show/slide-show-1-pammi-bakshi-on-supremo/20091110.htm. Accessed: June 23, 2014. 50 On censorship in India, see Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella, eds. (2015) Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 51 See ‘Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency, Interim Report’ (1955) http://www. thecomicbooks.com/1955senateinterim.html Accessed: August 14, 2014. Section III of the report states: It has been pointed out that the so-called crime and horror comic books of concern to the subcommittee offer short courses in murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism and virtually every other form of crime, degeneracy, bestiality and horror. These depraved acts are presented and explained in illustrated detail in an array of comic books being bought and read daily by thousands of children. These books evidence a common penchant for violent death in every form imaginable. Many of the books dwell in detail on various forms of insanity and stress sadistic degeneracy. Others are devoted to cannibalism with monsters in human form feasting on human bodies, usually the bodies of scantily clad women. 5 2 ‘Stopping Sale of Comics’, The Times of India, June 8, 1955, p. 1. 53 ‘Import of Horror Comics Banned’, The Times of India, June 8, 1955, p. 1. 54 ‘Prohibiting Production of “Horror Comics” in India: Lok Sabha Passes Bill Unanimously’, The Times of India, November 23, 1956, p. 9. 55 See William Mazzarella (2013) ‘Introduction’, in his Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 56 ‘Prohibiting Production of “Horror Comics” in India. 57 See McLain, India’s Immortal Comic Books, Chapter 1; and Sugata Srinivasaraju (2011) ‘A Pandit had a Dream. . .’, Outlook, March 21, www.outlookindia.com/article/A-PanditHad-A-Dream/270843. Accessed: July 20, 2014. 58 On children and advertising regulations in India, see Angad Chowdhry (2015) ‘Anxiety, Failure, and Censorship in Indian Advertising’, in Censorship in South Asia, eds. Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella. 59 Sakuntala Bhalla (1962) ‘Do Comics Really Warp Child’s Mind?’, The Times of India, September 2, p. 6. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 McLain, India’s Immortal Comic Books, pp. 50–52. 63 Ravinder Kaur and Thomas Blom Hansen (2015) ‘Aesthetics of Arrival: Spectacle, Capital and Novelty in Post-Reform India’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 23(3): 265–275, p. 6.

3 THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE INDIAN SUPERHERO THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE INDIAN SUPERHEROTHE GOLDEN AGE OF THE INDIAN SUPERHERO

Obsession runs in my blood! You who live in high rises, you wouldn’t know how uncivil and dark the truth is behind this civilised society [sabhya samaj].You can’t see this dirty muck [keechad]! Your mother and father have sheltered you with money! I have seen how an orphan is crushed by this world! I have suffered it! And suffered it so much that I myself am the image of that slimy muck! But I see this muck! And I will clean this too! —(Doga, in Wafa [Loyalty], circa 2007)

Superheroes might fly, swoop, swim, shape-shift or fight as they save mortals in danger, and protect the nation and world from the muck of evil. Produced by the needs of the hours, they represent, in their particular ways,‘the trinity of Law, Justice and Authority’.1 While they share traits with western superheroes, Indian crusaders do not simply replicate them. Nor can Indian superhero comics be described as derivative or mere translations. Through the reinvention of vernacular narratives, the Indian super-pantheon becomes an exemplar of ‘parabolic mimesis’, amplifying, refracting and displacing, and not merely a copy of a ‘master print’ associated with the west.2 In this chapter, we focus on the creation and what has been termed the ‘transcreation’ of Indian superheroism along with what we call trans/creation spectra.3 The superhumans might be viewed in terms of five main character concepts – mytho-modern, (extra)ordinary, transhuman, forest guardian and angry superheroes. Bearing in mind, Marvel Comics’ Black Panther and Wolverine, a sixth character prototype could be the ‘human in animal’ or anthropomorphic superhero as with Raj Comics’ Monty the Ape. But Monty makes only rare appearances with a team of other superheroes such that the animalesque is less a template for an Indian superhero and more for the supervillain. Even while drawing upon the strength of certain animals, importance is attached to looking the part of the ideal human figure in order to be a popular superhero, as

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we shall see in subsequent chapters. When considering Kobi specifically, there is a degree of fusion with the forest guardian and characteristics of the angry superhero. As is symptomatic of proliferating creative ventures, there is much overlap between character concepts. One could go on and allude to the half-human, half-horse mythical fantasy figure, Ashwaraj, that points to others such as the winged fairy prince, Bhokal. Our primary focus however, is on those superheroes whose main calling is to engage with crime and evil in multiple imaginaries of modern India. As argued in Chapter 2, alien superheroes such as Vinashdoot have passed their sell-by-date in India in an era where comic readers have become more conscious about foregrounding nationally and culturally embedded individuals. While in this chapter, we mainly concentrate on male protagonists, in the next we highlight the female crusader, Shakti, who would also qualify as a mytho-modern superhero.

An alarming zeitgeist Prior to the mid-1980s, most adventure comics were against crime in general. Reflecting challenges to the country at large, tales about border and separatist threats to India’s sovereignty and safety began to manifest themselves in the comics for which bigger and better heroes had to be imagined. Political turbulence included full-fledged militancy that had broken out in the northern states of Kashmir and Punjab, armed agitation in Assam from 1979, and an economy that had reached its nadir by the end of the decade compelling, in 1991, a loan from the International Monetary Fund with stringent strings attached – namely, liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation (collectively referred to as LPG).4 India’s first female prime minister, Indira Gandhi, had been assassinated in 1984 by her disaffected Sikh bodyguards, and a new Indian National Congress government re-elected with a massive mandate for her son, Rajiv. He continued his mother’s rhetoric of the ‘foreign hand’ that was destabilising the country and threatening its sovereignty.5 This murky hand alluded to Pakistan (hand-in-glove with the US) and their alleged role in threatening India through supporting insurgency in the region. It also extended to tensions with China over the northeastern states of India as border disputes resurfaced in 1986. Rapid change and challenges were on the anvil. Extraordinary situations had emerged within and outside of Indian borders. Along with other developments in the 1980s outlined in the previous chapter, social and political conditions were ripe for interventions, even if they were elliptical in the stratosphere of cultural imaginaries. Indian superheroes who could hold a beacon to solve the multiple problems that beset the country was one part of this creative foray. Furnished with wondrous desires for dire situations, subcontinental superheroes were invented to promote cultural cohesion and imaginatively come to the aid of the helpless republic – one that, on its own, could not protect its own leaders, let alone its own citizens. The period saw the birth of India’s first home-grown superhero with the mission to solve the crisis of not just national but also international terrorism. Their ethos supported the national mainstream that decreed some as heroes and others as

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villains. By the mid-1990s, with an advancing neoliberal economy and the rise of majoritarian nationalism, more superheroes had been produced such that they had gradually became to be seen as an emblem of an aspirational strong and invincible nation (see Chapter 11). Post-1990s market deregulation has energised further creative endeavours with trans/multinational corporate collaborations entering the comics enterprise in India. It was epitomised by New York–based Marvel Comics teaming up with Gotham Entertainment Group who held the licence to launch Spider-Man India in 2004. Peter Parker here appeared as Pavitr Prabhakar but, notably, his spiderlike powers did not originate with a bite from a radioactive spider in a science exhibition as in the US version. Instead, while being chased by other kids, Pavitr encounters an ancient yogi who gives him the power of a spider to fight villainy wherever it erupts. Local customs and narratives are interwoven with new scenarios, where Marvel’s Green Goblin villain is replaced by Rakshasa, an Indian mythological demon with morphing abilities. According to chief executive, Sharad Devarajan: It is one thing to translate existing U.S. comics, but this project is truly what we call a ‘transcreation’, where we actually reinvent the origin of a property like Spider-Man so that he is an Indian boy growing up in Mumbai and dealing with local problems and challenges.6 Effectively the character is ‘transcreated’ – that is, reinvented and repositioned in Mumbai in order to be more relevant for Indian audiences. Whereas with the US version, Spider-Man’s origins are rooted in science, in the Indian version, he is more indebted to magic and mythology.7 Superhero transcreations might also be located in earlier decades prior to the emergence of Spider-Man India in 2004. But such endeavours are not simply the result of an international collaboration, nor do their development necessarily represent a straightforward dynamic to do with indigenising foreign superheroes with a dash of folklore, magic and/or mythology. Rather, the significance of science remains resilient, and the origin stories and characteristics of Indian superheroes display what may be loosely identified as western and eastern inspirations but shaken and stirred to generate distinctive characteristics in multiple ways – not merely a case of indigenisation or transcreation. Where it becomes difficult to see what exactly is created or transcreated, we need to consider a more dynamic and multivalent terrain – a trans/creation spectra that encompasses a spread of creative impulses along with variable doses of mimicry and indigenisation. We might find that along the trans/creation spectra, certain superheroes seem to have their genesis in more autochtonous narratives as with Nagraj and Shakti. Others might appear more derivative of western prototypes as might be the opinion on the cyborg police officer, Inspector Steel, inspired as he was on the US Robocop, a cyberpunk action film that was released a year later in India in 1988. But even here, through its plot and narration, Steel’s character is given several unique and Indian inflections as we have occasion to see below. The jury on the direction of travel is still out.

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Mytho-modern superheroes The first strain of Indian superheroism from the mid-1980s drew from the repertoire of detective genres in Indian pocket novels and comic books, western superhero comics, television programming in India, and the rich resource of vernacular culture including the tales represented in the Amar Chitra Katha comic book series. Nagraj, literally meaning Snake King, was the pioneer superhero to be conceptualised by Sanjay Gupta with its first story written and executed in close collaboration with Parshuram Sharma for Raj Comics in 1986 (Figure 3.1). His birth began the formation of P.O.E.M. – Protectors of Earth and Mankind, Raj Comics’ response to DC Comics’ Justice League. Nagraj, who three decades on continues to be popular, epitomises the emergence of a distinctively new and modern figure yet based on familiar archetypes. These vernacular foundations are to do with beliefs about snake deities and the Hindu god, Shiva, who consumed a lethal poison, halahala, that emerged during the churning of the oceans (sagar manthan) so as he could save the universe. Nevertheless, Nagraj’s creation story presents an astonishing departure from them all. As related in the first comic book, Nagraj (1986), Professor Nagmani, who has been in search of a shape-shifting snake, comes across a baby boy in an abandoned temple.When Nagmani picks up the boy, a snake appears before him and turns into an elderly man. The man then tasks Nagmani with the guardianship of the baby who was the abandoned son of a female disciple who had been raped. The man gives Nagmani a specific set of instructions that involved the slow injection of snake venom into his body that would eventually convert the boy into the most powerful sovereign of snakes. Twenty years elapses as Nagmani diligently performs the instructions. Eventually, Nagraj’s body becomes resilient and snake-like, yet his face remains human. A tall man with green skin, Nagraj’s celestial venom can kill through his bite and his poisonous breath, vish-foonkar. But in a twist of biochemical reactions, it can also give him the power to immediately heal his wounds. In place of white blood cells, millions of microscopic snakes reside in Nagraj’s body that can come out of his wrists to form ropes, parachutes or anything that the superhero cares to imagine for a multipronged attack by his internalised ‘snake army’. Realising the astonishing potential of his powers, Nagmani operates on the boy to insert a ‘capsule’ that would keep the boy under his perpetual control (Figure 5.1 in Chapter 5). Nagmani fantasises that just like historical kings such as Mauryan Chandragupta who employed Vishpurush (Poison Man) and Vishkanya (Poison Maiden) to kill their enemies, he would create a Vishnar (Poison Man).8 When ready, Nagraj is presented as an ‘Ultimate Killing Machine’ to be sold to the highest bidder amongst a global consortium of criminals. The villains are amazed by his special abilities. Bulldog, the head of a terror organisation, ends up hiring him for $100,000, and enlists him to steal a gold statue from a temple. After the burglary, Nagraj is captured by a sadhu or Hindu mendicant, Baba Gorakhnath, who learns about the microchip and removes it from his brain. Afterwards, Nagraj commits himself to help humanity, with the particular task of combatting violent insurgency.

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FIGURE 3.1 Nagraj in the foreground with his spiritual guide, Gorakhnath, in the back-

ground, Nagraj (The King of Snakes, 1986), Raj Comics, front cover

As a testimony to the morphing of creation stories, in Nagpasha (Lord of the Snakes, 1995) and Khazana (Treasure, 1995), it is revealed that Nagraj’s powers come from his ‘divine’ origin by way of his family deity, Dev Kaljayi (God of Venom), who had given a boon to his parents. However, his uncle, Nagpasha, poisoned his mother with Dev Kaljayi’s venom. The enraged deity eventually spared his mother’s life and concentrated the venom instead in the unborn baby. Nagraj

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appeared to have been born dead, and his parents abandoned him by floating him out on a river. The boy went on to live, spending some of his time on Nagdweep, the island of ichchhadhari or shape-shifting snakes. The superhero’s dubious birth in an illicit act of rape is replaced by the additional twist of Dev Kaljayi’s boon. It recalls mythical stories about the resilience of abandoned babies with grand destinies ahead of them. Raj Comics’ creative director, author and illustrator, Anupam Sinha, explained that he: strived to go back and give Nagraj a logical background, explain his powers – gave him venom in his white blood cells for the deadly vish-foonkar [poison breath] – and develop his back story in a more mythological manner rather than the lab-experiment way.9 This revamp served to make the character more mythic, a strain that was revived by a surge of Hindu nationalism, which was making its mark in 1990s India.10 Equally, Nagraj’s character responded to neoliberal developments of that decade. He went on to work as a Public Relations Officer in Bharti Communications, a news corporation under the leadership of a high-flying career woman indicative of a new India. He is introduced as Raj on the last page of Khazana. His boss, Bharti, is the granddaughter of Vedacharya, a professor of the tilism – a labyrinthine maze, the likes of which we visit in Chapter 6. Bharti advises Raj to invest his inherited treasures into her media company while Vedacharya convinces him to stay in their city, Mahanagar. Thus begins the dual life of the original Nagraj: one as a superhero and the other as Raj, a media professional alter ego. Otherwise Nagraj is the king of ichchhadhari snakes on the mythical island, Nagdweep, even though the superhero chose not to take up the throne for fear of losing sight of his larger mission to protect humanity. Just as with his phenotypic plasticity, Nagraj’s stories saw phenomenal twists and turns as tales got more and more complex. Nowadays, there are three principle Nagrajs with entirely different and convoluted origin stories and plots. Such complexities are indicative of different creative collaborations as much as they are a response to transnational currents in graphic aesthetics. The original crime-fighting Nagraj is now with Anupam Sinha as its main executor. From the 2000s, other versions of this hypermodern action guru in parallel universe stories were developed to compete with those that emerged in western comics and in rival Indian outlets as with Virgin and Liquid Comics (see Chapters 4 and 11). The second Nagraj avatar is Aatankharta (The Destroyer of Terrorism) from the World Terrorism series from 2007. Here, Nagraj has no fixed abode and travels the world eliminating insurgents. The stories were mostly authored by Sanjay Gupta and Tarun Kumar Wahi up until Shikata Ga Nai (in Japanese, Nothing Can Be Done, 2010), after which Nitin Mishra took over as the writer. The third Nagraj avatar, started in 2009 by Gupta and Wahi, is Narak Nashak (The Destroyer of Hell).With shoulder-length hair and sporting a jacket and pair of trousers, Nagraj here possesses different powers and rides on a flying serpent called Sarpat (literally, Fast) fighting vampires, demons and

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zombies in a supernatural world of dark forces. After the comic book issue, Aadamkhor (Maneater, 2011), another author, Mandar Gangele, became involved, and with Infected (2011), Mishra took this series over as the main author. The Narak Nashak series is notable for its deep dark colours and much use of shadows to evoke an eerie underworld as apocalyptic storylines abound.11 The existence of three Nagraj avatars points to the extensive depths that the comic world can plumb conjuring up worlds – old, new and parallel. Any comparisons of Nagraj with western superheroes such as Spider-Man or Superman therefore fall superciliously short. Nagraj’s creation and attributes are a force to be reckoned with on their own terms. Yodha, meaning Warrior, is another mytho-modern superhero. He was introduced in 1993 in his eponymous comic book with Manish Gupta as the editor, Tikaram Sippy as the writer and Vinod Kumar as the illustrator. He is depicted as a great warrior from an ancient time who woke out of his slumber after a volcanic eruption. He comes across as a mythic, powerful but very gentle hero. His genesis recalls the compassionate yet volcanic warrior, Ashwatthama, in the ancient epic, Mahabharata, who, as legend decrees, is still alive roaming somewhere in the country. Yodha goes on to join forces with an Indian female secret service agent and even takes on the American external intelligence agency, the CIA, in Bijli (Lightning, 1996). Later, a new origin story was given for Yodha in Shoorveer (The Brave, 1995) that continues in Yodha ka Rahasya (Yodha’s Secret, 1995). As with Nagraj, the story in these issues establishes Yodha with semi-divine features when it is a demi-goddess who is declared his mother.12 With such rewriting of creation stories, there is a patent saffronisation of superheroism from the mid-1990s, a theme that we revisit in the final chapter of this book.

(Extra)ordinary superheroes The second superhero concept refers to ordinary people whose powers derive from their extraordinary intellect, moral conviction, and physical skills. The (extra) ordinary superhero celebrates a marvellously embellished version of the proverbial ‘common man’. They most obviously follow in the line of Diamond Comics’ synergetic duo, the exceptionally clever detective, Chacha Chaudhary, and his powerful henchman, Sabu.They might include individuals with no special powers other than unremitting patriotism, as with Diamond Comics’ ‘revolutionary patriot’, Dynamite, created in 1984 by Gulshan Rai, and Raj Comics’ Tiranga, created by Hanif Azhar in 1995. They also include Super Commando Dhruv, who with his sharp mind and acrobatic agility, epitomises the (extra)ordinary superhero to the hilt. Created in 1987 by Anupam Sinha as a fairly ordinary man with exceptional physical, intuitive and intellectual powers, Dhruv is born out of India’s hybrid popular culture, rather than the outcome of a firmly identifiable west-east transcreation. He was conceived as a gifted person named after the Dhruv Tara, the steadfast pole star. Having been brought up in Jupiter Circus by his parents who were trapeze artists, Dhruv grows up to become an expert bike rider, shooter, ringmaster, trapeze

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artist and bodybuilder.Whether they be man, woman or beast, he is the cynosure of everyone in the circus. His animal friends come to his aid anytime he is in danger, while his avian friends act like observation monitors and inform Dhruv if there is any malpractice, as if the superhero is the apex of an extensive, child-friendly surveillance regime. Such are Dhruv’s talents and public popularity in the circus that he attracts the envy and ire of other competitors. One such rival from the introductory issue, Pratishodh ki Jwala (The Fire of Vengeance, 1987, Plate 2), is the owner of Globe Circus. He sends his henchman to set Jupiter Circus on fire, in which most of the circus inhabitants, including Dhruv’s parents, are killed. A distraught Dhruv rushes after the arsonist on his bike, but a shot from an expert marksman hired by Globe Circus punctures his tyres and the chase abruptly ends. After Dhruv is orphaned, he vows to take revenge on the assailants. When he is adopted by a chief policeman’s family, he channels his rage to fight crime in general.13 Dhruv’s debt to the Amitabh Bachchan comic books, Supremo, is worth an extra note to demonstrate the more direct influences of other Indian rather than western comics even while they draw vicariously upon global currents. Both figures exhibit a great deal of intellectual ingenuity. Both endorse moral conduct and instruction and refrain from violence wherever possible. The two protagonists have a circle of birds and animals with whom they can communicate. They also rely upon a variety of technological gadgets with helicopters and wires as accessories that they put to earth electric currents. Such similarities are most striking when comparing Supremo who chances upon the underwater city, Atlantis, in Vilupt Nagri (Extinct City, circa 1983) and Dhruv who goes underwater and discovers Swarn Nagri (City of Gold) in Grand Master Robo (circa 1991). In each of these episodes, the culture and science of the underwater civilisation far outshines that on terra firma. In both tales, the protagonists are operated upon by the people so as they can breathe underwater unaided to pursue their no-bar adventures. While Dhruv may have the remarkable capacity to talk to animals, birds and sea life as well as survive underwater, Tiranga (meaning tricolour as in India’s national flag) has no special abilities. His heroism is revealed when he venerates and tries to protect the nation at all cost. His flag-covered appearance and patriotic actions suggest that he is a replica of Marvel Comics’ Captain America. However, there are significant differences.While Captain America is an ageless ‘super-soldier’ produced out of scientific experiments, Tiranga is an ordinary, although exceptionally intelligent and brave chauvinist with a notable talent for poetry. Tiranga’s genesis is described over three comics. The first comic book is Danga (Riot, 1995) that focuses on the hand-in-glove nexus of politicians, police and criminals in organising communal riots. Unrest is orchestrated in Bharatnagar, a locality symbolising the composite culture of India or Bharat and home to an equal number of Hindus and Muslims. An honest and elderly police constable, Ramnath, who tries to fight this nexus behind the riots, is beaten black and blue. His fingers and tongue are then cut off. Tiranga makes a brief appearance, fully determined to stop the riots and the cancerous police-criminal nexus.

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In the second comic book, Ziddi (Obstinate, 1996), the superhero’s identity as Abhay is revealed. When Abhay is out with his classmates and friends to stop the riots, he sees the policemen throwing constable Ramnath’s limp body among the riot victims. Ramnath also happens to be his foster father, whom he saves and admits to a hospital. Ramnath had wanted Abhay to become a police officer. But this superhero-in-waiting desists, deeming them corrupt and unreliable. He instead dons a tricolour uniform and a mask in the battle to protect the nation. As a weapon of choice, he selects the iron shield that had fallen from a statue of Shivaji, the legendary seventeenth-century warrior king of the Marathas who had fought against the Mughal empire under Aurangzeb.14 The statue had been smashed during the riots. Tiranga’s only other weapon is a rope. In the next issue, Kafan (Funeral Shroud, 1996), we learn that Tiranga’s entire blood family was attacked and killed by the unknown politician who had earlier engineered riots. Abhay/Tiranga, however, was saved because he was elsewhere trying to stop a villain, Kafan, who was intent on murdering all of India’s freedom fighters. As is the accepted convention, the family is the first obstacle in the life of a superhero. The death of Abhay’s blood family may have inflicted much pain on the youngster, but it assured his unflagging attention to rout out anti-national villains and the birth of yet another orphaned superhero.

Transhuman superheroes A third character concept of Indian superheroes concentrates more on those with special powers generated by techno-scientific developments for improved intelligence, awareness, strength, and durability.They may be termed as transhuman superheroes in that they go beyond ‘baseline human’ capacities with psychic and bodily enhancement.15 Transhuman superheroes are not so much homo sapiens endowed with superior powers as with the preceding examples, but homo superiors as their very constitution is technologically enhanced. These enhancements may vary and go beyond the mere addition of robotic prosthetics.The superheroes are more transhuman than the interdependent and critical disposition of the posthuman in that they reenact a fantasy of immortality that does not question the idea of humans as masters of the universe.16 However, transhuman superheroes are not attached to an individualist self-centred ideology, as might be the case for a cyborg supervillain like Grand Master Robo, for their primary role is to work for the larger collective, the nation. Due to the mechanisation of human life, these ‘humachines’ would on first impression appear more western than Indian, but vernacular culture leaves an indelible stamp on their stories and personalities.17 Prominent here are the figures of the ‘atomic wonderman of India’, Parmanu, with his alter ego, police officer Vinay, introduced in 1991 by Anupam Sinha, and the robotic Inspector Steel who was created in 1995 by Naresh Kumar, Lalit Singh and Pradeep Sherawat (Plate 3). Again an orphan and with extensive scientific powers, Parmanu can fly as well as use all kinds of nuclear powers as has been the case for US superheroes since the 1940s, most of whom are associated with DC Comics (earlier known

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as National Comics). Created in the image of Atom (Ray Palmer) who was first introduced in 1961, Parmanu appeared as a masked superhero dressed in blue and yellow with red bordered atomic signs. Like Atom (Ray Palmer), Parmanu can shrink his body with a gadget on his belt that enables a multiplicity of functions including the ability to fly and fire from his body. He also has wrist gadgets that reel out ‘atomic rope’ (parmanu rassi). His other capabilities and stories are unique to Parmanu, created afresh for the Indian context. In the issue that relates his genesis, Revolver (1992), Vinay as a young boy witnesses the murder of his father who is a police inspector investigating the whereabouts of a criminal who had killed the rest of his family in a personal vendetta. Vinay too is shot and loses consciousness in front of a divine statue of Shankar. He wakes up to find himself in bed, tended to by his uncle, a professor of science, who had come in the nick of time after being informed of his whereabouts. Suddenly, a monstrous hybrid of human and buffalo enters the room. They both run from the beast named Buffalo. His uncle instructs Vinay to put on a costume. Quick as a shot, he dons the outfit with a flashy belt, topped off with an atomic logo on the chest. He is immediately transformed into Parmanu, as he storms in and defeats Buffalo with dazzling electricity, before going on to vanquish Buffalo’s master and other dastardly fiends that threaten the safety and integrity of India. The rationale for a nuclear superhero in the early 1990s can be observed in the backdrop of events that were taking place in the theatre of South Asian politics well before India and Pakistan had declared their nuclear weapons status with underground tests in 1998.18 Aside from the clandestine drive to develop the nuclear bomb in neighbouring countries, tensions were running high over an extended military exercise by the Indian army along the border with Pakistan in 1986–87. Codenamed Operation Brasstacks, the event involved the troop movement of 400,000 Indian soldiers. Pakistan reacted by threatening to use the ‘bomb’, understood as nuclear, if driven to war.19 The nuclear reflex was closely plugged into asserting nationalist hypermasculinity embodied too in the figure of Parmanu. Another transhuman superhero is Inspector Steel, a seven-foot cyborg who appears to have a surface similarity to Marvel Comics’ Robocop, where a man called Murphy is gunned down by criminals and converted into an android police officer. Both Robocop aka Murphy and Steel are created out of a transhuman programme. More machine than man, they both wear a helmet that covers most of their face. Their personal memories are wiped out but occasionally return to them. Steel had originally been Inspector Amar, whose body parts were replaced by microchips, integrated circuits, armour plating, weapons systems and other electronic parts after a near-fatal accident. Only his brain is human, which is wired into the rest of his electro-mechanical systems. He has a special bike, helicopter and car that are remotely operated through the mini-computer dashboard in his arm. Diverging from Robocop substantively, however, Steel is not a product of a corporation set in the near future as the outcome of scientific enterprise designed to fight supervillains. Instead, Steel is firmly implanted in the present as a crimefighter working with Indian police and intelligence agencies along with his creator,

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the police scientist, Professor Anees. Rajnagar’s Commissioner of Police describes Inspector Steel as a mix of human brain and robotics, available for duty 24/7. He is dubbed a Farz ki Machine (Machine of Duty, 2000). His development as a product of robotics research is another instance of graphically showcasing techno-scientific mastery with a commitment to the protection and progress of India.20 Introduced in 1995 in the eponymous comic, Inspector Amar/Steel is thrown into an impossible situation where he fights a militant group called Octopus. They have placed a remote-controlled bomb in the plane carrying the chief minister; the bomb is in a garland that he wears, alluding to the actual assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam insurgents in 1991. Amar/Steel, dressed in a green uniform and looking like a helmet-clad soldier, not only catches a member of the group but then tries to board the plane from a helicopter. Once on board, he throws the garland worn by the chief minister outside the plane with just seconds to spare.The blast causes the plane to catch fire and Amar/Steel saves all the passengers by helping them get off the moving plane. The plane then crashes, taking the superhero down with it. But, like a phoenix rising from a fire, a steel-framed inspector emerges out of the burning debris. Badly injured, he is later operated upon and his brain placed in an electro-mechanical body to become a transhuman superhero. In Kobra (1996), Steel has flashbacks of his earlier life as Amar.They include tussles with his wife who was the daughter of a wealthy man. She had wanted him to leave his low-paying job as a police inspector – a mere 1,560.65 rupees a month – and join her father’s business so that she can enjoy a better life. On one occasion, Amar comes back home to his wife, who tells him that their son had gone to her father who would send him to the US for further education. Amar is angry at their decision, and the wife threatens to leave him.The scientist, Professor Anees, fears that since Steel’s memory was beginning to return as Amar, his emotions would debilitate his crime-fighting conduct. In Adha Steel (Half Steel, 1996), therefore, the scientist fits Amar’s brain into the body of another robot. He then tells Steel that his father-in-law had died, his son was studying in the US, and his wife went away to some unknown place. Nevertheless, his wife makes a comeback as a supervillain, and when his creator, Professor Anees, later goes rogue, the superhero does not desist from arresting him. Steel’s escapades reveal an unravelling tension between human memory and transhuman prowess, family commitments and national duty, and in his earlier personal struggles, between a life dedicated to civic duty and a neoliberal path that promises more opportunity and lucre. Inevitably, his techno-scientific dedication to civic and national duty prevails as the more valuable pursuit.

Forest guardian superheroes The fourth main character concept refers to those who appear like an Indian form of Tarzan, ‘lord of the jungle’, based on the 1912 novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes. But, again, these are just surface comparison, for the Indian characters are transposed, conceivably counterpoised, when compared with the western jungle

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lord – that is, while Tarzan acted like a colonial mascot of superiority for imparting Anglo-Saxon civilisation to ‘primitive’ people, the Indian forest guardian does not so much as seek to colonise and educate the wild natives but to protect the forest and its natural inhabitants.21 It is for these reasons that our preference is for the term forest, rather than the exotified jungle, a term that also accounts for the rich ecological diversity of the length and breadth of India – from the tropical to the temperate and alpine.These superheroes include Diamond Comics’ Mahabali Shaka by Gulshan Rai issued in 1978, Manoj Comics’ Mahabali Shera by Bimal Chatterji around 1980, and Raj Comics’ Kobi and Bheriya created by Dheeraj Verma in 1996. The Raj Comics’ superheroes are comparatively more distinctive in that Kobi and Bheriya offer both a forest guardian and an angry superhero. Once the two were one human-wolf cross-breed, and now they are two figures who act like two halves of a split personality. A quasi-mythical story about the birth of Kobi/Bheriya is related In Wulfa (1995).Wulfa was the king of Wulfano, a realm of wolf-men who lived 50,000 years ago. He falls in love with a human princess. Using the help of his magical teacher, Bhatiki, Wulfa hypnotises the princess and marries her. The princess gives birth to a half-human, half-wolf who is named Kobi.When the princess’s father comes to know of this, he leads an attack against the kingdom of wolf-men and defeats and captures Wulfa. Meanwhile, another magician breaks the hypnotic spell on the princess, and she is married off to a human prince. Bhatiki then trains Kobi for 20 years, after which Kobi leads a successful attack against his maternal grandfather. Kobi releases his father from prison and leads another attack against the new kingdom of his mother, the princess. This kingdom also falls. However, his mother refuses to accept Kobi as her child. She even curses him so that he turns into a statue of gold that will only come to life when the blood of a virgin is offered to him. Kobi stands there for 50,000 years until the curse is lifted. In Jaanwar (Animal, 1998), Kobi adopts the name, Bheryia. To take Kobi/ Bheriya back to the past kingdom of Wulfano, Bhatiki uses the help of powerful forces of Mobos and Phobos (the powerful oppositional satellites of the moon and a Raj Comics’ version of yin and yang). The presence of both good and dark powers inside his body makes Kobi/Bheriya extremely vulnerable to mood swings. In the subsequent Kobi aur Bheriya (1998), Bhatiki wants the Manichean conflict in Kobi/Bheriya to become so strong that out of frustration, he would give up his life in the present and time-travel via a portal in the ruins of an ancient fort, to his former life as the wolf prince, Kobi, in the ancient kingdom of Wulfano. However, when the lives of Kobi/Bheriya’s beloved, Jane, are threatened by gangsters, there is extreme tension in Kobi/Bheriya’s constitution. His body is pulled apart and two figures emerge. While Kobi becomes the manifestation of an angry wolf-like creature with dark magical powers, Bheriya becomes the cool-headed, skilled and humane person. Both of these characters stay on in the forest, battling against hunters, poachers, smugglers and insurgents who threaten the sanctity of their turf.

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Angry superheroes The last main character concept covers the rise of ‘angry superheroes’. Recalling the ‘angry young man’ of 1970s popular cinema, the superhero operates in a liminal zone such that he is compelled to pursue a very personal and often idiosyncratic path of social justice. This more gloomy turn gave space to Anthony. Created in 1996 by Raj Comics’ Tarun Kumar Wahi, he is an angry ‘undead’ hero who belonged to the minority Christian community. Doga too epitomises a turn to a dark side – a dog-masked superhero created in 1993 by Sanjay Gupta,Tarun Kumar Wahi and the artist, Manu (Plate 4). Anthony’s character somewhat resembles The Crow by James O’Barr.22 In O’Barr’s story, the Crow refers to Eric, who, along with his fiancée, is assaulted and left for dead by a gang. Subsequently Eric is resurrected by a crow and takes revenge on his attackers. But there are also some significant departures from the Crow with Raj Comics’ character, for Anthony Golsalvez used to be a successful Goan musician and singer. Crow Sangeet (Crow Music, 1996) relates how his album became so popular that his rivals tortured him to death. However, due to supernatural forces unleashed by his music, his soul lived on. Anthony is both dead and alive, rising from the grave to return to the land of the living at night. He rests with his pet crow, Prince, who sits on his tombstone and alerts him to cases of injustice with a series of shrill cries. Anthony left behind a wife and daughter. As he becomes part of the ‘living undead’, he can never be fully with them. Instead, his liminal persona sets out to vanquish crime and other dark forces lurking in his hometown, Roopnagar, so that they along with the other residents are kept safe. Anthony may be a shady character, but he is also one who is an avenger in the pursuit of good over evil. He can communicate with and command the spirits of dead people. He has abilities to teleport himself and create thandi aag, ‘cold fire’, a sensation that is akin to the ‘burning’ effect when ice is held tightly for too long. Since Anthony is dead and his body has no warmth, his fire is also cold like ‘burning ice’. In Mard aur Murda (The Man and the Dead Body, 1997), two angry superheroes meet: Anthony fights Doga and when Anthony catches hold of him, Doga’s hands start shaking in pain such that his gun drops. Anthony comments that ‘this is my cold fire which doesn’t burn but torments . . . and the victim feels that his heart is in the clutch of someone else’ (p. 45). Doga saves himself by dousing Anthony with water under the belief that dead souls are scared of water and fire. Doga is the epitome of instant justice in the world of the living. His blueish mask and impressive body suit recalls the dark tones of the Hindu god, Shiva; and his take-no-prisoners approach, the deity’s role as the destroyer when vigorously performing the rudra tandav, the cosmic dance of creation and destruction. As replete in folklore, when evil is rife on earth, superhumans need to eliminate the rot without remorse. As Doga operates on the fringes of legality, there are also some parallels to be made with the Italian sailor-adventurer, Corto Maltese, created by Hugo Pratt in 1967 Although he bears no physical resemblance to

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Maltese, his attributes are similar in that he too protects the weak and oppressed. Even if actions lie on the thin margin between good and bad, readers have come to accept them as the only effective way to overcome entrenched social and political problems where state authorities are either mired in corruption or sinking in ineptitude. As an orphaned child found living with dogs, the superhero-to-be is raised by a Muslim dacoit, Daku Halkan Singh, made clear in Curfew (1993). Since he was found abandoned on garbage, his parents are unknown. He is named Suraj, a Hindu name meaning sun, but otherwise defies any specific markers of religious or caste identity. Suraj escapes from the brutal Halkan, who he ends up killing. He grows up to be a bodybuilder running a gymnasium in the tough streets of the megapolis, Mumbai. This toughness is engrained in Doga’s resolve to eradicate villains, and his stories are often delivered with the extremes of graphic violence with even recourse to paramilitary paraphernalia. Suraj is portrayed as a modern man and has a girlfriend, Monika (the alias of the superheroine, Lomri). But he also adheres to Indian traditions such as fanatically showing respect to his elders having been trained in various physical activities including weight-lifting, boxing, martial arts and shooting by his four fictive uncles, Adrak, Dhania, Haldi and Mirchi. Instinctively, Suraj/Doga can communicate with dogs. He is a law unto himself. He maintains a laboratory for research on criminals and relies upon a chemical called sodium thiopental, also known as truth serum, for interrogations. This chemical is known to break down a person’s resistance by suppressing the more complex functions of the brain. He is wont to make other compounds in his laboratory as the need arises. In an effort to become stronger, in Kobi Bhai (2002), Doga is shown making his own steroids to match the animal strength of Kobi, the superhero with a short temper, magical powers and animalesque passion that is offset by his alter ego Bheriya as explored above. Doga is a human superhero albeit with a formidable physique, but unlike the extra(ordinary) superhero, he is a vigilante. In order to tackle the grime of crime, Doga has to some extent drop to that level. He deals mostly with crime syndicates, black marketers and communalist stirrers in a dissident style such that the police and even the army have to pursue him. The year of his launch in 1993 was itself a communally tumultuous year in recent Indian history. The Ram Janmabhumi movement led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party to build a Ram temple in Ayodhya had reached its peak in December 1992, leading to the demolition of the Babri Masjid that culminated in riots across the country. Indicative of the brutal violence that ravaged India, Doga is one superhero whose enemies have a gritty urban reality about them. He has no qualms about shooting whoever comes in his way of pursuing ‘natural justice’, justice that is not decreed by state legislature but by circumstantial ethics – that is, conduct that seems most appropriate to the circumstances so as to protect the innocent. As ‘Mumbai’s saviour’ (Mumbai ka rakhwala), the angry avenger’s mission is not just to wipe out crime, but to uproot it from its very bowels wherever those entrails might be located.

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The world of Indian superpower The 1980s precipitated a new age of Indian superheroes at a time when state-of-the-art technologies and the opening up to new worlds fuelled imaginaries to career forwards on the global stage. In times of stupendous trials and tribulations, only incredible individuals could conceivably rise to the occasion and help neutralise them. Steadily, while earlier decades saw adventure comics as incidental and even detrimental to nation-building, the attempt to inscribe adventure comics into the national popular became more prominent in the 1980s in the face of increasing threats against India’s sovereignty (see Chapter 7). Mythological or historical comics alone could not cut the mustard. Unlike the deities, saints, legends and freedom fighters that populate Amar Chitra Katha, Indian superheroes present new tales for new times through individuals with outstanding powers. They were created in a splintered and refracted image of the west. But they were not merely copies of foreign superheroes, relied upon vernacular stimuli, and to varying extents, drew upon a wider arena of influences both Indian and international along the trans/creation spectra.Where one influence ends and inspiration begins is akin to chasing rainbows. Indeed, trans/creation need not just have one singular direction – western emanations that are then transmogrified or indigenised. For many young people in mofussil India, they came across Indian superheroes first before any western protagonist. The latter were then seen through the lens of Indian superheroism, where they continue to hold their own status as more authentic if not altogether ‘original’. As one of our 25-year-old interlocutors, Rishi, from Deogarh in Jharkhand state, said: ‘When I first saw Captain America, I thought he was a copy of Tiranga’. As a feature of ‘modernities in the backyard’ where imaginaries run rife but with limited infrastructure and opportunities, his reflection recalls the young aficionado who thought the acronyms in DC Comics stood for Dolton Comics based in Chennai. Outside of court, the lens on trans/creation then becomes one of perspective and positionality, and not necessarily a barometer of accuracy.

Notes 1 Amitabh Kumar (2008) Raj Comics for the Hard Headed, New Delhi: The SARAI Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies http://sarai.net/category/publi cations/graphic-novels/. Accessed: December 11, 2017. 2 Raminder Kaur (2011) ‘Atomic Comics: Parabolic Mimesis and the Graphic Fictions of Science’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(4): 329–347. 3 On transcreation, see Sharad Devarajan cited in David Adesnik (2005) ‘Marvel Comics and Manifest Destiny: Spider-Man is Going to India. Just How Universal are America’s Most Cherished Comic-Book Ideals?’, Weekly Standard, January 28, p. 12, www.weekly standard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/181egxmv.asp. Accessed: June 12, 2014. See also Dan O’Rourke and Pravin A. Rodrigues (2007) ‘The Transcreation of a Mediated Myth: Spider-Man in India’, in The Amazing Transforming Superhero! Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film and Television, ed. Terence R. Wandtke, Jefferson, NC: MacFarland and Company; and Shilpa Dave (2012, 2013) ‘Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translating/Transcreating of American Cultural Narratives’,

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in Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, eds. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein, London: Bloomsbury. 4 Pulapre Balakrishnan (1990) ‘Economic Consequences of Rajiv Gandhi’, Economic and Political Weekly, 25(2): 301–304; and Bernard Weinraub (1991) ‘Economic Crisis Forcing Once Self-Reliant India to Seek Aid’, New York Times, June 29. 5 See Bhabani Sen Gupta (1988) ‘Rajiv Gandhi and his Forty Horses’, Economic and Political Weekly, 23(19): 938–940. Although not stipulating what kind of comic books, Rajiv Gandhi had even mentioned in parliament that his favourite reading material was comics. His comments invited ridicule at the time from those who viewed comics as naïve child’s play. However, their mere articulation amongst the Indian political elites could be viewed as validation of the appetite for a comics industry in the subcontinent. See Aruna Rao (2001) ‘From Self-Knowledge to Superheroes: The Story of Indian Comics’, in Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines, and Picture Books, ed. John A. Lent, Honolulu, HI: University of HawaiI Press, p. 42. To boot, the former Bharatya Janata Party prime minister, A. B. Vajpayee, was also a keen comic book fan, with much admiration for Tinkle. 6 Cited in Adesnik, ‘Marvel Comics and Manifest Destiny’. 7 This is not to overlook the spiritual-religious component in US comics. B. J. Oropeza, ed. (2005) The Gospel According to Superheroes: Religion and Pop Culture, New York: Peter Lang. 8 See Molu Ram Thakur (1997) Myths, Rituals, and Beliefs in Himachal Pradesh, New Delhi: Indus Publishing House, p. 17; and Vipul Namdeorao Ambade, Jaydeo Laxman Borkar and Satin Kalidas Meshram (2012) ‘Homicide by Direct Snake Bite: A Case of Contract Killing’, Medical Science Law, 52: 40–43. 9 Priyanka Kotamraju (2012) ‘The Man Who Made Them Superheroes’, Indian Express, October 28, http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/the-man-who-made-them-super heroes/1022940/2. Accessed: December 8, 2017. 10 See David Luddens, ed. (1996) Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 11 Another short-lived alter ego of Nagraj was presented in 2009 a series of comics written by Anupam Sinha – Nagraj ke Baad (After Nagraj), Fuel, and Venom. The superhero now works as a manager of a security agency, as Nagraj Shah or Snake Eyes. This transformation was compelled as the superhero was forced to reveal his identity, but this avatar of Nagraj has not reappeared since. 12 Another popular superhero is the winged warrior prince, Bhokal. He veers more towards the mythic past rather than the present, however his creation story is a sword-and-sorcery fantasy in which an otherworldly prince descended from parilok, ‘world of the fairies’, to take part in a tournament and went on to defend the people of a fictional city,Vikasnagar. 13 Interestingly, in a sub-series – Khooni Khandan (Killer Clan, 1997), Ateet (Past, 1998), and Jigsaw (1998) – Dhruv’s ancestry is traced back to feudal lords in France. It is stated that his living relations continue to own grand villas in the country. However, the idea was an experimental offshoot that has not since been revisited. 14 Many of the later insurgents are shown as Muslims so Shivaji could be construed as an icon of communalism as has been noted for the Amar Chitra Katha series by Karline McLain (2009) India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, Chapter 4. However,Tiranga’s creator, Hanif Azhar, is himself a Muslim.To infer then that Shivaji is a communalist icon in this instance is too simplistic. 15 Paul di Filippo (2012) ‘Beyond the Human Baseline: Special Powers’, in Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: The Sub-Genres of Science Fiction, ed. Keith Brooke, London: Palgrave MacMillan, p. 156. 16 See Steve Fuller (2017) ‘The Posthuman and the Transhuman as Alternative Mappings of the Space of Political Possibility’, Journal of Posthuman Studies 1(2):151-165. 17 John Benditt (1999) ‘Intelligent Machines: Humachines’, MIT Technology Review, May 1, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/400387/humachines/.

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18 See Itty Abraham (1998) The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State, London: Zed Books. 19 In an exclusive interview to journalist, Kuldeep Nayar, A. Q. Khan, who is considered the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, said: ‘If you (India) ever drive us to the wall, as you did in East Pakistan, we will use the [nuclear] bomb’. Nayar mentions that this was later confirmed by Pervez Musharraf when he became the president of Pakistan. See Kuldip Nayar (2006) Scoop!: Inside Stories from the Partition to the Present, New Delhi: HarperCollins,p. 175. See also P. R. Chari (2013) ‘Nuclear Signaling in South Asia: Revisiting A. Q. Khan’s 1987 Threat’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 14, https://carnegieendowment.org/2013/11/14/nuclear-signaling-in-south-asiarevisiting-a.-q.-khan-s-1987-threat-pub-53328 Accessed: June 14, 2014. 20 See Gyan Prakash (1999) Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; and Raminder Kaur (2013) Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns, New Delhi: Routledge. 21 See Bram Wicherink (2010) ‘Tarzan! The Untamed Image of the Perfect Savage’, Etnofoor, 22(2): 90–97. 22 The Crow initially came out in comic form in 1989 with Caliber Comics, followed by a Hollywood film in 1994.

4 GENDERING GRAPHICS

GENDERING GRAPHICSGENDERING GRAPHICS

During World War II, a German scientist had created a genetic fusion process that was used to create powerful wolf-like men, bheriya-manav. A gang of the hybrid creatures had set up base in the uninhabited forests of the Lakshadweep Islands off India’s western coastline.They descend upon Super Commando Dhruv, who is out there to investigate, and is summarily captured, imprisoned and forced to drink a solution that induces genetic mutations. Chandika, a super-smart superheroine, rushes to the scene. She uses high frequency ultrasonic beams from a gadget fixed in her belt to immobilise and defeat the wolverine beasts. As she later explains, she had reasoned that as the creatures shared the same gene pool as wolves, they would have a similar response to the beams. By coming to Dhruv’s rescue, she is able to avert the superhero’s imminent degradation. From her first appearance in Swarg ki Tabahi (Destruction of Heaven, circa 1987/88), the fourth superhero comic of the Super Commando Dhruv series, Chandika appears as a mysterious, masked person with long blonde hair wearing a figure-hugging, purple and blue catsuit (Figure 4.1). When not on her daring escapades as a sworn enemy of outlaws, Chandika secretly reverts to being Schweta, the docile younger sister of Dhruv, often depicted in the conventional two-piece Punjabi attire, shalwaar kameez. She is simple and simply genius. Her twofold identities revolve around what may be described as a ‘slipstream superheroine’ – that is, her one identity trailing the traces of the other that may be known to the reader but is not necessarily picked up by other protagonists in the story. Owing largely to her blonde hair, Chandika appears western, but the reader knows that she is Indian. The divided dynamics serve a number of purposes. First, it indicates a drive to introduce Indian superheroines into comic reader sensibilities, while demonstrating prowess in adventure and speculative fiction genres, usually considered as the forte of the west.1 Second, it gives an exotic sheen to an otherwise Indian character, laying the premises for her otherworldly capabilities. Third, it validates the dynamic roles of Indian women in the fields of science,

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FIGURE 4.1 The

superheroine, Chandika, Super Commando Dhruv’s aide (n.d.), Raj Comics, publicity image

technology and other modern vocations, and this before their expansion in the neoliberal labour market. In this chapter, we reflect on such dynamics by first, considering the distinct place held by female characters in Raj Comics superhero tales.We move on to attributes of masculinity or, more to the point, hypermasculinity, as they manifest themselves in the

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superhero comics, before focusing on their symbiotic relations with women in their more mundane and superheroic or villainous forms.2 We then proceed to a discussion on what we have termed the ‘super-sidekick’ or ‘last-minute’ superheroine and an enquiry into gender and villainy, before ending with an elaboration of the birth of Shakti in 1998 on the blazing trails left by pioneers such as Chandika.

Super women The Indian case study sparks comparisons with strong female protagonists that have emerged in the west, beginning with the likes of Wonder Woman in 1941 to latter-day multi-media avatars such as Lara Croft, who first appeared in 1996 in the video game, Tomb Raider.3 There is certainly a transnational debt to be acknowledged here, particularly when it comes to the sexualised appearance of superheroines. Other structural insights for western comics equally apply. As Sherrie A. Inness proposes, despite their active roles:‘The freedoms that these figures suggest frequently lie between a narrow set of prescribed social boundaries’.4 In India, these prescribed social boundaries do not merely result in masculinised femininity, tomboys, feisty women or variations of the dominatrix.5 Instead, they range from culturally sanctioned repositories of feminine power as epitomised by Hindu goddesses like Durga and Kali, and other socially respected abilities demonstrated by women’s political and intellectual achievements. Archetypes and active models of female power, therefore, are already a familiar and integral part of the subcontinent’s socio-cultural order. In superhero comics, they are reshaped into newer, hypermodern avatars.6 Karline McLain’s study on Amar Chitra Katha highlights how female characters are represented in mythological and historical stories. Idealised Indian femininity, she argues, revolves around the pativrata, the self-sacrificing wife, and the virangana, the martial woman who embodies male virtues of strength and courage, yet is equally prone to sacrifice all for the people.7 Similarly, Nandini Chandra highlights pativrata and virangana models embedded in a larger framework of a sati-shakti dichotomy in the comic book genre.8 By the end of the narrative arc, the virangana, as an embodiment of feminine energy or shakti, reverts to the sacrificial sati. Moving to the recent era with a focus on English-language comics circulating in India and amongst its diaspora, Sara Austin considers representations of women in Liquid Comics available from the 2000s.9 She highlights the prominence of ancient Vedic archetypes alongside new ones such as the ‘prodigal woman’ for those who transgress normative feminine behaviour and are open to violence or censure unless a male relative intervenes. In comparison, the representations of women in the Raj Comics oeuvre are neither simply westernised nor are they always framed by a mythicised or Orientalised discursive framework. Often they present vibrant images of modern womanhood. They are not prodigal women to be saved by men. Rather, they save men in dire circumstances. While demonstrating selfless conduct, they are not sacrificial lambs. Their role is to engage with and overcome paragons of evil and violence and help re-establish the moral order. They sustain and support superheroes not only from the homes, as is the traditional prerogative, but also from an active engagement with the outside world.

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Nevertheless, engagement with the world – whether it be as female mortals or as their fantastic aliases – is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself indicative of singular ambitions. Female characters are mostly heroic handmaidens tending to the needs of the superhero when he is in dire straits. With the exception of the superheroine, Shakti, women do not come centre-circle in Raj Comics. They provide a beacon on India, but not necessarily present a beacon of India, as does the superhero who stands in for a strong and incorruptible nation. The relationship is not simply metaphorical as conveyed with the interleaving of women and nation in representations of Mother India (Bharat Mata), a supreme icon of Indian culture and its perpetuity.10 There is little room for an orthodox Mother India figure in the narrative drive of these comics and her protective and familial embrace: for, as a gendered metaphor for the nation, she would then become its static reification. Rather, women’s relationship to the nation in the comic books is dynamic yet synecdochal – that is, they may be actively engaged but they allude to something that is bigger than them, the smoke that points to the gun that went off, the figure that points to the main narrative of the superhero’s exploits.

Millennial masculinity For many in the pantheon of superheroes in the Raj Comics publishing world, morality is deeply driven through their appearance, characterisation and conduct. Good is perfection incarnate, and evil the ultimate in imperfection. Despite their secular affectations, many Raj Comics superheroes have been created in the image of the maryada purushottama, the perfect man, steeped in ideas drawn from Hindu religio-mythology. The semi-divine king Ram is one of the main archetypes of the male patriarch. From the 1980s, the Hindu right began to promote Ram as a national hero.11 In this Ram revival, the divine king was not just presented as a mythological character such as the Pandava brothers, Arjuna or Bheema, in the ancient epic, Mahabharata. He was the myth itself come to life. Essentially, he was the Hindu hero who could never be defeated. By analogy, such aspirations were imagined for a country struggling to make its mark on the international map. Ram became an icon for a nation searching to assert its own strong and unique identity. Following rampant corruption and upheaval, the idea of Ram Rajya – a system of government based on honesty and integrity introduced by Ram in Ayodhya – became extremely attractive to Hindus of an orthodox persuasion. Accordingly, the right-wing campaign for the Ram Janmabhumi mandir (temple) in Ayodhya boosted the idea of Ram as the chief martial deity of the Hindu pantheon, rather than his earlier association as the seventh avatar of the god,Vishnu.12 The Raj Comics industry absorbed these currents in political culture, although they were careful not to perpetuate, but rather fight communalist stirrings in their fictionalised narratives. They are not part of any ostensible political project, certainly not in earlier decades. But they register wider currents that may well serve communalist forces in that several of the protagonists have Hindu names and thematics representative of the target majoritarian market, a subject that we return to in Chapters 7 and 11.

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There is a notable change in Indian superhero comics produced from the late 1980s to those of the early twenty-first century. Principally, stories have become more global, graphics more adventurous, and bodies more muscular and/or eroticised. Compare, for instance, the cover of Pratishodh ki Jwala (The Fire of Vengeance, 1987, Plate 2) with a more recent comic on Dhruv, Code Name Comet from 2013 (Figure 4.2). In his earlier rendition, Dhruv is relatively inert with his trim

FIGURE 4.2 Super

Commando Dhruv with a schematic silhouette of Dr.Virus behind him, Code Name Comet (2013), Raj Comics, front cover

68  Gendering graphics

yet non-sculpted body. In his later avatar, aided by digitalised three-dimensional rendering, he becomes a strong and strapping visual statement of steroidal superheroism. He is shown as a moody, muscular, angst-ridden character in a torque twist ready for dynamic action. As a reflection of the contemporary cult of the body beautiful, he reveals a finely chiselled build with thighs and torso pulsating with muscle topped off with a pair of bulging biceps. In this display of ‘millennial masculinity’, the superheroes flex their muscles in tune to the country flexing its economic, scientific and political clout.13 A remarkable example of the hypermasculine yet secular superhero is Doga, out to protect communities of all creeds. As a liminal vigilante, he defies the more standard attributes of maryada purushottama. In his superheroic escapades, his six-footfive-inches frame dons a menacing dog-mask and is kitted out with intimidating belts of bullets and ammunition of every kind (Plate 4). The grey-blueish rendering of his bare skin also takes on a metallic sheen as if he was a super-cyborg. It would seem that the muscular human body has surpassed itself to become a metallic human-animal hybrid, where Doga becomes the ultimate expression of physical power that he rigorously maintains. In Doga ki Kasratein (Doga’s Exercises, 1998), the superhero’s daily routine of exercises is listed including strenuous jogging, twistwalking and pelvic rotations in the gymnasium that he runs as his alias, Suraj. His steadfast attachment to a fitness regime is highlighted by Doga giving a lecture on how to do these exercises so as others too could aspire to his heights. In the comic book, Savdhaan Doga (Doga, Be Alert, 1998), the superhero goes to the Assam forest in northeast India to look for a drug kingpin, Michael. This headman is the brother of Jane, the love interest of Kobi and Bheriya who are the immensely powerful and brutal guardians of the forest.To reach Michael, Doga first crosses paths with the sworn enemies of Kobi and Bheriya, who think that Doga is invited as their guest. After eliminating them, Doga then has to face the incredible strengths of Kobi and Bheriya, who he also goes on to vanquish in a blood-thirsty orgy of violence. Doga’s status as a super-alpha male is graphically sealed. Similarly, in Cheekh Doga Cheekh! (Scream Doga Scream!, 1996), Doga does not so much as whimper when he is stabbed in the hand with a screwdriver. His hypermasculinity in action is pumped up by a display of stoic, valiant and selfless duty to protect the innocent, come what may. Not only is his masculinity defined with respect to his opponents, but as ‘an avenger of the street’, it is enhanced with respect to his supposed allies, where his masculine efficacy supplants the venality and fragility of the state, the official yet futile dispensers of law.14 However, while superheroes may have become muscular, six-packed he-men by the 2000s, their ‘millennial masculinity’ does not simply equate with standard associations of hypermasculinity along with ideas to do with patriarchy and male potency.15 Rather, their image of muscle-bound virility is intricately tied with notions of celibacy or ‘contained sexuality’, and their formidable powers put to the use of protecting the nation.16 A lack of family implies that they are free to pursue their main mission as national crusaders as well as dispense with customary gender roles. The superhero’s characteristics are such that he often appears to liaise with

Gendering graphics  69

female aides and heroines as equals, and he is just as comfortable with his domestic duties as he is fighting off dangerous villains. Thus, while portraying a martial masculinity, the superhero’s character is also one that equates with the ‘modern man’ appearing to recognise gender equality and mutually transferable roles within circumscribed limits. The King of Snakes, Nagraj, appears to be the most ‘egalitarian’ of the Raj Comics superhero pantheon: as his alias at Bharti Communications, he has a female boss after whom the company is named. In addition, one of Nagraj’s most staunch female supporters, Saudangi, who descends from Cleopatra’s family in ancient Egypt, actually resides inside his serpentine body. Introduced in Nagraj aur Jadu ka Shahenshah (Nagraj and the Emperor of Magic, 1990), Saudangi is a spiked ichchhadhari or shape-shifting Egyptian cobra who can entwine herself around an enemy before piercing their skin. She can also navigate mystical labyrinthine caves and subterranean passages. Visarpi, another of the prominent female characters in the Nagraj series, is the love interest of Nagraj and a powerful figure in her own right as one-time empress of Nagdweep, the sacred kingdom of the shape-shifting snakes (Figure 4.3). Refracting real-life dilemmas for bachelors, the prospect of marriage is a recurrent theme for all the superheroes even if they intend to remain single. This resistance to betrothal is not due to any issues that superheroes may have with commitment. Rather, it is as a result of their higher duty as saviours of the nation,

FIGURE 4.3 Nagraj

and Visarpi recline on Sheshnag (usually associated wth the Hindu god,Vishnu) with allies, Saudangi, Sheetnag and Nagu, as part of the snake’s many heads (n.d.), Raj Comics, publicity image

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if not humanity at large.17 Nevertheless, superheroes have multiple love interests, even though they appear to be faithful to one and only show platonic care for the other. Such dual relations set up male-centric triangles.18 Nagraj with Visarpi and Saudangi; and Dhruv with his love interest and arch enemy’s daughter, Commander Natasha, and a computer expert, Richa, to outline but two instances. In one story, Shrap (Curse, circa 2006), Nagraj had gone for milan yamini with Visarpi and leaves Saudangi in charge of the city of Mahanagar. Milan yamini implies both a night for meeting and mating. On her surveillance tours, Saudangi comes across a gang of robbers and, after being hit by a hammer, lies comatose. She is rescued by Shu, a faithful subordinate of her father who is the monarch of a magical realm in Egypt. Shu learns that Saudangi’s brain can be healed at the pyramid of the wicked Thoth. The pyramid is under the curse of an Egyptian deity, Mayaz. But there are two problems. Saudangi has to go to Mayaz in a fully conscious state, and then she would have to suffer her curse. The first problem is resolved with the Gem of Ra, the Sun God, who temporarily reactivates the brain of Saudangi for a day. Eventually Saudangi accesses the sarcophagus where Thoth’s body is kept, which awakens the pharaoh, who then repairs her brain. Mayaz then curses her and transforms her into a mummified body. Saudangi escapes the menace by asking for a boon – for Nagraj to be her husband – who is already meeting with Visarpi. By invoking Nagraj as her life partner, Saudangi saves herself from the curse. Such stories establish the status of the superhero above and beyond that of the super/ heroine, as well as legitimating the multiple relationships of superheroes. It is as if the superhero has the licence to love even if he does not appear to visibly dabble in the practice in the comic book series.

The ‘super-sidekick’ From the outset, when the alias of Chandika, Schweta, was introduced in Pratishodh ki Jwala, she is presented as a young innovator who resolves complicated problems with her scientific acumen and genius initiative. She can design and make gadgets such as ear plugs for Dhruv to protect him from the sonic blasts of a heinous scientist who exploits the power of sound to make destructive weapons, Dhawaniraj (King of Sound) in Awaz ki Tabahi (Destruction by Sound, circa 1991/92). Schweta had also created a small contraption that could regulate the air surrounding a body at its own temperature in Barf ki Chita (Funeral by Ice, circa 1988).This device proves to be essential for Dhruv’s survival in intemperate climates where his acrobatic agility and razor-sharp intellect is not enough to fend off his enemies’ assaults. Schweta’s significance to the superhero’s adventures is both integral yet peripheral. It is integral because, whether as an intellectual, scientific or as a physical aide, women are essential to the superhero’s image of invincibility. It is peripheral because women either remain outside of the main field of action and/or only ever make brief appearances when the superhero is close to death. Despite her stupendous powers, Schweta/Chandika does not have an independent career of her own, nor does she embark on an autonomous adventure. Instead, she partakes in intrepid

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activities only to aid her adopted brother, Dhruv – one identity firmly based in what appears to be a conventional home, but a home that also accommodates scientific advances; the other in her masked persona that is able to soar, strategise and fight, albeit very fleetingly. The gendered analysis begs a comparison with Partha Chatterjee’s outline of the dichotomy forged in the colonial era: the home (ghar), the hearth of family, religion and spiritual values; and bahir (outside) – the material realm of science and technology.19 Here it would seem that the associations of bahir have partly leaked into the ghar, and the outside now is a dangerous place of dark and villainous forces that only superhero/ines can successfully navigate. Science and technology may still reign supreme in this outside, but it is subject to capricious forces that can be deployed by good and bad alike, as we shall further explore in Chapter 6. The device of the ‘last-minute’ superheroine applies also for Lomri in the Doga series, and for Pralayanka in the Parmanu series. Lomri is the alias of Monica, a mystical fox-like creature who can run faster than Doga and saves him on numerous occasions from treacherous predicaments (Figure 4.4). Pralayanka is the alter ego of the news reporter, Mamta, and is a winged superheroine created by Professor Kamal Kumar. She may well have a career, but this vocation is more often than not premised on reporting to Parmanu. Her first and only priority is to help and save Parmanu. In Budhipalat (Reverse/Altered Cognition, 1996), Pralayanka swoops down to save Parmanu, who is about to jump off the hundred-foot-tall Delhi monument, Qut’b Minar, under the impression that he had killed his professorial mentor. But the superhero is under the influence of the criminal, Budhipalat, a teenager with extensive mental powers who in turn is controlled by the fiendish Khoonkhar (meaning savage or ferocious). To similar ends, in Qahar (Havoc, 1995), when Parmanu is lost in thought and flies towards high-tension wires to a certain death, Pralayanka swoops in to save him. While Parmanu is sent by the professor to handle crime scenes, he sends Pralayanka out only when it becomes necessary to protect him and not directly to handle the crime. Fittingly, she next intervenes only when the supervillain, Andhi (Storm), is about to bury Parmanu in the sand; and she disappears just as instantly after her work is done. Without her help, Parmanu would almost certainly have perished. Virtually all superheroines hide their faces behind masks, whereas with only a couple of exceptions, those of the superheroes are clearly visible. The phenomena indicate that the mask not only hides women’s real identity, but it also allows them to break out of the confines of social convention. From another perspective, however, the mask continues a sense of purdah, a means of physical separation or veiling, which entitles them to have an active public life while not altogether abandoning the screen of gendered expectations. So the superheroine is at once modern, and simultaneously, one that is framed by traditional ideas about womanhood attendant with restrictions on their appearance and movements. They appear suddenly as masked figures, and disappear just as quickly, presenting little of a social dilemma for the superheroes. It is as if they are from nowhere and go nowhere, even though the learnt reader is well aware of their alter egos. Women remain as ‘aide-de-camp’, adventurous yet subordinating their own ambitions to those of the superhero.

superheroine, Lomri, vanishes from Doga’s view, in Lomri (The Fox, 1996), Raj Comics, p. 19

FIGURE 4.4 The

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Relationships between the superhero and their closet beloved may be paralleled in western comics to some extent where, for instance, Peter Parker, the alias of Spider-Man, has a college sweetheart. Mary Jane Watson (after the death of his first love interest, Gwen Stacy) is always there for him, even though she fully recognises that there can never be a full relationship with him. The main difference in the two traditions of comic representations is that in the west, Peter Parker has to court the young woman to win her love, whereas in Raj Comics, relationships with the opposite sex are presented as a fait accompli: there is hardly ever a depiction of a romance developing, or indeed waning, between the male and female protagonists, indicating an area where comic book producers feel a degree of discomfort in romantic explorations. By the same token, the bottled romance never dies, certainly from the point of view of the women. While women may have their feelings hurt, there are no instances of romantic heartbreak for superheroes in Indian comic books.The superheros’ attention remains fixated on the outside world, and even though they may have self-doubt from time to time, they are less captive to a whirlpool of emotions as might on occasion distress the women. This is not to say that Indian superheroes are insensitive, only that their emotional pull is with respect to crimes and grievances that affect ‘innocent people’, not with respect to the trials and tribulations of personal or romantic relationships for this would be a distraction from what is considered their more important moral and civic duty to the larger collective. A compelling superhero comic is one that combines ‘the right does of action and emotion’, as one of our interlocutors put it, where the affective is less to do with familial or romantic sentiments and more to do with the civic and patriotic.

Gendering villainy Just as much as their male counterparts, villainesses have infinite capacity for selfish conduct, megalomaniac ambitions, and sophisticated technologies along with intellectual and/or physical abilities put to fiendish and violent use, as we shall further explore in Chapter 8. One thing remains distinctive, however: aside from unique figures such as Shakti, only when the female is othered as a villain outside the pale of civic order can the woman pursue an independent self-orientated pathway.20 Notable villainesses include Vishkanya (Poison Maiden). In her eponymous comic from 1996, she is born from a yajna (fire rite) in order to kill Nagraj (see Figure 5.3 in Chapter 5). She is ‘death incarnate’ (p. 3) and has the ability to absorb the powers of Nagraj, leaving him incapacitated. Madam Cold (1995) is fittingly made of ice. She mutates into an ice woman after an experiment to test the limits of human endurance of sub-zero temperatures fails while she was wearing a special protective suit designed by her lover. The villainess may also use feminine charms somewhere along her antics, invoking the idea of the femme fatale – the woman who is simultaneously attractive and dangerous. But this only manifests itself in a partially developed sense in Indian superhero comic books. Sexualisation may be noted in the representation of women, but acts of seduction are not.

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Some of the villainesses may pose as foreigners or have foreign features or attributes. Miss Killer, for instance, was originally a Japanese scientific genius who has access to diverse technologies, can teleport at will, and can read people’s minds. When she was introduced around 1991 in Nagraj aur Super Commando Dhruv, it was the first time that the superheroes came together in a multi-starrer in order to fight her phenomenal powers. Her latter-day indigenisation as an immortal apsara (a celestial maiden or nymph) was highlighted in the parallel world series, Narak Nashak (The Destroyer of Hell, 2009-). She had developed into an Indian genius as evident in Mrityujivi (The Living Dead, 2011, Plate 5; see Chapter 6). Her transformation points to the transference of the ‘foreign’ into the body politic of India. This is a characteristic trait of a neoliberal India that spawns both neurosis and confidence: neurosis because evil is located less and less in an immoral elsewhere outside of the nation, but is a contaminant within its very environs. Be that as it may, the country has the resources and capacity to confidently contain and neutralise lurking evils on all sides, a phenomenon that we examine in the final chapter.

The super-other One prominent exception to the theme of the superheroine as subservient sidekick is Shakti. She was created in 1998 by Tarun Kumar Wahi, first depicted as a nurse, then as a social worker called Chanda. Shakti’s origins are described in the multi-starrer Doga-Shakti (1998), and are worth relating at length for the way social urgencies to do with gender inequalities are highlighted, and yet again, for demonstrating how Indian religio-mythical prototypes are invoked along the trans/ creation spectra with respect to narratives of superheroism (see Chapter 3). Any impressionistic comparison of Shakti with DC Comics’ Wonder Woman need then be cast aside. Doga-Shakti opens with a litany of scenes where oppression against women in India is vividly illustrated. A rotund Brahmin pundit tells an opiated widow that her life is meaningless and that she has to go with her husband on his funeral pyre as a sacrificial sati. The next few scenes depict a woman being burnt for her dowry while her husband ignores her pleas for help. The man then remarries for another dowry.We then move on to vignettes in the life of Chanda, who has just given birth to a daughter in hospital. The husband quietly talks to the doctor and suggests that he should get rid of the girl. The doctor gives a fatal injection to the baby, who has a violent spasm and dies. Chanda awakes and shrieks on seeing her baby’s death, realising that this is how her other daughters had also died. Her husband begins to beat her, yelling that she has not been able to provide him with even one single son. In a strident protest, she wipes off her sign of marriage, sindoor, from her forehead. He is about to strike her with a surgical knife but the doctor stops him. Instead, the doctor punches her in the womb where her caesarean stitches would most be affected. Chanda’s flailing body is then thrown into a remote place, Kalighat, the valley of the goddess, Kali.

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There is a Kali temple nearby that Chanda manages to reach in her frail state. She cries passionately at the goddess’ sculpted feet and pleads: Come outside your stone statue and see. See, this pierced bosom of a mother. When my one daughter was brutally assaulted, my heart was torn apart. But your hundreds of thousands of daughters are being assaulted. . . . You are the mother of the world, don’t you feel pain? If you are not just a figment of the imagination, why don’t you break your cover and appear? Why, for the sake of protecting the female species, don’t you send an incarnation who would end the insult and pain caused by men against women? But no, you wouldn’t do any such thing. In this society, women would be burnt alive on the pyres of their husbands. They would be burnt in fire for their dowries. Their womb would be bloodied. Innocent babies would be killed even before they are born. She is the creation of this earth.Yet she will remain a slave to men. He should be called weak and vulnerable. But in your created patriarchal world (purush pradhan dunya), Chanda will not remain alive and she will beat her forehead on your doorstep and give up her life. This will actually be your downfall. (pp. 7–10) Instead of Chanda’s head cracking open with the force of her strikes on the temple steps, the stone effigy of Kali breaks open to reveal a bright light (Figure 4.5). Kali appears and says: ‘The tears born out of a sigh have the power to create chaos. And this maxim is about to come true’ (p. 11). The temple fills with this pure, divine light. Chanda’s eyes are wide with incredulity as if she was seeing a dream. Taking over the entire page, the divine light appears to speak: God created men more powerful than women so that they can protect her. But men intoxicated by unending power are committing atrocities against women. He has forgotten that the root of his power is the milk of the female which runs throughout his veins as blood. Every tiny part of his body is indebted to women. Women are the power of men because power itself is a manifestation of women. Without power, the supreme destroyer, Lord Shiva, is like a dead body. To show this truth to the men who are intoxicated by power, daughter Chanda, you will have to become Shakti. (pp. 11–12) Chanda becomes Shakti as her body turns blue due to the venom in her veins indicative of women’s collective anger. Kali describes the powers imbued to Chanda: ‘From where her bindi was torn, Kali gives Chanda the power of Shiva’s third eye. She will know all the languages of the world and will be connected to each and every women on earth’ (p. 13). The goddess continues: Divine weapons (shastrastra) will be at your disposal and extremely destructive. From your right hand, the anger of all these females, who have suffered or

FIGURE 4.5  The alter ego of Shakti, Chanda, encounters the supreme light of Kali after being thrown virtually lifeless into a remote valley, in Doga-Shakti (1998), Raj Comics, p. 12

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are suffering under patriarchal arrogance and atrocities, would create excessive heat. This fire would even melt steel like wax.You can use any metal and transform it into any kind of weapon to duly punish a wrongdoer. Now you are no more the cool moonlight (sheetal chandni) spreading Chanda. You are a fire shakti that would destroy male pride. SHAKTI! Yes! That will be your name from today. (p. 14, emphasis in the original) In her euphoric display of power, Kali undergoes transformations. From appearing to be a disused statue in an abandoned temple in the forest, she is roused to become, first, a mysterious grey shadowy presence. This shadow then transforms into the bright light of truth itself, so illuminating that powers are transferred from the goddess to a blood-stained Chanda. Radial lines around the bright light and then around the transformed Chanda underline the transference of energy such that a new superpower is born. Such sensational transference is a narrative device that often accompanies dire situations: when the earthly realm can no longer supply any solutions, there is no other option but to resort to miracle. Once transformed into a super-being, Shakti wears a leopard skin doublet with parts of her grey-blue skin exposed. She has a skull-and-bone necklace and armlets from her shoulders and around her wrists. Her black hair hangs loose and wild, and a third eye is apparent in the middle of her blue forehead. In her left hand, she carries a double-bladed khadag associated with Kali. Her exposed skin and use of animal skin marks Shakti as low-caste or an Adivasi (tribal), for, according to Hindu orthodoxy, such material would be considered polluting and coarse. Yet she draws upon the symbols and powers of a powerful Hindu goddess. Shakti is both the ‘othered’ woman and a well-established power to be reckoned with – the ‘superother’. The transformation parallels Mahasweta Devi’s eponymous novel on Draupadi, a Santhal tribal rebel who is brutally assaulted by security officials. In response, Draupadi became a fearsome avenger, as Gayatri Spivak describes her, ‘a terrifying superobject’ against the men who dishonoured and raped her.21 As a superobject herself, Shakti defies the laws of nature. She can telepathically hear a woman cry and even visualise the woman in need. She is connected to all women in the world and seeks justice for violence against them. She disturbs and explodes the containing and controlling impulse of the masculinist, sexualised gaze as well as destabilises the power of patriarchy on the basis of reinvented vernacular traditions. Once transformed, Shakti hears the voice of a woman in distress who is about to be assaulted by four gangsters in Mumbai. She wonders how she could get to her in time. At this mere thought, her body begins to tremble and she transforms into light, travelling then at the speed of light. But before she gets to the woman in need, Doga enters and beats up her assailants. Shakti appears and mistakes Doga for a gangster. She immobilises Doga by striking key points on his body, before fighting the other thugs (Figure 4.6). One of the men attacks her with a meat chopper but it is transformed into nails and thrown back onto the assailant. Shakti captures

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as Shakti fighting the superhero, Doga, Doga-Shakti (1998), Raj Comics, front cover

FIGURE 4.6 Chanda

the villains and inserts the nails in their tongues: ‘You have only seen the moon, you haven’t yet seen the stars’ (p. 25), she warns as she kicks them into the air. After the gangsters are beaten to pulp, the woman named Sonali explains to Shakti that she was pregnant and did not want her child to be born into a world of vice. Her husband had decided to leave the gang, but the chief gangster, Dara, had his arms

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chopped off and wanted to cut off Sonali’s tongue so that she could not say anything against Dara. Shakti defeats the gangsters using her divinely attributed powers. She grasps one man’s hands to the point that it is burnt to smithereens. A trishul, a trident, appears in her hands, with which she kills the other hoodlums. She uses her third eye to burn Dara into a skeleton. She then returns to Doga and mobilises him with her powers. He queries: ‘What kind of energy is this? I feel the power returning to my lifeless hands?’ She replies with a mystical smile: ‘I only reply to atrocities against women. I don’t reply to useless questions from men’ (p. 32). With one touch from Shakti, Doga’s automatic machine gun melts into metallic liquid. A most violent icon of superheroic masculinity is left weak and speechless in the face of Shakti. With dramatic aplomb, Shakti’s status as a superpower to be reckoned with is firmly established in the Raj Comics universe. Another mytho-modern superhero is born. Unaware of her mortal identity, Doga is in awe of Shakti’s powers, her physical feats, her metal transformational powers and the supremacy of the intense light from her third eye. Tough as he may appear, Doga’s physical powers pale in comparison. Whether it be Indian or other comic book series, such a scenario where a superheroine outranks the superhero is indeed rare. Its condition of possibility in Indian comics owes to the contradictory discursive field in which women are both oppressed (sati) and vehicles of formidable energy (shakti). Shakti as energy refers to a powerful female force that is attributed to warrior Hindu goddesses such as Kali and Durga in their malevolent form. It is an immense and unlimited power that cannot be overcome by any other kind of power. It is the ultimate force that resides in femininity, an allusion to the great procreative and destructive capacity of maternal powers.

Beyond the strip Indicating striking developments in Indian popular culture from the 1980s, conventional and modern ideas about gendered identities are interlaced and reconfigured to form other kinds of stupendous representations and suspenseful reactions. The Raj Comics superheroine is at once a modern woman, and one that is simultaneously informed by traditional ideas about womanhood and morally coded restrictions on their appearance and movements. Conventional ideas about woman as carer, and a repository of tradition subject to patriarchal assumptions to do with female docility, subservience and marriageability persist. But in a fictive world where customary roles are displaced by female geniuses and sky-high agents of fantasies, ideas to do with gender equality also come to the fore. However, this is limited to a heterosexual and ‘hypergendered’ universe through representations of superhumans with highly accentuated physiques, hardened along sharply contrasting axes of male-female binaries.Whereas the main characters are not overtly sexual, they are visibly sexualised. Despite canvassing formidable strengths for contemporary representations of women, female figures represent the ideals of a slim woman with buxomed and shapely hips, making for a lean yet voluptuous frame to suit the desirous male gaze.

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By having an associative rather than figurative role to the nation, the slipstream superheroine is both empowered and disempowered. She is empowered by virtue of her quick actions, agility, being a just-in-time avenger and protector while also being able to slip in to her role as dutiful sister or companion. She is disempowered in that she can never on her own save the nation, one obvious exception being Shakti. She can only save the superhero, who may be a mascot for the nation but who also controls the kinds of relationships that the superheroine can have with the wider public. From this point of view, the superhero is the primary gatekeeper to the moral community that is both gendered and nationalised. Female characters may exemplify powerful physical and/or intellectual abilities, but overall, they provide only a drop-in service to humanity. They remain handmaidens to the higher powers and missions of the superhero. On occasion where they do lead an autonomous life, they are more often than not in the guise of villainesses such as Vishkanya or superheroic characters based on divine precedents as with Shakti. Bad or good, such singular women are placed outside of the pale of normative society while enabling a familiar register to tune in to with which to imagine female powers. Albeit an exceptional character, not to be repeated again in the Raj Comics universe in quite the same way, Shakti has set a phenomenal precedent with which to forge new identities for women, both inside and outside of the imagined worlds of superhero comics. One avid reader, Sheetal (25), was from a small-time business family based near a mining outpost, Gomoh, in the state of Jharkhand. She commented: Shakti was the first female version of a superman [for me]. She was divine and could do anything, a manifestation of goddess Kali herself. We were sisters born in a semi-feudal family where the only voice and choice was [with] males. Shakti reflected a shift in my family’s thinking too. It was the time when the males in my family had realised that they can’t continue to think [like they were] in nineteenth century and had to move on, and no effort was made to stem our education. Shakti was the first imagination of a female challenging the male bastion. Shakti became a ‘proto-feminist’ inspiration for girls growing up in orthodox families. We use the prefix ‘proto’ with some reservation: not implying that the superheroine indicates a pre-political feminist phenomena. Rather, she represents a distinctive figure with which to imagine new powers for Indian women on the basis of reinvigorated vernacular and mythic prototypes combined with hypermodern visions.The Shakti archetype may not have presented a programme for political change as we might see in conventional understandings of feminism. Nevertheless, it countered gendered violence and, for many fans, provided culturally relevant routes with which to navigate the thicket of masculinist hegemony in postcolonial India.22 In order to examine how such figures came to fruition, we now venture to the outskirts of the state of Delhi, a mofussil town known as Burari.

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Notes 1 Even though performing a supporting role, Chandika follows in the line of (extra)ordinary heroines such as the kung fu aficionado, Bela, who supports the comic book hero Bahadur, from the mid-1970s. We could even draw a longer lineage of adventurous heroines that goes back to the mid-twentieth-century actress known as Fearless Nadia, who defied the norms and expectations of conventional femininity. See Rosie Thomas (2013) Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies, New Delhi: Orient Longman. 2 See Radhika Chopra, Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella, eds. (2004) South Asian Masculinities: Context of Change, Sites of Continuity, New Delhi: Kali for Women. 3 See Sherrie A. Inness (2004) ‘ “Boxing Gloves and Bustiers”: New Images of Tough Women’, in Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture, ed. Sherrie A. Inness, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan; Jennie Leland (2007) 'The Phoenix always Rises: The Evolution of Superheroines in Feminist Culture', MA dissertation, University of Maine; and Noah Berlatsky (2015) Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics 1941, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University. 4 Inness, ‘Boxing Gloves and Bustiers’, p. 8. 5 Jeffrey A. Brown (2004) ‘Gender, Sexuality and Toughness:The Bad Girls of Action Films and Comic Books’, in Action Chicks, ed. Inness, p. 49. 6 See Patricia Uberoi (1990) ‘Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Indian Calendar Art’, Economic and Political Weekly, 25(17): WS41–WS48. 7 Karline McLain (2009) India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings and Other Heroes, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, p. 84. 8 Nandini Chandra (2008) The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha, 1967–2007, New Delhi: Yoda. See also Frances W. Pritchett (1996) ‘The World of Amar Chitra Katha’, in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, eds. Lawrence A. Babb and Susan Wadley, Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press. 9 Sara Austin (2014) ‘Sita, Surpanakha and Kaikeyi as Political Bodies: Representations of Female Sexuality in Idealised Culture’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5(2): 125–136. 10 See Sumathi Ramaswamy (2010) The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 11 See Gyanendra Pandey, ed. (1993) Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today, New Delhi:Viking Publishers. 12 See Anuradha Kapur, ‘From Deity to Crusader: The Changing Iconography of Ram’, in ibid. See also Purba Das (2013) ‘National Integration Campaigns of India’, Communication Currents, 8(5), www.natcom.org/communication-currents/national-integrationcampaigns-india. Accessed: November 20, 2017. 13 More generally, Ravinder Kaur and Thomas Blom Hansen observe: ‘ “New” India is premised on a muscular nationalism espousing a (Hindu) civilizational narrative of the nation’. (2015) ‘Aesthetics of Arrival: Spectacle, Capital and Novelty in Post-Reform India’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 23(3): 265–275, p. 6. 14 Gyan Prakash (2010) Mumbai Fables, New Delhi: HarperCollins, Chapter 8. 15 Patrice A. Oppliger (2004) Wrestling and Hypermasculinity, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 16 See Joseph S. Alter (1992) The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 17 See Nandini Chandra (2012) ‘The Prehistory of the Superhero Comics in India (1976– 1986)’, Thesis Eleven, 113(1): 57–77. 18 On parallels in Indian popular cinema, see Sudhanva Deshpande (2005) ‘The Consumable Hero of Globalised India’, in Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, eds. Raminder Kaur and Ajay Sinha, New Delhi: Sage. 19 Partha Chatterjee (1989) ‘Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: The Contest in India’, American Ethnologist, 16(4): 622–633. On feminist critiques of this dichotomy, see Janaki Nair (1996) Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History, New Delhi: Kali for Women;Tanika Sarkar (2001) Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community,

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Religion and Cultural Nationalism, New Delhi: Permanent Black; and Himani Bannerji (2011) Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology, New Delhi: Orient Black Swan. 20 See Brown, ‘Gender, Sexuality and Toughness’. 21 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge, p. 184. 22 The case in question presents another perspective on the debates between modular feminism in the west and the specificities of postcolonial feminism. See Julie Stephens (1989) ‘A Critique of the Category of “Non-Western Women” in Feminist Writings on India’, and Susie Tharu (1989) ‘Response to Julie Stephens’, in Subaltern Studies VI, ed. Ranajit Guha, New Delhi: Oxford University Press; and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practice, Solidarity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

5 A HAVEN OF SUPER CREATIVITY

A HAVEN OF SUPER CREATIVITYA HAVEN OF SUPER CREATIVITY

Comics are what I was always into and always loved to be a part of. It is where I get to live my dream and I am paid for dreaming. —(Raj Comics story writer, 2014)

Burari looks like any other mofussil region of north India: busy, loud, dusty and polluted with its major and minor thoroughfares peppered by colourful box-style buildings among an array of hawkers and petty tradesmen. Its fairly ordinary character today belies its remarkable history, for it is part of the ancient Indus Valley and the site of epic battles such as the one at Kurukshetra, the grounds for warring factions in the Mahabharata. But there remains at least one claim to fame in the modern era for Burari: Raj Comics –‘the home of Indian superhero comics’.1 On a long, two-storey, ochre-coloured building, striking images of Indian comic book superheroes such as the dog-masked Doga and the snake-like Nagraj are painted in full swing. They stand out as hypermodern beacons in the midst of a mundane milieu. Regular passers-by hardly give the murals a second glance, however. For the buildings are only a meaningful place for Raj Comics employees and those eager fans who trek up to the northern end of the Delhi Metro underground line in order to do their darshan. For some, going to this mecca of Indian superheroism may even be met with an initial sense of disappointment, quite literally, the end of the line. But the sentiment is a fleeting one: when entering through a grand iron gate past the guard room that doubles up as a small godown (warehouse) into Raj Comics quarters, we enter a buzzing hive of fabulous fable-making. In a high-ceilinged, warehouse-style building, lanes of long counters host people busy around computers, often a couple of young men gathered around one portal. Electric fans gyrate above and around, and reams of paper lying under paperweights flutter at their edges. In one corner stand partitioned glass offices for middle

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managers who occasionally walk around and join others in conversation amongst the chai and snacks. Below is another floor, stacked to almost ceiling height with bundles of old comic books. In this fairly anarchic filing system lies some kind of order, as employees seek out copies of what they want, when they want. Visitors who come to meet the main creative directors are escorted into this hangar of a workspace, up some steps on a metallic staircase at the back of the building, and then down again into a fairly peaceful garden, an oasis of relative calm bearing in mind the perennial horns and hum of the traffic. In this shadowy grove, time appears to have stopped as if it was perpetually late afternoon when the sun provides long slivers of shade. The garden is surrounded by a few offices and another godown for the various outputs of the publishing house. Then up some more steps again to the main arena of creative work on the first floor where rests the Raj Comics nerve centre. Each of the executive and top creative directors have their individual offices on this floor along with a studio around the garden. In this inner sanctum, occasional murals are complemented with posters of superheroes. The most grandiose among them is a life-sized mural of Nagraj engaged in a fight till death with his archenemy Samrat Thodanga, a hybrid hulk of a beast combing human, rhinoceros and elephant. This is India’s historic heart of supercomic creativity. In this chapter, we harness a wide trifocal lens – historical, graphic as well as ethnographic – to reflect on how Raj Comics superhero comics came into being. We also hone in on the representative features of key artists, outlining their formative influences and contributions to the birth of this vernacular superhero genre.

The godfathers of desi superhero comics Raj Comics was founded as a subsidiary to Raja Pocket Books that was started by Raj Kumar Gupta in 1982–3. The publishing house has had a history of over 50 years behind them, as they were previously known as Harish Pocket Books publishing detective novels for adults as well as children. Raja Pocket Books’ other important subsidiary was Tricolor Books targeted at children around the age of 8. Described as providing a mix of ‘Moral, Science and Entertainment [sic]’, Tricolor outputs provided short six-page editions, with each page containing two frames on a ‘simple, clean story (without violence or other mature stuff) usually through animals as characters’.2 They also produced colouring books for children. Producing comics for them seemed like the inevitable next step. From 1984, Gupta’s three sons, Sanjay, Manoj and Manish, continued in their father’s footsteps by helping with the business around their school work, the elder brother Sanjay aged 16 at the time. Only Manish, the younger of the three, pursued tertiary education, going on to graduate from the Delhi College of Engineering. The other two brothers went straight into running their father’s business. As children themselves, the Gupta brothers were keen fans of comic strips available in newspapers or magazines and comic books such as Amar Chitra Katha. When

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Sanjay proposed the idea to publish comic books, his father and brothers became convinced that there was a huge market that they could enter. Sanjay recalls from these early years: Diamond Comics was already an established company and was making a lot of sales. They had a large share of the comics market. Then Nutan comics came up from Meerut [in Uttar Pradesh] and also started doing well. So this prompted us to think of starting our own comics. We were passionately in love with comics and with fantasy comics in particular. So my brother, Manoj, and I would read Amar Chitra Katha and the other comics that were around at that point of time. What happens is that once something fascinates you, you begin hunting for it. We had read all the Amar Chitra Kathas and then went to Indrajaal comic titles like Bahadur which were monthly, then became fortnightly and then weekly. But even that couldn’t quench our thirst for comics.3 Copies of Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) were sold in the Guptas’ own book shop that fronted their workplace on the main road. The young Gupta brothers would spend their entire day reading ACK and anything else they could lay their hands on by way of India Book House, Indrajal, Diamond, Manoj and Nutan Comics. They would also watch Spider-Man animation episodes aired on the Doordarshan national network during the early 1980s. Sanjay recalls that it used to be a 15- to 20-minute show once a week on Sundays: It was very amazing for us, as it was the only animation show available to us, and we liked it very much. But we could never become fans of Spider-Man because we thought that India should have a superhero character that should be powerful and interesting enough to become famous all over the world.4 Spider-Man could be a subject of intrigue but not unfettered admiration. On one occasion, as Sanjay recalled, the boys were sitting and singing the superhero’s signature theme tune, ‘Spider-Man, Spider Man’, and their father suggested: ‘Let’s plan a character which we could introduce as Nagraj who would use snakes in the place of a spider’s web and would be an Indian superhero’.5 A global trigger to spearhead Indian versions has become a familiar origin story in South Asian media histories. The impetus recalls the well-known tale about Dhundiraj Govind Phalke (Dadasaheb Phalke) who, on watching The Life of Christ in a colonial cinema, set out to make India’s first religious epic on film in 1913, Raja Harishchandra.6 Closer to the topic at hand, it also recalls G. K. Ananthram’s and Anant Pai’s ambitions to produce comic books on Indian tales in the 1960s as transpired for the evolution of the ACK series.7 So it was the case for the story of desi superheroism. Getting the green light from their father meant that the Gupta brothers could career ahead. They became preoccupied with thinking and discussing how this

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would-be superhero might look like on an almost daily basis. Sanjay Gupta reflected on their early intentions as the brothers nurtured their passion for comic books: We had to devise a character from our own imagination that didn’t have anything to do with them [western superheroes]. Because if we had kept in mind how powerful Superman and Batman are . . . we would’ve reacted to it and somehow allowed that to play a part in our creative process. Our first goal was to make a total Indian character.We didn’t want to copy.That wasn’t going on in our heads. But we were definitely inspired by them. We are still inspired by them. Even today we don’t copy . . . we are inspired by them. After all, everything has an origin.8 Inspired but not derived – a case of transference of some ideas merged with the development of their own. Even though as Sanjay states, ‘everything has an origin’, the exact location of originary points becomes a hazy endeavour. At the time, western superheroes such as Superman and Spider-Man looked very powerful, whereas Indian protagonists such as Nutan Comics’ detective, Bhootnath, seemed relatively limp and lackluster. With Nagraj, such an evaluation for the Indian context was to drastically change. Sanjay claimed that the idea for Nagraj was ‘entirely theirs’, and that they had spent years deliberating over it.Their pursuit was to create, as he put it,‘a pure Indian superhero who would be based on a purely Indian understanding of the world’. His powers would be boosted by associations with a creature of sorts as had happened to Spider-Man. But in Nagraj’s case, the creature had to be a snake. Sanjay explained: ‘Snakes were respected and feared throughout the subcontinent. Plus there were a lot of legends and myths surrounding the snakes’. He added: ‘Snakes are globally recognised as an Indian symbol’, and he too wanted to create a global, not just an Indian, superhero. Mythology formed the foundations of the superhero concept, but it was developed for a modern notion of superheroism, as we have argued in Chapter 1. Correspondingly, Nagraj’s characteristics follows legends about shapeshifting snakes, drawing also upon the ayyar (spies) of late nineteenth-century Hindi and Urdu literature. Popular films had also been made on the snake theme, as with Nagin (dir. Rajkumar Kohli, 1976) and Nagina (dir. Harmesh Malhotra, 1986). Such a confluence of forces, both foreign and indigenous, in a gestation period of more than two years, led to the creation of the hardy perennial desi superhero. As the saying goes, a legend was born: Nagraj, the King of Snakes. Raj Comics producers conscientiously assert: ‘We have a responsibility to society’.9 Spider-Man’s signature line, ‘With great power, there must also come . . . great responsibility’, was adapted for the Indian context. Sanjay added: ‘Nation is the ultimate good’. With the belief that a lot of people have the potential to become like superheroes themselves, the impetus was to imbue a sense of collective responsibility in their young readers where superheroes became embodiments of Indian patriotism and morality.

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Genesis from a song Superheroes were just one, yet the most popular, part of Raj Comics’ prolific outputs. By the 1990s, five types of adventure comics might be delineated in their oeuvre that show a degree of overlap with each other.10 First, there are mythological and medieval fantasies that centre on swords, sorcery and folklore surrounding newly created characters.These included tales woven around simple themes such as demons (Paropkari Rakshasha or The Do-Good Demon, circa 1989), village residents (Baat ka Dhani or Man of his Words, 1987), magicians (Jadugar ka Qila or The Fort of the Magician, 1990), kings (Pagal Raja or The Crazy King, 1986), queens (Raaj Pratigya or The Royal Vow, circa 1990), princesses (Kanakpur ki Rajkumari or The Princess of Kanakpur, 1985) and newly created fantasy heroes that veered more towards a mythic than a modern era, as with Tilismdev, Gojo and Ashwaraj.11 Second, comedies, prominent among which is the satirical character Bankelal, who was created in 1987 by Jitendra Bedi with Bankelal ka Kamal (Wonders of Bankelal). This character is the ‘king of comedy’ or hasya samrat. He is an anti-hero with a quest to kill the medieval king of  Vishalgadh and become the ruler himself. Bankelal believes in the existence of god as he was born out of a boon from the Hindu deity, Shiva, but he is a complete non-worshipper. He is at extreme odds with virtually everything, demonstrating a playful postmodern turn. Third, detective fiction and other contemporary stories, such as tales to do with the execution of wills, murders, or those stories with a social and/or moral message: Do Bechare (The Poor Duo, circa 1986), for instance, highlights the ordeals of two brothers who were afflicted with night blindness (a common ailment in rural India due to the deficiency of Vitamin A); and Thugon ki Nani (Grandmother of Thugs, circa 1984) narrates the brilliant moves made by a rural housewife against a gang of thugs. Fourth are the more supernatural horror stories that emerged most strikingly in the Thrill Horror Suspense series from 1986/87, some of which we focus on in Chapter 8. Fifth, and most significantly, are the superhero comics whose production we now go on to investigate. The biggest hand in creating Raj Comics was the Gupta brothers’ own reading of comics. Their knowledge was so vast that even before they had started the creative venture, they had read thousands of issues and had developed a fairly clear idea as to what their end product should look like. Their aim was to create a superhero with transferable potential for film. Attractive, invincible and modern, he also had to be a force for good that emerged out of India’s wealth of heritage. Initially, it was mainly Sanjay and Manoj Gupta who were engaged with the task of producing comics as their younger brother, Manish, was preoccupied with his studies. Nowadays, it is officially Manish who is the CEO, Manoj the President, and Sanjay the Studio Head of Raj Comics. Of those early days, Sanjay recalled: No one was there to guide us as to how the superhero comics should be made or what should go into them. . . . Each character takes month or even years for development. Nagraj in fact took two and a half years in development.

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In the 1980s, there was a dearth of illustrators to call upon in order to execute their ideas. They went to Indrajal Comics and to the admired writer of the comic book, Bahadur, Jagjit Uppal, for guidance. Whoever they approached was either already working with the large comic book houses of the day or was not able to fully understand their viewpoint or character concepts. The Guptas faced a lot of trouble in the effort to put together what they considered ‘a perfect team’. The ‘purely Indian superhero’ was glimpsed but, for some time, remained elusive. In the lean years of the mid-1980s, to find a suitable writer for Raj Comics was equally difficult. It was, as Sanjay quipped: ‘Bahut papad belne pade’ (‘We had to roll out a lot of papads/poppadum’), meaning that they faced a lot of trials and tribulations: delays, misunderstandings, people pulling away, new ones coming in who required protracted training and so on. Before their archetypal Indian snakesuperhero saw the light of day, there were several other figures that have not stood the turbulence of time as has Nagraj. For the first set of adventure comics, the Gupta brothers had hired the wellknown Hindi pulp novelist, Parshuram Sharma, who wrote one of the stories for the superhero, Vinashdoot. The brothers also fell upon a relatively unknown artist, Jagdish Pankaj, among a few others like Jitendra Bedi who helped out in their execution. However, Vinashdoot did not have a long shelf-life. As a blonde-haired alien, he had less to do with Indian vernacular culture than he did with the global mythology of superheroes, its main reference point being the likes of Flash Gordon and Superman. As with Diamond Comics’ earlier Fauladi Singh,Vinashdoot’s look owed to the popular convention at the time to depict superheroes as alien, foreign and/or new entities to be reckoned with rather than the familiar home-grown Indian. Despite efforts to make his adventures relevant to India, the concept did not gain long-term traction. Even so, Sanjay explained: ‘Our approach to comic book production was more from the perspective of fans rather than from the angle of business’. If the first few comic books did not do very well commercially, it did not halt their production. Their parent company, Raja Pocket Books, with its regular supply of pulp novels for adults and children, kept the business afloat. Nagraj was created in the fourth set of comic books that Raj Comics produced in 1986.12 For this venture, the Gupta brothers decided to ask, in Sanjay’s words, ‘the greatest illustrator of India at that time, Pratap Mulick’. Mulick was renowned for his ACK illustrations. He had also produced comic books on Amitabh Bachchan, along with narratives provided by the renowned poet, scriptwriter and film director, Gulzar, for Supremo comic books in the 1980s. Mulick eventually arrived from India Book House to help forge Raj Comics’ future direction with Nagraj. The lineage of religio-mythological and modern filmi narratives converge in this one art director to set the distinctive image and characterisation of Nagraj amongst other superheroes. But this arrangement too was not without hurdles. For the first eponymous issue on Nagraj, the two Gupta brothers discussed the concept with the artist, Pankaj. Out of this creative exchange came several sketches, from which they finally selected a Nagraj figure for the cover (Figure 3.1

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in Chapter 3). This they took to show to Mulick for the internal illustrations of the comic book. Mulick would often be in his home city, Pune, about 800 miles to the south, so the Gupta brothers would have to take several days out to travel overland to the western state of Maharashtra. Parshuram Sharma also entered the Nagraj team and wrote the first five Nagraj comic book stories. But, still, the Guptas were a little dissatisfied: ‘What we wanted was not coming up’, Sanjay reminisced. They had wanted punchier dialogue and description suited to sequential art rather than excerpts from a literary novel merely added to illustrations. After the first Nagraj issue came out, Mulick was getting busy elsewhere at a studio in Hyderabad. In the meantime, the Guptas hired Mulick’s student, Sanjay Ashtaputre, from his school in Pune, for the next four issues hoping for a similar execution of drawings. When eventually the illustrations for the second issue of the Nagraj series were produced, Nagraj ki Kabra (The Tomb of Nagraj, 1986), the Guptas were shocked to see the deteriorating quality of the imagery (see Figure 5.2). The bodies were awkwardly positioned and the face of the superhero looked almost deformed when, as a supreme superhero, he should be an expression of masculine perfection. Other characters also merged with the background, showing a lack of clarity between figure and space. The Guptas became worried as to how Nagraj comic books could go forward and establish a fan base. Nevertheless, the alluring story of this snake-like superhero carried the comics through the low points of design in this early phase. In Nagraj ki Kabra, the superhero undertakes his first mission against international terrorism. Nagraj hunts Bulldog, a villain who runs a terror organisation based in India’s border state, Assam. The fiend had first hired him to commit a series of crimes when the superhero had a microchip implanted in his brain that others could control. Nagraj is directed to a local muscleman, Romo, whom he defeats. Following the convention of submitting to a respectable enemy, Nagraj befriends Romo, who then takes him to Bulldog’s henchman. Nagraj then hypnotises this man so as he reveals the address of Bulldog. When he reaches the next location, there is a big explosion in which Romo dies, leaving Nagraj buried in the collateral damage – a superhero cliff-hanger that resonated with readers. Buoyed by the popularity of the story, the Gupta brothers continued as best they could. As Mulick was still not available, Ashtaputre continued to execute the illustrations for the second to fifth comic books in this first Nagraj series. Even though not considered as accomplished an artist as his teacher, Ashtaputre’s knowledge of comic book production and stories was outstanding. For the sixth issue in the Nagraj series, Khooni Khoj (The Bloody/Violent Hunt, 1987), Mulick offered his art direction. His son, Milind Mulick, also an illustrator, joined forces with Ashtaputre to execute the illustrations that improved the quality manifold. The Gupta brothers began to work on the Nagraj stories between themselves, developing the dialogues as well as the plot. Eventually they took over the story writing from Sharma for this sixth issue in 1987, as they had wanted more colloquial dialogue. As Sanjay elaborated: ‘We tried to explain to Sharma, but Sharma was not able to incorporate these suggestions into his stories’. Sharma wrote long sentences while the Guptas’

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sentences were short, simple and crisp. After much tutoring with issues such as Toofan Zu (Toofan and Zu, 1990) and Nagraj aur Jadu ka Shahenshah (Nagraj and the Emperor of Magic, 1990), Sanjay left the writing of Nagraj’s stories to Tarun Kumar Wahi, who is now Raj Comics’ chief writer. Still, Sanjay would discuss every scene and every step of the plot with him, overseeing each comic to completion. Eventually, after a period of about six years supervising as art director, Mulick agreed to return to Raj Comics to illustrate the twenty-third issue of Nagraj, Nagraj aur Bugaku (Nagraj and Bugaku, circa 1992) with Sanjay as the author. It would take the Gupta brothers about six to seven days to research and finalise a story as they would want them to be the best available. They had a step-by-step approach intact with contingency measures.They discussed the details of story situations and scenes at length, and agreed on how the plot would unfold at any key moment. If they ran out of ideas, they would then leave the project and start again from where they had left off the next day. Not only would they be closely developing the concepts amongst themselves, they would also develop the plot and closely monitor its execution with the illustrator, continuously getting it changed until ‘a perfect page and finally a perfect comic book is produced’, as Sanjay explained. A carousel of images would be selected as they would be rejected in their journey of creative perfectionism. As occurred for the first comic book on Nagraj, they had tried several images before selecting the final format. This close and meticulous collaboration frequently paid off. Around 1992, when Sanjay Gupta collaborated directly with Pratap Mulick as illustrator for Nagraj and Bugaku, the issue sold 600,000 copies in the first three months, a sales figure that remains unmatched in numbers and pace for any comic book sold in India, including the sale of international brands.This was largely due to the gripping tale plus the combination of two superheroes, Nagraj and Dhruv, in battle against the fiendish Miss Killer, who in her quest for world domination required the resurrection of other staple villains in the Raj Comics universe. With the success of the superhero comic books, several other artists and writers were brought on board. Most significant among them was Anupam Sinha, who joined Raj Comics as a writer and illustrator in the mid-1980s, and now is its creative director. Sinha had started his illustrating career in 1975 at the age of 13 for a small magazine, Deewana Tej (Crazy Brilliance), in Kanpur in the state of Utttar Pradesh. He then went to work for Chitra Bharti Kathamala. At the age of 17, he joined the comic book market leaders of the time, Diamond Comics. While illustrating popular comics such as Tauji aur Jadu ka Danda (Uncle and the Magic Stick), he enrolled for a Bachelor of Science degree at Kanpur’s Christchurch College. He then pursued an engineering degree in the reputed Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani Institute in New Delhi but left to return to his passion for comics. Sanjay had seen Sinha’s works in stories about characters like Detective Kapil and Space Star when the latter had been working with Chitra Bharti Kathamala and Diamond Comics. Around 1986, Sinha was visiting a publisher in New Delhi from his native state, Bihar. Sanjay came to know of the visit and went and waited

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outside that publisher’s office. By the end of that day, he had recruited Sinha for Raj Comics, first on a freelance basis and then permanently. Sinha’s first commissioned work, Dev-Raj, was six pages long to be published by Raj Comics that, in the end, never saw the light of day. Once recruited, Sinha went on to create another stalwart of Raj Comics, Super Commando Dhruv, in 1987. As Sinha elaborates on this (extra)ordinary superhero that he authored, drew and inked: Children see the world very differently, and there is a reason for it. Every person seems like a giant to them and people can do something that they cannot. Like taking out a jar of toffees from the cupboard. And the adult is thus a superhero, because they can do something that the child cannot do. Kids see every person as a superhero. They are heavily dependent on other people. Tell me, when do you move out of reading comics? When you are an independent human being. Fantasy does not interest you all that much. The psychology of being dependent, of ‘I must have a person along with me to protect me from any impending danger’, is essentially a child’s psyche. That’s why I wrote this character Super Commando Dhruv.13 By merely portraying an ordinary man was enough for a child to forge a link with something bigger and better than him/herself. For the person to then perform amazing feats was to catapult him into the child’s boundless imaginary. Still, with his affable personality and circus skills, Dhruv could easily be envisaged as a child’s friend. In this way, Sinha diverged from the common trend of the superheroes to have fantastic origins and features as well as an ordinary alter ego. As he went on to elaborate, it shows ‘respect to the cops who had to fight crime without any alter egos’.14 There were several early trial images for Dhruv, one of which showed him wearing a shirt and a pair of trousers along with a pair of shoes as if he was an office clerk.15 He used the brighter, primary colours of blue and yellow for his outfit to single him out from the darker villains. Later, Sinha gave Dhruv a makeover, and changed his attire to tights worn with boots as is customary for circus acrobats, evident in his introductory issue, Pratishodh ki Jwala (The Fire of Vengeance, 1987). Due to his virtuosity of ideas and their execution, by the mid-1990s, Sinha was taken on board the Raj Comics executive. He assumed the role of writing, drawing and inking for the Nagraj series, creating new stories for the superhero through Shakura ka Chakravyuh (Shakura’s Squared Planning, 1995), Nagraj ka Ant (The Death of Nagraj, 1995), Zeher (Poison, 1995) and Khazana (Treasure, 1996).16 Dilip Kadam was another key creative that was brought on board the Raj Comics stellar enterprise as an illustrator in the 1990s. He had a background in fine arts and was working on ACK comic books when the Guptas approached him. Kadam’s expertise was nurtured through his love for mythology that was exploited to its fullest in Raj Comics’ series dedicated to a mythic superhero, Bhokal, who also featured in a few issues of the medieval anti-hero, Bankelal. In our correspondence with him in 2016, Kadam talked about his ‘good memories with Raj Comics’,

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mostly recalling his religious and medieval stories. Now retired, he worked with Raj Comics until 2012, following which he became a professor of fine arts in Pune. Most of the later illustrators approached Raj Comics for work as the publication house became prestigious in this thrilling new market. Some even left their jobs to work with them. Sanjay Gupta stated: There are almost 65% people who have come from other jobs just for the love of comics while during the early phase we only used up professional artists and writers. But with our own development and understanding we have now become an institution in ourselves. Once established as a force to be reckoned with, Sanjay moved more and more out of the creative zone to the publishing side of Raj Comics, helping Manish and Manoj out with business plans and operations in the early 1990s. Nevertheless, to this day, the Gupta brothers oversee all the work entailed in the creation of each comic book. As Studio Head, Sanjay goes through each illustration, or what he calls ‘pencil arts’, suggesting changes where required. If a writer conceives an idea, they would then discuss it with Sanjay at each step. A draft storyline is prepared, after which the ‘pencillers’ would get in and work closely with Sanjay and the writer to execute their vision. Sometimes changes occurred even during the later process of development when a new and important idea might strike. Each time any changes are decided and executed, Sanjay would get a print-out and study the change, comparing it with what came before to fully assess their impact. Only when he was satisfied were the pencil sketches inked and colored in. He enthused: ‘I feel like holding each illustration for hours. I have always remained a fan and I still love to read the comics’. Nowadays, there are about 20–25 storywriters and illustrators employed by Raj Comics, most of them in their 20s and 30s bubbling with ideas and energy. Many new artists have joined hands to design and conceptualise the heroes in terms of both their appearances and stories. They might take on several complementary roles. All come from diverse backgrounds in the Hindi-speaking belt of India and have a strong understanding of Indian oral traditions and social values that are often reflected in the storylines. Interviewed in 2007 by both Anupam Sinha and Sanjay Gupta for the job, the established writer, Nitin Mishra, was asked to design a new look for the superhero, Yodha, after which he too was hired. However, the final rendition which he produced for the published comic book on Yodha, Aarambh (The Beginning, circa 2009), was heavily criticised by fans as ‘a design fiasco’, as one reader put it. The superhero’s physique seemed to have gone haywire. There was little consistency to the images, and Yodha’s face seemed to appear very feminine, incongruously attached to a hypermasculine body. Later, Mishra came out with more acceptable and coherent representations. It is clear from this that many of the creatives experimented and learnt about the art of visual storytelling through trial and error. Mishra went on to create the Fighter Toads that, in concept and execution, were seen as more

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satisfactory. With a bachelors and masters in fine arts from Benares Hindu University, Sanjay asked him to double up as both illustrator and story writer, and he has since been involved in various projects including the multi-starrer Sarvanayak (All Heroes) series that has been running from 2012. Other key members of the Raj Comics team include Anurag Kumar Singh, a chemistry graduate from the state of Bihar who pencils, inks and writes stories. Hemant Kumar is another addition, who along with Nitin Mishra, played an instrumental part in running the Sarvanayak series. He gained a masters in fine arts from Lucknow University in the state of Uttar Pradesh but has now moved on to be a partner of another group, Illustrators Today. Abhishek Gautam is a notable illustrator and colourist who was associated with the Nagayan series (2007–2009), inspired by the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, where Nagraj and Dhruv play roles akin to the demi-god, Ram, and his brother, Lakshman, with the villainous Ravan played by Nagraj’s uncle, Nagpasha. Gautam’s recruitment was as a result of his regular visits to Raj Comics as a fan, after which he was offered a chance to work for them in 2006. Raj Comics have also hired women such as Stuti Mishra, who is Nitin’s wife. Stuti is a graphic artist and has also written scripts for various comic books such as Rajnagar Rakshak (The Protectors of Rajnagar, 2015) and Rajnagar Reboot (2015). The couple often play complementary roles: for All the Best (circa 2011), for instance, Stuti was the artist and inker while Nitin was the writer. A few other women worked for Raj Comics as well but have not yet been involved in the core team for comic book production. The success of Raj Comics’ collaborative work patterns is particularly notable with the development of Doga in 1992 by Sanjay Gupta, Tarun Kumar Wahi and the artist, Manu. The superhero presented a new route for Raj Comics creations, the role of the street-fighting vigilante outside the folds of the state. Editor, Vivek Mohan, explains: ‘Doga cannot stand the delay in justice’.17 For this purpose, resorting to violent extremes in order to get justice had to be deployed. Sanjay reflected: ‘Since the world is cruel, Doga has to be cruel in return’.

Shape-shifting styles As we have seen, in the early years, only a few of the Raj Comics’ workers had formal training in the scripting, illustrating, inking and editing of comics. Most learnt on the job and on the go powered by an abiding love for comics. They had the lived experience of reading thousands of comic books and children’s magazines themselves before taking their fascination up as a vocation. The early comic books were colourful although less glossy than the current comics, having been produced on a more granular ‘butter paper’. The panels were straightforward, with images and scenes firmly contained in the rectangular boxes often laid horizontally with occasional presentations in vertical columns.The dynamism came from the content and the frozen action imagery of the main protagonists. Later, around the turn of the new millennium, with the influence of changes

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in global superhero comics along with the competition of new trans/multinational and start-up comic book publishers in India (see Chapter 11), presentations became more experimental with the use of more glossy and saturated colours, dramatic changes to the predictability of panel layouts, and the depiction of figures striking out of panels to present a more challenging and action-bursting layout. By focusing on one of Raj Comics’ earliest superheroes, Nagraj, we will now chart out the main stylistic developments from the mid-1980s. As we have outlined, most of the first 50 issues of Nagraj were either illustrated by Pratap Mulick or were executed under his art direction from 1986 until 1992 freelancing from his base in Pune. When compared to his more recent avatars, Mulick’s portraits depicted Nagraj as a jejune, fairly thin and dark green superhero, as is clear in his eponymous comic of 1986 (Figure 5.1). The images are sharply defined in a realist mode, owing a debt to the smooth technicolour aesthetic of popular calendar art evident in ACK that itself derived from the late nineteenth-century painter, Ravi Varma.18 The superhero wears gold earrings, as has been the tradition amongst Indian noblemen and royalty, and is dressed in a similar style to western superheroes with a figure-hugging costume underneath a pair of pants. His human hands are revealed and the snake scales are not clearly depicted. Instead, snake skin is alluded to by a pattern of curlicues on his outfit. He wears a wide belt that in later comics from the 2000s becomes thinner, and then disappears into a blue-grey overcoat in the Aatankharta (The Destroyer of Terrorism, 2007) series in which Nagraj appears as a mysterious detective. In the four issues after the original Nagraj, the stories were created by Sharma and illustrated by Ashtaputre as explained above. The images in this comic book are hazier and the compositions of some of the frames appear almost clumsy and cluttered (Figure 5.2). Nagraj appears as an unclear and asymmetric superhero, demonstrating a slight awkwardness in the body’s outline. His outfit is similar to the one that preceded it, although his belt is now reddish pink in colour. His hairstyle is ill-defined, and he has a white overcoat to cover his snake-like body. By the sixth issue, Khooni Khoj, the images reverted back to their sharp and symmetrical prototypes as they were overseen by Pratap Mulick. Now Nagraj’s hair is in a more confident, stand-out tuft almost like that of the Belgian cartoon character, Tintin. He appears with a fuller body but his muscles are still more suggestive than fully elaborated and sculpted as emerges in later muscular millennial versions. The recruitment of Sinha in 1987 was to dramatically change the representative styles of Raj Comics to ones that are more dynamic and accomplished with more fluid and coherent connections between the narrative and imagery. Around 1992– 93, digitisation of the pencil sketches was introduced to Raj Comics’ working practices, which was another major impetus for stylistic change. Indeed, the Guptas are keen to state that they were the first to use digital technologies, even before wellestablished newspapers and magazines in India had adopted such technologies.19 Accordingly, the technology helped alter the final look of the superheroes and their comics, making them sharper, sturdier, more colour-saturated and providing more scope for visual elaboration.

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FIGURE 5.1 Professor

Nagmani inserts a brain-controlling microchip in Nagraj, illustrated by Pratap Mulick, in Nagraj (1986), Raj Comics, p. 28

Along with the tutelage of the creative director and illustrator, Sinha, and aided by digital methods, the first version of Nagraj’s characteristics underwent an extraordinary evolution from the mid-1990s. Sinha’s Vishkanya (Poison Maiden, 1996) shows a light green, wide-berthed and muscular Nagraj (Figure 5.3).The digitised effects on Nagraj are heavily schematic, with cross-hatching to depict form, replacing curlicue

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fights an adversary, illustrated by Sanjay Ashtaputre, in Nagraj ki Kabra (The Tomb of Nagraj, 1986), Raj Comics, p. 10

FIGURE 5.2  Nagraj

scales on his skin. His belt is now in the shape of a snake, and his body takes over more of the comic book canvass. Accordingly, his powers in the story have increased manifold, with many new additions. In the comic book strips, Nagraj now becomes visibly shape-shifting. Earlier it was only mentioned that he had the capacity to do this. He also acquires more magical powers and has under him powerful snakes

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FIGURE 5.3 Nagraj

fights a demonic octopus, Octosnake, sent by the evil tantric,Vishkanya, illustrated by Anupam Sinha, Vishkanya (Poison Maiden, 1996), Raj Comics, front cover

who were his earlier opponents: Sheetnag (Cold Cobra) can freeze anything that would attack Nagraj, and Nagu can take any form because of the powers of his gem, Mani, and to an extent, can replicate even Nagraj’s powers. Mulick’s and Sharma’s Nagraj would mostly fight human opponents, but Sinha’s Nagraj took on more and more of the world’s adversaries in all their weird, wonderful and wicked forms.

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Conceptually and visually, Nagraj was becoming more and more the ‘nemesis of terrorists across the globe’ (MAMBR, circa 2008, p. 31). Throughout his lifetime, there has been much diversity in the appearances of Nagraj. But staple features are retained: principally, these are Nagraj’s snake-like skin and his tall and aquiline features. Otherwise, variations are the result of different combinations of creatives and the impulse to experiment and excel. In the process, layers of complexity are added to the characters that keep the enthusiast engrossed in the multiple plots that continue to unravel. In the 2000s, Raj Comics tried to bring in more complicated forms of design with dark colour-saturated pages without clear borders. The panelling was sometimes not always easy to sequentially follow. Image positioning would be differently conceived and characters might strike out of panels or assume the whole page, as is evident in Raj Comics’ Nagayan series. However, when sales did not fare as well as they would have liked, they reverted back to earlier formats: white margins to the pages with more straightforward panelling and a less sombre palette. It is primarily for experimental reasons that Raj Comics decided on the initiative of ‘parallel earth’ or Aatankharta from the World Terrorism series from 2007, and the Narak Nashak series (The Destroyer of Hell) from 2009. This way they could continue with the original Nagraj formula while developing other avatars. Authors had the freedom to deviate from the original stories, taking the character and plot to entirely new levels, and illustrators were able to explore new territories and styles of presentations, and possibly even attract new audiences. As goes the maxim for the Hindu concept of divinity: one name, but many forms.

A love for comics Superheroes have come and gone in the Indian scene, but despite the hitches and glitches, many of Raj outputs superheroes have stood the test of time and continue to have a loyal fan base. Although less than during the Golden Age of Indian superhero comics, their outputs continue to sell in their tens of thousands, with Dhruv being the most popular after which Nagraj and the vigilante, Doga, have the most readership. Some comic books have attained cult status even if they did not sell well in the first place. This includes the online sale of the now discontinued Nagayan series that displayed the superheroes in epic new avatars. Having grown up with Indian comic books and western superheroes, the Gupta brothers have had a major influence in charting a space for desi superheroism from the 1980s. For this task, they elicited the talents of several artists and authors, from whom they also learnt. In any Raj Comics production process, there is then a close and fluid relationship among the writers, illustrators, inkers, colourists, and editors as well as the Gupta brothers. They work in tandem and are constantly in conversation over the phone or in meetings in their garden studio. In the contemporary era, only when there is a rush to finish a particular set of comics do the Guptas become taskmasters. Otherwise, they have delegated responsibilities to those who have proven their creative credentials and company loyalty. Now into their middle

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ages, the relationship between the Guptas and their employees is friendly and fairly paternal, tutoring as well as nurturing new talents based on a common love for comics and the exhilaration of making modern mythologies for India.

Notes 1 https://comicvine.gamespot.com/raj-comics/4010-2280/characters/. Accessed: July 7, 2018. 2 Mohit Sharma (2010) ‘Good-Bad Company (Tricolor Kids Series)’ www.rajcomics.com/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=17:story-plots&id=2378:goodbad-company-tricolor-kids-series&Itemid=21. Accessed: June 12, 2014. 3 Pao Collective (2007) ‘Raj Comics: A Brief Overview’, http://paocollective.wordpress. com/2010/03/11/raj-comics-a-brief-overview/. Accessed: June 12, 2014. 4 ‘Raj Comics Janoon Mela Conference – Part 1’ (2009) www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zb0NsfWU5NU&hd=1. Accessed: July 20, 2014. 5 If not otherwise indicated, the direct citations from Sanjay Gupta are from interviews conducted on July 7, 2014 and August 11, 2014 at Raj Comics in Burari. This has been augmented by telephone calls and email correspondence up until 2018 as well as internet-based research. 6 See Raminder Kaur and Ajay Sinha, eds. (2005) Bollyworld: Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, New Delhi: Sage, pp. 13-14. 7 See Karline McLain (2009) India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; Nandini Chandra’s (2008) The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Kathas (1967–2007), New Delhi: Yoda Press. It is often cited – McLain and Chandra’s works included – that the beginnings of Amar Chitra Katha was under Anant Pai, who was working for the The Times of India’s Indrajal Comics in Mumbai in 1967. But there are some eclipsed histories here that take us further south. In 1965, a book salesman called G. K. Ananthram was working in the Bangalore office of the India Book House that sold imported English books, such as those by Agatha Christie and Louis L’Amour. Influenced by the ongoing Kannada literary renaissance following the formation of the state of Karnataka, and after receiving 10,000 rupees from his employer to publish books in Kannada, he came out with a comic series for children that he named Amar Chitra Katha. Based on the success of this venture, Ananthram wrote a proposal to his head office in Mumbai suggesting ‘a mythological comic series in English to take forward the Amar Chitra Katha project’. It was then that Anant Pai was brought in from Indrajal Comics to develop his vision for a wider audience. Ananthram thus describes himself as ‘a midwife in the birth of the comic series’. Cited in Sugata Srinivasaraju (2011) ‘A Pandit had a Dream. . .’, Outlook India, March 21, www.outlookindia.com/ magazine/story/a-pandit-had-a-dream/270843. Accessed: December 1, 2017. 8 Pao Collective, ‘Raj Comics’. 9 ‘Future of Desi Comics’ (2014) www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJYWSKHCbwU. Accessed: December 20, 2017. 10 The fifth is to add to Aruna Rao’s four-part schema followed in her (2001) ‘From SelfKnowledge to Superheroes: The Story of Indian Comics’, in Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines, and Picture Books, ed. John A. Lent, Honolulu, HI: University of HawaiI Press, pp. 58–59. 11 Authored by Tarun Kumar Wahi and illustrated by Dilip Kadam and Jayprakash Jagtap, Tilismdev (Lord of Tilism) is introduced in the eponymous comic around 1989. He is Nagdev, the god of the snake realm. Introduced in 1993, Gojo is one of Pratap Mulick’s creations. In his eponymous comic book of that year, Gojo emerges from a yajna, a sacred fire, after the Earth was attacked by a species of demonic cannibals with humanlike torsos and spider-like legs. Introduced in 1992, Ashwaraj, Lord of the Horses, was another of Mulick’s creations. Located in the era of ancient kings, Ashwaraj is the prince

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of Ashwalok (Realm of the Horses). He is introduced in Khalnayak (The Villain, 1994) as a participant of a swayamvar where brides are allowed to select husbands or the husbands were selected through competitions. 12 The titles of Raj Comics’ sets of comic books are listed here, https://rajcomicsinfo. blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/set-wise-raj-comics-list-in-sequence.html. Accessed: November 7, 2017. 13 Pao Collective, ‘Raj Comics’. 14 Cited in Alok Sharma (2012) ‘Pratishodh se Prernashrot Tak (From Revenge to Inspiration)’, in Pratishodh ki Jwala and Nagraj, Silver Jubilee Editions. 15 This information is revealed in the Silver Jubilee Edition reissued in 2012 of Pratishodh ki Jwala. This issue was supposed to be the second Dhruv comic book after Roman Hatyara (Roman Assasin, 1987). But following the convention of first introducing the character and then providing other stories on his exploits, Sinha decided to introduce Dhruv through Pratishodh ki Jwala. 16 Mulick returned around 2008 to do a special cover for the Nagayan series, but he died that year and the cover remained unfinished. 17 Pao Collective, ‘Raj Comics’. 18 See Kajri Jain (2007) Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Christopher Pinney (1998) Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, Chicago: Chicago University Press; and Nandini Chandra (2012) ‘The Prehistory of the Superhero Comics in India (1976–1986)’, Thesis Eleven, 113(1): 57–77. 19 According to today’s rates, the cost of creating one comic book page including the fees of all the creatives comes to around 8,000–15,000 rupees, roughly 120–200 US dollars.

PLATE 1  A reincarnated

Hitler sits atop a leviathan monster made out of a mass of human beings while directing his viral formula at the superheroine, Chandika. On the bottom left are the superheroes, Nagraj and Super Commando Dhruv. On the right is the guru, Gypto’s spirit reincarnated in the body of a woman, Tanashah (The Dictator, 1998), Raj Comics, front cover

PLATE 2  Super

Commando Dhruv on a motorbike against Globe Circus burning, Pratishodh Ki Jwala (The Fire of Vengeance, 1987), Raj Comics, front cover

PLATE 3 Super

Commando Dhruv and his aide, Blackcat, stand amidst carnage caused by robots on the loose. Commander Natasha stands aloof in a military outfit while Inspector Steel beats up two villains, Hammer and Farsa (Axe), Rajnagar Reloaded (2016), Raj Comics, front and back cover

with smoking pistols in each hand, in Doga Poster (circa 2010), Raj Comics, Collector Edition.

PLATE 4  Doga

villainous Miss Killer confronts Nagraj and his aide, Sheetika, in Mrityujivi (The Living Dead, 2011), Raj Comics, p. 11

PLATE 5 The

attack Haru, a rival of the gods, Kohram (Mayhem, 2000), Raj Comics, front cover. Clockwise from bottom left, they include superheroes, Shakti, Anthony, Parmanu, Nagraj, Inspector Steel, Tiranga, Doga, Kobi and Super Commando Dhruv

PLATE 6  Superheroes

PLATE 7 Doga

accused of favouring one community over another during interreligious riots, in Doga Hindu hai (Doga is Hindu, 2008), Raj Comics, front cover

PLATE 8 Superheroes – from left to right,Tiranga, Super Commando Dhruv, Parmanu,

Chandika and Doga with Nagraj in centre – gear up to deal with beings from deep inside the Earth who exist in darkness, and when on the surface, prowl in our shadows. They are the Negatives led by the villainous General Andhaman, Negatives (2013), Raj Comics, front cover

PLATE 9  Supervillains

and superhero aides surround Super Commando Dhruv, in Maine Mara Dhruv ko (I Killed Dhruv, 1995), Raj Comics, front cover. Clockwise from bottom left, they include Bauna Waman, Barf Manav (Ice Man) aka Dr. Verghese, Chandika, Grand Master Robo, Vanaputra, Lori, Dr. Virus, Jingalu the Yeti, Natasha, Chumba, Kankaltantra, Dhwaniraj, Cadet Peter, Suprema, Chandkaal, Samri, Blackcat and Dhananjay

6 THE FANTASTIC FAMILIAR

THE FANTASTIC FAMILIARTHE FANTASTIC FAMILIAR

Super Commando Dhruv tries to stop a bank robbery. The thieves call for back-up to fend off the crime-fighter. Dhruv then encounters a different kind of bank robber in the shape of a grotesque brown beast unlike any he has seen before. While fighting this mighty monster, Dhruv bangs its head on a water purifier that uses ultraviolet rays for cleansing.The ultraviolet rays from the machine strike the monster’s chin, and the skin mysteriously transforms into that of a human. Elsewhere, it is revealed in Dr. Virus (circa 1993) that an Indian scientist has an amazing breakthrough. At his secret location in the army-controlled section of Kullu in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, he combines animal with plant genes to create a hybrid plant,Vrikshapashu (literally, Tree Animal). This animated plant proves to be as powerful as a military tank, and it can walk and actively hunt for its own nutrition. In the guise of an Indian military general, Dr. Virus infiltrates the facility and discovers that the scientist had fed ‘beta virus’ to the plant to create the hybrid. The scientist further elaborates that the ‘tree animals’ could be controlled through a central computer by installing microchips in their trunks. Dr. Virus then uses the beta virus on the scientist, destroys the laboratory and runs away with a sample and a formula for its production. Dr. Virus begins to conduct many experiments on plants that attract the ire of a new character, Vanaputra, who is angry about the villainous scientist’s maltreatment of trees. Literally meaning son of the forest, Vanaputra is a demi-god, the king of all plant life on Earth.1 At his bequest, the plants perform wondrous feats: they can grow to extraordinary lengths and, if the need arises, can even physically attack enemies, which they do against Dr.Virus and his creations. Meanwhile, in his secret den, Dr. Virus applies the beta virus on humans to create a hybrid army for his criminal activities. It is one of these formidable Viral-Men that encounter Dhruv whose monstrous skin begins to revert to its original state.

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As incredible displays of power and transformation are essential to the intrigue of superhero tales, science plays a fundamental part in their constitution. But this is not science as we might understand it from textbooks. One of our interlocutors, Akshaye (27), who was running a medical practice in Nirsa in Jharkhand state, mentioned that his favourite villain was ‘Dr.Virus due to his scientific magics’. Fully aware that it was not realistic science that was depicted in the comics, its potential to break through new frontiers – in this case, through the principles of micro-biology, genetics and computer technology – thoroughly captivated him as a young reader. Effectively, Dr.Virus’ creation of Viral-Men holds the reader in ‘a willing suspension of disbelief    ’.2 It is an ‘experience of limits’ as Tzvetan Todorov puts it, where: events are related which may be readily accounted for by the laws of reason, but which are, in one way or another, incredible, extraordinary, shocking, singular, disturbing or unexpected, and which thereby provoke in the character and in the reader a reaction similar to that which works of the fantastic have made familiar.3 The fantastic is made familiar, and, by the same token, the familiar is made fantastic – an acrobatic complex that could be described as the ‘fantastic familiar’ pushing at the limits of our known physical world. As the fantastic familiar is enhanced through the fictional funnelling of developments in science and technology, superhero comics fall into the category of science fiction. But some qualifications are in order. In its western avatar, science fiction has been described by Darko Suvin as being: distinguished by the narrative dominance of a fictional novelty (novum, innovation) validated both by being continuous with a body of already existing cognitions and by being a ‘mental experiment’ based on cognitive logic.4 Science fiction as understood in the west has been circulating in various forms and outlets in South Asia since the colonial era, but up until recently has largely been overlooked.5 The impression becomes that recourse to science fiction is a recent development, some critics even declaring as late as the turn of this millennium that it does not exist in India. Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt propose, for instance, that: ‘Science fiction is a time machine that goes nowhere, for wherever it goes, it materialises the same conjunctions of the spacetime continuum; the conundrums of Western civilization’. They declare: ‘It does not exist in India or other places with extensive film industries’.6 Such an oversight is mainly due to a preoccupation with a relatively stiff understanding of science fiction associated with empire and its use of technologies to execute imperial designs and expansion over other populations. Tending to this master narrative associated with the global north is to the neglect of other transnational and translational examples in colonial and postcolonial contexts.7

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When compared to the more generic term for futurist tales, speculative fiction, or the more supernatural, science fantasy, Suvin’s definition of science fiction is relatively narrow as it prioritises a ‘cognitive framework’. As is evident in subcontinental and even in western comic books, the ‘novum’ that is portrayed in science fiction may well have a mystical rather than logical character.8 Speculative fiction is our preferred term because it is less prescriptive as it has developed in India, it could be seen as essentially of two kinds. One draws upon the amazing potential of modern science and technology (vigyan) for inspiration in the Suvinian sense. Another strand of fictionalised science draws upon archaic parables and treatises for contemporary application that might be described as paravigyan. Although the latter may not represent science in the rational-modernist sense, they are a vitalising part of a techno-mystical impulse similar to what Banu Subramaniam has described for contemporary Hindu nationalists as: ‘archaic modernities . . . strategically employing elements of science and religion, orthodoxy and modernity’.9 The conflation of cultural precedents and modern science has been prominent since the late nineteenth century.10 Indian superhero comics demonstrate a latter-day version of this phenomenon, where ideas to do with power, whatever their source, are promiscuously mined to fuel new scientific magics for the making of stupendous worlds. In addressing the cultures of fabulous science in Raj Comics superhero comics, we navigate an interactive mesh of scientific (vaigyanik) and para-scientific (paravaigyanik) innovations. Vigyan, or vaigyanik in the adjectival sense, might apply to mundane science or, in other words, day-to-day, applied science, such as the information that ultraviolet rays are used in water purification to kill bacteria and viruses, the credibly possible. But it might also be stretched to more far-fetched territories in terms of the incredibly possible as with the skin of Viral-Men neutralised by ultraviolet rays or, for that matter, the creation of hybrid animated trees that can be controlled by microchips. Similarly, paravigyan might enhance the credibly and incredibly possible with fabulous figures and devices that have their provenance in Indic religion, mythology, treatise, parables and folklore including the shastra (ancient Vedic texts), tantra (unorthodox or ‘left-field’ Hindu rituals) and vernacular articulations of jadu (magic). In the process, paravigyan provides autochthonous precedents and legitimation to what Suvin described as ‘mental experiments’. The vaigyanik and paravaigyanik elements might be distinguishable and counterpoised, or they might be intertwined and latticed. They converge and diverge with the effect of injecting a plotline with the fluidity of the fantastic familiar.

Getting to the source The principal difference between the heroic and the villainous does not lie in the source of their powers, even though on occasion it may appear as such. Exalted as they might be, religio-cultural traditions might well become the basis for heinous plans and identities, as with those villains explored in Chapter 8 who have acquired

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astonishing tantric or mantric powers through sacred penance and meditation.11 Some villains have even consulted the ancient shastra and display a range of archaic modernities to do with physics, chemistry and/or biology. Equally, they might master the latest designs in computer chips, arms and missiles, laser technologies, DNA genetics, cloning, telekinesis, chemical formulas, electromagnetics, quantum physics, atomic gadgets and state-of-the-art hideouts to hatch their malicious plans. But such sources could also provide a plethora of devices and strategies for superheroes to use against villains. Moral valences therefore lie in intention and not in origin – that is, superheroes use knowledge from whatever source for the good of all, whereas the villain avails of it for selfish reasons and megalomaniac ambitions for the control of all. Proposals that modernity is replete with ‘bads’ in this era, as the sociologist Ulrich Beck maintains, do not hold well.12 Such views only have partial relevance to the postcolonial world, where the drive to modernise and ‘catch up’ with the west remains irrepressible. Whereas in the west, science and technology are seen both as the means to progress and its uncanny ‘other’ – namely, contamination and catastrophe – in India the overriding concern is to embrace techno-science to its fullest, treating it as one of the key instruments to throw off the legacies of colonial oppression, perceptions of ‘backwardness’ and/or continuing dependence on the west.13 In a eulogy to a postcolonial national preoccupation, whoever owns the scientific genii is also the one that can strengthen and dictate the political economy of the present and future. To give it an archaic autochthonous twist is to further legitimate India’s contribution to this field. By way of illustration of these interpenetrative dynamics, in Kalyug (The Dark Age, 1999), the preceptor of the daitya (demons), Shukracharaya, exhorts the demonic Shambuka to attack the Devas.The Devas are pure-hearted human beings who are vested with advanced scientific powers. They were a part of the great ancient Indian war in the epic Mahabharata, for which they had created the divine weapons of the era. A population with advanced technologies is attributed autochthonous importance. However, the Devas then went underwater after the great deluge known as jalplawan, and live in an underwater city, Swarn Nagri. As subaquatic pacifists hidden from the eyes of human beings, their scientific genius had lagged behind in the art of warfare for they have never since had to engage in any battle. Once their cover is exposed by demonic forces, they are effectively vulnerable to whatever attacks come their way. Only superheroes with their recourse to technoscientific powers can provide any means of protection and salvation.The message is that prowess in the art of defence and war has always been there in India, but these skills were forgotten. They can no longer be ignored in the contemporary world. As a critique of the narrative of non-violence that dominates India’s colonial history, it has now become the consensus that such strategies are of little use against present-day forces of tyranny. When the demons are let loose on Earth, one of them attacks the superheroine, Shakti. The demon’s chief power is his shrill voice that has immense destructive capabilities – so much so that Dhruv has to come to Shakti’s aid. Despite their

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prodigious powers, the crusaders realise that they are not able to defeat or kill demonic forces as they are too powerful in the Kalyug, the current age of dystopia (see Chapter 8). Swiftly, Dhruv takes recourse in scientific logic while Shakti creates a grand resonating chamber using thin iron sheets with her supernatural transformatory powers. After its construction, they both throw the demon into it, where his shrill voice amplifies, reflects and destroys him inside the chamber. This episode is a dazzling combination of scientific ideas with supernatural powers utilised for the destruction of an ancient being. A similar incident is repeated in the latter half of the story when Dhruv again faces another ancient demon who builds and lives in electrical circuits. Cleverly, Dhruv defeats the demon by short-circuiting the system. In this case, scientific intuition and action ultimately debilitates the supernatural forces of evil. In Kirigi ka Kahar (Destruction by Kirigi, 1992), yogic, evolutionary and telekinetic powers come to the fore. The story introduces an ancient ageless Ninja warrior who has developed incredible spiritual powers over centuries of penance. After a series of misunderstandings with Dhruv, Kirigi becomes a staunch friend and supporter. In Mahakaal (A Mammoth Death, 1997), Kirigi comes to Dhruv’s aid to fight off the telekinetic powers of the supervillain, Mahamanav, a constant nemesis for Dhruv. Mahamanav, literally meaning Grand Man, has evolved through the ages from a single-cell, amoeboid organism to his advanced human form in a single lifetime (Figure 6.1). Despite his short humanoid body, he has a very large brain with superior telekinetic powers that can unleash much havoc and destruction. When Kirigi confronts Mahamanav, Dhruv is worried that Kirigi might not be a match for Mahamanv. Kirigi replies that ‘spiritual power is more powerful than the telekinetic mental powers [of Mahamanav] as spiritual power is a combination of both physical and mental powers’ (p. 40). When Kirigi and Mahamanav clash, their mighty powers cause an energy surge on the planet that then revives a hibernating dinosaur, Galala-Gheecha, who too has enhanced telekinetic powers. Rather like an adrenalising shot of antibiotics, as Galala-Gheecha is revived with the powers of both Kirigi and Mahamanav, he is immune to both their attack. Galala-Gheecha recounts how he was led to hibernation during the ice age that ended up wiping out all the other dinosaurs. He declares that the ice age was orchestrated by Mahamanav who could only survive and thrive in cold weather. But Galala-Gheecha was able to save himself by surrounding himself in a ‘mental safety capsule’ (mansik suraksha ka kavach). Due to present-day global warming, his consciousness had awoken even though his body needed a much more extreme dose of energy that was provided by the collision of Kirigi’s yogic and Mahamanav’s telekinetic energies. Galala-Gheecha then goes to look for Mahamanav to avenge the extermination of his species. Dhruv now has to neutralise the threats of both Galala-Gheecha and Mahamanav through recourse to scientific knowledge and intuition. After a series of twists and turns, he attaches a futuristic device to their bodies such that it subjects them to a dreamworld where they get lost in a maze of their desires.

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FIGURE 6.1 The

evolution of the supervillain, Mahamanav, as narrated by Super Commando Dhruv to his friend, Dhananjay, a scientist from the underwater city, Swarn Nagri, in Mahakaal (A Mammoth Death, 1997), Raj Comics, p. 15

As recounted in Chapters 4 and 7, Shakti’s sole adventures emphasise the supremacy of spirituality.The main point here is that Raj Comics do not have an ideological investment in one more than the other. Rather, the dynamic flow of the main protagonists and plots determines the direction. If foregrounding extra(ordinary) superheroes such as Dhruv, the power of the intellect and/or techno-science will

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come to predominate by the end of the story. If foregrounding mytho-modern superheroes such as Shakti and Nagraj, supernatural powers will in the end overcome the threats. If considering multi-starrers, it is anyone’s guess as to who or what dominates. The bottom line is that all of these powers, vaigyanik and paravaigyanik, need to be close to hand to be able to defeat absolute evil and take a story to superlative and suspenseful levels.

Multi-linearities A remarkable realm with which to further explore the fantastic familiar is with regards to ideas about space and time. In a genre that appears to know no bounds, comic books have invoked several parallel time-spaces anchored by a narrative text that explains any convoluted plots to the reader. A striking example of parallelism in Raj Comics is Kohram (Mayhem, 2000), where multiple superheroes featuring Shakti, Inspector Steel, Nagraj, Dhruv, Bheriya, Tiranga and Anthony face Haru, an extraterrestrial creator who tries to rival the planetary creation of demi-gods also known as Devas (Plate 6). The extraterrestrial comes from a race of Haru who live in a distant galaxy where the basic laws of physics are confounded as with the prevalence of cold fire and hot ice. This region in space is chaalees lakh crore prakash varsh or 40 trillion light years away. As a megalomaniac deity, Haru destroys the worlds of Devas and humanity, and entertains ambitions to recreate life on Earth. Imagining himself to be the ultimate intergalactic deity, Haru explains: ‘Space is so vast that no single power could create and control life so there are different creators and creative powers for different regions of the space and on earth it was Devas who were responsible for creating life’ (p. 8). By eliminating Devas, he aims to channel the power of supreme creation to himself across the multiverse. Jeff McLaughlin notes that the narrative potential of parallel worlds is so vast that in the case of the Crisis series in DC Comics, 3,000 universes had to be navigated and exterminated.14 To similar ends, in Nagraj ka Kahar (Destruction by Nagraj, 2001), the superhero travels through several parallel universes while looking for an exact replica of the Earth in a tilism, a magical world of mazes and prisons that keep a person(s) lost or locked in a labyrinth. The tilism is made up of a series of very high pillars in the midst of lightning and heavy rain that, along with various other hurdles, renders the labyrinth extremely treacherous to navigate. When Nagraj and a disguised villain who calls himself Tilismacharya are caught in the tilism and need to find the exact copy of the Earth to move to the next stage of the layered labyrinth, the superhero explains the Earth’s tilt in scientific terms. Nagraj states: ‘The copy of the Earth must have all the qualities of the real Earth . . . like our Earth is tilted 23.5 degrees towards the sun, a tilt due to which the season changes on Earth’ (p. 28). In another section of the comic, the guard of the tilism reveals herself as a demoness called Kidit. Describing herself as ‘the daughter of the clouds’, she is created out of lightning and attacks others with it (p. 38). She evokes the fear of lightning

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amongst rural populations, where several people die annually from fatal strikes. To defeat this demoness, Nagraj uses his snake rope as a lightning conductor and causes her to disappear in the iron frames of the pillars to which Nagraj has tied his snakes. After killing the demoness, Nagraj explains how a lightning conductor works. The story interlaces scientific explanations with a plethora of transformed folkloric ideas about lightning. In the process, it instructs the reader in planetary rotation, the seasons, as well as how to protect oneself from lightning strikes. Such is the attraction to the potentials of scientific magics that the comic books might introduce young readers to topics even before they are raised in their school curricula. In the multi-starrer with Nagraj, Dhruv and Chandika, Hadron (circa 2010), readers were introduced to the sub-atomic Higgs boson, the fundamental particle that gives matter its mass, and this was before its discovery became world news in 2013.The discovery was an outcome of the Large Hadron Collider/CERN experiment that was set up in 1998 involving thousands of scientists and engineers from over a hundred countries including India to do particle physics research. In this three-part story, the Hadron ‘atom-smasher’ creates a black hole when two sub-atomic particle ‘protons’ are collided in a tunnel (p. 12). The aim was to see how such experiments could open portals and wormholes to other dimensions and worlds of the universe. The fear of them spiralling out of control and destroying the Earth remains an undercurrent, and it is later revealed that the black hole thus created was in fact a demon who goes into the cosmos with a hunger of gargantuan proportions. All of these worlds in other dimensions have their own set of superheroes with varying powers. Many other avatars of Nagraj live in these other realms, who try to kill the present-day Nagraj from planet Earth. Since all of these Nagraj figures exist in a parallel universe, so, in a very intricately entwined story, the original Nagraj travels to each of these realms locked away in the time-space labyrinth of a tilism, before returning to the time-space of the reader (Figure 6.2). As all these narratives are placed in different dimensions, the story pans out as if they were happening simultaneously. Correspondingly, the sequential art is characterised by intersecting graphics sharply cutting into each other to provide a visual patchwork that evokes trans-temporality. In one instance, the original Nagraj encounters the black hole that has been personified in the form of a demonic creature. Dhruv and Chandika are trapped inside the black hole.To save his friends from getting crushed by the immense force of, and to save the Earth from being swallowed up by the expanding black hole, Nagraj decides to move towards the centre. When Nagraj reaches the middle, he is addressed by the black hole (Figure 6.3). Shocked and surprised by the formidable powers of Nagraj, the black hole demon asks: ‘Who are you that stands defiantly before the power of the black hole that can even crush a mega body as great as the sun to the size of a pea?’ (p. 55).The demon elaborates that he has an insatiable hunger for the nuclear energy hidden inside atoms, which he regularly consumes and crushes. When Nagraj questions who he is, the demon replies that he is everything that both constitutes and surrounds Nagraj, and threatens to both disintegrate and consume the superhero.

FIGURE 6.2 Many avatars of Nagraj in a tilism (labyrinth) along with his assistant, Nagu,

in Hadron (2008), Raj Comics, p. 5

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FIGURE 6.3 Nagraj confronts the supervillain, Black Hole, in Hadron (2008), Raj Comics, p. 55

The scientific convention is that the black hole is a massive region with an exceptionally high gravitational pull, from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Its powers are defined by the ability to suck all energy, even the energy locked inside an atom, to the point that it has the capacity to compress the sun to ‘the size of a pea’. However, Nagraj’s divinely ordained constitution prevents him from getting crushed against this formidable force. As Dhruv explains:

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Since inside the body of Nagraj, there were innumerable other Nagrajs from other dimensions, and as all of these were divinely created, and contained innumerable snakes, the black hole cannot crush Nagraj. (p. 55) Nagraj’s affinity with multiple divinities and temporalities presents a superior force to overpower the threat. Eventually, Black Hole is defeated with the help of an antiblack hole ‘zero gravity zone’, also known in astrophysics as ‘white holes’ – that is, regions in spacetime (where space and time are mutually transferable) that cannot be entered, but which spill out matter and light.15 With slightly askew terminology – for, theoretically, an anti-black hole force does not exactly equate with a zero gravity zone – scientific magics are conjured up from sub-atomic and astrophysical research to suit the narrative compulsion of good prevailing over bad. As a mytho-modern superhero, Nagraj dwells in various spatio-temporal dimensions. By comparison, the demon is a melange of quantum science and astrophysical conundrums, with a villainous identity that draws upon vernacular ideas about malevolence. While Nagraj remains a figure, albeit multiple figures, the black hole is both figure and discourse – that is, the demonic black hole is not just an embodiment of evil, but also the figure and environment of evil. Both good and evil have gone beyond the realm of singularity as Nagraj is a superhero comprising multidimensional beings in the form of other Nagrajs; and the villain is a demon who is a wasp’s nest tangle of magic, quantum science and the physics of a dead star. Such bowdlerised scientific ideas are interwoven with narratives about the labyrinthine tilism and allusions to the many incarnations of the Hindu demi-god Ram in the comic book. As A. K. Ramanujan highlights, different incarnations of Ram for every era, so Raj Comics proposes different personalities for Nagraj for each of these dimensions – one Nagraj for each universe.16 In this way, the fantastic familiar is premised on a spiralling mesh of scientific and religio-cultural dynamics, the vaigyanik with the paravaigyanik.

Time-crossing Travel through time forms a recurrent part of speculative fiction, and Indian superhero comics are no exception. In X (2011), for instance, the superhero, Dhruv, is complemented by his lookalike who can time-travel to kill criminals. The birth of X is due to artificial insemination. He was born while his mother was timetravelling in her vehicle and had accidentally gone into a state where time got stuck in the fourth dimension. This meant that time would stand still for the mother and the vehicle, whereas all other dimensions continue to change. In this state of suspended animation, X continues to grow in his mother’s womb. He is born during the timeflux. Due to this aberrant escape from the grip of linear time, X grows to develop a special power to time-travel at will. The tale shows some parallels with Einsteinian theory. In modern physics, space and time are flattened to a mathematical model where the three-dimensional aspects of physical space are considered along the single linear dimension of time.

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It is proposed that travel at speeds faster than light can free the subject of such constraints. As X was born in the fourth dimension where time stands still, he has the special capacity to travel across linear dimensions while others around him stand motionless in oblivion. Another incredibly possible scenario presents itself. Time-travel might also be explained through indigenous tropes. Hindu deities are not renowned for time-travel – for instance, there is no tale of a god/ dess travelling back or forth in time. However, as immortal beings, they do travel through dimensions such as mrityulok (earth), devlok (heaven) and patallok (subterranean realms of the universe). If the gods are understood as omnipotent, time-travel as a journey between different realms may well be extrapolated as a feat that is not beyond their capabilities, as is evident in Hadron above. In Kaal Karal (Time with a Terrible Face, 2012), a paravaigyanik justification is given for time-travel in order to correct something that happened in the past. Kaal Karal comes from the future who can time-travel through the use of snake power in his very constitution, while the villain, Dhura, uses a time machine run by fabulously extrapolated scientific principles external to his constitution. Consequently, Kaal Karal can take others with him independent of a time machine. In the story, a meteor strikes a remote jungle, scattering with it bright pink crystals. The scientists who are sent to analyse the crystals conclude that each one of the crystals could supply the entire Earth with energy for at least a hundred years. The crystals are then followed by the two super-beings, Dhura and Kaal Karal, from about 5,000 years in the future. Dhura is an unscrupulous scientist who intends to steal the crystals with destructive intent and create a devastating energy reactor similar to a huge hydrogen bomb and thus threaten and control the world, while Kaal Karal wants to use the crystals for good – that is, to generate power for the world’s population, very much mirroring well-known debates about the constructive and destructive potentials of nuclear energy. When Kaal Karal first encounters Nagraj, they are not aware that they are both in the struggle to overcome evil. They fight over the pink crystals. Kaal Karal is not able to overcome Nagraj, as mysteriously, the energy from the pink crystals had transferred to Nagraj’s body. Both Nagraj and Kaal Karal are shape-shifting snakes. Nagraj, being their master, has the capacity to absorb Kaal Karal’s powers and use them against him. Undeterred, Kaal Karal then drags Nagraj into a time loop, taking him into the nascent stage of Earth’s formation when there was no atmosphere and the planet was under constant attacks by meteorites. As the story unfolds, Nagraj realises that Kaal Karal belongs to the special category of snakes who can control time – Kaal Sarp, or in other words, snakes who have mastered time-travel. Kaal Karal soon realises that Nagraj is a defender of Earth and stops attacking him as he too has an interest in protecting the Earth of the future. They then join forces to defeat the villainous scientist from the future, Dhura, who wishes to steal the crystals from the time of their formation in an original meteorite attack to destroy the world. Mrityujivi (The Living Dead, 2011, Plate 5) provides yet more dizzy encounters between the multiple facets of the vaigyanik and paravaigyanik. This comic book

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relays a tale that is less about time-travel but time-conflation. Garalgant (literally, Venom Possessor) is an ancient snake demon who rapes a woman. She approaches every ruler of the era for help, but they all deny her justice for fear of Garalgant’s wrath. She conceives a child who is born dead and curses Dev Kaljayi (God of Venom), so that the deity loses his control over all matters of life and death. To escape the curse, Dev Kaljayi brings her child back to life with his immortal poison. Due to his undead status, the baby named Bokaraksha is now a zombie but with the full cognitive capabilities of a human being. He starts biting others to create an army of undead for himself. The supervillain, Miss Killer, takes some poison from Bokaraksha, activates it with the help of scientists and creates artificial rain that has zombie-making capabilities. The poison rains over cities in India so as to create a population of ‘undead’ beings. It is revealed that this was originally a plan hatched by Garalgant to lead an army by controlling Bokaraksha with the help of a mindcontrol device. As the world is in danger from this menacing meteorology, Nagraj intervenes, but he is bitten by a zombie and gets infected. An Indian scientist had earlier managed to develop an antidote to the zombie poison and had administered it to his daughter, Mahi. The effect of this poison makes Mahi blind. However, after one of the zombies infects Nagraj through his snakes, and turns him into a zombie too, the tears of the blind girl, which contains the antidote, returns the superhero back to conscious human life. When the sage, Trikaalraj Tilisma, destroys the gadget that controls Bokaraksha with a powerful mantric attack, Miss Killer and Garalgant are forced to run away. Trikaalraj Tilisma makes Bokaraksha’s body into a tilism for the powerful venom so that it can never come out. Nagraj then attacks Bokaraksha and throws him into the unknown through a portal opened by the sage so that the Earth is safe from his devilry. This multi-spiralling yarn is replete with fantastic fusions of science with the supernatural and folklore. Since Miss Killer was earlier an apsara, a celestial maiden, she also had a share of the amrit, the immortal poison that all demi-gods have, which enables them to live through the ages. A fallen celestial nymph uses modern science to activate an ancient divine poison to try and control a zombie army ravaging Indian cities for which an antidote is developed by a scientist that ends up accidentally reviving the unconscious superhero who goes to defeat the zombie lord with the help of a sage. How such vertiginous mental experiments fall into a straightforward resolution between vigyan and paravigyan is simply beyond comprehension. Although in the end, owing largely to the fact that this is a Nagraj tale, the supernatural eclipses the power of scientific intervention.

Entangled Superheroes are like modern magi. As the above tales vividly illustrate, the scientific magical scenarios that they are immersed in do not show a transcendent unification or resolution of what might otherwise be presented as oppositional knowledge

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epistemes whether they be deemed tradition or modern, religio-culture or science, paravigyan or vigyan. Instead, we have tensile, fragmentary and multi-meshed narratives that have become more and more convulated over the decades. The possibilities of techno-science as much as cultural precedent give protagonists the opportunity to demonstrate their characteristic prowess. Any of these ideas might be deployed to create credibly and incredibly possible scenarios – that is, realms that mirror the world in which we live, and realms wherein you know that the characters and events described are not real, but they are invoked in such a way that they could well be real. For the credibly possible, the familiar becomes fantastic, and for the incredibly possible, the fantastic becomes familiar. Throughout, the comic book tales display a promiscuous debt towards vernacular traditions and modern developments, any aspect of which might be harnessed in the mission to protect humanity against threats that fester across myriad time-spaces at alarming levels. We now come back down to earth with a graphic exploration of contemporary threats to and tensions within the nation-state.

Notes 1 The character of Vanaputra alludes to Vanadevta or Vanadevi, deities that are protectors and controllers of scared forests. Their stories resonate in the lores and legends that circulate in rural and mofussil regions of India. 2 This quote is attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1997 [1817]) Biographia Literaria, ed. Nigel Leask, London: J. M. Dent, Chapter XIV http://www.english.upenn. edu/~mgamer/Etexts/biographia.html Accessed: September 18, 2018. 3 Tzvetan Todorov (1975) The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, transl. Richard Howard, New York: Cornell University Press, p. 46. 4 Darko Suvin (1978) ‘On What Is and Is Not an SF Narration; with a List of 101 Victorian Books that Should Be Excluded From SF Bibliographies’, Science Fiction Studies, 5(14), www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/14/suvin14art.htm. Accessed: January 10, 2015. 5 See Raminder Kaur (2014) ‘The Fictions of Science and Cinema in India’, in Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinema, eds. K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, Abingdon: Routledge. 6 Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt (2002) Aliens R Us:The Other in Science Fiction Cinema, London: Pluto Press, p. 2. 7 See Michelle Reid (2005) ‘Postcolonial Science Fiction’, www.sf-foundation.org/publi cations/essays/reid.html. Indian writers have also taken on the western genre of science fiction and written against its imperial prerogative, notably in novels but also through comics, television and cinema. See Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan (2004) So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press; and Kaur, ‘The Fictions of Science and Cinema in India’. 8 See Christopher Knowles (2007) Our Gods Wear Spandex:The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes, Newburyport, MA: Red Wheel/Weiser/Conari; Jeffrey J. Kripal (2011) Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, Chicago: Chicago University Press; and Richard Reynolds (1994) Superheroes: A Modern Mythology, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, p. 16. 9 Banu Subramaniam (2000) ‘Archaic Modernities: Science, Secularism, and Religion in Modern India’, Social Text, 18(3): 67–86, p. 74. 10 Gyan Prakash (1999) Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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11 The relation between tradition and modernity is by no means straightforward, as a correlation with the past and the present would suggest. Traditions are not necessarily supplanted by the modern. They can of course be revived as a consequence of modernisation, as can elements of ‘the modern’ be presaged in earlier historical periods. See the classic, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. (1983) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 12 Ulrich Beck (1992) Risk Society,Towards a New Modernity, transl. Mark Ritter and with an Introduction by Scott Lash and Brian Wynne, London: Sage Publications. 13 See Prakash, Another Reason; and Akhil Gupta (1998) Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 14 Jeff McLaughlin (2005) ‘What If? DC’s Crisis and Leibnizian Possible Worlds’, in Comics as Philosophy, ed. Jeff McLaughlin, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, p. 5. 15 Theoretically, a white hole is a black hole running backwards in time. It is considered a left-over yet expanding lump from the original Big Bang that is still spewing out matter. It is held that the black hole is caused by the collapse of matter to a singularity, and out of this singularity, the white hole is born. See Alon Retter and Shlomo Heller (2012), ‘The Revival of White Holes as Small Bangs’, New Astronomy, 17(2): 73–75. 16 A. K. Ramanujan (2004) ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations’, in The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan, ed. Vijay Dharwadker, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

7 THE STATE OF THE NATION

THE STATE OF THE NATIONTHE STATE OF THE NATION

May we live for it – only this should be our source of pride. Whether life is in our body or not, the honour of the tricolour should remain. —(Tiranga in Deshdrohi [Traitor], 1997)

India: not just a geopolitical entity but also an honoured and sacred idea that must be fought for and protected at all costs, even if this involves sacrifice of the self.The superhero’s allegiance to the nation goes without question, a nation understood as an ‘imagined political community’ as famously proposed by Benedict Anderson.1 By diligently working to protect the upstanding citizen and defend the country, the superhero enables the imagining of this idealised nation. Through a variety of circumstances, special powers and boons are gained and deployed to these ends. By facing both imaginary and real-life threats, the mediated contours of the imagined community between superhero and reader are congealed. Through the body and antics of the superhero, the Indian nation is further exalted as a sacrosanct and powerful space, a space that despite its historical emergence in 1947 as a territorially bounded political unit is presented as if it existed since time immemorial. Ancient, present and futurist narratives are flattened to present a seamless trajectory. By association, the country itself becomes aggrandised – a super nation beyond time itself. From the mid-1980s, stories about border and separatist threats to India’s sovereignty and safety began to manifest themselves in superhero comics.While national discourse was implicit in earlier adventure comics, the main arrow of the action was against criminals in general. In the 1980s, separatists and traitors began to be seen as the most heinous of villains. State protagonists such as the police and army rather than just the highly intelligent detective also became more prevalent. Superintendent of Police, Mr. Mehra, was introduced in the first comic book, Nagraj, in 1987, and the Indian army introduced in the Super Commander Dhruv issue,

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Aadamkhoron ka Swarg (Heaven of the Cannibals) around 1988. From 1992/93 with the upsurge of communal riots, factions within the nation began to make more of a strident mark. Hindu-Muslim tensions became more prominent, so much so that it led to the genesis of a new superhero, Doga, to tackle the rot within the system. The political turbulence in India was spurred by the Bharatiya Janata Party–led Ram Janmabhumi movement that sought to replace the Babri Masjid with a Hindu temple dedicated to Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya, a real-life scenario that also has its imprints in narratives about this dog-masked superhero who tries to combat both communalism and corruption while his own ethno-religious origins remain obscure. Sometimes, national fealty is clearly expressed in superhero names as with Tiranga – a name referring to the three colours of the Indian flag that are worn by the zealously patriotic crusader as if they were his second skin. He represents the ordinary citizen with extraordinary powers. Another is Super Indian created by Tarun Kumar Wahi and Dilip Choubey in 2005.This superhero is originally a clone of an insurgent, Ahankari (literally, Vainglorious), the supremo of a fictional land, Afakistan. Despite his dark and nefarious origins, he goes on to become a powerful and upstanding good Indian as narrated in Super Indian Kaun? (Who is Super Indian?, 2005). Sometimes the superhero might have origins in a mythic past but pledges to protect the country from its present-day enemies. Arising from a deep slumber after an ancient volcanic eruption, the mild-mannered Yodha is a superhero who encapsulates the primordial premises of the modern nation-state. Tellingly, in Aakraman (Attack, 1993), while Yodha defeats and kills several criminal gangs, he attracts the attention of an honest police officer, Inspector Bharat (another term for India), who is committed to fighting organised crime in Rajnagar. In Maharathi (The Great Warrior, 1994), Inspector Bharat takes out his gun at this strange person when Yodha approaches the national flag, but then drops it as he is pleasantly surprised to see him salute the flag. The relevance of this primeval powerhouse to the present nation becomes patently clear as the superhero pledges to take on crimes against the country. The ‘truth-seeking’ superhero epitomises the ‘greater good’ for the populace. S/he executes various tasks to protect the nation, and in the process, engages with (and, as the case may be, even disengages from) the state. In comparison to the nation, the state is, most simply, a political apparatus concerned with governing, or in the Weberian sense, an entity that possesses monopoly over the use of legitimate force or violence on residents in a given territory.2 Nevertheless, in the superhero universe, the holy grail of the nation is often de-linked from the state as a bureaucratic machine of governance.3 This is a state conceived of as dominated by a murky realm of politicians and police, but not necessarily by the army. The Indian army is for the most part held in high esteem, superior enough to be allied with the holy grail of the nation in the public imagination, as men and women who are prepared to sacrifice their lives to protect its borders. Politicians and other officials in the structures of governance are only subject to this revered opinion in exceptional cases.

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Accordingly, sometimes the superhero epitomises just the nation (which may or may not include the army) as against a separated and splintered state dominated by opportunist politicians and other dubious or corrupt officials. Sometimes, the superhero personifies both the nation and the state together: this is highlighted, on the one hand, in those cases where the superhero’s alter ego is a police officer, and on the other, where the superhero has to join ranks to fight insurgents and antagonists. But even here the state may be fractured along the lines of good versus bad, or as Thomas Blom Hansen argues, the sublime versus profane aspects of the state.4 Upstanding officers trying to conduct their duties amongst a swarm of degenerate individuals both within and outside the state apparatus means that the struggle for integrity manifests itself at several intersecting levels. While the superhero is emblematic of the nation through and through, the superhero is only a contingent figure for the state. Conceptually, the hairline hyphen in nation-state might indicate joint or rupture, and occasionally, both in simultaneous tension, as we shall investigate in the following excerpts.

The affairs of the state The superhero is often sought by the army, police and intelligence units to help them in their investigations as if s/he was an aggrandised officer. Super Commando Dhruv, for instance, is sent to investigate remote places as transpires in Aadamkhoron ka Swarg. He is also sent to negotiate with a supervillain dwarf in Mahamanav (The Grand Man, 1990) when ordinary police civilians and even army officers fall short. In Lahu ke Pyase (Thirsty for Blood, circa 1990), Dhruv is sent to Rajasthan to investigate cases of cross-border smuggling. His middle name, Commando, alludes to the National Security Guard, a government outfit established to tackle insurgency and colloquially referred to as Black Cat Commando. He thus works as a specialised addition to Indian law-enforcing agencies. Similarly, Tiranga’s close friend is a police commissioner who, in tune with the Batman series, signals a call for help with a Tiranga light beam cast into the sky whenever he is in need of enforcement. But what when the state and the system it is part of is perceived of as corrupt and crooked? What if state representatives are deemed ineffective, opportunist and even wicked? This observation only serves to underline the importance of crusaders, messianic individuals that catalyse the ideals of the state, and energise its sublime as against its more profane aspects. There are essentially two types of relationships here. First, there are those like Parmanu and Tiranga who choose to keep their distance and individuality but cooperate with the state as the circumstances dictate. The insider ensconced in procedural machinations, such as Vinay, a police officer, becomes the catalytic outsider, Parmanu, an atomic superhero representing idealised values in the pursuit and arbitration of social justice that representatives of the profane state cannot always deliver. Second, there are those vigilantes like Doga who contest the state apparatus altogether for it failing to deliver justice to the people, in the process of which he might be ostracised as a gangster. The prosaic battles

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between good and bad, and the honest and venal aspects of the state are played out in idealised fantastic forms where the real-life inadequacies of the political infrastructure are compensated for with superheroic characters whether they work within or without the state apparatus. As ‘in/exclusive’ figures, superheroes also stand for an ideal, an anthropomorphised super-state that is a sublime version of the nation-state. It is just, effective and incorruptible that is able to rein in the powers of the villains as well as compensate for the venality of political culture but only if the superhero remains on its outer limits. This lesson is clearly evident in Vote for Parmanu (circa 2000), in which the superhero decides to canvass as a politician to promote his cause only to be trapped in a tangle of accusations from opponents, press and the general public. In the end, Parmanu finds that he is led astray by a villain and revokes the role of politician to concentrate on being a crusader again.5 The engagement with the nation yet disengagement with the state is also illustrated by Tiranga who, at first, wanted to join the police force as an officer. But when he sees that the police were corrupt and involved in engineering riots in Danga (Riot, 1995), he dons the tricolour as a uniform in opposition to the uniform of the police whose hands are tied by nefarious politicians. Tiranga then decides to fight against the corrupt, even if they be officers ensconced within the state armature. In his tricolour eyes, there is little difference between a corrupt man and a national traitor whatever their official position. His mission is to create a space of pure patriotic politics. The importance of this message is underscored by inscribing real-life episodes into the superhero stories, thus anchoring the story in the readers’ social worlds (see Chapter 9). In Lehrata Rahega Tiranga (The Tricolour will Keep Flying, 1996), Tiranga as his alter ego, Abhay, joins Janashakti, a non-governmental organisation led by T.N. Seshan who fight crime and corruption. In real-life, T.N. Seshan was an Indian Administrative Services officer and the tenth Chief Election Commissioner of India (1990–1996), who is renowned for taking strict action against electoral malpractices in the country. The rot in the system is underscored by rotten apples in the family. Parmanu is such a law-abiding citizen that he does not even hesitate to kill his own brother, Ajay, when the latter adopts an unscrupulous path.6 In Aag (Fire, 1991), Ajay has taken bribes to help insurgents by providing them with curfew passes. Consumed with anger, Parmanu’s alter ego, Vinay, interrogates his brother. When Ajay refuses to help Vinay find the fanatics,Vinay shoots his brother in the police station. This is not without Parmanu hugging him with sorrow as he performs his duties. While presenting an emotional conflict, the choice for the superhero to eradicate crime is made palpably clear, with the message that it should be so for others. It recalls famous cinematic scenes between brothers on opposite sides of the fence, as with the farmer and dacoit in the film, Mother India (dir. Mehboob Khan, 1957), and the police officer and smuggler in Deewaar (The Wall, dir.Yash Chopra, 1975). Duty to the idealised nation prevails as the good son shoots his criminal brother dead. The nation as fictive family, one that is placed above blood or adopted family, is perhaps best represented in the Nishana series comprising three comic books:

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Nishana (The Target, 1997), Deshdrohi (Traitor, 1997) and Sindoor Mitado (Wipe away the Vermillion, 1997).7 Tiranga/Abhay has to investigate the collapse of a bridge. The bridge was constructed by a company belonging to his foster father, Mr. Sharma. During the investigation of the death of the superhero’s father, it is revealed that Mr. Sharma was a corrupt man who had built a substandard bridge to garner more profit. Once this news is released, even his family refuses to do anything with Mr. Sharma. His wife is driven to wish for Sharma’s death after he is forced to take her hostage to escape the superhero. Shikha, Tiranga’s foster sister, shows no hatred or revulsion for Tiranga even after he has killed her father. Both women implore Tiranga/Abhay to stay with them despite the fact that Mr. Sharma was the head of their household. The pure patriot then takes over the space of the shady patriarch. If the venality of the state becomes too overpowering, stupendous anti-heroes who are located almost entirely outside state structures become necessary. Doga is the ultimate outlier before descending into outright villainy. What keeps this angry superhero within the skein of the nation is that, come what may, all his adventures target corruption and injustice wherever that is located, and rarely the innocent even if he be misunderstood by the people around him. His maxim is ‘Doga only kills crime! Doga only kills criminals!’ Despite the fact he is given the Hindu name, Suraj, after his adoption, Doga’s ambiguous religio-ethnic background attributes this superhero the status of a secular icon. But his reputation might be pulled apart by others wishing to subvert his popular authority and command in street justice. In Doga Hindu Hai (Doga is Hindu, circa 2008), a gang involved in the black marketing of blood whip up communal riots in order to undermine his status amongst Mumbai’s residents while also presenting themselves with an opportunity to sell blood for the injured (Plate 7). Doga attacks and beats up a gang of blood black marketers. Fittingly called Bloodman, the cartel’s boss kills the Muslims from the gang that Doga had just attacked. Bloodman’s goons then whip up a crowd, claiming that since Doga was Hindu he had killed only the Muslims. A riot ensues in protest. Questioning his secular credentials, Muslims pick up swords and decide to attack Doga to his death. Suddenly, the fox-like superheroine, Lomri, appears in a van, picks up a dazed Doga in a neardead condition hiding in a sewer with a gang of whining dogs.There are more riots in the city and, as a result of the bloodshed, Bloodman’s business increases manifold. The government calls out the army and decrees a shoot-on-sight order for the rioters and a notice to capture Doga, dead or alive. The story then continues in Ro Para Doga (Doga Started Crying, 2009). Hounded by gangsters, police, the army and the public at large, Doga is taken by Lomri to an emergency medical facility, where she closes her eyes to remove Doga’s mask.While Doga’s soul is shown rising from his body, the police and the army surrounds the emergency room. But Lomri vanishes with Doga and leaves him at his house where he recuperates. Bloodman unleashes dogs to attack the military with grenades so that the public are led to believe that Doga was behind the attack. Once he has recovered, Doga is compelled to start killing the rioters even though he knows that they are misguided.

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In the subsequent Doga ka Curfew (Doga’s Curfew, 2009), Doga initiates a curfew for rioters. But people begin to protest, announcing on television news that due to Doga’s curfew, people cannot come and donate blood for the needy. Adrak Chacha, his uncle, organises a group of blood donors but is attacked by the rioters. Incensed by their actions on his uncle, Doga decides to contain and then kill the rioters with a captured petrol tanker followed by a military tank. Doga is surrounded by the military but escapes by detonating mines on water pipes that create a wall of water between him and the military. The army then try to eliminate Doga, deeming him a major public threat. Doga is forced to attack the army, undermining their actions when they had more important things to deal with: ‘Why did you leave the border and come here? This is the fire of my house, and I will pour water over this fire’ (p. 8). He then uses mines to blast the sewer lines under the soldiers’ feet, who fall into the sewers. His attacks on the army, however, do not lethally injure them. Eventually, Lomri identifies the link between the blood black market and the riots. She also points out that despite the riots, gangs were moving around freely using the guise of ambulances. Bloodman’s scam is exposed, and Doga’s innocence is proven. Doga eventually kills the villain in a bloody battle. Despite his liminal status, Doga gains his credentials in the eyes of the people as against the misguided arms of the state, including even the army.Yet the state still continues to see him as an illegitimate contender for power. Effectively, truth lies in the intent of the superheroes, not necessarily in representatives of law and order. In this case, Doga becomes the parallel state, the rhizomatic and true entity that has monopoly over the use of legitimate force or violence in response to the unthinking and/or venal paragons of the established state. He becomes the purer body that could lead the imagined community while encouraging the readers to envisage a better nation and state. In such ways, superhero comics try to nurture a field of ‘pure patriotism’ through protagonists not just embodying truth, but also performing truth against a plethora of proliferating threats and terrors. First, truth is defined as against what it opposes – the uncertainty and malevolence that plagues society in the form of villains and other dubious characters, often presented as power-crazed, corrupt, inept and/or inefficient. Second, it is a performative truth that comes into being by virtue of protagonists’ conduct and how the plot unfolds moment by moment. This – and not necessarily state paragons such as the police or army – is the space of pure patriotism and the legitimate space for violence in the superhero universe.

Adversaries of truth In virtually all superhero comics, the nation as sanctioned truth – whether it be in the form of an ideal, symbol or personified as individuals or collectives – is shown as perpetually under attack. The culprits might be located within the nation as criminals and insurgents, outside the nation as invading or threatening armies and organisations, or even in the past or future as villainous entities resurrecting themselves from earlier times, or appearing from future time-space scenarios.

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Superheroes come into their element as national exemplars par excellence when they fight real-life concerns represented by the foreigner and/or the atankvadi, translated as insurgent or terrorist. As a legacy of Cold War politics, many in India continue to suspect US involvement in South Asia as counter to Indian interests. It is proven knowledge that, up until recent years, Pakistan has long been seeking US mediation to resolve the contested sovereignty of Kashmir. In the early 1990s, the US had even persuaded the USSR to not supply India with cryogenic technology that scuppered the Indian Space Research Organisation’s ambitions for launching heavy satellites and manned space flights.8 The Yodha comic books from that decade vividly reflect such anxieties by foregrounding a mytho-modern superhero, a patriot who although not always anti-American, is ready to take the political chicaneries of the US government head-on. His patriotism is so pure and infectious that even foreigners have to bow down to him. In Bijli (Lightning, 1996), for instance, America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sends its best field agent, Badman, to gather more information on the Indian superhero. Despite being an American patriot, Badman ends up befriending Yodha and keeps him informed of activities against crime. This is most apparent in Khabardar Yodha (Yodha Beware, 1994), where the superhero teams up with Badman to get involved in the protection of a ‘living diamond’, an Indian scientist’s invention of a jewel that can grow like a tree and even defend itself against attack. In comparison to the US, Pakistan’s position with respect to India is less ambivalent, for the country is often portrayed as the nation’s unremitting enemy.9 Several issues openly cite the country’s name. In Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Pakistan, 2003), supervillains disable the superheroes while they battle with separatists in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, otherwise known as Azad (Free) Kashmir. Taliban commanders plan to instigate communal riots across India along with Pakistani figures of authority. However, all their efforts to create the tumult come to naught due to the intervention of Indian superheroes.The antagonists are frustrated and decide to hire supervillains through a proxy to take out the superheroes. While the superheroes are being neutralised, a high-ranking Taliban commander based in Pakistan called Kasai Khan (Butcher Khan) is handed over to India under US pressure. Enraged, Taliban-affiliated militants blast two towers in the US, which responds by heavy shelling of the militant hideout in Afghanistan. Although not named, the incident clearly points to the hijacked aircraft attacks on the World Trade Centre towers in New York in 2001 and its aftermath. To ensure continued Pakistani support, the militants decide to instigate war between India and Pakistan and attack Indian parliament (alluding to yet another real-life incident in December 2001). However, since the superheroes have already been disabled, the supervillains realise that they cannot live anywhere except India. They switch their loyalties to India, signalling that insurgents were the worst of all villains. The supervillains then collectively reach the Indian side of Kashmir and face shelling by the Pakistani army.They feel ashamed that they had earlier attacked superheroes who could have saved the situation. In remorse, they change their tactic, infiltrate the disputed territory of Kashmir and attempt to destroy the base

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camps of the Pakistani insurgents. But the betrayal of one of the supervillains leads to their capture. In a dramatic reversal of circumstances, the superheroes are released and save the day by destroying the Pakistani terror camps. Pakistan’s secret services, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), are often shown involved in anti-India activities. In reality as in fiction, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency is alleged to have been fermenting trouble in India. In the multilayered multi-starrer, Negatives (2013), the Area Chief of the ISI masterminds the kidnapping of Indian scientists so as to prevent the launch of five satellites that would help Indian scientists monitor and regulate cyclones and even help to predict earthquakes (Plate 8). But there was another more secret satellite function, which was to create a magnetic net over the Earth that could not only block the harmful rays of the sun but also destroy meteors. Eventually, Dhruv foils ISI’s plan by having already taken the place of one of the hostages. As one of Raj Comics’ writers, Anurag, explained: Pakistan is ‘a chief source of terrorism’, so directly or indirectly Muslim characters are incorporated as antagonists.10 As a consequence, one reader, himself a Muslim, decried how Indian Muslims are treated as if they are ‘the fifth column of Pakistan’. The comic book producers were very conscious of their diverse fan base, however, and were attuned to such sensitivities. Certainly in earlier decades, anti-Muslim bias is circumnavigated by depictions of ‘good Muslims’ and secular narratives that do not conspicuously favour one religious community over another. As with popular Indian film, antiMuslim rhetoric, to a greater or lesser extent, tends to be mollified and countered by other gestures to inclusivity. Occasionally, comic books might even highlight sound Pakistani representatives depending upon the political contingencies of the time. Kurbaan Zaidi, for instance, was introduced in Maut Chipi hai Desh me (Death is Hiding in the Country, 1999). Zaidi is originally an India-hating leader of a fanatical organisation based in Pakistan, but he has a change of heart after Tiranga helps him defuse bombs in the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad, in Jhanda Uncha Rahe Hamara (May our Flag Fly High, 1999). The year 1999 happened to be when agreements for bus travel and diplomacy between India and Pakistan came with an unprecedented thaw in relations. The battle that ensued later that year, due to the Pakistani army overstepping the Line of Control in Kargil, put a stop to any mediation between the two countries. In Kargil (1999), this realpolitik drama is vividly played out in the land of graphic interventions. Tiranga covertly enters the disputed region to counter the militant intruders in Kargil and succeeds in getting the release of an Indian flight lieutenant in Pakistani custody. In Bharat Saaf, Pak Saaf (India Clean, Pakistan Clean, 2004), the 2002 Akshardham temple attack by militants in Gujarat is replicated.11 The comic book ends with the Pakistani patriot and superhero, Kurbaan Zaidi, joining forces with Tiranga to defeat and kill Asgar Masood, the enemy of India, who also became the adversary of Pakistan. Masood was depicted as the leader of Al Jaish Qaida, an insurgent organisation that was earlier promoted by Pakistan. A Pakistani captive tells Tiranga that their government had funded them and had incited them to attack civilian targets

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in India. However, when the talks between the Indian and the Pakistani governments were making progress and funding to militant organisations was stopped, the insurgents decide to step up their attacks in India to derail the peace process. Their jihad against India resumes with a vengeance – jihad being a spiritual struggle that has assumed armed combat. The tale suggests that if Pakistan did not support insurgent organisations, the two neighbouring countries could be allies. Ultimately, these antagonists could come to haunt Pakistan itself. In Border (circa 2000), the superheroine, Shakti, battles against the Pakistani invasion of Indian territory. She works closely with the Indian army, while the adversary is in cahoots with insurgent networks that operate from within India’s borders. There is one signature building that acts as the archetypal symbol of secularism – a conjoined mandir (temple) and masjid (mosque) positioned directly on the India– Pakistan ‘Cheema’ border (Figure 7.1). It is a token of both union and separation – a reminder of the religious diversity of the country, and also the rupture of the Radcliffe line that divided composite cultures in 1947 during the partition of the subcontinent. A female reporter makes an announcement about enemy shelling on the border, alluding to the real-life news reporter on the frontline in 1999, Barkha Dutt. One farmer has had four bullet wounds, and his condition is critical. There are no facilities to take care of him, and the nearest hospital is twenty miles away. In India’s capital, New Delhi, doctors return from a meeting in a high-rise building where they are requested to attend to the wounded at the border. They refuse to risk their lives. When they are inside a lift, the wires snap, and it descends at a frightening pace towards the ground. Suddenly the lift stops in mid-descent, as Shakti had gone into the lift shaft and remoulded the wires with her metal transformative powers. The relieved doctors come out of the lift, remarking: ‘I haven’t seen death at such close quarters ever before’ (p. 5). Another joins in and says: ‘This is no less than a miracle’, at which point Shakti replies: I have come here just to tell you that you can also perform a similar miracle elsewhere. At the Cheema border, you can also help the dying and wounded and save them. (p. 5) Deeply affected by their near-death experience, the doctors decide to go to the border to help the wounded. At the border, a little girl, Cheena, is inside the syncretised mandir-masjid. The enemy army sends in war planes and shells the area so that a signal is given to the insurgents to devastate the region. One of the pilots sees Cheena and fires a battlefield range ballistic missile, HATF-5, akin to Ghauri I known to be used by the Pakistani army. Shakti intervenes just in time and hurls the missile back to the plane, which blows up into pieces. Shakti returns Cheena to her house, where doctors are performing operations on her wounded father. All the lights have been shattered, however. Instead, Shakti produces light from her hands saying: ‘My second name is light’ (p. 19), under which the doctors perform their life-saving operation.

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temple-mosque on the India–Pakistan border, in Border (circa 2000), Raj Comics, p. 9

FIGURE 7.1 Conjoined

On the final page when Shakti has helped the Indian army defeat the assailants, Cheena’s father in a drug-induced state says: ‘I need to go to my fields’. Shakti reinforces the sentiment, stating: ‘In this village, the plough will never stop’ (p. 29). Even though Shakti has been entangled in a highly masculinist and belligerent battle driven by the use of modern science and engineering, she still bows to the fertility

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of mother Earth as the ultimate in strength. It is the feminine principle embodied in the powers of Shakti that can effectively assist and instruct arch figures of modernity such as doctors and soldiers. The tale is a reminder that the formidable powers of the nation’s soil and spirituality can vanquish the errant ways of the modern world. The scenarios may be very masculinist in that they invariably involve the knowledge and navigation of science, engineering, metallurgy, warfare and weapons, all male-dominated fields; but Shakti is able to excel and overcome them, effectively emasculating them in order to foreground corrective, nurturing and regenerative forces. Shakti alludes to the unlimited powers of fertility, in this case of mother Earth. Her alliance with the significance of the Earth and agriculture contradicts the latter-day valorisation of industrialisation, machinery, urban and sedentary lifestyles. Her embracing of ordinary people, no matter what their class or creed, serves as a counterpoint to the divisive interests of self-interested middle-class metropolitan professionals. As with other superheroes, her call is for service to society and unity in humanity. China too has a lurking presence in some of the comic books. Barf Ki Chita (Funeral by Ice, circa 1988) suggests a Chinese incursion to the Indian side of the Himalayan mountain range. Dhruv is shocked to see Chinese-looking faces behind a set of alien-looking helmets and calls them ‘kaminon’ (a term of abuse meaning extremely ruthless people, p. 21). Initially thinking they were ‘aliens’, as they had been wearing radiation-proof suits, a Chinese scientist then tells him that they planned to use their atomic guns and a nuclear reactor to rapidly melt ice so as to flood the northern plains. The aim was to send the Indian economy into turmoil and then the country would have to surrender their claim on the territory without a fight (Figure 7.2). Raj Comics’ studio head, Sanjay Gupta, confirmed that the story was developed in response to the news of Sino-Indian tensions over Sumdorong Chu in 1986–1987.12 He also asserted that, in part, the comics catered to an audience who was in search of answers to various problems facing India. Nevertheless, Raj Comics would prefer to allude to aggressor countries through the visuals, rather than actually name them in the text. Gupta narrated a recent incident when they were undertaking translations of the comics into English in order to widen the reach of Raj Comics beyond the Hindi-speaking mofussil heartland. In this case, the translator directly referred to China rather than a lightly veiled reference, as was the original intention. Subsequently, Raj Comics had to get the translation altered as they did not want to name the Chinese as villains in Barf Ki Chita.While references might be noted in the facial physiognomy of ‘the enemy [that] will capture this region of tactical importance’ (p. 25), and there might be occasional allusions such as yeti inhabitants who refer to ‘a nation which is the strongest in the region’ (p. 21) and the ‘evil designs of our neighbour’ (p. 32), China is not at any point mentioned in either the Hindi or English versions. Nevertheless, when it comes to the naming of people from Pakistan, a comparable level of discretion is not always followed, with the country’s name even cropping up in comic book titles, as we have seen above. This disclosure is primarily due to the fact that even though there have been disputes over territory, China or those with affiliations to the Asian superpower are

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enemy force running away from the melting ice, in Barf Ki Chita (Funeral by Ice, 1988), Raj Comics, p. 30

FIGURE 7.2  An

not demonstrably involved in insurgent activities within the heart of India. Their threat is more economic and geo political on the borders of India. Moreover, like warring brothers, Pakistan is the country with which India’s esteem is historically and politically entangled. It is a country against which comic book producers and their readers could actually see themselves as winning a war.To name them was also to identify and conquer them.

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Contagious patriotism The lyrical Tiranga continues from the opening quote: ‘Whatever happens, the nation must remain supreme’.This is even over the sanctity of the family, otherwise endorsed in virtually every other aspect of Indian culture. With a combination of misfortune and determination, superheroes have marginalised family life so as to work for the more superior family, the nation. But figures of familial affection are recreated through adopted or fictive relatives. By extension, this relationship becomes another chord of affiliation for the readers. Dhruv, for instance, lives as the foster son of Rajan Mehra, who is a high-ranking and honest police officer. Shweta, his foster sister, also supports Dhruv in fighting crime, firstly through her ingenious gadgets, and secondly, through her secret identity as the superheroine, Chandika. Similarly, Doga has been brought up by his foster uncles who have supported him and protected him throughout his life. Monica (as Lomri) and her brother, Inspector Cheetah, help the vigilante as and when the need arises. The point here is that even though the superheroes are alone and do not have a consanguineous family or direct address to the social world of readers, s/he is interpellated into their habitus through associated figures of affection.13 As the superhero’s affective bonds are not always sealed in blood or a pact of marriage, they are then relatively pliable relations. In a sense, they have the best of both worlds. The lack of blood relations enables the superhero to proceed with his or her higher mission at hand without qualm. Simultaneously, the fictive family provides a skein of trust with which superheroes can be embedded in Indian society and reach out to a broad range of sensibilities that values the family, nested as it is within the matrix of the national family. As John Stephens observes on children’s literature in general: ‘fiction must be regarded as a special site for ideological effect, with a potentially powerful capacity for shaping audience attitudes’, a proposal that we will further investigate in Chapters 9 and 10.14 Overwhelmingly, the superhero remains the exemplar of good conduct that plays a significant part in shaping the views and imaginaries of his/her followers. With a focus on threats to the imagined or fictive family of the nation with regards to corruption, communalism, border disputes, insurgency and enemy battlegrounds, pure patriotism is performed through the superhero’s conduct and augmented by his/her distinctive looks and/or name.While the nation is sacrosanct, the state is ambiguous. The superhero might be the nation incarnate, but s/he has a varying relationship with the state, ranging from ally to antagonist. S/he may be able to correct the social and political order even if it be only for the moment, but cannot change the system irrevocably. Even if s/he were to try to engage with and/ or create substantive change with the state apparatus, s/he would no longer retain the authority of an ‘in/exclusive’ superhero. Rather, s/he would get swallowed up by the vine of human vice and corruption that mars the sublimity of the state. Throughout the superhero comics, concepts about the superhero as emblematic of good citizenship may vary. It may be different according to which superhero is the focus: with Dhruv, for instance, there is minimal use of and even withdrawal from violence in his adventures. By contrast, Mumbai’s saviour vigilante, Doga,

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almost swims in a bloodbath of savagery, such that even the ideals of a sublime state remain a chimera. Even when considering the same superhero, sanctioned conduct might change with time. In the course of the two decades of Parmanu comics since their emergence in 1991, ‘rightful vengeance’ was seen as an adequate reason for taking someone’s life. By ‘rightful’, we refer to the reader’s sympathy for the tragic consequences of Vinay’s parents, who were murdered and thus left the boys as orphans. As with Giorgio Agamben’s insights on ‘bare life’ or homo sacer, the villain here is so outside the pale of political society that his killing is not conceived as murder.15 Later, however, vengeance is channelled into a discourse about ‘lawful citizenship’, where taking anyone’s life is not an option: Parmanu while vanquishing villains only incarcerates them in his role as Inspector Vinay, and Dhruv prefers to send them to Narka jail in Rajnagar. Here, there is recognition that, however liminal, monstrous and murderous a villain may be, s/he also exists within the law. Notably, this observation does not apply to the conduct of all superheroes, more so to those superheroes that work closely with, or have another alternative identity as enforcers of established law. Indeed, not killing the arch villain serves multiple purposes over and beyond demonstrating the superhero’s exemplary conduct.This non-execution becomes a tactical irresolution in that it generates vigilance as well as intrigue. The prospect always remains that (super)villains can return for payback, for which riveting cliff-hangers become de rigeur.

Notes 1 Benedict Anderson (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London:Verso, p. 5. 2 Max Weber (2015) Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society, transl and ed. Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters, London: Palgrave MacMillan Books. There are, of course, extensive theories of the nation and state but unless they have direct relevance to the material in question, they lie beyond the scope of this book. See Erika Cudworth (2007) The Modern State:Theories and Ideologies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; and Hansen and Stepputat, eds. States of Imagination. 3 On the qualitative differences between rashtriya (national) and rajnaitik (political), see Raminder Kaur (2003) Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism: Public Uses of Religion in Western India, New Delhi: Permanent Black, Chapter 6. On governance, see Christopher Ansell, University and Jacob Torfing, eds. (2017) Handbook on Theories of Governance, Cheltenham: Edgar Elgar Publishing. 4 Thomas Blom Hansen (2001) ‘Governance and State Mythologies in Mumbai’, in States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, eds.Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 226. 5 See Raminder Kaur (2013) Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns, New Delhi: Routledge, Chapter 9. 6 Ajay’s name is later altered to Vijay in Death Atom (2003) due to a change of authors. 7 Vermillion is applied on Indian, mainly Hindu and Sikh, women’s foreheads as a circular mark by those who are married. Wiping the vermillion from the forehead signifies the death of the husband. 8 See N. S. Ramnath (2010) ‘Cryogenic Technology: The India Story’, Forbes India, June 9, http://www.forbesindia.com/article/hindsight/cryogenic-technology-the-indiastory/14012/1 Accessed: July 18, 2018.

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9 Parallels might also be made with other comics, as with Captain America and Superman comics during the years of World War II in which the superheroes take on Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. 10 Interview, Raj Comics, Burari, August 11, 2014. 11 In an alleged retaliation for the post-Godhara riots in the state of Gujarat in 2002 in which over 2,000 civilians were killed in communal clashes, militants claiming affiliation to the Lashkar-e-Toiba group, attacked Akshardham Temple in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. 12 Interview, Raj Comics, Burari, July 7, 2014. Aside from the political hangover of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, one other major point of tension was around 1986 when India raised the status of Arunachal Pradesh from a Union Territory to a full-fledged state.The borderlands were claimed by the Chinese, and by the end of that year, there were reports that the Chinese military had ventured south of the McMahon line with around eight divisions and over 20,000 men. The Indian government responded with sending up to ten divisions over and above the 50,000-strong troops already posted there. See John W. Garver (1996) ‘Sino-Indian Rapprochement and the Sino-Pakistan Entente’, Political Science Quarterly, 111(2): 323–347; and V. Natarajan (2000) ‘The Sumdorong Chu Incident’, Bharat Rakshak Monitor, 3(3), www.bharat-rakshak.com/ARMY/history/siachen/286Sumdorong-Incident.html. Accessed: October 18, 2017. 13 See Louis Althusser (2014) On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, transl. and ed. G. M. Goshgarian, London:Verso. 14 John Stephens (1992) Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction, London: Longman, p. 3. 15 Giorgio Agamben (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 15.

8 A FORENSICS OF EVIL

A FORENSICS OF EVILA FORENSICS OF EVIL

A boy acquires a marvellous ancient chest. The chest or pitara is named after Bhanumati, Duryodhana’s wife in the ancient epic, Mahabharata. Once opened, the container can suck up everything and, simultaneously, spill out anything at the command of its owner. Through the control of a magical bracelet, the chest can even devour the entire city of Mahanagar, home of the superhero, Nagraj. One day, the chest spews out a demon who replicates all the powers of Nagraj. The demon confronts the superhero and almost annihilates him. Had it not been for the sons of Nagraj and Super Commando Dhruv, who are lost inside the universe of the chest and crack a formula to eliminate its magic, Nagraj would certainly have been defeated by the dystopic forces unleashed in Bhanumati ka Pitara (2006).1 Dystopia, or rather the threat of it, is a recurrent theme in superhero comics. It often forms the main element of the plot, as evident in the titles of several comic book issues such as Rajnagar ki Tabahi (Rajnagar’s Destruction, 1996), Kalyug (1999) and Kohram (Mayhem, 2000). The stakes are dramatically raised as high as they can go for a superhero to test his/her mettle. As mammoth violence, totalitarian iniquity, dehumanisation and cataclysmic events are set to engulf the planet, the urgent mission for the superhero is to stop the world, not just the locality or nation, from doom and damnation. Dystopia has Judeo-Christian resonance in terms of the apocalypse – the final conflict in which the forces of good overcome evil. It also invokes the Indic concept of Kalyug or Kali Yuga, the dark ‘age of downfall’ – the fourth epoch in which we currently reside according to Hindu and Sikh scriptures. Kalyug might be associated with authoritarian rulers, food shortages, displacement, the disappearance of spirituality, and the exponential rise of sin based on wrath, avarice and lust. It is an age of climax due to the accumulative wrongdoing of people in earlier periods, one to be followed by a new and peaceful order. A related Islamic concept is qayamat or doomsday for the non-believer. While apocalypse or qayamat is a concept that is

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firmly located in the future, Kalyug is said to swamp our present era. Both timeframes are pertinent here. Like a double helix, current and imminent threats rotate around each other in the superhero universe. A motley melange of dictators, mobsters, robbers, terrorists, megalomaniac scientists, mythological and folkloric demons, and terrifying aliens and monsters are liberally scattered across the comic books to execute their horrific designs (Plate 9). Aside from criminality such as gangsterism, smuggling and political insurgency, in other fictive scenarios, (super)villains might meddle with the course of humanity, and along with mythic prototypes and impressive devices, even time and the cosmos itself. The dead might come alive to ravage the Earth. Portals to other worlds might open through which the long incumbent forces of darkness rush in to destroy Earth. Mortal enemies of the nation might ally with these supernatural forces to usher in an era of chaos, an impending picture of ‘ultimate evil’. In this chapter, we examine such threats, the features and fears that attend dystopic worlds, and their operational role in the comic books. Indeed, without such negatives there would be no positives. We begin with an examination of types of villains and supervillains before delving into their relevance for superhero stories. As distinct from mundane lowlife, the supervillain refers to those larger-than-life villains, male or female, who have acquired incredible powers. They do not just concern themselves with local or national control, but planetary – if not (inter) galactic – domination for which only a superhero is equipped to handle and thwart.

Homo bestia Basing his observations on US superhero comics, Pramod K. Nayar comments that villains compels: an exercise in teratology (the science of monsters). The monster is also – etymologically speaking the term comes from ‘monstrare’ meaning ‘to show’ or ‘reveal’ – about revelation, portents and omens. What the monster reveals in the superhero comic book is an imminent future – of chaos, lawlessness, a different social order. What the superhero fights is a villain who is almost always a mutant monster, a freak, or one who has developed extraordinary powers which s/he uses to overrun society.2 Through the villain, the reader enters the limits of civil society.This reprehensible body has to be contained and/or expelled if the heroic body, an aggrandised version of the citizen encapsulating notions of a strong and upright nation, is to be preserved and promoted. Contrasting Giorgio Agamben’s ‘bare life’ or homo sacer, the figure of debasement in superhero comics – whether they be an errant human or a human hybrid – might be a figure of debasement but it is also superhuman in that it has recourse to phenomenal powers that can overrun society: the supervillain as homo bestia.3

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Through availing of a mix of archaeological, mythic, historical and scientific devices, impressive supervillains came to prominence in the 1980s with Raj Comics’ Roman Hatyara (Roman Assassin, 1987) and the appearance of man-beast cannibals in Aadamkhoron ka Swarg (Heaven of the Cannibals, circa 1988). Roman Hatyara begins with a narration of a Greek attack on India, opening with a scene of the war between Alexander the Great and Porus of the Paurava kingdom around 326 b.c.e. The Indians were on the verge of defeating Alexander as Porus’ defence included the use of formidable elephants. However, in an elision of ancient histories in which comic books excel all too well, the Greek army’s fate was reversed by a lone Roman soldier who, with the power of his helmet given to him by a mystic, attacked Porus’ army (Figure 8.1). His punch alone had ‘the combined strength of several elephants’ (p. 21). In a fit of frenzy, the animals then turned on the Indian forces. In the current era, four archaeologists had unearthed the helmet from the ruins of the Indus Valley civilisation. After it is exhibited in the fictional Kudanpur Museum, one of the more unscrupulous archaeologists decides to steal it for himself and use it for his own selfish ends. Dhruv later finds that the helmet was festooned with many tiny needles covered with a mysterious paste of ancient herbs and roots. When worn, these needles would lightly puncture the skin on the head, secreting minute amounts of this mixture that would then increase manifold the strength of the person wearing the helmet. In Aadamkhoron ka Swarg, a criminal gang uses the formula of a dead German scientist, who during World War II, had tried to create the ultimate fighting force for the dictator, Adolf Hitler. With the potion, he could turn human beings into man-beasts with extremely powerful bodies and bulletproof skin. This transformation was aided by instilling genes from various animals that lent the human being the qualities of that particular animal.The genetic conversion was temporary and was overseen by a central solar-powered machine that was linked to the subjects’ body through a monitor worn on their wrists. Basing himself deep in the jungles of Lakshadweep Islands, Narasingha found this potion in the current era and endowed himself with the mighty powers of a lion. Supported by a genetically transformed army and a cache of military armament, he sought to rule India and then, of course, the world.

A gallery of villainy A ‘monstrology’ of superhero comics need take stock of the diversity of villainous intent. Robin S. Rosenberg proposes a tripartite typology: the ‘straightforward criminal’ engaged in relatively mundane misconduct; the ‘vengeful villain’ who seethes with a personal vendetta against the superhero; and the ‘heroic villain’ who has a greater goal to do good, even if it be a twisted desire that contradicts those of the archetypal superhero – for instance, attacking human life in the effort to save the planet’s plant life as conjured up by the antics of the eco-terrorist, Poison Ivy, in DC Comics’ Batman series.4 Although stimulating, Rosenberg’s schema is limited in its scope and cannot fully account for the variety of villainy in Raj Comics superhero comics.

FIGURE 8.1 The

story of a legendary Roman soldier who could even defeat elephants as discussed by archaeologists, in Roman Hatyara (Roman Assassin, 1987), Raj Comics, p. 2

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While straightforward criminals and vengeful villains may be identified at length, heroic villains do not appear with abundance to constitute a substantial type. Yet there are plentiful others that could be added to the deranged gallery. Straightforward criminals could cover anything from urban crime, smuggling, to insurgency. In the 1970s, dacoits or the rural gangster in the ravines were commonplace (see Chapter 2). Straightforward criminals might also include crooked individuals such as suspect politicians and the bent police officer who are supposed to represent the epitome of civic good but have instead turned to crime and corruption. They lurk in the nether regions of official posture and shady wrongdoing. Their presence indicates a public lack of trust in civic structures and official rule of law, thus further compelling a faith in superhero vigilantes. Reflecting threats at large since the 1980s, insurgents or terrorists are straightforward criminals writ large attached to politically motivated transnational networks.Their offensive is tied in with promoting a particular race, creed or religion with the use of violence as we have seen in the preceding chapter. The emblematic vengeful villain in the Raj Comics oeuvre, if we were to call him that, is the robotics specialist, Grand Master Robo (Figure 8.2). His left eye shoots a powerful laser beam, and his body is immune to the venomous poison of the mamba snake. Yet he is consistently outsmarted by Dhruv who, without any obvious superpowers, Robo considers a mere amateur. Robo’s revenge is highlighted in his first appearance in Maut ka Olympic (Death Olympic, 1989), where international criminals gather to participate in an absurd series of games, some of which are fatal to participants. They include, for instance, European crooks robbing a silver coin from a cricketer’s pocket in an India-England tournament; and Chinese felons running off with the frames of two rare paintings, but strangely, leaving the canvasses behind. Robo monitors the events from a distant location but is foiled by Dhruv, who finds out the international criminals’ hiding place. After his ludicrous ‘Olympic’ goes astray, Robo rises from his seat with a mamba snake in his hand and rips it apart in a fit of rage, vowing revenge against Dhruv. His vengeance is stoked further by the fact that his daughter, Natasha, who was the commander of his crime syndicate, falls in love with Dhruv and leaves the world of crime. This indeed leads to a curious relationship between the superhero and supervillain: one that is based on contempt and reprisal from the point of view of the supervillain, and, from the point of view of the superhero, a degree of pity and even begrudging respect for the fact that Robo is Natasha’s father even while he tries to vanquish his villainy. In the Nagraj series, Nagin is a vengeful shape-shifting sea snake with hypnotic and tantric powers (Figure 8.3).  Tantric refers to esoteric rituals and physical activities to transcend the material world, many of which are dark or associated with left-hand (unorthodox) Hinduism and used to exact vengeance. Nagina is yet another bitter tantric. Even though there are no obvious associations with sexual rituals in the comics, Nagina’s battles with Nagraj are immersed in a latent sexualised tension in their struggle for power. Nagraj’s beloved, Visarpi, is the ruler of the island of Nagdweep, and Nagraj is a sworn protector of the throne that Nagina seeks for herself, a story that is vividly depicted in Nagina ka

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FIGURE 8.2 Grand

Master Robo and his henchman, Agnimukh, attack Super Commando Dhruv, in Grand Master Robo (circa 1991), Raj Comics, front cover

Jaal (Nagina’s Web, circa 1990). Here, Nagina is asked to help make Nagdweep a haven for shape-shifting snakes by the sage, Kaaldoot, the first person to discover and conquer Nagdweep from its earlier tribal inhabitants. Nagina, however, hatches a plan to become the empress of the island. She seeks to strengthen her powers by daily sacrifice of a shape-shifting cobra whose blood she drinks. When her megalomaniac ambitions are exposed, Kaaldoot imprisons her and makes Visarpi’s father

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villainous Nagin sucks Nagraj’s superpowers, Nagin (1990), Raj Comics, front cover

FIGURE 8.3 The

the king of the snake island. Nagina escapes and enlists the help of other dangerous prisoners of the island for her vendetta. Vengeful villains keep returning as a matter of personal pride. The time-­ traveller, Itihaas (History) is another supervillain who frequently returns to plague Parmanu. As he does so, he conjures up a plethora of chaotic and dangerous scenes from the past into the present. This is aptly illustrated in Ek Naya Itihaas

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(A New History, circa 2000) and Phir Aaya Itihaas (Itihaas Comes Again, 2002), where the deranged turban-headed mystic returns to get even with Parmanu. In Ek Naya Itihaas, the villain creates a Trojan horse and kidnaps children. His conduct forces Parmanu to get the Black Book of Magic from the clutches of an insurgent called Khoonkhar Changezi (Ferocious Changezi), a magical book that could augment Itihaas’ black powers. In Phir Aaya Itihaas, the villain forms a team with a tantric and takes control of Shakti. Bringing alive another ancient power, he immobilises Parmanu and orders Shakti to kill Parmanu. Parmanu escapes by slightly moving his body in such a way that a weapon thrown by Shakti activates the transmitting button on his belt. In his atomised form. Shakti then attempts to incinerate him with her shots of fire. Eventually, Parmanu’s cyborg aide, Probot, transmits him back to the laboratory so as to escape her assault. Later in Hukumat (Government, 2003), on another rancorous trip, Itihaas tries to kill Parmanu by bringing the hundred-foot Mughal monument, Qut’b Minar, to life in order to crush Parmanu in New Delhi. Heroic villains – those that prize other principles more than human life – are few and far between in the Raj Comics universe. Mention might be made of Professor Enviro who is an eco-terrorist in the Tiranga series. Wearing a red and yellow outfit, the masked villain carries small bags filled with his mutated plants around his waist. Enviro’s forte is to mutate plants into dangerous beings, training them to attack and defend against those who he thinks are enemies of the environment. Refracting protests against the actual Tehri Dam in the northern state of Uttarakhand from the 1980s, his father was killed during demonstrations against the construction of what in the comic books is called Behri Dam. The supporters of the dam including the engineers and the minister of environment described his death as an accident. This angered Enviro to the point that he took out his ire on anyone who destroyed the environment. His dubious heroism is therefore spurred on by a vicious strain of vengeance. There is also the self-obsessed, twisted patriot, Dr. Danger, who might be seen as a heroic villain in that he fights for a patriotic cause but with very questionable means in which human beings become his unfortunate casualties. Appearing in an eponymous issue in the Tiranga series in 1996, Dr. Danger wears a green shirt and red trousers under his doctor’s uniform combined with a helmet to mask his identity. He kills any doctor wishing to leave India to work abroad. As a result of his warped vision, he is a ‘perverted patriot’ – anyone who he feels betrays the nation becomes fodder for his evil designs. He even targets the brain drain of young professionals trained in elite Indian institutions, deeming them as unpatriotic and therefore, in his eyes, criminal and deserving of death. Related to this tripartite schema of villainy, there is also the power-crazed and sadistic villain. Khoon Chor (Blood Thief) is infamous for stealing blood from sleeping beggars for his blood bank in the Doga series. Daku Halkan Singh, who is notorious for having killed children, is another sick villain in the Doga series. Rarely, however, is Singh shown in the act of torture, rape or executing gruesome murders in the comic books. The strain has been more fully developed in popular

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film, as with Sangharsh (Struggle, dir.Tanuja Chandra, 1999) where the villain, Lajja Shankar Pandey abducts children believing that their sacrifice would lead to his immortality. If we were to continue Rosenberg’s schema, we may extend the gallery along the following spectrum. They include scientists gone mad and/or megalomaniac, such as the brilliant yet psychopathic bio-technologist, Dr. Virus, as we saw in Chapter 6. They also include those characters who have excelled in science to the point that they have absorbed its powers into their very constitution, as with the scientist, Dhawaniraj, who has the capacity to send out lethal sound waves, and Chumba is endowed with the power of magnetism. Zero G is another demented scientist whose gun fires rays that can free people from the pull of gravity, and as with hydrogen-filled balloons, start levitating into the sky (Figure 8.4). He can even fire his gun at clouds, causing them to burst and flood a city. In one of his attacks in Zero G (1999), his exceptional gun removes oxygen from a room in which sits the chief minister, Sheila Ben.5 The minister had plans for housing the poor that would affect profit-minded developers that Zero G was supporting. Super doppelgänger are villainous entities that are either created by other (super)villains to emulate the superhero, fester inside the body of the superhero, or are the black mirror to the superhero. They are the underbelly to ‘clean’ power, often deranged and power-crazed. They might generate an interior or exterior apocalypse as the true identity of the superhero is lost. In Ek Aur Parmanu (One More Parmanu, 1993), for instance, Parmanu is cloned into a ‘monstrous double’ by a supervillain known as Fefra.The two even confuse his scientific mentor, Professor K.K. (Kamal Kumar Verma), who decides to set a challenge for both of them in order to ascertain the real Parmanu. The winner would take his latest invention, a powerful laser torch. In Death Atom (2003), Parmanu fights this eponymous supervillain who is another creation of Professor K.K. Parmanu’s professorial mentor has now become the member of the underworld. Not only does Death Atom have similar powers to Parmanu, but he is also capable of transforming one thing to another: for example, to attack the superhero he converts a truck to a huge crane. It is then revealed to Parmanu that Death Atom was his brother, whom as his alter ego, Inspector Vinay, he had thought he had killed for taking bribes from antinational felons in Aag (Fire, 1991). In Khalnayak Nagraj (Villain Nagraj, 2004), Nagraj is split into two by the scientific genius, Miss Killer, using her ‘personality-splitter machine’. With oppositional characteristics, the good and bad aspects of Nagraj start fighting each other. Both the Nagrajs are united after they get help from a most aptly named man with telekinetic powers, Brain Gun, who performs exceptional stunts for the general public such as bending a spoon or boiling water inside a bulletproof jar through the power of his mind. However, Brain Gun is put in a coma as Miss Killer steals his mental powers. Just when the bad Nagraj is about to kill the good Nagraj, Brain Gun comes to consciousness and attacks the deviant Nagraj with his telepathic powers by launching sharp metal objects at him. The doppelgänger villain changes into a shape-shifting form to dodge the shrapnel. Simultaneously, the good Nagraj also

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and Parmanu are crushed by the supervillain, Zero G (1999), Raj Comics, front cover

FIGURE 8.4 Shakti

converts and combines himself with the bad Nagraj, thereby taking him back into his own constitution where evil is neutralised. Fantastic hybrids are visual freaks of nature, lying in the liminal space between animal and human, mutants in the awry reflection of humans, as with Narasingha cited above, the half-man, half-beast Buffalo, the highly evolved Mahamanav, and

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the guerrilla warlord, Samrat Thodanga, combining rhinoceros, elephant and turtle in one. Buffalo makes a short appearance in Revolver (1992). He is shown to be an extremely powerful man-beast who can even crush a revolver with his bare hands. His close association with a mad scientist, Dr. Honolulu, points to the scientific creation of Buffalo. Mahamanav is a case of biology gone awry: he was born as an amoeba that somehow reached the North Pole during the summer. As the sun shone unremittingly for six months, and as the atmosphere was very thin around the poles, strange mutations occurred and a formidable creature evolved each day from the amoeba such that he developed superior psychic and telekinetic powers (Plate 6). Samrat Thodanga (Emperor Thodanga) is one of the recurring nemeses of Nagraj. He is a tower of a hybrid beast. His legs are very strong and broad like that of an elephant. His body has a shell like that of a turtle in which he hides his head when he attacks. On his shoulders there are two straight and long horns that he uses to bore his enemies (Figure 8.5).Thodanga is introduced as the ‘uncrowned king of the forests of Tanzania’ in Kabuki ka Khazana (Kabuki’s Treasure, 1990). He is reputed to have had a herd of painted rhinoceroses with which he would have daily wrestling matches, sometimes even killing them. In Nagraj aur Thodanga (Nagraj and Thodanga, 1990), it is revealed that he was the most brutal and violent animal in the jungles of Tanzania and that he needed an elephant for his daily meals, thereby wiping out the elephant population in the region. Villains based on indigenous demons/demonesses or rakshasha, transplanted in modern contexts are exemplified by Black Hole, as we saw in Chapter 6. The ancient demon in the eponymous comic, Kaali Chchaya (Black Shadow, 2002), is quite literally a shadow of its former self – it had lost his body due to a curse and is now a dark shadow. Endowed with the powers to make anything animate or inanimate into vehicles of malice, the only way it can get his body back is through pursuing heinous acts. Related to the above are supervillains with supernatural powers, drawing their exceptionality from ancient Indian treatises, epics, rituals and folklore. Mantric identifies those people who use meditation and sacred utterances to acquire great boons. Examples of mantric supervillains include Vidrohi and Nashketu, whose powers become a threat to the supreme status of the superheroine, Shakti.Vidrohi is in fact a renegade scientist who gains supremacy by tapping ancient powers embodied in the great battlefield, Kurukshetra, from the Mahabharata to rule the universe as is apparent in Bachao! Bachao! (Help! Help!, circa 2001). Nashketu refers to the destruction associated with the Hindu god, Shiva: Nash in his name implies destruction, Ketu refers to the headless body of the mythic demon, Rahu. In his eponymous comic book in 2000, Nashketu appears as a deviant prone to eating insects. Through the mere act of touch, he has the powers to bring death to anything animate and destruction to anything inanimate. He is a deformed man who uses his mantric prowess to suck out the powers of other superheroes with a view to becoming invincible himself. Aliens and those with extraterrestrial power who threaten humanity’s existence include Haru who arrives from a planet where the laws of physics are convuluted.

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FIGURE 8.5  Nagraj

fights the supervillain, Samrat Thodanga, who has kidnapped the wife of a forest ranger in Tanzania, Nagraj aur Thodanga (Nagraj and Thodanga, 1990), Raj Comics, front cover

He is a rival of the gods (Devas) with ambitions to overthrow the Earth as evident in Kohram (Mayhem, 2000, Plate 6). In the beginning, Haru is a humanoid who lands on Earth inside a comet. He then changes form and enters the body of a human. No matter, for tell tale signs remain: his hands remain three-fingered with a membrane and his two-fingered feet and forehead are conspicuous by their length.

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Aliens from a very advanced race and inhabitants of a dead planet, Tibba, make an appearance in Chakra (The Circle, 2005). Known as Tibbawasi, the aliens seek to set back Earth’s evolution by millions of years so that they can harvest the genetic pool of Tyrannosaurus Rex that they need to save themselves from a deadly disease. In the process, they turn humans into apes as well as unleash several other extinct animals onto the planet. Worm Queen, introduced in her eponymous comic in 2005, is the daughter of Dr. Worm (Figure 8.6). Both are extraterrestrials from a planet called, not surprisingly, Worm World. Dr. Worm is a mad scientist of that world who comes to Earth to subdue it using the planet’s insects and worms as his allies. After he is defeated by Parmanu, his daughter, Worm Queen, rises to avenge his defeat. Resurrected despots from the past who come to unleash terror is a favourite past-time for the villainous time-traveller, Itihaas, who brings back to life cruel versions of the French military and political leader, Napoleon (Bonaparte), to battle Parmanu. Popular here is also the fascination with Adolf Hitler, as we have already seen throughout the book. In much vernacular pulp culture, Hitler is described in a rags-to-riches tale, a man who grew to threaten the world, thus challenging the supremacy of Britain over its colonies. Perspectives on Hitler in the subcontinent were therefore very different from perceptions of him in the west. Even though some people disagreed with Hitler, this was not the view of Subas Chandra Bose, who attempted to forge an alliance with the Axis forces in the 1940s supported by the Indian National Army that was based in southeast Asia. Hitler, therefore, became a deeply ambivalent figure of power – admired as a threat to western powers as much as he might be reviled for his fascist atrocities.

Super-horror After decades of debate about the morality of horror comic books, representations of foreign forces of supernatural darkness or exogenous evil such as Dracula and pathologised Egyptian mummies began to emerge in Indian popular culture in the 1980s. Horror may have played an integral part of the masala aesthetic of popular Indian film, but its emergence as a specific genre owes to its global commodification through the influence of transnational media. Such importation of horror to the subcontinent added to the stories about ghosts and demons that children had grown up with when listening to garrulous elders. One of our interviewees, Rajesh (28), recalled: We would cuddle during the summer vacations around any elder to tell us ghost stories on nights when there was no power and nothing to do. Then we would not even go to the toilet, preferring to listen to the stories instead. Tales of horror thrilled audiences through the pull of their supernatural magic, cruelty and sheer ferocity, first through storytelling, then in adventure novels and related literature, and then in comic books. In the 1990s, it was further popularised with the rise of the Zee TV Horror Show.

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attacked by a huge supervillain, Dr. Worm (2003), Raj Comics, front cover

FIGURE 8.6 Parmanu

The popular ‘horror stars’ in comic books are somewhat tangential to the supervillains outlined above in that, more often than not, the figures do not talk and are outside the purview of civility altogether. Owing to their supernatural powers, however, they may well be under the control of other supervillains who have turned against society, unleashing enhanced evil to the world.

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Horror for young people was first heralded through spy-duo comic books (see Chapter 2). Dracula came to light in 1981 through Diamond Comics series on the detectives Lamboo (Tall Guy) and Motu (Fatty) in Dracula se Muthbhed (An Encounter with Dracula). This was followed by Manoj Comics with their detective duo, Ram-Rahim, who also confronted Dracula. But the nomenclature did not necessarily conflate with what might be understood as Dracula in the west. A terrible creature already known in India was a pischach, a flying serpent-like entity with a man’s head, and the vetal, a ghost who can be a blood-drinker or a flesh-eater and came in many forms, the most popular being a skeleton with large, ragged wings. Pischach were not exactly blood-sucking vampires but flesh-eating demons. Along with other ghostly creatures, they haunted cremation grounds at night and could change form, become invisible and even possess people’s minds.6 In the LambooMotu series, the producers use a familiar image of a flying serpent with a man’s head, but call it Dracula.7 In the comic itself, the creature is curiously referred to as ‘Brown Dracula’ as if to mark him as racially distinct from what would then be ‘White Dracula’ in the west. But there is no further racial commentary. Brown Dracula was presented as a disgruntled man who had arisen from the dead after being murdered in a conspiracy. The Manoj Comics’ version of Dracula is the product of a mad scientist who injected a dead infant back to life. The child turns green and develops huge spikes all over his body. In the tale, both Dracula and the scientist drink blood from the children whom the vampire kidnaps and kills. This Dracula is afraid of light but does not convert others into vampires through his gruesome bite. Clearly, international icons of horror are transmogrified to create specific worlds of horror for Indian readership with a license for creativity. In 1985, Raj Comics came out with its Thrill, Horror and Suspense series. In the ongoing series, a bat-like creature similar to Dracula appeared in Chamgadar (The Bat, 1986). A protagonist of horror who was actually named Dracula first emerged in Vampire (1994) for the Super Commando Dhruv series. This Raj Comics version more closely follows the well-established attributes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with its count-like appearance and nocturnal forays for human blood. As in the Victorian novel, it too emerges from Romania as remarked in Dracula ka Hamla (The Attack of Dracula, 2003) (Figure 8.7). The blood-sucking and nocturnal predator was countered by Lori, Dhruv’s friend. Lori’s great-grandfather was an Indian king near the Pokhran region in the state of Rajasthan in India. In a war with the British, her great-grandfather was imprisoned while her pregnant great-grandmother was sent back to Britain. Along with her father, Lori is born in England and returns to India in search of her roots. She discovers in the fort of her great-grandfather a library filled with ancient texts. Through reading and committing them to heart, she becomes an accomplished tantric augmented with telekinetic prowess. Later in Dracula ka Hamla, she is also revealed to be the descendant of a Romanian saint who had killed Dracula. Using her tantric powers, Lori teleports Dhruv from India and with his help, defeats Dracula’s slave, a vampire who lives underwater. Dhruv then returns to his home in Rajnagar with Lori. As Dracula is the king of the realm

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FIGURE 8.7 Advertisement

for Raj Comics issues on Dracula (n.d.), Raj Comics

of the dead and can easily transmit himself between graves and graveyards, he comes to India in order to kill Lori, which unleashes a series of other episodes. In this way, Stoker’s Dracula becomes firmly transplanted in the subcontinent. Due to its gripping qualities, Dracula reappeared in 2014 in the Sarvanayak (All Heroes) series. Over the decades in the comic books, Dracula has evolved with a lot more powers than even those displayed in western media. He is shown as the

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sovereign of all bad souls and can travel to any grave in the world. He can take the form of a fierce bat and achieve immortality after drinking a drop of blood from Nagpasha, Nagraj’s villainous uncle. He is indestructible, and not even a stake through his heart can kill him. His servants are Frankenstein, a flying wolf-vampire, along with a swarm of fierce predatory slaves. His ambition is not just to hunt for humans as is Stoker’s Dracula, but to unleash all his powers to rule not just this world, but also the afterworld. Ancient Egyptian mummies and zombies visualise another supernatural threat. Mummies appear from the very early days of comics as with Tutankhamen in Nagraj aur Jadu ka Shahenshah (Nagraj and the Emperor of Magic, 1990). Deadly monsters reappear in the Narak Nashak series (The Destroyer of Hell, 2009) with Halla Bol (Attack, 2009), an issue that marks the beginning of Nagraj's entry into the world of the undead with extensive powers through his tantric snakes. The superhero moves around on a dragon-like flying serpent called Sarpat in a parallel world to vanquish these exotic mummies. Zombies as creatures from the dead make their first Raj Comics book appearances in the Narak Nashak series comic books, Infected (2011) and Mrityujivi (The Living Dead, 2011), as we have already seen in Chapter 6.

Show time These dreadful aspects of villainy embody as well as allude to different kinds of threats to the superhero, and by association, the civil-political space of India. Equally, they provide a deranged and disordered canvass against which to showcase the abilities and attributes of the superheroes. As Raj Comics’ studio head, Sanjay Gupta, elaborates: There are crimes of various types. There are a few high intensity crimes and then there are the low intensity crimes . . . and so we distribute the crimes according to the powers of the superhero. Some crimes are meant for Doga and others for Nagraj. If there are crimes in the society they go to Doga. Like the Nithari Killings is something that only Doga could be a part of [referring to a serial case of child murders just outside of New Delhi in 2005]. There is no space for a Nagraj [in such local crime scenes]. . . . Nagraj is not supposed to unearth the entire episode and work on a smaller scale. There are bigger crimes for him. Doga basically deals with crimes that take place within the fold of the society.8 (Super)villains are thus served out in different scenarios as a means to sharpen superhero characteristics: Doga whose religious identity is ambiguous even though his adopted name, Suraj, is a Hindu one, becomes a force against communalism and corruption. He mainly deals with ‘straightforward villains’. Nagraj who, while kitted out to fight international terrorism, also has incredible mythical qualities that can catapult him to fend off supernatural and intergalactic supervillains. Doga then is the more localised, sunk mainly in the metropolitan mayhem of Mumbai with

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a secular message for the country. Nagraj’s remit is broader, spanning the uncanny and the interstellar, while keeping the protection and propagation of the Indian nation firmly in mind. One remarkable tale that canvasses and compares the superheroes’ specific talents concerns the news of car-bombing suspects in Britain, Dr. Mohammed Haneef and his cousins. The incident finds its way into both Doga and Nagraj comic books.9 First, Doga goes after suspected Indian insurgents. He tries to tell them the importance of living in a society free from communalist trappings, and how, as Sanjay Gupta comments: their parents expected so much from them.That they would become doctor’s now and would finally settle down. So many dreams must’ve been woven around them. It’s so tough for a Muslim Community to come through in India, and after everything their parents come to know that they are terrorists. All their dreams are shattered [sic].10 Doga asks them to abandon their political designs and hunts instead the masterminds who had turned them into terrorists.This plot continues as the backdrop for a Nagraj comic book, where the superhero is requested by the British government to go to London to tackle terrorism, a struggle that spirals into an intergalactic battle. Just as the dog-masked Doga would look odd battling in another galaxy, so would the familiar characteristics of the original Nagraj look out of place in the urban noir environs of Mumbai.11 Dhruv is associated with agility, intelligence and resourcefulness. He largely fights his battles in and around his home in Rajnagar. His villains are cunning and often highly intelligent, but their ability is never quite enough to outsmart him. This is well illustrated in Alladin (sic, 2014) when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is integrated into a video game such that a warlord made out of ‘gamma photon rays’ bursts out of a television screen, the ‘mother’ of evil (p. 7). The supervillain’s aim is to render three-dimensional forms into two-dimensional ones, so that they become ‘like a framed pic on the wall’ (p. 11). Virtuality becomes reality in the form of a gaming fiend to present a series of challenges for Dhruv. The television screen on which the game was being shown is impregnable, covered with a powerful gamma shield to protect the game from damage. Dhruv decides to get to the table on which the screen stands that is not protected by the gamma shield. He picks up the television from underneath the table and throws it at the heart of the screen projections. His actions destroy both screen and the projection of the character that had come out from the screen. The Alladin game also creates a djinn with an impressive name, Confederate Jinn Sulaiman. Sulaiman attacks Dhruv with large aeroplanes. When Dhruv climbs on top of a plane, the djinn tells him that it is going to explode in three seconds, and it will destroy everything within half a kilometre. Dhruv then jumps from the plane’s ‘jet-blast’ that thrusts him beyond the half-kilometre limit in time (p. 28). By jumping from plane to plane, Dhruv is able to reach the end of the game, where he finds the malicious Alladin aka Photon Singh. The supervillain wants to threaten ‘total

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annihilation’ (p. 40) by transmitting a virus across all internet networks, including even those that operate nuclear missile codes. After a spectacular battle, Dhruv calls his foster sister, Schweta, to transfer an ‘anti AI virus programme’ onto his communication devices called ‘star-transmitters’ that are strapped onto Dhruv’s wrists (p. 43). The crusader is then able to inject the virus into the core of the game using ‘star-transmitter circuits’, thus ending the game of apocalypse. Shakti’s (super)villains arise with anyone who endangers women in mundane life. They are usually men, but occasionally have taken on female form. Her specific super-spiritual talents are exploited and tested by supervillains with mantric powers such as Nashketu and Vidrohi, and those with tantric powers such as Yogini and Bhairavi. Supervillains who sought to marry the superheroine began to appear in the 2000s, indicating a patriarchal attempt to contain her superpowers. They are showcased in Bhairavi (2002), Chaar Chandal (Four Butchers, 2003) and Nash (Destruction, 2004) – comic books in which Shakti is pursued as a match for a forced marriage.12 In tales that ring close to home, men with supreme spiritual or mantric powers seek to syphon her powers to themselves through a bond in marriage, thereby suppressing her powers while enhancing their own ambitions for invincibility.

Double helix sublime Dystopian scenarios and prospects driven by power-hungry tyrants and the like make the role of superheroes necessary. If without a villain, there is no hero, then the villains are an ‘essential evil’. As many enthusiasts would argue, actions against essential evil become not simply gratuitous inclusions but indispensable. Raj Comics’ creative director, Anupam Sinha, concurs: My stories are centred around the villains. Nagraj and Dhruv are onedimensional characters and they merely react to the aggressors. So, I have to think of ways to make my villains more powerful and exciting. Even the cities, Rajnagar and Mahanagar, are replicas of metropolises where the smallest things – for instance, germs – can be used to depict evil. My cities are planned to have waterfronts, jungles, swamps, dense populations, dark narrow lanes, financial and scientific hubs – all with a possibility of evil.13 The seeds of dystopia reside in anything that surrounds us, animate or inanimate, present or future, alongside a proliferating gallery of villainy. Evil might even be engrained in our genes, as is vividly demonstrated in the future Witler, a megalomaniac who is revealed to be Dhruv’s descendant in Udantastari ke Bandhak (Prisoners of the Flying Saucer, circa 1988, see Chapter 10). Just as there are different levels of specialised agencies for dealing with different kinds of crime – such as the police, Central Bureau of Investigation, Enforcement Directorate, Crime Investigation Department (CID), and the (para)military for curbing cross-border crime – so too is there a need for different kinds of superheroes to tackle evil, present and impending. For example, the criminals Dhruv would tackle were are highly intelligent and even genius, enabling then the showcasing of

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the superhero’s quick-thinking brilliance at any turn. Had it been any other way, the stories could not establish the powers of the protagonist, nor grip the reader’s imagination. While Nagraj fights extraterrestrial threats and international terrorism as an ally of the state, Doga emerged to fend off extremely brutal, urban crimes as a vigilante and antagonist to the state. In an attempt to highlight gendered violence while attracting more young women to their comic books, Shakti was created. Similarly, as we saw in Chapter 3, Tiranga was introduced to deal with day-to-day threats to the nation where the sole reason for superheroic action was the defence of the country. To fight criminals who were a threat to India’s scientific prowess, Parmanu was introduced – and the list goes on. The superhero can catalyse the sublime potentials of the profane state.14 But, interestingly, when we come to focus on supervillains, an inherent tension is highlighted in the concept of the sublime. Those villains who have acquired formidable superhuman powers may well be a threat to the sublime state or the ideal civic order, they may be embroiled in gruesome activities and herd in ultimate evil, but they are also held in awe by comic readers. Almost as much as the superheroes, supervillains command an enthusiastic, sometimes closet fan base due to the draw of their spectacularly unfettered powers. Their episodic appearances over the lifetime of a superhero comic career act like enduring teasers and are often met with intense fascination, more so because they represent a forbidden space beyond the strictures of social convention. Readers’ intrigue with evil compels us to revisit concepts of the sublime. As famously proposed by the philosophers, Edwin Burke and Immanuel Kant, and developed by several others, the sublime is amazing yet terrifying, captivating yet repulsive.15 Unlike the beautiful, the sublime is a shapeless object without boundaries, an earthquake, a cataclysm, a cliff-hanger precipice that portends mortality and death. It is a multi-dimensional helix that harbours excitement and dread, and not merely the one-dimensional reactive space of superheroes. From this perspective, it is the superhero that is an embodiment of beauty, and the dystopic and/or the supervillain the epitome of the sublime, presenting a marked contrast to the demarcation of the profane (bad) and sublime (good) state, as outlined in the previous chapter.The nationstate can only ever, at its idealised best, be beautiful, not sublime. With a loyalty to serve the nation, the beautiful superheroes then have to rein in this sublime. This ambiguity in the use of the word sublime stands in as a metaphor for the vacillating view on supervillains, both gross and appealing. In order to fully appreciate how such beautiful and sublime elements resonate, it is to comic book readers that we owe a dedicated rendezvous.

Notes 1 The superheroes are married in the distant future in 2025 in the Nagayan series (2007– 2008). After being challenged by Nagraj’s wicked uncle, Nagpasha, and other dark powers in the tale, the superheroes give up their lives to protect the universe and leave the world in the hands of their children. 2 Pramod K. Nayar (2006) Reading Culture:Theory, Praxis, Politics, New Delhi: Sage, p. 96.

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3 See Giorgio Agamben (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 4 Robin S. Rosenberg (2013) ‘Sorting Out Villainy: A Typology of Villains and Their Effects on Superheroes’, in What is a Superhero?, eds. Robin S. Rosenberg and Peter Coogan, Oxford: University of Oxford Press. 5 The character alludes to Sheila Dikshit who was Delhi’s Congress Chief Minister from 1998–2013. 6 Pradip Kumar Singh, a Hindi language teacher at the American Centre in New Delhi, who had studied Indian mythology, related how the Dracula-like nar pischach (male demonic figure) appears as a Sanskrit term found in the Ashtadhyayi of Panini, and was first used for the cruel daughter of King Daksha who was called Pischach. Later the term was used to address the invading Turks in the ninth century, who were supposedly very cruel. (Interview, New Delhi, July 19, 2014.) 7 Indeed, Dracula has now become a generic term to refer to a ghostly or demonic threat. For example, see the D-grade film Khooni Dracula (Blood-thirsty Dracula, dir. Harinam Singh, 1992), www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFB4AyoVf0Y. Accessed: July 17, 2018. 8 Pao Collective (2007) ‘Raj Comics: A Brief Overview’, http://paocollective.wordpress. com/2010/03/11/raj-comics-a-brief-overview/. Accessed: June 12, 2014. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 On Indian film noir, see Ranjani Mazumdar (2007) Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 12 Chandal is a Sanskrit term that is often used in a derogatory sense to refer to low-caste people who handle corpses. 13 Priyanka Kotamraju (2012) ‘The Man Who Made Them Superheroes’, The Indian Express, October 28, http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/the-man-who-madethem-superheroes/1022940/2. Accessed: November 22, 2017. 14 See Thomas Blom Hansen (2001) ‘Governance and State Mythologies in Mumbai’, in States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, eds. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 226. 15 See Edmund Burke (2007 [1767]) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Abingdon: Routledge; Immanuel Kant (2006 [1790]) The Critique of Judgement, New York: Cosimo Inc.; and Robert Doran (2015) The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

9 READERS’ WORLDS

READERS’ WORLDSREADERS’ WORLDS

I think I would still be reading the comics when I am 75, even more. Even when I get married I shall be reading them in bed.This is still my bachelor phase, and like the superheroes I want to stay a bachelor as long as I can. —(Vinodh, aged 21, 2014)

On the way to catch a train in Jharkhand state in 2012, we came across a young man, Amit, aged 17, sitting in a small shop outside the railway station. Colloquially known as a chowki, it comprised of two wooden benches around a flat board covered with a dusty plastic sheet that acted as cover from the elements. Underneath it lay a veritable feast of comics, magazines, newspapers and books designed to prepare students for competitive examinations for entry to government jobs or to government-run institutes. They included the sale and, for regular customers with less disposable income, the rental of Raj Comics issues. Amit had stopped studying at the age of 11 in order to help his family run the shop. He was drawn to the superhero comics, particularly those starring the snakeking superhero, Nagraj. In between retailing and renting, he whiled away his time by browsing through them and developed his reading aptitude. Comics opened up new avenues when the standard ones for a person of his age were closed. They became an alternative pathway to learn about the world and imagine other possibilities. Simultaneously, they enabled an escape into, as Amit put it: a free world for me that is outside the boundaries of reality. I would also use it to change my mood – like a stress reliever after I have had a hard haggling session with customers. By energising his fantasies, adventure comics freed up real-life responsibilities offering brief escapes from the mundane world, even acting as a kind of therapy, while

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all along improving his reading skills when other educational opportunities were stalled. As a child, Aadya (27) too would sit at her maternal uncle’s book stall. Such was her passion for the adventure comics that she would refuse to sell any that she had not first read. As she was from a small town in the state of Uttrakhand, there was a limited supply of comics to distribute, so she would become very possessive about them.The vivid illustrations and engaging stories were too enticing, too good to be sold without first availing of their delights herself. Fuelled by superhero stories in comic books and on television, she recalled how her imagination used to run riot: I used to imagine that there was some magnetic belt out there. You could rotate the buckle and it would have magnetic powers to attract those things made of metal. . . . Later on . . . there was this character in a TV series who had this pencil, whatever he sketched with this pencil and give a command, that would turn into reality. So I used to imagine that I should have a pencil like that, and make my dream come true . . . it would make my life so much easier. Fantasies with their action-packed adventures, superlative gadgets and supernatural or transformational powers were the essential elements with which to imagine an ‘easier life’ when life around her did not seem that perfect. In this chapter we ask what exactly is the draw of comic books for young people who grew up in such provincial or mofussil regions of India? What is the ‘aesthetic response’ to superhero comics among their consumers?1 In the process, we chart out youth-orientated circuits of exchange from recollections that go back to the 1980s. Vernacular superhero comics forged readers’ interpretive communities who read with the grain of narrative unfolding in a comic book as much as they read against the grain as they interpret its manifold content in multiple ways with their peers.2 While they do so, they also reflect, analyse and interlink the comics with their own lifeworlds. Many of them had grown up in the 1980s and 1990s in the Hindi-speaking BIMARU states (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, with Jharkhand formed out of Bihar in 2000). Some of the more ambitious and able had migrated to Delhi for study or work. Admittedly, they revisited their childhood through the interleafed gauzes of memory and desire. Nevertheless, their discussions reveal glimpses of a wildly diverse arena that often inverts producers’ intent. If the author is not entirely ‘dead’ in the Barthesian sense – for respect is still attributed to the comic book creatives – s/he is certainly part of the ‘living undead’ in that s/he hovers but cannot intervene directly in how an episode is remembered and (re)construed by lively minds in the making.3

Alternative cultural circuits From the mid-1980s, the distribution net of Raj Comics ran the whole gamut of bus and train station stalls, small kiosques such as those that sell the betelnut-based

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digestive, paan, combined outlets that sold or rented these comics alongside other books, magazines and other provisions, and later, raddi stores that recycled old literature for cut-price amounts in the Hindi-speaking belt of India. Any outlet that doubled up to rent comic books became a particularly popular meeting point for young people (Figure 9.1). At such venues, interested parties could pay a nominal rental sum and sit down on a bench to read the comic there and then.

FIGURE 9.1 Retailer

of comic books at a railway station in north India (2012), photograph by Saif Eqbal

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Recycling circuits served another useful purpose in that the comics need not be taken home and risk being picked up by any orthodox relative who disapproved of their consumption. Due to the popularity of such activities in the Golden Age, shop owners could earn a minimum of 3,000 to 4,000 rupees in a month just from renting comics even at the average rental of one rupee per comic. During school summer holidays around May and June, their income would increase manifold as children free from the onus of studying, flocked to such stalls to read more comic books. Abhijit (30), a student in south Delhi from Katra in Uttar Pradesh, put it neatly: ‘comics and holidays was a good match’. Naresh (19), from Dholi in Bihar, recalled with much enthusiasm about rental outlets: I would wish to die with a comic in hand. Like Dhruv, I would imagine to live a life in service of humanity. I would wait every month for my local magazine shop to put the latest set on rent – which they would do only after the initial sale had dried up. Naresh’s passion for the comics was irrepressible. Even if purchase was not possible, hiring them was not altogether out of his orbit. Manik (19) was a die-hard fan of superhero comics from Neturia in West Bengal who used to accompany his dad over a distance of almost 60 miles once a month to meet his uncle in the neighbouring state of Jharkhand. There he could buy Raj Comics issues. He reflected: ‘I never stopped reading these comics. Because I realise the usefulness of these comics as a parallel world.They inspire my imagination, they actually fuel my imagination’. Being away from the main distribution centres, his monthly trips to his uncle’s house took on a sense of affective urgency. The superhero comics were both inspirational and ‘useful’ such that they were essential to his sense of being and becoming. Multi-starrers had an extra magnetism. These refer to several superheroes who are brought together by a serious threat that an individual alone cannot curtail. The genre began in October 1991 when Nagraj and Super Commando Dhruv joined forces in their eponymous comic book to ward off formidable threats posed by Miss Killer, who had kidnapped all the other superheroes – a recipe for a very thick volume with a multi-layered story. As Bhaskar (28), a postgraduate student in Delhi who hailed from Bamanheri in western Uttar Pradesh, recalled: ‘Me and my sister always counted our comics collection by the length of its thickness and not numbers, and this was a kind of heaven for me’. Vikash (18) was another migrant from Baheri in an agricultural district in Bihar. Now pursuing a foreign language course in Delhi, he reeled with pleasure when discussing superhero multi-starrers: They were always an excitement because we expected with great anticipation how our heroes would handle the threat of a villain who was more powerful than a single hero. It was basically an exciting wait and hours would be spent on guessing the story with friends and discussing how real these threats could be. Often the discussion would begin with a line that . . . ‘my

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father says that he has read that scientists have been able to contact great alien civilizations’. I think these civilizations are so powerful that even Nagraj can’t defeat them . . . and so on. The superhero stories in print were just the trigger for envisaging and discussing other encounters and potentials as knowledge about the world and even galaxies widened in animated communion. Even though adults might see comics as disposable material, for young people, to throw them away was tantamount to a sin according to an unwritten juvenile moral code. Once read, comics would be either stored or shared. One schoolboy in Bihar aged 15 said in a matter-of-fact tone: ‘I have already read it, so what is the point of wanting it back. At most, I will keep a comic for my friend. It’s not just read alone’. Solipsistic reading was not to be encouraged for reading the same material was a means of group bonding and sociality. Recycling and sharing a comic enabled the development of a community of interpretive readers who could engage, (re)articulate and act out memorable stories while inventing new ones in their moments of leisure.

Blurred lines Many schools had unofficially, if not officially, banned superhero comics.4 Abhay (21) came from Barhaj, a town in eastern Uttar Pradesh, and was preparing for the Indian Administrative Services exams when we met him. He remarked that ‘superhero comics were a complete no-no in our schools’. Studying to get good grades and entrance into premium colleges outweighed anything else, next to which comic reading was seen as largely a distraction, if not a detriment to be kept at bay by many orthodox parents among other figures of authority.5 Their being outlawed in schools continued the state’s paternalistic sense that comics could expose children to harmful material, detrimental to a child’s development (see Chapter 2). Aman (25) was a doctoral student from Gomoh, a small mining town in Jharkhand. He recounted that as he did not have a sister to do the housework, he was expected to help out: ‘So mother would get irritated by my comic reading’. Amardip (21) was another civil services aspirant and a theatre activist who lived in a town, Silaut, in Bihar. He related: I used to read the comics a lot, but my parents used to beat me and used to stop me reading comics because they thought it affects mind and takes time off students [sic]. Other parents in these mofussil regions might be a little more accepting, but only at particular times. Rajshree (24), a postgraduate student in Delhi from the town of Madhupur in Jharkhand, stated: ‘Parents do not mind if we read during holidays. Otherwise we got blastings [sic]’. Abhijit recalled one incident at the English-medium missionary school that he attended as a young boy:

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I actually remembered being shouted at in school. We did not really use the word ‘crap’ back then, but the meaning was there. So at school if you were caught reading a comic book, they’d be saying – what is this nonsense you’re reading? You know, rather than reading something like Agatha Christie on Hercule Poirot. And I was so pissed off with them, I thought – I’m never going to read that shit [by Christie]! Study had to come first, any other duties second, and anything else including superhero comic book consumption was tertiary, if not lower down on the scale of significance. Worldviews were almost diametrically opposed. Parents might see the future through an investment in their children’s education.6 For many mofussil middle classes, it was the only path to secure a bright future for them.7 But several children, while they might acquiesce to their parents’ decisions on occasion, saw their future in the aureola light of superhero comics. As goes an age-old paradox, their status as ‘forbidden fruit’ made superhero comics that much more alluring. Despite schoolyard censorship and domestic disapprovals, fans continued to read the superhero comics at any given opportunity.They poached time and space to read the comics, on special occasions, through friends’ copies, or through the rental circuits. Deepak (27) was a migrant from the town, Turki, in Bihar, and now an engineer working with a private sector firm in south Delhi. In a tale that is familiar to many children, he would read comics in the dark when in bed: I would get the light to shine through the door so as it would illuminate the pages I would read. I had an extended family nearby and I would get a fair amount of pocket money and would not use it to buy food, but comics instead. While his family disapproved, Deepak would quite happily sacrifice the needs of the body to that of the mind. Parents’ aspersions on superhero comics stretched to the point where they even saw them as the progenitor of pathologies. Abhay remembered how his physical ailments were linked to his comic book consumption: ‘I used to have constant headaches, which my parents attributed to the comics’. Raj (20) was from Sohawal near the now-infamous town, Ayodhya, where the Babri Masjid was razed in 1992 by Hindu chauvinists. He recounted how some adults even held wayward interpretations of comic book aesthetics when they warned that: colourful pages were harmful for the eyes – I don’t know why they would say this. So, yes, comics would always be read hidden in school books, and there always was a constant tussle that we are wasting time by reading comics. But they were really addictive. Young people continued to revel in their guilty pleasure, an ambivalence highlighted in their use of the word ‘addiction’ and variations thereof. Caught between

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two poles, Raj adored the comics but also acknowledged them as somehow bad – almost as if comics were in the same league as smoking, drinking and drug-taking. Mohammed (19) was from a family of professional carpet weavers in the town of Ghosi in Uttar Pradesh. He reiterated the compulsive sentiment: Because I would spend all my pocket money on comics and even would take the pocket money from my younger brothers, I had become a kind of comics addict and would not listen to any one till I have finished the comics that I have begun to read. While they enjoyed reading the comics, their contested status put them in a moral dilemma as to their ‘addiction’. But it was also a status that they would challenge for they saw several redeeming features in the comic books to which most of their elder relatives were simply blind.

A vernacular vanguard Rather than viewing comics as contentious material corrosive to social convention, many young readers saw them as imparting values relevant for the life they imagined for themselves, next to which social convention might well be the bugbear.The comic books were not simply material for dubious escapades. Mohammed said that he learnt that ‘we have to keep patience and use our minds in difficulties’. Amardip discussed how he had learnt about ‘debatable issues like bribe, anti-corruption, and security-related issues’ from the comic books. Bhaskar mentioned: ‘I learnt the need to fight against social evils’.Vivek (22), a teacher in Delhi who grew up in Bermo in Jharkhand, outlined a thematic continuity between earlier adventure comics that he had read and superhero comics: ‘Chacha Chaudhary comics used to teach a lot: truth triumphs, believe in yourself     ’. Even though dramatically different in content and style, superhero comics continued to uphold this maxim. Mohan (18), from the town of Sagheri in Bihar, reflected on how the comics imparted ‘faith’ in troubled times, and that we must: have faith in truth and in emergency, use presence of mind. Comics helped me much to know about different aspects of life. I read much in those comics but now I can understand those issues in a broader way.The described reasons in these comics may be the real causes of today’s problems. It was the comics that tutored him to be confident and attuned to the ways of the wider world, offering an insight into some of the causes of social and political problems. A conviction in an individualised sense of justice was nurtured by tales about superhuman truth-seekers – one who works according to his/her own strengths and a sense of social justice. This is the ‘truth’ that readers aspired for themselves. Ayan (28) was a civil servant from Barauni, a town in Bihar with a large railway

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station due to the presence of a public sector oil refinery. He contended that like superheroes: ‘I seriously believe that the only way to fight corruption is to be honest myself and create problems for the dishonest around me’. He elaborated: We need to groom ourselves on the level of ethics so that we avoid corruption ourselves. My father was a very honest man so he was denied promotions and always given shunted posts and denied any kind of official facilities. And it was commented to my sister in a social gathering that she shouldn’t dream of appearing to medical college tests as her father couldn’t afford the fees of the college – though she became a doctor anyway. See the pride in having extra money and a lot of these are in Delhi and were there in the [anti-reservation] movement and I just cannot bear standing next to them.8 A lot of the people supporting the movement were engineers and doctors; and you might have heard that in medical schools and engineering colleges we have the worst kind of ragging imaginable. Students even commit suicide. And I have firsthand experience as I went to a government engineering college and even at IIFT [Indian Institute of Foreign Trade], there was a kind of brutal mental torture in the name of personality development. It is similar. It is at all IIMs [Indian Institute of Management]. Here from the very first day [due to my experiences of ragging], we had to fight a social evil that was ignored. In Ayan’s view, it was upper-caste middle-class social convention that was dubious for its anti-reservation orientation and the victimisation of lower-caste classes. Superheroes in contrast provided a charter for social justice. His experience of corruption, institutional hierarchies and bullying led him to nurture a very particular sense of survival and ethics. While pertaining to be a part of the apex of civilisation, inmates at educational institutions assert their authority through disciplining newcomers through a brutal practice known as ragging, a form of psychological and/or physical torture. Even though it was outlawed by Supreme Court of India legislation in 2001, Ayan’s view was that even established justice casts a blind eye on instances of ragging. Ayan continued: Ragging goes on for ages, two to three months in general. We, as 19-yearolds, were required to keep a pack of condoms all the time, sometimes forced to stand naked in a row wearing condoms. I had to keep a military cut hair and had to keep looking at the third button from the top of the shirt but the worst are where kids are beaten brutally and tortured mentally. Schools and colleges were likened to military outposts, where it was a case of survival of the fittest. Obsequious gangs formed around leaders while other individuals were ill-treated. Rather than a bastion of rules-governed behaviour, Ayan’s experience was that institutions were where rules were flouted with abandon. Violence, whether it be physical or mental, institutional or unofficial, led to him seeing himself as an ‘in/exclusive’ in more ways than one. Not firmly placed in one group or

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another, Indian superheroes such as Doga provided him the courage and conviction to follow a more individual, even quasi-vigilante pathway against the institution, so that he did not bow down to the people he despised around him. A contrasting scenario was provided by Ajay (21), a sports enthusiast and a postgraduate student in Delhi from a tribal background from Namkom in Jharkhand. His experience and interpretation of the institutionalised framework was strikingly different. Ajay had lived virtually his entire life in hostels due to his boarding schooling. One of the most important things he learnt from superhero comics was the importance of patriotism, particularly through the Tiranga series. He had received a scholarship to join an army (sainik) school funded by the ministry of defence before going to university in Delhi. It informed his future plans to join the commissioned ranks in the Indian Armed Forces by preparing for the Combined Defence Services exam: I felt like I am given a chance to be the superhero by being given a chance to fight the enemies of the country. I sometimes feel that the army is itself the superhero and fighting the villains and enemies. Army is a kind of personification of the superhero. For Ajay, the state was the superhero, in this case experienced through what he considered the magnificent realm of the national army. By joining the army, he could realise his dream of becoming a superhero. Through the comic books, Ajay discussed how he ‘learnt about communal harmony in case of aliens attacking, and superheroes unifying people’. He interpreted stories about aliens threatening the planet as divisive forces that could ruin society as with the ‘curse of communalism’. Superheroes, in his eyes, could rise above such schisms to fight for justice and have a unifying influence on humanity. Nikit (26) was from the town of Mahoba in Uttar Pradesh and now an engineer working for an IT company in Noida just outside New Delhi. He reflected on how the comics imparted values that continued to nurture him. These were to do with: team work, power capabilities of human psyche, a never-give-up attitude, develop consciousness of good and bad. . . . They gave me a sense at a very early age of universal brotherhood, which I still stick to. It made me grow my mentality above religion and see how atrocities are created in the name of god. It made me understand that humanity is above everything. It was as if superhero comics had the capacity to burst out of the limiting parameters of any religious themes, parables and influences in the comic books. They enabled a platform for grander ideas where the national was corralled with the global. Nikit preferred to underline their secular intentions. The superhero fought not just for particular religious or national communities, but for humanity at large. In this way, superhero comics opened up to a vast world without boundaries, rather than simply collapse to context.

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Much before the rise of social media, comic books acted like virtual vehicles for travel. Nimit (25), also an engineer from the town of Mahoba, mentioned how much he had learnt about the rest of the world through comics, particularly as he had not travelled outside of India: Through the journeys of Nagraj through Asia, Europe, USA and Africa I got to know about these places. Like elephants in Africa might not be a big thing to an adult, but to an eight year old studying the legends about elephants, it is [with reference to Kabuki the elephant in Kabuki ka Khazana, The Treasure of Kabuki, 1990]. I learnt about the housing architecture in China [in Toofan Zu, Toofan and Zu, 1990] and about the pyramids of Egypt [in Nagraj aur Jadu ka Shahenshah, Nagraj and the Emperor of Magic, 1990]. When foreign travel was limited, if not impossible, comic books enabled a canvas for what Homi Bhabha terms ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’.9 It became a form of simulated tourism well before virtual reality became a vernacular reality. Although the majority of readers of comic books were boys, girls were not averse to reading them, and some became as enthusiastic about them as their male peers. Among them, Shakti was a particular favourite. Shabana (34) was an Indian paramilitary officer who hailed from Baghmara tehsil (sub-district) in Dhanbad district. She reflected on her childhood reading superhero comics: Shakti was a pleasant change and an inspiration for me in the world of male superheroes. I wanted to become an IPS [Indian Police Service] officer and fight crime. Inspirations were few especially in backward semi-rural areas. . . . When Shakti was released, I was just finishing my twelfth grade and was preparing for the first competitive exams of my life and was competing with mostly my male classmates. I was good in studies and Shakti was good in fighting crime, helping me feel and dream myself as the first female IPS officer. She instilled confidence into me that wearing a uniform or fighting crime was not just a male thing. Where other media was limited or conservative when it came to portrayals of women, Shakti paved the way for her to confidently pursue her career in a male bastion. Chandrabala (25) was from the town of Govindgarh in Rajasthan and was doing a postgraduate degree in Delhi. when we met her. She also commented on how superhero comic books imparted strength in herself and faith in justice: ‘There will be many people around you trying to hurt you, but you must be strong enough, facing and overcoming difficulties, and at last, everything will be good’. She elaborated on how reading comics ‘has improved my reading skills and I have grown as a better social person’.The comic books were inspirational as well as aspirational material. Similarly, Shalini (24), from the town of Hathras in Uttar Pradesh, and now doing a degree in Delhi, was of the opinion: ‘In childhood, we learn lots of things. We learn how to help, how to respect. These comics help to make

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our morals and character’. Rather than seeing superhero comics as bad influences detractive to their future pathways, young people viewed them as good influences, even character-builders so as to be able to navigate their social worlds.The fact that the nation was still held as supreme meant that for several readers, a dedicated commitment to self-improvement did not always descend into the cult of individualism.

Scientific magics The conveying of scientific information was equally appreciated by young enthusiasts, even if textbook science might be blown out of proportion in the comic books. Some young readers, for instance, became acquainted with the science of magnetism through the actions of the supervillain, Chumba, a term that comes from the Hindi chumbak, meaning a magnet. Ayan explained: In Chumba ka Chakravyuh [Chumba’s Trap, 1992], Dhruv fights Chumba, a scientist who has developed extremely powerful magnets. He calls his two assistants, North Pole and South Pole, whose magnetic powers are strong enough to rip a man apart if the victim has been doused with a special magnetic paste made of gum mixed with powered iron [Figure 9.2]. Chumba is after a special nuclear battery which is to be used in the Trishul missile [a surface-to-air missile adopted by the Indian army in 1999]. Chumba has already stolen missiles that have been test launched by catching the missiles mid-air and bringing them to his secret lab. At one point . . . Dhruv saves himself from another assistant who was using electricity to attack by making a lightning conductor out of a rod from a window. Chandika then ends the game by reflecting the magnetic rays of Chumba back to him which converts him to a huge magnet and makes him immobile. Through this comic book, Ayan acquainted himself with the concept of magnetic attraction and repulsion at the tender age of 7, much before it was a classroom topic at his school. A number of other readers became intrigued by the power of lasers to burn and cut through metal through stories about Grand Master Robo (see Figure 8.2 in Chapter 8). One of the supervillain’s eyes is robotic and contains a laser gun emitting a powerful beam that can destroy whatever Robo lays his sight on. Even if the science described in the comic books was exaggerated, it conjured up credibly and incredibly possible scenarios based on the fantastic familiar complex, as we have explored in Chapter 6. Zain (25) was a student from Kurhani tehsil in Bihar. He described how the comic books animated his science classes: When I read the Awaz ki Tabahi [Destruction by Sound, circa 1991/92] . . . and we were studying sound waves in our classes around that time, that was when an idea struck me that if I could put a number of ultrasonic sound producing machines in a box with highly reflective surfaces, we could actually have a

FIGURE 9.2  The

supervillain, Chumba, uses extremely powerful magnets to cut a man in half with the help of his henchmen, North Pole and South Pole, in Chumba ka Chakravyuh (Chumba’s Trap, 1992). The final panel shows Super Commando Dhruv with his aides, Natasha and Schweta, Raj Comics, p. 4

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machine which could direct sound waves with maybe dangerous results. I am sure that this is hypothetically possible. The hypothetical hovered somewhere between the credible and incredible – theoretically possible but practically perhaps not. What is most at issue here is that the comics enabled him to at least think about these potentials. Awaz ki Tabahi with the supervillain, Dhwaniraj (King of Sound), was a story that impressed several interviewees and is worth citing at length for its multiple threads. The tale starts with an introduction to the power of sound with an illustration of sound waves compared with the harmony of music and the rupture of noise that, at high decibels, can even be destructive. At the fictional Rajnagar University Centre, two Indian scientists have developed two machines, a portable one to be worn with an outfit and a larger machine that could harness the destructive power of sound. However, the larger machine needs a special diamond from the National Museum. One of the scientists, Professor Kale, the alter ego of Dhwaniraj, hires a few goons, kills the other scientist and deploys the machines for his megalomaniac plans. Equipped with his foster sister Schweta’s gadgets to protect his ears from noise pollution, Dhruv manages to locate Dhwaniraj. After using high-decibel sound in an attempt to make Dhruv deaf, the supervillain tries to bury him in the debris of a falling building demolished with the deadening noise. He then creates a freak creature out of sound energy called Karkash (the name referring to an extremely unpleasant sound).This creature unleashes a reign of ruin on the superhero’s hometown, Rajnagar. Dhruv sees that on Karkash’s body there are two points that are very prominent. He guesses that they could be positive and negative points. By short-circuiting the points, Dhruv successfully destroys Karkash. The moment of defeat is accompanied by a description of how to short-circuit an electrical system and how a leather belt could act as insulation from the damaging effects of electricity. Undeterred, Dhwaniraj interrupts television broadcasts and makes a demand of 500 million rupees if people in Rajnagar are to be spared his wrath. When Dhruv returns to Dhwaniraj’s den, he is made immobile by distinct sound waves directed by the supervillain’s special sonic gun. Just when Dhruv is about to be terminated, Chandika appears and removes the diamond from the machine, thereby deactivating the gun. Gunfire aimed at Chandika is redirected towards Dhwaniraj’s own body, owing to which the control panel that he had been wearing is ruined. Dhwaniraj then escapes from the scene in a hot air balloon, but Dhruv catches up with him. We come to a sobering end when it is revealed that Dhwaniraj took to villainy because, despite giving 15 years of his life to develop this machine as a government scientist, he was paid a miserable 6,000 rupees as a salary, a point we return to below. This sorry state of afffairs left him with no choice but to turn to nefarious conduct. The appeal of techno-scientific possibilities far surpassed Manichean considerations about good and evil, (super)hero and (super)villain. Shorn of their ethical

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mooring, the fantastic scenarios depicted in this comic book triggered a marvellous chain of thoughts regardless of who was at the helm. Nikit reflected: Dhwaniraj provided me knowledge about the science of sound. Nagraj is a classic example of mutation (or at least this is how Professor Nagmani described him). Dhruv provided me with tips and tricks of scientific experiments. . . . It provided me with an insight into how simple gadgets and tools could be used in self-defence and for making our daily lives easier. Satish (25), from a small town of Minapur in Bihar, was also introduced to scientific principles such as the theory of sound waves and thermodynamics through such comics. In another story, Maine Mara Dhruv ko (I Killed Dhruv, 1995, Plate 9), Dhwaniraj declares that he has killed Dhruv at a moonscape in a space training centre using his sonic boom. But the claim is rejected by a grand court of criminals who want to take the glory of killing Dhruv for themselves. A highly intelligent robot, Biotron, interrogates each of their claims and, against Dhwaniraj, declares that sound cannot travel in the vacuum of moon space. From this episode, Satish then understood as a young child that sound waves cannot travel in a vacuum. Satyam (21) took up the study of science up until the twelfth grade, where he grew up in Musahri in Bihar. He was driven by vocational ambition as much as by his consumption of superhero comics. With the benefit of superhero characterisations and plots, he described how he ‘could imagine effects of mutations, chemical warfare and the importance of small inventions’. He elaborated: Everyone wants to do the science for its end results, and dream to show the world what they could do with science. Mostly people took science, as taking humanities is considered feminine, and commerce was for [the children of] businessmen. Parents force kids to take up science till twelfth grade so as to help them later in the competitive exams. He referred to the exams that provided entry to the civil services, for many in the mofussil middle classes considered ‘the ultimate dream job’ due to its life-time perks. Equally prevalent were several young readers of superhero comics who had gone on to take up scientific or engineering education and careers.10 Zain mentioned: Because of these comics I am now knowing a lot of scientific stuff: like if you put coal tar in the petrol tank of a bike it could blast – I picked this up from Dhruv comics. It is done in Saza-e-Maut [Death Penalty, 1996]. Dhruv faces a villain, who calls himself Schemer – a person who kills his enemies with his schemes. A bird informs Dhruv that his bike is being tampered with. Dhruv rushes and catches the person who acts as a drunkard thief and tells Dhruv that he was just stealing petrol and spills all the petrol that he had stolen. Dhruv has to take his bike to the petrol pump where Schemer sends his goons to rob the pump. While Dhruv is engaged with the robbers, Schemer

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throws a ball of sodium or potassium into the petrol tank of Dhruv’s bike. . . . I also used to wonder about the use of science along with magic, along with the powers of tantra and mantra. In grades 2 and 3, I would be knowing a lot more practical science than my classmates because I had developed a hunger for it from the comics [sic]. In this case, the superhero comics did not so much as provide food for thought, but created an insatiable hunger for the amazing possibilities of scientific as well as magical interventions. At the time of our interview in 2013, Rajshree was doing her masters in environmental science. She too emphasised how she picked up a fascination for science through superhero comic books, particularly through Tiranga’s dealings with the scientist, Professor Enviro (see Chapter 8). As a child growing up in Nirsa in Jharkhand, she believed that one day, like Enviro, she would develop something that could solve many of the environmental problems of the country, but of course, without murdering humans in the process. Swati (28), from Kanti in Bihar, was doing postgraduate research in climate science in Delhi. She recalled how she had been inspired by these comics because they always focused on ‘both sides of science especially its effect on the environment’. She made a parallel with environmental pollution and the superhero, Nagraj, who is always careful not to use his poisonbreath in public in case people are exposed to its deathly fumes. Returning to the resolution of Awaz ki Tabahi where Professor Kale/Dhwaniraj declares that he was driven to crime due to a meagre salary as a government scientist, Sahil (29) was prompted to make the following point. At the time we met him, he was a public relations professional with a public sector company in south Delhi and grew up in the town of Katras in Jharkhand. His criticism of the government sector was one reason why he chose to join a private firm. He remarked: We are being faced with problems for researchers and scientists in India and were being told that people serve the nation without being paid much. So the nation is important.The superheroes are never shown to charge anything for their services. In Awaz ki Tabahi, Dhruv is shown refusing any kind of reward for arresting Professor Kale [the alias of Dhwaniraj]. Professor Kale is the government scientist who despite years of service is paid a pittance and so decides to go bad. It brought to the fore the dilemma of good brains being made to work for pittance despite being involved in very important researches. It also raises the question of the state of scientific research in India. Actually till the 1990s the debate of good brains rotting in government sector and the frustration with the youth with the system - I guess this is what was portrayed as the reason for the scientist going bad [sic]. The reader was not expected to feel sympathy with the (super)villain’s predicament, as his lust for power had grown beyond social toleration, but the narrative raised an important issue about the neglect of talented individuals in the government sector.

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Sacrificing one’s salary for the good of the nation was simply not valued in the contemporary era when the cost of living was escalating. Money boomed louder than even Dhwaniraj’s sound waves.

Janus directions While some of the themes above are not entirely unexpected, there were other strains that pointed to a reading against the grain of a comic producer’s intent even while young people read with the grain. In other words, readers often diverged from the narrative intent while empathising with the main direction of travel of the characters as the plot unfolded. As we have explored in earlier chapters, young people agreed with the dominant convention in superhero fictions that superheroes should not marry. Vivek, for instance, underlined this point, emphasising that if they were to marry: ‘This will stop the story. We need to preserve the alpha male identity of the superheroes’. Alpha male identities could only be conceived of as outside the institution of marriage. However, such views tussled with the colossal of convention: that marriage is the main destination for any Indian worth his/her mettle, whatever their ‘profession’ might be.11 Indeed, several readers expressed the view that superheroes should marry. Abhay’s reasoning was to do with the idea that ‘then they will produce more heroes and heroines’. Satyam indicated, along with a few others, that marriage was a ‘right’: ‘Superheroes have the right to live a normal life and should marry’. Even if they knew that their single status enabled them to fight injustice, they still held marriage as the norm. As superheroes were exemplary role models working for society, they too should marry. Chandrabala even insisted that through a superhero’s marriage: ‘we can see their other side, the family side of the man’. Despite the subsidiary role intended for romance and marriage in superhero comics by the producers, they were raised as important themes by a few readers, reflecting the prominent dais that marriage had in society in general. Other readers recognised that women have the ‘right’ to be superheroines but that this had not been fully developed in the comic books:‘so then they just become like sideys’. Mohammed elaborated: I liked all the female supporters of Dhruv – Schweta as Chandika, Richa as Blackcat. And for Doga – Monica as Lomri fox. And Jane in [the comics about] Kobi/Bheriya. They were supporting, kind of. But I don’t think they are that relevant or have bright future. Our society still considers women not fit for leadership and must remain within the house. Overwhelmingly, women did not command the same kind of interest or credibility as did their male counterparts. This view was predominant among males but even extended to some women. Superheroines’ ventures into action-packed territories were received with a degree of patriarchal chauvinism and reservations about the dangers that the outside world posed to females in north India.

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Other readers, particularly those from minority religious backgrounds, expressed a discomfort in the foregrounding of ‘heavy’ Hindu religious narratives for superheroes. They mentioned that Shakti’s stories lacked believability because, as Mohammad stated: ‘in terms of ideas and setting, her comics hinge on the thin line between truth and reality’. He added: ‘If something looks like a lie, I will say so. I get angry at any kind of religious extremism’. For this reason and orientated by his minority identity, he dismissed the superheroine as ‘an extremist’ due to her intricate association with the Hindu goddess, Kali. The religious content in this case was just too much for his sense of superheroism. He preferred only ‘neutral heroes’ such as Dhruv and Doga. Amin (19) was from a Muslim weavers’ family, and had been to an Urdu-medium school in the town, Maunath Bhanjan, in Uttar Pradesh. He found the Hindi narration challenging to read and therefore started ‘reading’ the comics through interpreting the graphics. As a result, he had developed a particularly sharp impression of the visuals: In case of Vampire [1994], terrorists all are Muslim and have beards. The clear point was that Muslims were enemies of the nuclear program of India who came to disrupt the tests in Pokhran. After Pokhran II [nuclear tests], the bomb was called a Hindu bomb. What appeared to be an anti-Muslim strain did not, however, put the young man off the superhero comics. The objectionable representations were alleviated by the secular bearings of the superhero and their captivating adventures. Amin explained: My desire to know the superhero was much more than any revulsion. Also the comics are addictive – you can’t leave it. Phantom was obviously a colonial mascot yet he was loved. Just as the colonial provenance of The Phantom was taken with a pinch of salt in India, so too was any anti-Muslim content in a superhero comic whose adventures he otherwise adored. Other hooks could be generated to turn a blind eye to disagreeable features – a reading with and against the grain in Janus directions.

Transgressors The violent vigilante Doga held a particular appeal for those who despaired of the shenanigans of real-life political cultures in India. Abhijit waxed lyrical: Doga was totally bad ass. He is ‘our Rambo’ [referring to the US war veteran movie character]. There’s glamour attached to guns. He was like a GI Joe [a US action figure]. Submachine guns, assault rifle, pistols, daggers and probably he has a rocket launcher on his back.

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Doga meant business: his personalised sense of justice meant transgressing the sanctioned rule of law. As ‘our Rambo’, he was the epitome of hypermasculine cool – a man of steel that could take anything in his stride, someone that Abhijit could feel proud of in a transnational field of visuality. Doga encouraged a sense of individual ethical cultivation in a dog-eat-dog world. Manoj (33), a start-up entrepreneur from Chandrapura in Jharkhand, explained the ambiguities of the rule of law: ‘I never had to lie before I first went to court. My lawyer asked me to lie’. The ‘moral universe’ was not so moral after all.12 It was socio-legal convention that encouraged him to be an unprincipled character. From a perspective adopted later in his life, not only was Doga’s conduct just, but the rule of law was unjust. Abhijit continued: Doga was something very distinctive. There was a vigilante aspect and slight blurring of the lines between good and evil, which is why I enjoy reading Doga a little bit more. Doga does not appeal to a higher power which is also something I liked. When you see Dhruv and you see his hair, I think – Boss, you just listen too much to your parents’ Doga had a raw visceral appeal. Beating up bent cops – I think that was a first in comics. You never really saw that in superhero comics before. But cops being corrupt was something we deal with all the time. And you grow up thinking – oh yes, I want to do that as well! Dhruv was too much of a neat-looking mummy’s boy – one who played according to the rules, when Abhijit knew that the implementation of rules was itself flawed. Doga was where the real deal lay. If there was a fine line between just and unjust, and even good and evil in society, then Doga’s role as a social transgressor becomes even more pertinent, and one that his fans instinctively recognised. Rather than blurring their sight, superhero comics made their aficionados, as Sahil put it, ‘see more’. Similarly, if a villain’s persona was based on a stimulating or fanciful idea and/ or a phenomenal story, a fan base would swiftly develop, thus denigrating moral judgements, and elevating the fiend to the stage of the superhuman. Mohammed admitted that he admired Mahamanav, an evolved species of homo sapiens with telekinetic powers (see Figure 6.1 in Chapter 6). Due to Mahamanav’s evolution from an amoeba to a psychically advanced superhuman in just one lifespan, he described him as ‘the future man of the earth’. Ayan concurred: Mahamanav is the only villain who has traversed the entire length of the existence of life on earth. He somehow never died and is the most natural of impossible supervillains.When I first read Mahamanav, I was familiar with the theory of evolution and he fits in so easily there. And then he is a fast forward product of how we might look in the future. When I read him, I felt as if this is the most feasible way to gain superpowers.

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The ‘most natural of impossible supervillains’ conveyed both incredible yet credible scenarios if the rolling logic of evolution was to be pursued to its inevitable conclusion. It was not so much the conduct of supervillains that attracted readers, but an awe for their sublime yet feasible ‘fast forward’ powers – how they attained and exercised them, and how they threw up extreme and vicious challenges for superheroes to tackle. Pankaj (17), a twelfth grader in a government school in Delhi, admitted that he admired Nagpasha, Nagraj’s devious uncle: ‘He is immortal. His mind is brilliant. Undoubtedly he causes great difficulties for Nagraj. And Nagraj even with his special traits has to struggle to defeat him’. Bauna Waman was also a figure of intrigue who would transform toys into potent weapons (Plate 9). He was introduced in Khooni Khilaune (Killer Toys, 1991) as a dwarf with a pot belly. He wears a striped upper dress that conveys a sense of comedy more than danger, attributing a demented Joker-like twist to his persona. Bauna Waman’s popularity stems primarily from the fact that, with him, anything could become a weapon – a common antic for children in their imaginative play, chasing, dodging and doing Mexican stand-offs with any item that comes to hand. Abhijit vividly recalled how he played out adventure stories in his childhood: You made up these games in the world. In the afternoon, there’s nothing much to do and you take these things lying in your house, you take a piece of pipe and you turn it into a gun. If you were really lucky and some relative had gone to Bombay or something you might have a gun. I remember that this had a very nice effect on our imagination and we concocted these stories and enacted them. . . . And we had to close the story – it was 4 til 6.30 and the next day you’d have a new story. Much like comic book producers, they were concocting and enacting new stories every day with combustible spontaneity. They played Nagraj, Dhruv and a host of other characters – borrowed from east and west, south and north – on their crimefighting sprees. While several young readers wanted to be admired and played the role of superheroes with creative panache, the crux was: who would be the villain, and thus sign an unspoken contract to be first in the line to get a beating? They might appreciate supervillains, but they did not want to role-play them in real life, only to then get battered. If a toss-up was not in the offing, the supervillains would just be imagined with mock superheroes chasing long shadows into the early hours of the evening. After all, as we saw in the previous chapter, they are an essential evil for any superhero story.

A super-charged labyrinth We have reached a moral labyrinth. On the one side, while superhero comics enabled the agonistic forging of alternative circuits, away from adult-led and educational establishments, many readers would still define their worth in terms of standards

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deemed socially important by these very sectors. These included knowledge about the world, communal harmony, social conscientiousness, nurturing esteemed characteristics such as respect, faith, aspiration, ambition, and strength, the significance of scientific content, literacy and other educational and vocational merits, and the value of truth, justice and protecting the nation, if not humanity, against threats. On the other side, superhero comics encouraged an admiration for traits in supervillains that were not entirely socially sanctioned but might be justified on the basis of scientific or intellectual genius. Going further, they might even be an admiration for dubious channels or violence when other routes are stonewalled. They might then become a junction for recompense and retribution, while powering alternative worlds outside of social conventions. This route became the basis for a much more idiosyncratic, self-serving and/or irreverent paths where angry superheroes and even supervillains might be revered for their special powers and unique status – a theme that we resume in the next chapter. Such contradictory impulses run rife in society at large.The popularity of superhero comic books lay in how they responded to them with élan. Partly their appeal lay in them being a wellspring for the complexity of young people’s lives and fantasies that, at the time, other media provisions in India did not sustain as well. Their allure lay in their colourful, action-packed illustrations with riveting plots, amazing powers and relatively racy content, depicting fit and attractive men and women on grand stages, vanquishing all kinds of actual and imagined threats. In such ways, vernacular comics acted like passports for virtual travel with which to imagine, discuss and (re)enact daring stories that transported them outside their provincial localities. Partly the appeal of superhero comics was down to the way they addressed social and topical issues that engaged and explained issues that mattered to them, and this through superheroes that they could call their own, figures who looked as convincing and acted as bravely as those associated with the west. Partly they enabled a pliable means with which to counter the challenges and dilemmas that they daily faced in a way that made sense to them – whether it be to think about corruption, bullying, marriage, the role of women, the status of religious minorities, and so forth. Instead of presenting the familiar and staid stories of custom and convention, superhero comics were bursting with new ideas that seemed to both be relevant to their lives and to break new frontiers. It was, in the end, their world – to make of it what was possible and even, forbidden.

Notes 1 Scott McCloud (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: HarperCollins and Kitchen Sink Press, p. 199. 2 See Janice A. Radway (1984) Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. 3 Roland Barthes (1977) ‘The Death of the Author’, in his Image-Music-Text, transl. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana. 4 On the currents and complexities of censorship or cultural regulation, see Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella, eds. (2009) Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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5 On a comparable debate on comic books in the west, see Carol L. Tilley (2012) ‘Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications that Helped Condemn Comics’, Information and Culture: A Journal of History, 47(4): 383–413. 6 See Craig Jeffrey, Patricia Jeffrey and Roger Jeffrey (2007) Degrees Without Freedom? Education, Masculinities, and Unemployment in North India, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; and Radhika Chopra and Patricia M. Jeffrey, eds. (2005) Educational Regimes in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Sage. 7 See Mark Liechty (2003) Suitably Modern: Making Middle Class Culture in a New Consumer Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 215–216. 8 The anti-reservation movement reached a height following protests in 2000 over the Mandal Commission that was established in 1979 and implemented from 1990 to address reservations and redress caste discrimination. The protests were led by the upper-caste middle classes.The movement gave birth to Y4E (Youth for Equality) that is against government reservations for Scheduled Tribes and Castes, Backward and Other Backward Classes. 9 See Homi Bhabha (1996) ‘Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, in Text and Nation, eds. Laura Garcia-Morena and Peter C. Pfeifer, London: Camden House; and Pnina Werbner, ed. (2008) Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives, London: Bloomsbury. 10 In a study of 5,000 13- to 19-year-old boys and girls across 12 states in India in 2006, scientific jobs were rated as the most prestigious amongst all sectors. See Work, Orientations and Responses in Career Choices: Indian Regional Survey. Cited in Hemali Chhapia (2006) ‘It’s Best to Be a Scientist, Say Youth’, The Times of India, Mumbai, February 27, p. 2. 11 See Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella (2004) Men and Masculinities in South India, London: Anthem Press, p. 2. 12 See Rosie Thomas (1995) ‘Melodrama and the Negotiation of Morality of Mainstream Hindi Cinema’, in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, p. 157.

10 IN ONE OF MY DREAMS, I DEFEATED AMERICA IN ONE OF MY DREAMS, I DEFEATED AMERICAIN ONE OF MY DREAMS, I DEFEATED AMERICA

One of the main times for reading comics was summer vacations when power cuts would end all other means of entertainment and there was nothing to do in the long summer months. So we only had comics and dreams of comics to pass the days with. —(Naimitya, aged 29, 2012) Poets, then, can be classified by their response to the question: ‘Tell me which infinity attracts you and I will know the meaning of your world. Is it the infinity of the sea, or of the sky, or of the depths of the earth, or the one found in the funeral pyre?’ —(Gaston Bachelard, 1988)1

Dreams conjure up aspirations and ambitions in the wide-awake world while pointing to a more subterranean and enigmatic territory associated with the blanket of sleep. These somnolent dreams afford a glimpse of limitless imaginings and feral fantasies that defy the laws of nature as we understand them.Vividly portrayed in Paramjit Singh’s graphic narration as a ‘sleepscape’, they are ‘a kind of metaphysical alternate world’, in the words of Brian Stableford.2 But the dreams may also refract thoughts and happenings that occur throughout the day. Moreover, there are always factors to do with selective memory, personal interpretation, willful omission, editing and exaggeration in the retelling of dreams when awake.Their recounting through language also has the effect of squaring the fluidity of random sequences and figures that populate drifting dreamworlds. Sleep-state dreams can then only be glimpsed through an evanescent palimpsest. The line between dreams as they relate to the state of being awake and asleep is hazy. In fact, there is little of a line. The dream is immanent in waking realities as are everyday realities in dreams. Equally, as a term of reference, a dream is a narrated document of sleep as it is a waking ambition for particular goals. Both ends of the dreams spectrum – as somnolent journey and as aspirational aim – are implicated

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in our deeper enquiry as to the receptive aesthetics of superhero comics. While in the last chapter we concentrated on how young readers analysed comic books with respect to the more permissible aspects of their lifeworlds, in this one, we venture into the way comics conjured up further fantastic worlds characterised by impermissible pleasures and, most conceivably, impossible ambitions when compared with real-life limitations. Less the young analysts, this chapter is about young dreamers.3 The recollections of dreams may prompt psychoanalytical perspectives: the drives of the id, ego and the superego as Freudian analyses might have it, or in terms of ‘lack’ or compensation as poststructural analyses might provide.4 But such approaches are reductive and fail to account for the diversity of accounts and the agency of individuals. Nor do they provide us with the tools to engage with the irregular osmoses between the asleep and the awake, the conscious and the unconscious. As Slavoj Zizek maintains: ‘the unconscious is outside, not hidden in an unfathomable depth’.5 Gilbert Herdt alerts us to Moebius qualities of dreams: the fact that culture may change experience inside of dreams, and that ‘the productions of dreaming . . . become absorbed and transformed into culture’.6 As applies to several other anthropologists of dreams, the culture he talks of need be seen as an open, dynamic and ambivalent terrain.7 In this case study, it is moored but by no means confined to the circuits of vernacular superhero comics in the mofussil bypasses of a developing and globalising India in what we have called ‘modernities in the backyard’. We locate our analyses on the interstices of the personal and the social and, of course, their reflexive presentations to us on the outside. We submit to the surreal excesses of memories and desires that cannot always be put through the ‘lemon squeezer’ of social analyses.8 Dreams like stories meander and mediate the personal and the collective, and in their situated and reflexive (re)assembling and (re)telling, they are further mediated while revealing glimpses into the socio-psychological, cultural and political dimensions of an individual’s life.9 Based on free-flowing conversations with the more avid superhero comic aficionados, some of whom we encountered in the previous chapter, we consider how readers dreamt about be(com)ing superhumans. It was true that believing was almost akin to becoming.Yet the belief in becoming a formidable personality did not simply correlate with ignorance about human limitations. It did not mean that fans would then don a caped costume and jump off a balcony as characterises knee-jerk reactions by overly concerned adults against gravity-defying superhero stunts. Paternalistic pathologisation often parodies the playing out of young people’s fantasies. Manan Kumar comments: ‘such comics have been responsible for children attempting daring but foolish acts, hoping to be saved by the superheroes. Many have lost their lives or have become maimed for life’.10 Without the support of carefully calibrated evidence, a morally loaded statement against superhero comics is presented as if it was a social fact. Rare events where children may have injured or killed themselves while concocting and reenacting superhero fantasies is magnified to the realm of the ‘many’.

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This so-called statement of fact goes against the actuality. Many young people retained a sense of physical limitations, while imagining parallel worlds for themselves. It was as if their minds ran simultaneously in two or more overlapping lanes – one to do with everyday realities, the other to do with fantasy – fully aware of how one simultaneously propels and places limits on the other. Alok (34) was a theatre artist and a research scholar in Delhi from the town of Pakur in Jharkhand. He reminisced about his childhood in the 1980s: ‘Superheroes were real people for us children. It’s not that we didn’t know they were fiction. We just didn’t think of them as fiction in the same way’. While recognising their fanciful features, superhero stories and characteristics nevertheless had a powerful appeal to the point that they became real at the juncture of what is imaginatively persuasive and physically unattainable. This imagination might be materially and socially affected, but it also leapt and bounded across such contextualising balloons.11 These aspirations and journeys might manifest themselves in stupendous exploits while asleep, awake or the daze in between. They might be to do with personal powers and abilities, justice and vengeance, geopolitical relations, technoscientific fetishism and whims, romantic and sexual fancies, and the alluring possibilities of masked identities aided by the internet as it became gradually accessible from the mid-1990s.

Enchanted It was certainly the case that somnolent dreams were only dimly recalled by interlocutors. Their peculiar elements were communicated as if still in an out-of-focus and irresolvable suspension. Ayan related: Some dreams were very bizarre. In them was my envy of Nagraj traits, with which he saved his town and vanquished all the villains. So one night I dreamt I was a superhero – name isn’t coming to my mind – who, first of all, beat Nagraj to demonstrate my strength. It was in fact a war of survival that the superhero starts. Then the new superhero is sworn in as the superhero of the world [sic]. For Ayan, the superheroes he had read about were not enough. In fact, they triggered ‘envy’ (jalan) in him such that he fantasised about an even more powerful one – one that he could become as the most superior of superiors. He elaborated: Generally I don’t share it [the dream] with anyone. It remains there and each day still when I am depressed or get into altercation the dreams come back. But then often newer dreams take over but maybe after some months or even years I would revert back to that dreamworld again. Somnolent dreams may have morphed in their retelling, but there were invariably traits that persisted from dream to dream, almost as if the readers had the

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power to conjure their favourite parts of superhero stories up as yet another ‘unforgettable piece of imagining’.12 The main pull was the physical perfection of superheroes combined with their intellectual genius, muscular strength, special powers, and invincibility that young people wanted to possess for themselves. Prabhat (28) was from Aurai in Bihar and preparing for his civil services examinations in Delhi when we met him. He emphasised the physical looks of the superheroes that in a spiral, spilled out from superhero comics into his dreams and then into a real-life ambition: I wanted to look like them [the superheroes]. It was a dream to have a body like them. . . . We did not have gym facilities nearby but I bought dumbbells and also since Dhruv learnt from natural things I would have buckets of water to do sit-ups holding them. This was heavy and you learn poise as you cannot spill the water. I used to do this every day nearly, from age 13–17. Even though access to a gymnasium was not easy in the area, Prabhat made use of whatever was at hand to achieve his goal. Dreaming here was both aspirational and somnolent. Powerful bodies enabled powerful outcomes whatever the setting. His growing sense of masculinity was deeply inspired by superheroes and inscribed in how he could physically impress other boys and girls alike. Small-town guys had big dreams for their future in the metropole. Even though it was not the only influence and factor, superhero comics provided the spark and a major push to make the jump to move to the city, wherein the neoliberal economy was opening up new avenues. Metropolitan migration for young men was a way out of the provincial net of suffocating relatives and peer pressures. Some even chose to throw caution to the wind and change life directions. Chand (23) had refused a steady job with a reputed bank so as to teach Hindi to foreigners in New Delhi that he found more exciting. He explained: ‘I am looking for a superhero’s life to settle in’. The desire for thrills and new encounters spilled into his vocational desires. The comics boosted his confidence for navigating the unknown and unpredictable, as also evident with Pranav (23). He lived and worked as an engineer in Delhi and hailed from a small mining locality, Bhatmurna, in Jharkhand, and recounted with much enthusiasm: Every episode of a comic was like a new life. I’ve been having a very exciting life through them. I could not stay in one place for too long, or one job for too long. I always lived the life of a superhero, moving around. . . . I liked the thrill of not knowing what might happen next. But it’s also very complicated because at the end of the comics, the hero wins. So I also feel that I’m going to win. There’s a comfort in knowing that. The unfamiliar was actively courted and the unexpected boldly navigated in the knowledge that, somewhere in a parallel world, superheroes would also act in a similar way and still be successful.

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Comics became a connective conduit between the here-now and the farremoved, the visible and the invisible. Sahil elaborated: Comics performed this function of connecting with something where everything else seemed disconnected or another world.These [comic book] worlds were more accessible and allowed me to carve a space out for myself as I was growing through different parts of my life. It provided me a temporary relief and a temporary parallel world where I existed. And it was my world. Also this was the world where I was not limited by anything. For Sahil, comic books could enable a safe world in which he directed the shots and would not be hurt. It was one of infinite possibilities that also permitted him a place of solace and inspiration. By comparison, Pranav’s dreamworlds were more ambivalent, inspired as they were by stories from the Doga series: I wanted to lead a dual life, be a very powerful politician, and be a superhero in the dark so that during the daytime I would be making laws and necessary changes for the good of the country but at night I would be picking out the rotten eggs of society. I read about some South American elite secret society that had members from the military who were killing corrupt people in the country. I was not sure whether it was an urban legend or not but I believed it at the time, and wanted to be like them. Pranav well knew that to take the law into his own hands even for handling the vilest of criminals was prohibited. But he still entertained ideas of doing so encouraged by stories of other vigilantes. His solution for society was a night and day formula – daytime to correct social wrongs legally, night-time to oust its foul elements in a more expeditious manner. Crime and corruption aside, the main problems that children had to contend with were to do with bullies at school, underperforming in examinations, authoritarian parents, the pain of brawling relatives and the fear of violence and abduction in places where policing was lax – even more reason for why superheroes were admired.Vinodh (21) was an undergraduate student in Delhi from Musahri block, a mofussil area of Bihar. He admitted: Whenever I would be depressed or in a kind of problem, I would just go and wrap myself in a quilt or just bury my face in the pillow and lose myself in the world of dreams. As a superhero, I would analyse all my problems and punish all those who have hurt me, and then I would go off to sleep, and by the time I woke up I wouldn’t be so much depressed or feel so much hatred I had for those who had hurt me. The frustrations of the weak were allayed to some extent by dreams about fantastically perfect worlds that could provide a reviving refuge out of otherwise

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depressing or anxious scenarios. Aman recalled how he bonded thoroughly with superhero comics after a serious road accident that left him bedridden for a year and a half: I would always come back to my comics and read them just to cool myself down and feel close to perfection. I would read these stories again and again. Sometimes my newspaper-wallah would bring them. Sometimes my parents would go out and get them. They did not mind at this period as I was bedridden. . . . This was also a bad phase in my career because I was not allowed to come to Delhi or any other nice place to study. Instead, during my bedridden phase, it was decided that I would go to one of the worst universities where not even exams happen. . . . They don’t bother and a lot of the time they would be on strike for something or other that would go on for months, or it was too wet, too cold, or too hot. Superhero comics – as did dreams about them – were a palliative balm for Aman at a time of great need in his life. Against all the odds, they emboldened him to imagine himself as an individual above and beyond his physical disabilities and social circumstances where he could feel ‘close to perfection’. Zain related how his minority positioning led to a singular affiliation with superheroes. Regularly, he would feel Othered for his Muslim identity: ‘did you eat beef today?’ was a common question asked by his Hindu neighbour, for instance. Here the ‘alien’ is not so much the extraterrestrial but the alienated minority self. The superhero as a lone crusader provided a means with which to strike a bond of familiarity and a salve against alienation: My growing up was a unique experience. I grew up a Muslim in a Hindu locality. So at times my assimilation was partial. At any rate, assimilation was almost nil in both societies [Hindu and Muslim]. I was like an alien at all times. Being a Muslim I was different and being a non-practicing Muslim I was different from Muslims too. I was the Other most of the time. This made my being a contested one. I was in no group and had conflicting identities. This is where I struck a chord with the superheroes. They also had a unique existence. Their uniqueness was further established by making them free of all blood ties. All the major superheroes are alone in the world with their close blood relations dead. . . . With all their capacities and capabilities, they would stand out. As a Muslim minority in India, yet one who did not adhere to community convention, he related to the superheroes, as like him, they were unique and outside any particular social grouping. Even though he had family and community around him, he felt like he was an alienated orphan but with great potential, just as it was with his outstanding superheroes.

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Iqbal (30), a Bihari migrant research scholar in Delhi, admitted that his dreams would often be influenced by which comic he read before sleeping. Of these, he had his favourites, and this too often related to his social experiences as a religioethnic minority: One of my favourite dreams was having a mental power like that of Mahamanav [a superior species of homo sapiens who had psychic powers]. This was because I was one of the weakest in my class and suffered a lot for being a minority in the residential area, so mind power was the only superior thing I could have. And more than that, I dreamt that I should have the power to drag my enemies into the world of cartoons where I would always win because of my unlimited powers of imagination. Coming from a minority Muslim background meant that Iqbal suffered several instances of discrimination and a lack of self-worth as a child. Superhero comics afforded him some respite, strength, knowledge as well as fuel for fantasies about how he could battle oppression and social hierarchies. Here, it was not so much displays of physical or technical strength that empowered him, but creative and intellectual powers that inspired him to outwit others who otherwise saw themselves as socially superior. In this endeavour, it did not matter whether the font of inspiration was the superhero or the supervillain. More important was the ability to become something greater than merely human. Vinay related a dream that he particularly relished that was inspired by the lionesque supervillain in Aadamkhoron ka Swarg (Heaven of the Cannibals, circa 1988, see Chapter 8): Always I wanted to have that much power that combines the animal and human. Animal power is unrestrained and human brains are unrestrained as well. With my imagination and this kind of power I could actually rule the world. Even though allied with villainous designs, the prospect of omnipotence had a magnificent pull for Vinodh. His own father used to regularly beat him as a child, and would even instruct his tutor who provided extra maths lessons at home: ‘The bones are mine, the flesh is yours’ (‘haddi mera, chamri aapka’) – in other words, if you need to beat the boy, that is fine so long as you do not break his bones. The adults’ understanding was that if the boy did not perform well in his lessons, this was down to Vinodh’s own laziness, and that ‘sense had to be beaten into him’. For Vinodh, superhero comics enabled a route away from adult brutality where he could imagine himself as stronger than anyone around him. In his dreams, the jouissance of ultimate power against the people he saw as hurting him could be enjoyed without qualm or repercussion.

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Sweet revenge As with desires about omnipotence, vengeful ambition also pulls the official narrative apart – away from conduct in the name of the collective good for society to the micro-designs of the self-obsessed individual. Revenge might play a momentary part in the superhero’s genesis as a crime-fighting crusader, but this trait is more prevalent with unscrupulous villains. However, this has not stopped readers from becoming ensnared in the bittersweet promises of a vendetta. Aman recalled a period after his road accident when he was reading a comic book, Udantastari ke Bandhak (Prisoners of the Flying Saucer, circa 1988). The story relates a dictatorship projected 25,000 years into the future led by the supervillain,Witler, who leads men made out of mechanical prosthetics called Make-Men. Aman explained: Super Commando Dhruv is abducted by a future generation of humans and taken on a time-travel that traverses into the future where he found out that one of his descendants is Witler who aims to rule the world. Witler is entirely robotic except his brain. Because of this absence of human body, he lacks empathy and emotion and is very ruthless. Dhruv is requested by the humans to put some human hormones into his brain that would make him feel empathy with other humans. Especially during my accident period, I dreamt I could get something like a robotic leg for myself. I also began to feel that I did not have a heart. I was losing emotions. It felt justified if I had some robotic body parts. I felt that I don’t have a heart anymore because I suffered so much. I wanted to be evil. I wanted to avenge myself on people who had hurt me – such as the lorry driver who drove over my leg, and the people who threw me out of college. They had an elaborate process of admissions that depended on corrupt practices. Dhruv was not enough because he was too good. For this, you needed the powers of supervillains like Witler and Grand Master Robo. I felt like I had the brain of a five year old, and I wanted to live in my dreams. Aman’s loss of the use of his legs seemed to extend to the loss of his heart, or rather his ability to feel empathy. His disability led him to imagine new limbs attendant with all kinds of powers as if he was a child again with limitless fancies. He had suffered physically and mentally, combined with the additional injustice of being thrown out of college for his family ‘not being corrupt enough’ and paying people off with bribes in order to remain. As a consequence, at this point in his life, he nurtured ideas of extreme revenge to reclaim a sense of personal esteem. Superhero comics enabled him to imagine such scenarios, but significantly, his empathies lay not with the forces of good – for he did not see the path of the righteous leading to success when confronted with severe challenges. Rather, he imagined himself as a powerful tyrant, perhaps even a ‘heroic villain’ who could exact vengeance on people who he felt had wronged him (see Chapter 8). Away from the grounds of role-playing, there need be no physical retribution for merely imagining the role of the supervillain.

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Even though the Make-Men in the Super Commando Dhruv series had resumed physical movements, the prosthetics had removed their capacity to have thoughts and feelings, making them susceptible to Witler’s orders. Since Witler has no human body part except for the brain, he is the cruellest Make-Man, with megalomaniac ambitions to control all of humanity. Both in name and motivation, the supervillain recalls Adolf Hitler in spirit. For Aman, the morality of the tale faded when power became more tantalising to exact a sense of personal justice. Victory was more important than principles. In fact, revenge was a common refrain that a variety of readers could imagine against those they felt oppressed, injured or humiliated them. Superhero stories rather than the superheroes themselves provided a malleable template with which to envisage justice in a multitude of ways. Pankaj said: ‘If someone would hurt me I would spend hours dreaming how I would have my revenge as Super Commando Dhruv’. Justice is understood as just desserts. It did not matter to him that Dhruv was mainly averse to violence and vendettas. What attracted the young reader were the superhero’s unsurpassable intellectual and physical powers that could pave the way for a victorious vendetta. Sujeet (26), a political activist in Delhi from the town of Harnaut in Bihar, recalled: Comics helped me get my revenge in my dreams. Even though I feel that if I had those powers I would hurt them back. . . . Vengeance comes from my powerlessness to do anything or my helplessness. If I get humiliated I feel oppressed and this was what I did not want. Nitin (31) was a mid-level manager who lived in a public sector township, Bokaro, in Jharkhand. He emphasised that vengeance was not merely a pre-social emotion that had to be kept in check. Rather, revenge was essential to build one’s reputation and esteem. Saving face was particularly important to his sense of masculinity: Vengeance is good and these comics teach you that sometimes but not all the time. As a natural response if someone hurts me, I want to hurt them back. In the comics, they only fought for the good. There was nothing regarding vengeance even in Doga. Doga is fighting against bad men and not with his former friends [who had deserted him]. He saw a flaw with the hypermasculine icon, Doga, in that he never exacts revenge on the friends that humiliated him in his drive to rout out crime. For Nitin, this was a compromise that he would not be prepared to make. Readers interpreted and extracted what they needed from their comics to cultivate fantasies of retribution that mattered to them, even if they might not openly admit to them. As we saw in the previous chapter, reading – or rather, imagining or dreaming – against the grain was much in evidence. Similarly, imaginaries of vengeance were not uncommon. They were even encouraged in the playground

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from an early age, a classic arena within which to play out schoolboy animosities. Krishna (25), a resident doctor with a government hospital in Muzaffarpur district in Bihar, elaborated: With small kids, if you have a fight and you do not want to talk to them again you would rub your small finger from your right hand against theirs to signal this. This is called kattis. So anyone that did kattis to me, officially they would become an enemy. I was eight or nine at the time, and by age thirteen I grew out of it. But kattis continues into teenage years. Then you make real enemies and pick up a physical fight, or you get beaten or you stay on the banks (kinare raho). The social compulsion for vengeance tipped over any narrative about the need to keep it in check as conveyed in the narrative of comic books. For boys, fighting skills had to be learnt early for self-preservation, even if one strove to keep away from antagonists. While superhero comics displayed grand scenes of battles, they also had to be useful and necessary for navigating their less grandiloquent settings as young boys. The sentiment and strategy extended to girls. Aadya, who considered herself a ‘tomboy’, talked about how she learnt how to fight off boys who used to tease her: I used to threaten them. I used to even enjoy it. I used to imagine if I concentrate, then when the time comes, maybe I could wield some powers. I used to say to them – please don’t threaten me or I will be forced to use some of those powers on you which I do not want. I used to think that if I am angered if I close my eyes and focus, and if I do my hands like this [raises her palm up], some cosmic rays would flow out of my hand [and blast them]. Enraged by those boys whose ‘bossy attitude’ she did not approve she would shout and threaten them that she was going to use her special powers. She did this with so much conviction that it proved to scatter the boys away. Battles to attain self-esteem and command over a situation took on wider geopolitical twists and turns, as we can see in this remarkable rendition of a remembered dream. Kabir (26) was working in an economic research institute and came from Dr. Ambedkar Nagar, a cantonment town in Madhya Pradesh. He recalled: In one of my dreams, I defeated America. There is something called Spacequake which is a severe disturbance in the solar corona, and which would create temporary communication blockade on earth. If I could plan an invasion of America at that point of time without any superior communications, numbers of army personnel would count. The US only has a small army of about 500,000 active personnel whereas India has 1.2 million. Without any superior technologies, the navy and the air force of the US would be useless. We, with our more traditional sense of communication, would be better

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placed. In 2011, China reported training 10,000 pigeons for its army to be used in the eventuality where modern forms of communication break down. So in my dream I invaded America with my Indian army and by breaking the social system and promoting different groups. So that I would not be fighting the war with my soldiers but I would make others fight it. Divide and rule. So black would fight white.There were other minority groups who would be made to fight. Just look at the Indian army: Christians and Sikhs are in good number in the Indian army and so are Dalits. They could be easily turned against a highcaste dominated army. . . . Also there is a lot of regionalism in the army. Biharis are hated a lot. Uttarakhandis are called Mugga (as rumour goes that they use the same mugs for loo with which they drink tea). Dividing and ruling sounds cruel but I would be using convicts to control the US army personnel. Everything is fair in love and war. Ultimately the US would put the leg in everything I wanted to do. That is why I wanted to mess them up. In this era of globalisation, no country is insulated from each other, especially India which now has strong trade and strategic relations with the US and it also has a very strong Indian community in the US. So anything that will be done in India will find resonance in the US and might even invite retaliation from the US. Ultimately the enemy would be the US. In my dream I was a general fighting on a submarine. The whole grand plan was to have a grand base in Africa: to buy out two hundred by hundred square kilometres of land and install highly industrialised factories for producing arms and other necessary items. We moved in submarines from this location. First, we went to defeat the US and then come back and establish ourselves in India as the new superpower. Bigger than even China. Subterranean rage at the inequities of the global order came out through an extravagant dream of conquest and recompense. Comparatively empowered in numbers but disempowered by a lack of recourse to the latest in technologies, Kabir dreamt about burrowing the gargantuan bastion of superpowers from within. In a combination of subjective and objective realities, he laced tendrils of legitimation from the wide-awake world to his dream as if to provide a corrective to contemporary globalisation. ‘Everything is fair in love and war’, he emphasised along with another series of facts and figures woven into the retelling of his dream. The fantastic scenario of confronting the geopolitical might of the US, while vying with India’s neighbour, China, is almost given credibility. A nod to the British empire’s divideand-rule policy was just one historical episode that lent credence to possibilities of establishing global control. India’s neoliberal tiger economy and its mainstream narrative with regular announcements of its breakneck Gross Domestic and National Products at the time was another factor that further convinced the young man that his dream is not an altogether far-fetched scenario. The US had a prominent place in dreamworlds, representing as it does the apex of economic, political, technological as well as superhero clout. If it appeared as the most advanced and seemingly perfect country, then the fantasy became to usurp its power and claim it for yourself. A couple of readers fantasised about digging a

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powerful tunnel between India and the US. Influenced by media narratives about neocolonial reparation, on the one hand, and the powerhouse of India’s neoliberal economy, on the other, Surinder (25) too indulged in his ambitions to thwart US supremacy. Born in Ladesar in Haryana, he was a postgraduate student in Delhi and a body-building enthusiast to boot: My dream was to have a corporation, which was to be called Potomax Corporation that would be making everything and would have offices all over the world. One section of the corporation would be taking care of security contracts and, in a close tie-up with the US army, I would be providing them with security services in overseas location which initially would appear very cheap for them. But in the long run I would be establishing a lot of bases in the US. I would be manufacturing herbs in the US – like they have established in China – and I would keep my prices low by importing personnel from India who would also be trained in the art of warfare. By this time, I will be having enough money to buy loads of shares of Lockheed Martin and Boeing so that I would have access to the most sophisticated technology of air warfare and this would ultimately put me in the position to start an offensive against mainland USA. These ideas have all come from comics like Grand Master Robo who wants to rule the world and defeat Dhruv. In the Super Commando Dhruv comics, Grand Master Robo has a global network that operates like a multinational corporation. Even though there is no story that specifies Robo’s ambitions to conquer the US, he is, nevertheless, a meglamaniac who has contacts, connections and business interests with insurgent and criminal organisations in multiple hubs. Surinder had developed a good idea of how the global economy works through Robo’s enterprise. He too began to imagine that the route to hegemony was not through taking the US on in a full-scale battle, but patiently penetrating its stronghold from within. He saw himself intervening in the current status quo such that power accrued to him and his country. Empathising with the supervillain was legitimated if this route led to overcoming an even more heinous fiend, and when the sanctioned heroic pathway was not seen to deliver effective or beneficial results.Villainy and tyranny prospered, as epitomised in readers’ caricatures of the US. The western superpower was intensively loved as it was hated, particularly by those Muslims who saw the country as ‘anti-Islamic and an evil empire’, and by others who distrusted the US for its unscrupulous ambitions and the fact that they have supplied and supported Pakistan in wars with India in the past, including taking its side in the conflict with India over its disputed northernmost territory, Kashmir. Jitin (24) was a journalist based in Delhi who grew up in various cantonments as the son of a soldier. When considering the larger geopolitical context, he asserted: I side with the villain because there is no morality for the enemy which is the US. That’s why I cannot be a good superhero. I only dream as per the villain

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might because only he has the mercenary character to want to defeat superpowers. I always call myself a political mercenary because I have no loyalties to any political ideology, but I can understand all the political ideologues and, if necessary, I can defend them from their point of view. I have followed the history of actual mercenary generals in India such as Nawab Sumru and René Madec.13 This German and French man fought for the Indians against everybody in late eighteenth to nineteenth century. Jitin wanted to break the monopoly on truth and morality that (neo)colonial powers acquire for themselves. But this was not on the basis of a nationalist rhetoric but a very individual narrative. In his dreams, it was only mercenary power that could defeat (neo)colonialism. Despite and because of his direct experience of his soldier father, national loyalty meant little to him. From close quarters, he could see that the army was not as pure and ideal as it was made out to be elsewhere in mainstream culture. It was as if he could see through the nation’s ideological trappings that favoured the elites and held others as captive to its allure. Just like the army, nationalism for him was a ruse, a part of a ‘herd mentality’ and a means to disempower the citizen so as s/he cannot develop his/her own initiatives, thinking and independent capabilities. In this way, he departed markedly from not only the official line in comic book narratives but also the mainstream narrative of the army that endorses a collective fight for the national good. There was no permanent resolution of good vanquishing evil, only an ongoing struggle against foes and the forces of darkness.These dark forces did not just reside in the imagined supervillain but might well be emblematic of society or the world at large. The twist in some fans’ fantasies was that while the superhero sought to protect society, in their view, there was ultimately no society worthy of protection. The superhero was rendered redundant, and only the supervillain could stand tall in the vacuum that remained.Villainy was transposed to real-life networks of sociality and geopolitical relations, and these were the most devious harbours for avarice, selfishness, greed, prejudice, opportunism and megalomaniac power. These features were reflective of the ascendance of an individualist and neoliberal competitive ethos in post-1990s India for which new kinds of superhumans had to be imagined.

The lure of techno-science As we have seen in previous chapters, superhero comic books afforded a canvass for ‘scientific magics’ with which to imagine unique powers. Techno-scientific gadgets played a huge part in the intrigue with power variously imagined – a mix of physical, intellectual, financial, technological, military and state powers.Vinodh related: A lot of the times the superheroes were using scientific gadgets and I was intrigued by them.When I was reading Mandrake [the Magician] comics when I was four years old, I thought of using magic to get the prettiest of girls. But later, real-life power was more important for me. This was there in the

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superhero comics. Because of that I was more into proving myself, into power. I believed that the only thing I needed in the world was power. Vinodh saw how many of the superhumans relied upon science and technologies for their unique powers. Power in and of itself became not the means but the destination of his desires. Tuning into national rhetoric, Sahil imagined that powers could be accrued to himself through advances in nuclear and related science: Parmanu had the power of teleportation, decreasing his size, increasing his size, and this is scientific powers. I wanted to become invisible like him as well. I thought a lot about how to bend light around my body. I realised that if I could make some refractive surface around the body of a human being I could bend light around it. Then I heard about the ‘Philadelphia experiment’ which is an experiment, an urban legend based on Einstein’s theory and was carried out by the US in the 1940s where they made the ship disappear or made invisible. I knew that if this was possible that Nagraj too could teleport himself [without being seen]. And I too could do it! While Parmanu was the ‘atomic wonderman of India’ capable of defying the tangibilty of matter, Nagraj too had breakthrough potentials. For Sahil, invisibilty meant invincibility that he dreamt about for himself, spurred on by stories of superheroism. Sometimes, techno-scientific powers were not just a wonder to behold, but also a means to a very mundane end. Satyam explained how techno-science could enable him to leapfrog the ladder of upward mobility for the mofussil middle classes: Even before we know what the IAS [Indian Administrative Services] is, we’re supposed to prepare for it. Your ultimate dream is IAS, it’s filled in to us. It’s also a feudal thing as the ultimate dream of every Bihari is to become a Laat Sahib [a distorted version of Lord Sahib, generally used for the colonial Viceroy and later extended to lower officers including the district magistrate]. It is a national timepass for Biharis. . . . I dreamt about putting human brains from my enemies in animals, and keeping capsule size bombs in my shoes. I imagined that my quilt was a car and driving through wilderness and fighting demons. The car would be equipped with everything including food, guns and other necessities. I would make my own army of mutated trees like Dr. Virus. And I would send my spy snakes to find out the exam question paper prior to the exam like Nagraj does. To become an IAS officer was to raise your status and also marriageability in that a young man could command a bigger dowry and gain a prettier bride. Against these stakes, to become invisible and find out exam questions or even to time-travel in order to ascertain exam questions, especially for a life-changing vocation as a civil servant, was too strong a temptation. After all, ‘spy snakes’ are essential to Nagraj’s

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duties to protect the nation, reasoned Satyam, who saw his own role as a service for the nation, even if it be in the relatively mundane administrative sectors. ‘This was my dream’, he asserted for interconnected revelries – whether they be while fast asleep or wide awake. Despite the mushrooming of private enterprise and opportunity, many of the mofussil middle classes continue to see achievement through the prospect of a post in governmental administration along with lifetime job security and other perks.14

Multiple identities 2.0 Journeys online upped the ante for superhuman imaginaries where and when the internet was available. In a parallel to the euphoric publicity for the technology in its early days, it afforded a scope for the making of multiple dreams and creative identities. Cyberworld was an environment in which young people could dare, but at the same time, keep up the social pretences of the family. Deb (31), for instance, was from a town, Kusunda, in Jharkhand who worked as a software developer in Delhi. He related an extraordinary account where he became an Aryan neo-Nazi online and even partook in racist online chat forums in the early 2000s. Owing to superhero stories, particularly those that invoked Hitler, he explained: I was fantasising myself as Ubermensch [the Nietzchean sense of the perfect super man].15 And I became an internet fan of neo-Nazi movements. I met some Fourth Reich activists online who were propagating anti-Semitism and had the dream of creating the Fourth Reich. Some were from Romania, France, USA, Germany and I was introduced to movements such as the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, Aryan Nations, Stormfront, and websites like Solar General, and other anti-Semitic works. I was introduced to the works of David Irving [who denied the Holocaust]. Also other works of similar racist writers such as Richard E. Harvard and other writers like Israel Shahak who is also a Holocaust denier. I was not against the Jews. But at my lowest point, I found myself similar to Germany at its lowest points. I felt lost and needed some kind of moral support to rise against all odds. I felt a close connection with Hitler and to a lesser extent with Witler who was a cyborg villain in the comics. On the internet sites I was using several fake identities, not just one. I would criticise lots of things such as Judaism, Christianity. Later, I also put Islam and Hinduism in the same list. The superheroes were all Aryans in my eyes and they represented a force to be reckoned with. I did not say I was from India on the internet sites. I used names like Dietrich (a German military commander from 1944), Royal Blood (due to my imagination as I came from a family that was ruling a small area), and similar names. I knew that these guys were racist against Indians but I believed using my intellect and seeing the quality of my writing, they could not simply ignore me. The real pride lay in my realising that Europeans did not turn out to be that intelligent at all, I’m sorry to say.

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The internet transported him out the colour of his skin and the bearings of his smalltown surroundings to deal with a veritable feast of challenges. It was as if he looked inside of himself to see how he would fare in an ugly yet, at the same time, exciting world. Fully aware of their racism against Indians like him, Deb navigated the internet as an Aryan invader himself. It was as if he drew on the malleability of the term Aryan, referring to both north Indians and its adoption by (neo-)Nazis.The vigilante refrain about thinking and acting for oneself was twisted so much that Deb adopted the identity of a racist in order to go into the heart of the enemy’s lair and challenge them at their own game.While he interrogated their logic, it became evident to him that there was nothing that exceptional about them. In the process of his masked encounters, he hoodwinked right-wing fascists and found pleasure in exposing what he deemed in the end was their stupidity. His larger mission was coupled with coming to terms with his own ‘intuitive inner stranger’, leading to a better understanding of his self and its limits. It was a means with which he could confront his own biases, a deliberative as well as dreamy self that could reflect on others as well as his own prejudices. Deb’s repulsion yet attraction to fascism extended to religious fanatics of all faiths. Through his deep study of religious texts, he began to highlight contradictions, even if it was at the cost of putting his online group membership at risk: I was becoming more anti-religious because I could see that all religions were sanctioning violence, and they were philosophising about violence. Each and every religion gave the person a justification of violence. This [experience] was making me more and more superior, and may be megalomaniac. My superheroes were all uncompromising and they would face and say anything that was wrong. They would point that out. And whenever I saw anything wrong in the religious texts, I would point that out too. They gave me the confidence to be what I should be, to be daring and to speak what I thought was the truth. They put an independent streak in me. Like his superheroes, he felt brave, independent and resilient, and was not afraid to challenge the views of fanatics. His sense of social justice and intellectual accuracy was too much for him to make compromises. In successfully avoiding identification, he felt that he attained a special power that protected him from any physical or mental harm. It was a moment of sweet, albeit singular, victory for him. In his simulacrous neo-Nazi ventures, Deb learnt many skills that helped him with his prowess on navigating internet and computer technologies in the 2000s: Over the internet, I found a group of friends who would guide me on different trivial computer stuff like changing my IP [Internet Protocol].You need small software. I also taught myself where to download booters which could be used to attack users on Yahoo messengers if I did not like their messages. I suffered a lot of booting. I was booted out a lot of times. My views were not tolerated. At that point in time (around 2003–4), Yahoo was not recording

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our IPs. So I could do and say whatever I wanted. This was the power of anonymity, the mask behind which Doga moves. I also had anonymity in the cyberworld similar to his. It gave me special powers and I could move without being hindered by borders or anything. I could interact with people without borders. And also this made me realise that before strict citizenship laws were imposed, how easy it was for me to shift to any nation or nationality. I felt like a pioneer of that era because I was doing a similar thing. I did not have a nationality on the internet. It made me feel free. The internet enabled Deb ‘special powers’ that made him free to challenge rightwing networks, borders, and even surveillance mechanisms. He felt like he was a superhero at the frontier of a freefall cyber-galaxy. He remarked how ethnonational barriers were another injustice imposed upon humanity so as to channel and restrict their movements. Only superheroic powers could undermine their entrenched and manipulative control over people’s minds, norms and conventions. But, similar to the threat presented to some superheroes if their real identity was to be revealed, his own exposure was too great a step to risk. He explained: I made friends from all over the world. I would exchange songs, books, despite my internet connection being very slow. My zenith or nadir came when I was equally frightened and equally proud. It was when somebody offered me money for my work over Yahoo messenger. I was proud because I was able to fool such people. But I got scared that this might have gone too far as getting offers of money meant that I might have been getting some serious notice and it could also mean trouble for me. So I did not take up on the offer. The internet afforded him many adventures in cyberspace, befriending people who otherwise would be his considered enemies, exposing and undermining the logic of racial and ethnic superiority, and discussing religious texts in order to criticise what he considered as their fanatical and sham worldviews. His aim was to seek a sense of personal pleasure as well as an idiosyncratic path of justice. But when his masked cyber-adventures got too hot, Deb got out of the proverbial kitchen.

Flights of fancies When it came to sexual fantasies, heterosexual young men monopolised the discourse, not least because they were the predominant readers of superhero comics. Even though sex was not a component part of comic book tales, and romantic relationships were largely incidental to the main thrust of the action, sexual fantasies were triggered by the inclusion of sturdy and strapping models of masculinity, on the one hand, and striking and curvaceous superheroines, and female aides or companions, on the other. In what would seem to some as a compromise on superhero values and ethics, the desirability of superheroines often came to the fore in their

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thoughts. Several young men recalled the once villain turned girlfriend of Dhruv, Commander Natasha, as a ‘hottie’, perhaps also because she had a dark and dangerous history adding a certain frisson to her appeal. Shaan (21), a software engineer and an expert racing biker (known as ‘copters’), lived in Delhi. Growing up in Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan, he remembered thinking as a young teenager: The superheroes’ girls were sassy. And the comics are so designed that the girls’ bodies are fully exploited. The comics reveal all the curves of a girls’ body: how am I supposed to take it if not sexually. As a kid, I always dreamt to marry someone like Natasha or Richa, because they are more sexy as they are also dangerous [the latter who becomes Blackcat to seek revenge for her father’s murder]. Now I would love to have either of them as a girlfriend because they are different than the silly fashion dolls that are around. Shaan preferred the female protagonists in the comics even when compared to reallife women, however attractive they might be. With an ironic indictment on the neoliberal carousel of beauty and fashion enterprises and models, three-dimensional women lacked clout and substance when compared to these two-dimensional female protagonists of fantasy. Deepak declared that he wanted to have superpowers to get close to women: I always wished I had the powers of Dhruv to talk to birds or send spy snakes like Nagraj to know what a girl thinks about me and if the girl whom I wanted to ask out likes me or not. When I had grown up a little and was a teenager, I had a fetish about transmitting myself like Parmanu to the house of the prettiest girl of the school and see her sleeping or even hide in her bathroom to see her take bath. Fetish was invoked as a sexual fixation enabled by the magical amulet of superhero potential. Deepak admitted that without superhero comics, he felt like he would ‘lose his mojo’: ‘That’s why I never stop reading comics. Because if I stopped I would feel disempowered and this is what fuelled my imagination’. The prospect of limitless and sometimes unscrupulous possibilities was too entrancing. Superhero comics became essential sustenance. Even while he had to hide his liaisons with the opposite sex from his relatives, he still needed a lot of courage and artful manipulation of social networks to approach and talk to any girl he was interested in. This was where superhero comics could play a particularly confidence-boosting role. Akash (21) was an undergraduate student in Delhi from the town of Rajgunj in Jharkhand. He too admitted that the superhero comics incited sexual fantasies, but he kept them in check as it was not the primary motor of the story, nor was it encouraged by elders around him: Yes I did fantasise about it [sex]. But the fact is relations are never the primary concern of the superhero. But like the subconscious mind, it keeps on

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hanging in the back. It’s like – even though Parmanu as Vinay wants to woo Sheena, as a superhero and a policeman, he keep his duty as a priority. Despite his fantasies, self-control was paramount. Just as the superhero characters had dual identities, he too adopted a dual approach – one of civil probity, the other of fantastic abandon. Whereas superheroes had to remain bachelors due to their crusading duties, in Akash’s case, it was the space of superheroism that stimulated him to think about courting women. Deepak provided other perspectives on the superhero comics: When I was reading them, I was a teenager and for me everything that was a mystery was exciting; and in case of India the only thing that remains a constant mystery for a thirteen year old is sex. The comics were a sexual text that could be read without attracting any attention and then I would go deep into the world of dreams where I would be roaming around with Natasha or, sometimes, Shakti. That is the point in getting a girlfriend – to roam around with her. Even though sex did not rear its head in vernacular superhero comic books, the material attained a visceral vitality as a ‘sexual text’. Young men might have access to other kinds of salacious literature, but superhero comics with their inclusion of vividly coloured and attractively shaped figures combined adventurous and sexual fantasy in one fell swoop. The internet afforded another powerful means of malleability and manoeuvrability to engage with the opposite sex, especially in regions where meetings with the opposite sex were difficult. Mitthu (24) was a postgraduate student in Delhi from Chunar, a town in eastern Uttar Pradesh. He mentioned how a mutual interest in superhero comics became the means to bond with a woman he encountered online: I was never that interested in girls because in the place I lived it was very problematic to get into a relationship. It was a small town where everybody knew each other’s business. My parents were never in favour of me getting in to a relationship. . . . On the internet you have the power of not physically hurting anybody or getting physically hurt by anybody. So this makes a lot of things easier a lot of the time. Because you can just go ahead and also if you have a way with words you can just start flirting and propose a date very soon. It was me first and she eventually said yes. First, it was just chatting and there are others with cameras.You do it through words, and maybe sometimes you can talk on messenger. It’s not real but again it’s very good up to an extent as it does not hurt anyone. Also it makes you feel relieved, because your emotional void is filled up.You could talk with that person a lot without that person infringing on your privacy. There’s certain information you don’t give such as where you exactly live, or any exact information that

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could give you away. We exchanged photos. But if I saw her on the Metro [Delhi’s underground railway system], I would not recognise her. In photos everybody appears very different [to their actual self]. Also we’re never sure whether it’s the real photo. Again the internet afforded ways to know the Other – this time in a gendered sense.These encounters were both real and not-real, a moral grey zone yet one that became supremely ethical when immersed in it. He explained: Maybe some people call it perversion but it’s not. . . . At that point when we were doing different things we would make appointments [in chatrooms through the social networking site that was popular at the time, Orkut] and wait for each other. We could quite safely two-time on the internet. It was fun. It did not feel immoral because I was not physically hurting anybody. Lots of girls I talked to were already in an actual relationship and even physical with their boyfriends.They found me and my dreams extremely attractive and also they liked the way in which I treated them online like a gentleman and somebody who gives them respect when there is no need for it. This is also how superheroes treated women. They do not need to but they treated them with respect. I had lots of internet girlfriends but in real life I only went out with a girl last year. It felt unnatural in real life. Even my superheroes did not have girlfriends in the same way. The way superheroes dealt with their love interests provided a stimulating way with which to engage with the opposite sex – treat them in a gentlemanly manner, but keep them at arm’s length even if it involved e-liasing with more than one woman. These online relationships began to take on more of a reality than even his real-life girlfriend. On one occasion, after meeting in a chat forum, he developed quite an intense online engagement that continued for about a year. I once had an internet girlfriend and she forgot my birthday once and in return for forgetting my birthday, she went on the internet and purchased me a lot of books. She was from Gurgaon [just outside of Delhi in the state of Haryana]. We prepared our exams together. . . . She also had a little interest in Raj Comics. She was into Super Commando Dhruv because she was studying bio-technology and Dhruv is also fighting a lot of scientists who abuse bio-technology [such as Dr. Virus]. This was an interest for science students. We also moved onto serious topics which we would require for our entrance exams. And then her college started and my college started.We stopped chatting. We never really ended it. It just fizzled out. Intimate discussions were exchanged online as if they were in a close relationship. They even imagined and discussed meeting up offline, but it was not to be. Mitthu’s explanation was: ‘The idealism goes away in case of real-life and once you know

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the person you start seeing the negative side of the person too’. He preferred to live in the world of ideas and ideals fired by superheroic stories. The internet threw up another dreamscape where, in his view, nobody could get hurt whatever you did, next to which visceral bodies around him seemed to etherise. Just like his superheroes, he could have multiple female liaisons but not have to commit to them in any kind of romantic or marital tie. The male-centric triangles that we observed in Chapter 4 for superheroes took on polycentric proportions in cyberworlds.

The real dreamers Whether it be dreams to conquer America, set up successful corporations, defy schoolyard and campus ‘enemies’, find out exam paper questions, become invisible to enter off-limit areas, or enter into flirtatious liasions, superheroes as well as supervillains became Himalayan fonts of inspiration. The superhero comic books had what could be described as an ‘ir/reality function’ in that their fanciful content could almost come to life as they embedded themselves in young readers’ lives in multifarious ways. This ir/reality does not pose a distinction between reality and fantasy, the actual and the possible, the material and the dreamt, or the wide awake and the fast asleep. It revels in their osmotic fluidity and reveals the generative seeds of speculative fiction.Yet, it is not merely to be conflated with pathologies of innocence and ignorance as with anxieties about gullible children and their desire for dare-devil stunts from high-rise buildings. Instead, it touches upon the intertwining of superhero comic and everyday realities with compelling imaginaries to do with strength, invincibility, revenge, techno-science, geopolitical navigations and romantic liaisons. Masked identities enhanced such journeys. In this case, disguises did not just revolve around real-life characters and the alter ego of vigilante do-gooders as in the two-dimensional plane of comic book representations. Rather, masked identities 2.0 created suppler selves to pursue labyrinthine paths interlaced with, yet away from, the strictures of quotidian life.16 In these more subterranean worlds, perceived wrongs were righted according to a very personal agenda. Dreamy and deliberate selves may diverge as much as they converge as elements that related to young people’s likes and dislikes, desires and repulsions seeped into their thoughts, while awake, asleep or the misty space in between. In their generative dreams, moralities were put to the test. Here, they borrowed quite liberally from more questionable terrain and even quite ostensibly darker forces to do with supervillains endowed with phenomenal powers but with little care for social responsibility. In this sense, dreamers were more free, unshackled from the fetters of social expectation. In contexts where society or even the nation were not held as the repository of good that they ideally ought to have been, villainy outside of the social pale became an attractive proposition. Moreover, it was deemed more effective in getting things done. As in life, so in dreams. Even though Raj Comics creatives conscientiously assert their ‘responsibility to society’ in their channelling of good ethics through superhero conduct, it is clear that it is not always the main lesson picked up by readers.17 Rather, owing to a host

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of personal, temporal and situational factors, readers’ orientation may well vacillate to the side of villainy. In this ‘left-hand’ interpretation of superhero comics, the author is well and truly dead.18 In such superhuman games to do with both war and love, any attribute, devise or tactic could be gainfully deployed. Great power need not just come with great responsibility.

Notes 1 Gaston Bachelard (1988) Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, transl. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell, Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture, p. 5. 2 Cited in Paul di Filippo (2012) ‘Beyond the Human Baseline: Special Powers’, in Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: The Sub-Genres of Science Fiction, ed. Keith Brooke, London: Palgrave MacMillan, p. 166; Parismita Singh (2012) ‘Sleepscapes’, in PAO: The Anthology of Comics, by The Pao Collective, New Delhi: Penguin India. 3 See Snigdha Poonam (2018) Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World, London: C. Hurst and Co. Publishers. 4 Sigmund Freud (1997 [1900]) The Interpretation of Dreams, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. On the ‘lack’ in poststructural psychoanalytical discourse, see Jacques Lacan (1977) Écrits: A Selection transl. Alan Sheridan, London: Tavistock. 5 Slavoj Zizek (1990) ‘Fantasy as a Political Category’, in The Zizek Reader, eds. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, p. 89. 6 Gilbert Herdt (1987) ‘Selfhood and Discourse in Sambia Dream Sharing’, in Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations, ed. Barbara Tedlock, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 82. 7 See James Clifford (1998) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Harvard: Harvard University Press. While we do not have space to provide an overview of anthropologies of dreams, a useful summary is provided by Iain R. Edgar, ‘Anthropology and the Dream’, http://community.dur.ac.uk/i.r.edgar/. Accessed: December 20, 2017. 8 T. S. Elliot cited in Mary Douglas (1975) Implicit Meanings: Mary Douglas: Collected Works, London: Routledge, pp. 140–141. 9 See Richard Bauman (2004) A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Inc.; John Comaroff (1992) Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Oxford: Westview. 10 Manan Kumar (2003) ‘Today’s Comic Culture in India’, ABD (Asia-Pacific Cooperative Programme in Reading Promotion and Book Development), 34(1): 6–7. 11 Imagination as invoked here is not simply the social imagination or imaginary conceived as an organised practice in the age of electronic media and mass migration – ‘a collective, social fact’ in the words of Arjun Appadurai. Rather, it is conceived on the basis of a very personal inflection and often idiosyncratic intervention in already imagined social worlds led by adults. Arjun Appadurai (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, p. 5. See also the special issue (2002) ‘New Imaginaries’, Public Culture, 14(1). 12 John Grant (2012) ‘Infinite Pasts, Infinite Futures’, in Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: The Sub-Genres of Science Fiction, ed. Keith Brooke, London: Palgrave MacMillan, p. 64. 13 Nawab Sumru aka Walter Reinhardt was a European mercenary soldier who served various sides with his well-trained contingent during the wars of the eighteenth century in India. He was involved in the killing of about 200 prisoners, many of whom were British, on the orders of Mir Qasim, the Nawab of Bengal in 1763. He then later joined the services of Shah Alam II, the weak and nominal Mughal emperor in Delhi. See Mesrovb J. Seth (1937) History of the Armenians in India from the Earliest Times to the Present Time, London: Luzac and Co. p. 77. René-Marie Madec was a French adventurer around the

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same time and was involved in various wars. He too joined the service of Shah Alam II and became very rich through his exploits. See William Chambers and Robert Chambers (1850) Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, London and Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, pp. 108–111. 14 See Craig Jeffrey (2010) Timepass:Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 82–84. 15 See Friedrich Nietzsche (2006 [1891]) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, transl. Adrian del Caro, ed. Robert Pippin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 16 See Tom Boellstorff (2008) Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 17 ‘Future of Desi Comics’ (2014) www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJYWSKHCbwU. Accessed: December 20, 2017. 18 Roland Barthes (1977) ‘The Death of the Author’, in his Image-Music-Text, transl. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana.

11 FUTURE PRESENTS

FUTURE PRESENTSFUTURE PRESENTS

You’re not only a genius, you’re an ‘indi-genius’, Dilwale Dulhania le Jayenge. —(The Brave will take away the Bride, dir. Aditya Chopra, 1995) Viewing those images would immediately take me to a different world. The illustrations were so impressive that I still remember them. —(Mohit Sharma, 2017)1

Early in the book, we proposed that the development of adventure comics in India may be examined with regards to the Nascent Age, a drawn-out period that tilled the ground for indigenously produced superhero comics well before they were actually produced in India. The Golden Age encompasses the 1980s to around the late 1990s, a coming-of-age period that saw the fully qualified Indian superheroes emerge. Amidst a whirlwind of media proliferation and challenges for comic book print culture came the Dark Age that spanned the late 1990s until the 2000s. As Sanjay Gupta, Raj Comics’ studio head, stated in an interview in 2014: ‘All dark phases give a new lease of life to ideas’. Now we reside in the Platinum Age that is accompanied by the development and maturation of new ventures, artists, collaborations and the consolidation of verbal-visual creative talent across diverse platforms. This era entails a more transnational and transmedia approach to themes developed in the Golden Age, often with higher costs and at the expense of excluding lower-class readers. In this concluding chapter, we focus on the present trends and future potentials for comic books. We also address how representations of millennial desi superheroism have percolated in a rapidly liberalising political economy and what this means for adventure comic books as well as young people’s imaginaries in and of millennial India.

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Trojan twists Although the seeds of Indian superhero comics were sown earlier, as vividly displayed in the emergence of Bahadur and Bela, Fauladi Singh, Nagraj and Super Commando Dhruv, it was in the 1990s that the processes of neoliberalisation had a catalytic impact on their proliferation. These newer developments were largely due to diverse media technologies for their production and dissemination, cable and satellite television, film and digital transferences, market deregulation and trans/ multinational collaborations. But in a Trojan horse twist, by the late 1990s printed issues became threatened by these very same developments. Audio-visual and digital media, gaming consoles and other techno-gadgetry began to preoccupy young people’s minds. The decline in comic book cultures set in almost as soon as they experienced a swell in interest.2 Only a few vernacular comic book companies survived this lean patch. One was Raj Comics, which had developed a loyal base for their daring and creative tales. Another was its larger competitor, Diamond Comics, which retained its niche share of younger children’s comics, particularly by those whose parents who retained a controlling hand and thought Raj Comics was too violent, westernised and therefore inappropriate for the ideals they harboured for their offspring. A large number of other vernacular comic book publishing houses were not able to muster the same kind of cult following that Raj and Diamond Comics had developed and so fell wearily by the wayside. However, when one steps out of the urban nexus, a reality check sets in, one that might be better described as a reality slap. Paper comics still occupy an important place across the electricity and digital divide, where young people’s access to media is unreliable if non-existent, and where other entertainment avenues are relatively limited. In a country where only around 66% of the country is connected to the grid, and those that are connected tolerate anywhere from 10 to 18 hours of power cuts in any one day, comic books do not have such a bleak future.3 In these areas, young people’s enjoyment of audio-visual media is hampered if they are then habituated into thinking that they would not be able to see the programme or film till the end. In comparison, readers could exercise a degree of control regarding the unfolding of a printed comic book and reach its cliff-hanger conclusion relatively unimpeded. Yet the rising costs of comics as they became more elaborate and produced on relatively expensive paper means that, as new, they remain outside of their reach. Quality care had to be extended in all directions by their producers, evident in the use of thick, glossy paper worked upon with plentiful digital effects rather than the basic illustrations on what was granular ‘butter paper’ for earlier comics. Correspondingly, the price has catapulted anywhere from 6 to 60 rupees for a standard issue over the last decade, and up to a couple of hundred rupees for multi-starrer issues as transpired with the 200-rupee tag for Raj Comics’ Negatives (2013, Plate 8). The newer superhero comic books issues are only accessible to

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wealthier consumers, the upper echelons of the ‘old middle classes’ along with those who have made it in recent decades as nouveaux riches, the ‘new middle classes’.4 A neoliberal narrative of arrival is at the expense of shutting the gates on those who cannot arrive. Those left outside ‘acutely feel the sting of the inaccessibility of full participation’, as Brad Weiss describes Tanzanian youth’s position in the neoliberal political economy.5 While their dreams and fantasies persist, they are then limited to making do with recycling circuits, or freely available e-comics that might be accessible if the infrastructure permits. Contradictions abound. While certain aspects of youth cultures recalibrate and converge, led by the urban middle classes and tantalising many to dream of ‘incredible India’ and bold and beautiful new worlds, other aspects to do with limited opportunities and capital means that striking divergence remain across young people in the country. Language is another crucial consideration. The new visual-verbal art that has emerged in millennial India explored below is mainly directed at English-educated metropole-centric target markets. Yet Anglophone comic books and graphic narratives remain beyond the reach and even interest of India’s lowermiddle-class youth. Gulshan Rai from Diamond Comics stated that they will not be able to overpower vernacular versions: ‘Their readership . . . is limited to 11–17 per cent of the market. If you step out of the metropolitan cities, no one even knows about them’.6 Naimitya (29), a research scholar from Mau, a town in Madhya Pradesh, pointed out the irony of comic book diversification when the strategy is in danger of losing anchorage among earlier audiences. He reflected that even when English versions of a few Raj Comics issues were made available, ‘no-one bothered to pick them up’. He elaborated: Most of the time the English version would come later than the Hindi version so by the time the English would come I would have read it already. Also it felt strange to see an Indian hero speaking in English plus the speech balloons were squares and rectangles giving them an unattractive look. The text was in capital letters. Who enjoys texts in CAPITALS?! Aman too laughed off the idea of reading Raj Comics in English in India itself. He stated: ‘Most of them had not even read an English novel even though they were good students and were highly educated’. For him, it was incomprehensible for Indian youth living in provincial areas to read something in English in their leisure time when vernacular languages held more of an immediate appeal. Even if they spoke and read English, bearing in mind its fraught associations with exams and jobs, he remarked matter-of-factly: ‘English is a burden. It is not for pleasure’.7

New media, new approaches Where vernacular comic book houses have had to shut shop, Raj Comics have stepped in and, in 2017, acquired copyright permissions for Manoj,Tulsi and Nutan Comics outputs with plans to re-release some of their earlier superheroes. In this

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endeavour to expand and survive in a hugely competitive scenario, crucial creative choices had to be made. The dominant trend is to upscale for those publishing houses that are in a position to do so, very much paralleling the history of comic production houses based abroad. This upscaling is in terms of experimenting with new content, styles and media with which to develop comics; collaborating nationally and internationally to forge new avenues and audiences; and demonstrating a more rigorous approach to intellectual property. Such challenges meant a greater degree of work for the comic producers – sharpening up their techniques in stateof-the-art representations, understanding their audiences, developing strategies to target new openings and create niche markets, and being fully aware of their rivals, old and new. Raj Comics’ creative director, Anupam Sinha, commented: ‘Comics have a different role to play in the future . . . you have to link comics with other medias like cartoons, movies and video games’.8 Typical of any superhero exploit with its twists and turns came the attempt to resurrect comic books, this time using newer avenues such as digital copies in the form of e-comics available on the internet, m-comics or motion comics, android apps, video and mobile games on the superheroes, and collaborations with other media practitioners to pursue animation, film and digital ventures, catering more and more to urban-centric middle-class contingents.9 A film collaboration on the superhero Doga, to be directed by a long-term fan and director, Anurag Kashyap, was prepared with a 200-page anthology in 2008 but did not materialise. Instead, Raj Comics pursued other initiatives. They commissioned the heavy rock band,Warwan, to release a strident song, Doga (2018).10 They took steps to venture into film-making themselves while retaining full control of the production.They set up Raj Comics Motion Pictures and Raj Prem Films.The former came out with its own film, Doga: Mumbai ka Rakhwala (Doga: Mumbai’s Saviour, dir. Wikki Koul, 2017) with ambitions to fund more as with a web series on Super Commando Dhruv. The latter production offshoot is a woman-run affair with control lying with the female members of the expanded family and the matriarch, Prem Gupta, at the helm.To date, they have crowdfunded the film, Aadamkhor (dir. Kshitij Sharma, 2017), based on the Thrill, Horror and Suspense comic book, Aadamkhor Hatyara (The Cannibal Killer, circa 1990). The reproduction of their comic books online by their readers was generally tolerated earlier, but in recent years, this laissez faire attitude was replaced with a more hands-on proprietorial approach. In 2016, Raj Comics’ management of copyright and intellectual property saw a step change, with the setting up of a legal department to tend to these concerns and queries.They ran a campaign against websites that used to host pirated comic book copies. Sanjay Gupta highlighted the poor quality of the reproductions on pirated versions of the comic books. He also remarked that a few owners of these sites that hosted pirated copies even had the nerve to charge Raj Comics to buy their PDFs of comic books.11 The online struggle goes on between a company that seeks to mark its stamp on all outputs, and long-term enthusiasts who believe that certainly the older comics are an integral and affective part of their youth, ones that they painstakingly converted for sharing on the internet.

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An expanding graphic multiverse Meanwhile, foreign and trans/multinational comic publishers such as Virgin, DC and Marvel have entered the subcontinental scene with a vengeance. With much fanfare, Virgin Comics came out with Devi (Goddess, 2006–2008), The Sadhu (The Sage, 2006–2007) and Snake Woman (2007). Devi relates the story of Tara Mehta, who is believed to be the next reincarnation of a celestial warrior goddess created by the gods to defeat their enemy, Lord Bala. The Sadhu tells the story of a British soldier who discovers that he is a reincarnation of an ancient sage. His journeys revolve around a mix of Hindu mythology and fantasy, with him trying to disconnect from his current life. Snake Woman draws upon the Indian belief that the soul of the serpent reptile may be reborn in the form of a beautiful woman. But this time the story takes place in Los Angeles, with the key protagonist being Jessica Paterson. In the bid to save herself from an assault, she is consumed by reptilian instincts that kill the man as if she is being controlled by an ancient force of revenge. Jessica then becomes something much more than the waitress she appears to be. Virgin Comics, later recast as Liquid Comics in 2008, are relatively more mystical in their representative style and content.12 The pages are dominated by swirly imagery with a colour-saturated yet muted palette. They draw quite clearly from a history of western ideas about the Orient. The stories do not pitch themselves in modern India as much as the vast swathe of Raj Comics superhero stories. Produced largely in English, their expensive digitalised production has meant that they are mainly available in the top-end book stalls sited in malls and other airconditioned buildings. Priced between 299 and 495 rupees, they are geared towards even wealthier classes in metropoles and those among the Indian diaspora. An offshoot of Liquid Comics is Graphic India that works across multiple platforms with collaborators across the world. In an attempt to take the thunder from vernacular rivals, CEO Sharad Devarajan declared that they tap into: the creativity of India to launch a new wave of enduring characters and mythic heroes to captivate the imaginations of youths in India and around the world.13 The ‘new wave’ is in fact over deeper currents that they appear to overlook, but it certainly has become the more visible, nationally and transnationally.This wave came sweeping in with international film and comic book conventions that have appeared in the subcontinent around 2010 after the success of literary festivals from 2006. In 2011, Comic Con India was set up in metropolitan heartlands such as New Delhi and Mumbai. Soon after, the event was organised in the hubs of India’s Silicon Valley, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, followed by other cities.14 The convention showcases the work of up-and-coming graphic artists as well as more established ones from India and abroad. Such events would typically attract young people, occasionally with their parents, attending stalls, talks, workshops and other undertakings to do with comic books, gaming and related activities. Some would dress up as superheroes and

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supervillains, and take much delight in posing for the camera (Figure 11.1). Nowadays, most of the Comic Con events are monopolised by western superhero comics with some space for emergent Indian talent writing stories in English. But old-school hands such as Raj Comics continue to prosper as the only remaining superhero comic book publishers in Hindi participating at such events in India. From 2017, Raj Comics committed themselves to international presentations with a stall at the Frankfurt book fair in Germany showcasing their Hindi-language comic books alongside English editions of books for children, both to cater to the Indian diaspora as well as aiming to create for themselves international presence and prestige.

FIGURE 11.1 Comic

Con, New Delhi (2017)

Photograph by Raminder Kaur

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Independents developed their own comics and websites so as not to rely on online stores such as Amazon and Flipkart to sell their wares. Many of the new Turks in graphic media are defiantly pushing the mytho-modern theme onwards and upwards. Vivek Goel, who previously worked for Raj Comics as an inker, went on to develop the Ravanayan comic book series with Vijayendra Mohanty. After its success, Goel founded Holy Cow Entertainment in 2011. Ravanayan tells the epic story of the Ramayana from the point of view of the antagonist who was defeated, the demon king of Lanka, Ravana. He is described as the ‘leader of the rakshasa [demon] nation, conqueror of worlds and vanquisher of gods’, and the comic charts his life up until the time he descended into a moral quagmire and abducted Ram’s wife, Sita.15 Start-up creatives such as Chariot Comics from 2015 are another example of new Indian ventures catering to a globally aware, locally conscious, metropolitan crowd with stories such as VRICA (2017) about an elite Indian army unit that operates worldwide. Other players are also vying to penetrate the Indian market with its large youth population. One international group is the Hong Kong–based Fluid Friction Comics. Tying up with Indian book companies and chain stores such as Oxford University Press, Crossword and Planet M, the comic books were launched in 2008. The first in the series was called Deva Shard: At First Light (2008), a multi-issue graphic narrative of Karna, the ‘hero antagonist’ in the ancient Indian epic, Mahabharata. India-based comic book and graphic novel publishers have sought international bases with which to globalise their operations. Vimanika was set up in 2008 in Mumbai with a studio in New Delhi, a US base in Philadelphia and a British base in Leicester. Picking up the Amar Chitra Katha baton, they specialise in stories for comic books, animations and films based on ancient Indian figures and deities with an entertaining and instructive remit. Transmedia – when sequential art merges with multiple audio-visual-digital delivery channels for an immersive experience – have cropped up in India too. These comic book ecosystems owe to a desire to create greater believability – impactful stories that might even effect social change. The channelling of Indian culture on new media is prominent here, as are initiatives to use its immersive potential to deal with social issues such as women’s safety and education. Priya’s Shakti was an augmented reality comic book, street art and social media campaign against rape. It was produced in 2014 by Indian creatives based in US and the subcontinent.16 There is also the ‘cultural adventure game’ based on south Indian culture about a man who travels to Mars, Antariksha Sanchar (Transmissions in Space), developed by Quicksand GamesLab in 2016.17 Designed by a VJ (video jockey), Avinash Kumar, the graphic adventure is visible on his Instagram page as part of a design log and also issued as a music album. Collectives have cropped up as with the Indian Institute of Cartoonists in Bengaluru from 2001 and the Pao Collective set up by the SARAI Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and the French Information Resource Centre in New Delhi in 2007.18 While some of them were Raj Comics enthusiasts, they became hives of activity from which new socially relevant graphic storytellers were nurtured.

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Coming into the second decade of the new millennium, graphic novels – or what Pramod K. Nayar prefers to call ‘graphic narratives’ – have reinvigorated ‘the canon, the form and the themes’ of sequential art in the printed form.19 At over 120 pages long and mainly in English, they are, as Nayar outlines, characterised by ‘an array of story-telling strategies and . . . its insistence on tackling more complex social commentary and cultural critique of the nation’s or society’s lacunae or flaws’.20 Although the first can be pinpointed around 1994 with examples such as River of Stories by Orijit Sen on environmental issues surrounding the building of the Narmada Dam, the 2000s saw the most prolific graphic outputs spurred on by a college acquaintance, Sarnath Banerjee, and his Corridor in 2004.21 The graphic narratives continued to pick up social and political issues, as with Amruta Patil’s Kari in 2008, a graphic novel on love and homosexuality by India’s first female graphic novelist. Other notable auteurist graphic contributions include the artist and musician, Aappupen aka George Mathen, who draws stories from a mythical dimension called Halahala, a dark and quirky parallel world to our own, some of which is depicted with panelled illustrations alone.22 Jai Undurti sets his adventures in metropolitan time-travel as with A Graphic Novel: Every City Is a Story on Hyderabad.23 Using a three-wheeled vehicle as a time machine, different narrators travel to different eras in the city’s history while remaining within the geographical confines of presentday Hyderabad. Such examples are but a scratch on the surface of a new wave of sequential art. There is little evidence of magic or superheroism that might draw a younger audience in such graphic narratives, however. With experimental signage and panels, monochrome lines and/or a sombre, colour-washed palette, several of them convey complex stories, dark dystopias, or strident political critique where the hallowed space of the nation is not necessarily outside of their shooting range.Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm (2010) marks the growth of graphic narratives focused on human rights issues.24 The visual-verbal tale relates life in 1975 when a draconian state of emergency was declared by Indira Gandhi’s Congress government. Ghosh also edited another work on stories of partition and the creation of Bangladesh with This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition.25 Some graphic stories such as the Bangalore-based publisher Manta Ray’s HUSH (2010) on child abuse within the family have even become wordless. Such works add to the visual culture of subcontinental sequential art, pushing India’s graphic terrain, as Michael Galchinsky describes it, towards framing a new ‘rights ethos’.26 Such a human rights ethos is a vein that is muted in vernacular superhero comics even though social or civic injustices might propel the narrative onwards. Misconduct and corruption might be highlighted but, apart from individual vigilante tales that challenge paragons of the state apparatus, the system as a whole remains unquestioned, thus falling one step short of creating a compelling ‘human rights culture’.27 Superhero stories simplify and homogenise. Even while they might challenge the status quo, for the most part, they end up bolstering it in its idealised form.

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As their main address is to English-educated metropolitan adults, the new wave of sequential art caters more to established and enterprising new middle classes, rather than their mofussil contingents, even though some of the latter with the appropriate skills, luck and levers in terms of social connections and funds have joined rank with the former. Geographically too, they have moved for education and work reasons to cities such as New Delhi, Dharbhanga in Bihar, Ranchi and Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, and Indore and Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh and beyond.28 Such social changes owing to processes of globalisation that penetrate more of the avenues and gulleys in India are beginning to challenge bounded regions and classes.29 They have led to a certain flattening out of desires that is particularly evident among young people. The impact of global ‘time-space compressions’, as goes David Harvey’s classic term, also has implications for metropolitanmofussil compressions.30 As old becomes raggedly fused with newer youth cultures, backyards are coming out of the shadows into the light of visibility. Desires for vernacular comic publication are converging more and more with the narrative of metropolitan-charged globalisation that infuses mainstream culture, with what Sunil Khilnani has described as an orchestral flare of ‘percussive nationalism’.31 This is a locally anchored yet global India, as is patently clear with the Times OOH advertising agency’s tagline – ‘Indian at heart. Global in spirit’ – another version of what William Mazzarella calls the ‘ “Indian soul, international feel” equation’.32 Whether one lives within or outside mofussil regions, there is a concerted effort to get out of any site – geographical and conceptual – of provincial backwardness. Mofussil is fast being rated as a fossil. Today, young people are exposed to a variety of Indian and foreign-produced media through their smartphones among other channels. What Mark Liechty calls the ‘transnational sphere of . . . media assemblage’ has also spread to nonmetropolitan areas that are fast developing.33 As a result, even though expense and electricity may continue to be a factor in accessibility, young people’s media literacy is much more reflexive and worldly-wise from being exposed to a variety of new productions. Where attainable, young people are drawn more and more to high velocity mediation and goods that can deliver immediate gratification. Abhijit emphasised that children today ‘have so much stuff, sometimes they do not use the imagination to make up stuff  ’. His use of the English term ‘stuff    ’ rattles with Danny Miller’s version where the anthropologist argues that stuff is more than just consumer objects, but deeply and intricately makes our personal and social worlds.34 In a para-Marxist sense, Abhijit contends that young consumers have always engaged with stuff, but nowadays have relegated the imaginative job of ‘making stuff    ’ to others. The move is one from making to taking stuff, from slow to instant gratification, and from sporadic and solid to saturated and transient cultural circuits. In other words, ‘slow stuff    ’ was instrumental to the making of youth cultures when Abhijit was growing up with his comic books in Uttar Pradesh in the 1980s and 1990s. But in this era of escalating temporal and spatial compressions, ‘fast stuff    ’ has crowded youth cultures today with multiple choices for speedy, sensorial pleasures through a plethora

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of commodities and a mix of audio-visual-digital interfaces. When stuff becomes fast, creative agency is swamped. In his view, children’s resourcefulness and creative interactions have become submerged by the numerous provisions available. While admitting in the English that he did not want to sound like a ‘boring old fart’, there is certainly some truth in Abhijit’s observations when it comes to registering the decline of reading comics amongst children today as opposed to viewing them in spectacular motion – a subject that has to be for another study.

Millennial superheroes Soaring into the new millennium, superheroes are becoming the rage across all media. This is the era that celebrates desi superheroes of all shades – those who are smart, sophisticated, enterprising, worldly, tough and can ‘kick butt’. Increasingly, popular film has taken on the creative energies of speculative fiction and superheroism as vividly depicted in the creation of Krrish in the films Koi Mil Gaya (Found Someone, dir. Rakesh Roshan, 2003) and its eponymous sequels in 2006 and 2013, not to forget earlier precedents in film and later developments across media. Seeing their potential, some of the film houses have also tied up with comic book production and animation projects. Among the grandest ventures is Graphic India’s comic book and animation arrangement with the two blockbuster films in 2015 and 2017 on the mythical royal warrior, Baahubali, directed by S. S. Rajamouli. The creatives recognise that superheroes are not merely fictions of great talent and strength, but they convey the hopes and aspirations of the contemporary neoliberal nation. As consumers take succour in imaginary friends, they are spurred by a belief in a global India that can make a mark in the land of superheroes without compromise, hitherto an asymmetric field dominated by the US. Here, they conceive themselves not as ‘patients’, but as agents, super-agents even.35 The position is about flexing muscles in fantasy as well as in realpolitik, in popular culture as well as in political corridors. The difference between earlier decades is one of greater confidence, channels and intensity. A sense of thwarted destiny is played out with abandon through the superhero tales when anything – even global supremacy – becomes possible to imagine if not fully realise. There is a felt need to take on crime and the fight for justice in the ‘Indian way’ as opposed to the grounds already gained by the ‘American way’ of freedom and individuality portrayed by the likes of Superman and Spider-Man. This way is one means with which to amplify and chart the ‘American Dream’ transplanted as the globalising ‘Indian Dream’.36 It is part of a quest for the expansion of a subcontinental mission civilatrix that celebrates the country’s talent for resourcefulness, formidable strength and success, ancient heritage, morality and individual initiative for the good of the collective. Superhero stories present a brand of Indofuturism that seeks to orientate subcontinental identities for global presentations with a cryback to a rich heritage and a wake-up call to a future of possibilities. Indofuturism is an imagining of the past, present and future in which Indian individuals, technocultures and speculative fiction are inscribed into the metanarrative of global

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superheroism. It shirks off ideas about backwardness and (neo)colonial dependency to emphasise the glories of the realm and embark on a project of superhero empire building. It tries to write the country back into world history, not as an underdeveloped victim or former colony, but as an ethical, strong and successful nation that is coolly accomplished with technologies and marvellously innovating on all fronts. Indofuturism has become part of a drive for global multipolarity to transplant superheroism into new territories and counter the master narrative emerging from the global north.37 There are some telling comparisons to be made with Afrofuturism as a cultural aesthetic from the 1950s to revisit diasporic Black people’s relationship with technology and speculative fiction.38 Indofuturism, as manifest currently in the subcontinent, is orientated around the established mainstream than it is energised by the precarious margins. It is more conservative than radical.While visionary in some parts, it has a troubling erasure. As it exalts, it also essentialises and excludes. It falls short of addressing internal power dynamics, particularly with respect to heterosexual conservatism, and subaltern and minority communities who do not share an upper-caste Hinduised narrative of the nation.39 Indofuturism as it stands today is not futurist enough. In the 2010s, one of the international godfathers of the superhero genre, Stan Lee, teamed up with artists and writers from Liquid Comics in India.40 This former chairman of Marvel Comics responsible for creating Spider-Man, The Hulk, the Fantastic Four and X-Men, to name but a few US superheroes, created ‘Chakra, an Indian superhero’. Replete with a blue body suit and a large yellow circle over his heart centre of energy, Chakra was first released as a series of downloadable and mobile comics on Liquid’s Graphic India platform in 2012, and was screened as an animation on Cartoon Network in 2013.41 A 66-minute film, Chakra:The Invincible, premiered on ToonsTV in 2014, a new online channel from Rovio Entertainment, the creator of the Angry Birds franchise, thus enabling a global reach. Chakra is the alter ego of the teenager, Raju Rai, who is a technology genius living in Mumbai.With the help of his scientist mentor, Raju develops a technically enhanced suit that activates the yogic chakras of the body, healing energy points that are syphoned to eliminate crime. In this way, Chakra is another expression of the ‘mytho-modern’, as described in Chapter 3, a theme that is becoming more and more prominent as a specifically (H)Indian nationalism takes centre stage after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) landslide victory at the 2014 general election.42 Minesh Pankhania at Vimanika comic house, reflected on Chakra: It’s nice to see a character created that combines important spiritual systems such as the chakras, which can further open our deep spirited Hindu practices to all. . . . We are familiar and have grown up with aspects of super powers in forms of our own ancient scripts and texts. I’d push to say maybe our gods were the original superheroes.43 Indian deities as the original superheroes – the discourse of indigeneity makes another entrance as one more episode to what Khilnani calls the ‘project of

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Indianization’, and what we have called the saffronisation of superheroism.44 This is yet another expression of Indofuturism – one that proposes that even though western superheroes may run the roost when it comes to international success, the very seeds of superheroism were first sown in India.45 Devarajan reiterates the sentiment in production terms: ‘Our mission is to transform India from outsourcer to source’.46 The rules of adventure comics are being (re)appropriated and rewritten. As a regional superpower, India has begun to cast speculative fiction as an autochthonous alibi for the privilege to design, control and expand in imaginary and real-life time-spaces.47 As with fictional superheroes, so with real-life superheroes: Indian public figures of all backgrounds have been vigorously mined for their superheroic attributes and potential. In 2007, Virgin Comics attempted to capitalise on the popularity of the cricketing star, Sachin Tendulkar, with The Master Blaster. Although a level-headed individual, the sportsman’s superpowers come to roost with the performative power of his flaming bat.Then holding the record for most test cricket centuries and most runs in one-dayers in cricketing history, Tendulkar is aggrandised in the realm of a superhero pantheon. The chief creative director, Gotham Chopra, stated: ‘Sachin’s unparalleled skill on the cricket field and his dynamic personality off it, make for the raw elements of a great hero that will inspire kids all across the planet’.48 With this global Indian, the address is not just to the country, but the entire planet. The drive is to dominate the world through home-grown Indian talent and creations, rather than to simply follow those bred elsewhere – and what better place to demonstrate this than on the sports field. This is a phenomenon that has also marked the spate of popular films on the Indian sporting hero/ine at the turn of this century. These span champion fictions as with Lagaan: Once upon a Time in India (dir. Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001), where Indian village residents take on the might of the British empire, to melodramatic docu-fictions that glorify actual events as with the national and international achievements against all the odds of female wrestlers in Dangal (dir. Nitesh Tiwari, 2016). Raj Comics’ response to the rise of Narendra Modi, the leader of the rightwing BJP, now the prime minister, was to release Pragati Purush, Narendra Modi (The Development Man, Narendra Modi, 2014).49 It was released in Hindi, English and Gujarati to cater to readers in the state where Modi was formerly the chief minister. With this issue, Raj Comics openly declared their backing for the ‘no corruption, pro-development’ mantra of the BJP. It was a total departure from Raj Comics’ sensational supply of battles with (super)villains to provide a relatively staid visualverbal hagiography on a religious, disciplined, incorruptible and hard-working person. It was the first time that Raj Comics laid their party political cards squarely on the table, by confidently bestowing a superhero halo to a politician – the Development Man. As the head of a right-wing party, Modi is renowned for his attachment to neoliberal development plans in tandem with Hindu cultural revivalism, but also, more controversially, a darker side when he turned a blind eye to communal violence, as transpired most notoriously in Gujarat in 2002 and continues to this day – episodes that do not get a mention in the comic book.50

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With his almost legendary rise from a tea boy at a railway station to a highranking politician, the comic book celebrated the BJP leader as an unmatchable personality, a man who would never bow to anything that was considered wrong, suggesting that superheroism is inherent in his unbeatable personality. Like an Indian Ubermensch, Modi sublimates his desires and acquires self-mastery through hard work.51 In this case, superheroism is not just saffronised with regards to a mythical past but in terms of an (extra)ordinary present. It is conceived as moral, conservative, conscientious yet strong and enterprising: another superhero fit for the neoliberal era.The (extra)ordinary superhero parallels Sanjay Srivastava observations on ‘Modi-masculinity’ demonstrated by a ‘ “manly” leadership style: efficient, dynamic, potent, and capable of removing all policy-roadblocks through sheer force of personality’.52 Such a role model is purportedly in the interests of India’s development that can lay the tracks down for a glistening future – a message that is percolating down to the very young as ‘Development Men’ in the making.53

Super states? Throughout the book, we have highlighted not just the super states of superheroes, but also how these are fused with the rhetoric of the super attached to personal, social and political aspirations. Such ideas have ramifications for the way the super plays itself out through producers’ choices and readers’ views, activities, dreams and fantasies. But seismic gulfs can appear between intent and outcome, fantasy and reality. This was the case with the one-off comic book on Modi that was variously received, as it was with more extended superhero series as with Chakra and SpiderMan India. Pomp and flair may well fizzle out, like a firework dampened by the opening of too many champagne bottles. One of the now familiar points is, of course, that anything that seems too derivative of the west is not a winner in a neoliberalising yet also reflexively revivalist India.54 Superheroism has to be Indianised. But why then didn’t even an Indianised superhero such as Spider-Man India and Chakra develop an enduring fan base? The supposed invincibles became invisible after only a few issues. For one thing, the price bracket and English language of the superhero comics books meant they were intended for the affluent sectors of the middle class.This constituency could easily access foreign alternatives that they might well prefer as more distinctive and a measure of their international nous. For another, even when they were within purchase range, the comic books had conceptual and aesthetic shortcomings. Spider-Man India sporting Indian attire around his waist with the dhoti seemed more like a case of Oriental cladding than an engagement with modern Indian culture. Raj reflected on what he thought was senseless: I think it was stupid to use a dhoti because the boy is shown to study in an elite school and all schools in India have uniforms, none of which is dhoti. Even in the villages now dhoti is disappearing. It was probably a western interpretation of India.

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The superhero wearing a dhoti when most boys and men do not wear them in the urban nexus seems odd to say the least. For futurist imaginings, it was archaic and primitive. As a ‘western interpretation of India’ it was far removed from contemporary vernacular logics. Spider-Man India’s attire is a cry-back to Orientalist imaginings of India and previous ‘supermen’ such as (Mahatma) Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi who, despite his views on nuclear power, was described as a superhero, even India’s ‘Atomic Man’.55 Supremo may well have worn a dhoti in the 1980s over his figure-hugging outfit to highlight his essential Indian identity while concealing his modesty, but that too was another era. The appearance of a dhoti on a red and blue web-patterned superhero outfit definitively associated with hypermodernity seemed out of kilter for the 2000s. Kabir, who had read all four issues of Spider-Man India’s battles with the likes of Rakshasa, Doctor Octopus and Dark Spider, recounted: It’s just making an adaptation of the story in an apologetic manner.They have brought in demons to fight off Spider-Man, the chosen messiah. He has been made divine, but in the subconscious he remains a copy and a poor imitation of Peter Parker [from the US version of Spider-Man]. So I think it failed. Pavitra [the alias of Spider-Man India] is younger and is shown to take on the oldest of monsters but no suitable reason is given as why he is the chosen one or the ‘Christ in the Marvelverse’. He is forced to exist in a very elite school and still appears like a villager. He is even without shoes – he would be thrown out for this even in government-run schools. . . . If the yogi had given him spider powers, this is contrary to Indian religious and cult stories, and no rationale is given as to why it is spider power that is given to him. Even Doctor Octopus is forced to be a doctor and a demon at the same time. What came out were several anachronisms that did not correlate with his experience of modern India nor seep into his ‘subconscious’. At best it was an ‘apologetic’ excuse for an Indian superhero that was not thought through properly.Vinodh put it thus: ‘Either the superhero should have been located in the past or his get-up should have been more modern. It was a bad copy. It was really a bad concept’. It may be relatively easy to reproduce ambitions of global domination as played out through a superhero’s international and galactic quests in Indofuturist fiction. However, even after throwing big names and big bucks at the enterprise, the reality to capture the national – let alone the global – market has been much more treacherous. Readers have easy access to a range of media, so anything produced in India has to compete, if not excel, with the graphic aesthetic standards set up worldwide. The bar has been raised. Indigeneity alone cannot suffice. So in the second decade of the new millennium, we are at a curious crossroads or perhaps a ‘noodle junction’ – one that is characterised by swarming neoliberal currents tangled with indigenising efforts to forge a distinctly Indian claim on modernity. But overlain with this is also a superhighway that engages with transnational/international media associated with ‘world standards’ where what might

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be perceived as ‘too much Orientalist indigenising’ is seen as out of touch with contemporary times, certainly for the world of superheroes. Indigeneity alone is not enough to carry a concept onwards, when stand-out ideas and their excellent execution from an Indian production base are also paramount. Provincial or backward touches have to be refined and upscaled for an India that, as Christiane Brosius states, imagined itself as ‘ “world-class” and still remain distinctly Indian’.56 The ambition is to be globally savvy, to be a path-breaker rather than a path-follower, and to present the country not simply through dhotis and dhols, or saris and samosas for that matter, but through cutting-edge creative and entrepreneurial artistry that they could be proud of. Made in India and out of India, the mission is to create a forward-looking Indianeity rather than a backward-facing indigeneity. To some extent, forward-looking Indianeity parallels the growth that Stuart Hall had identified with Black diasporic cultural productions from the ‘struggle over the relations of production to a politics of representation itself    ’.57 Indianeity is not about foisting an authentic tradition or Indianness but recognising that tradition and Indianness itself is a discursive field. The ‘first moment’ – the dhoti moment, perhaps – might be seen as a recovery of good old Indian traditions for global (read: modern) times.The ‘second moment’ – that fractures but does not fully replace this sense of authenticity – recognises internal differences and debates about what best constitute Indian yet also modern identities. The struggle is not just about autochtonous representations or the relations of productions (between east and west, India and the rest), but about what makes India truly distinctive and future-facing. The politics of representations in this era is more about the self-reflexive, worldy-wise aesthetic evaluation of graphic narration. Indian productions are still valued, but the debate has moved on from indigeneity alone to exploring a new grammar for Indian visuality that captures both the thrills and pressures of contemporary life. It is a compulsion that vernacular publishing houses too are experiencing. The phenomenon is, as Lewis R. Gordon proposes for ‘black aesthetics’, akin to ‘the quest for aesthetic self-respect’.58 Here, it is a case of seeking aesthetic self-respect for Indian creatives on a treacherous transnational stage in a phase that E. Dawson Varughese describes as ‘Indian post-millennial modernity’.59

Die-hards Comic books have ordinarily been produced with young people in mind. But, interestingly, lounging in the silvery rays of the erstwhile Golden Age, the culture around them is ageing. In this multi-media era, comic book readership is less so among under-16s and more for those kidults in their 20s and 30s, and even older. A small book shop owner in Delhi commented: ‘Now the only ones who ever look for comics are adults. It’s been years since a kid might have asked for a comic book’. Comics are seeing a revival in interest as ‘geek culture becomes cool’, as one IT professional put it. Other superhero comic readers have been fans since the very early years of Raj Comics and buy out of a sense of nostalgia. These are the

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readers who have followed the comic outputs into their adulthood and now, mainly as older students and working professionals, periodically return to comics for rejuvenation and recreation. The sentiment extends across to the diaspora, as reflected with Tarun (28) who, after going abroad for his education, now lives in Germany with his Slovakian girlfriend. He said: ‘It’s all about my memories. I take them everywhere. I also have a room in Old Delhi with stacks of these comics – Dhruv, Nagraj, Chacha Chaudhary’. Those who grew up with the comics retain them as a cherished part of their childhood. Internet-based communities add another layer to the circuits of hard-copy circulations that were earlier carved out as young people’s social niches – the corners of a school or a neighbourhood playground, at busy junctions around train and bus journeys, around retail and rental outlets, or just in the dim light of bedtime reading. Soft online circuits act upon and are at exponential tangents to the harder circuits that thrived in the past. They have led to wider platforms and newer audiences for sharing tales, news and views, but digital copies have not entirely killed off paper books, nor has it paper comic books. While soft circuits promise accessibility and immediacy, they are disabled in regions where there is little grid and/ or internet connectivity, such that hard versions of sequential art endure as already mentioned above. But even when internet and other technologies were within easy reach, there was still a tangible preference for hard copies amongst older fans. Iqbal stated: ‘Till now we have not gotten used to the idea of reading comics online’. Ayan added: It is easier to read during journeys. You can read it lying down or keep it hidden in a book so to hide it from parents or teachers. They were thin and colourful so it was lovely just to handle them. The smell of a fresh comic book is sublime. I have a friend who still wants to just open the book and smell the pages. Not least due to their fading fragrance, hard comic books continue to curry favour on journeys up and down the country and outlets recirculate a plethora of old books and magazines to enthusiasts of varied backgrounds. Elsewhere a journalist reports more widely on the hard currency of a variety of comic books that formed the ‘mind-food’ of many children growing up in India: Among the Indrajal [comic book publisher] lovers – a motley bunch of executives, housewives, scientists, journalists, civil servants and the like, who are part of offline and online comic-book communities – is 45-year-old Delhibased Vineeth Abraham, a section officer with the Indian government. Abraham, who collects other comics as well (he has about 6,000), has almost all the 800-odd issues of Indrajal and some 600 Phantom comics published by Frew (Australia). Dr P C Sarkar, another fan with a background that screams gravitas – he’s a scientist with the central government – also hunts down comics religiously. Says he in his blog: ‘When the publishing houses stopped

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these publications, readers became collectors, and suddenly the value of these discarded comics shot up. Now E-Bay India is full of these comics, selling at atrocious prices. Some smart chaps have also scanned the comics and sell them in CDs. From a buyer’s market, it has become a seller’s market’.60 While publishing houses battle it out with each other to sell new comics across a range of media, the readers of yore battle it out with each other to seek older hard copies that are now out of circulation – either as part of their quest to seek beloved albeit dusty memorabilia, or with a view to sell them on with interest. Comic books retain their paper allure among niche communities and are even seeing a revival in some areas as they fuel the growth of a pulp heritage industry. As with the latterday releases of 1980s Raj Comics issues as ‘Collector Editions’, memories are also becoming packaged into tangible heritage. Undoubtedly, the market principle is all pervasive, leading to, on the one hand, dynamic waves of newer proliferations and ventures, and on the other, the resurrection of the old in the form of an emergent comic book heritage industry. But swirling beneath them are deeper currents, where the raw passion for a memorable and illustrative story that you can hold in your hands cannot be neatly packaged or sold on. One young boy listened with intent as his mother pointed to a Nagraj issue at Comic Con 2017 in New Delhi. Handing the copy over, the mother said: ‘See, these are the comics that me and your father grew up reading’.The boy started poring over its colourful images, rapt with fascination . . . Whether it be by the light of a long dead star or the light from a new sunrise, the ultimate adventure is within ourselves.

Notes 1 http://indiancomicsfandom.blogspot.in/2017/09/comics-memories-deepak.html. Accessed: November 11, 2017. 2 In 2010, Sanjay Gupta observed: ‘In the 90s, each Nagraj comic used to print at least 3 lakh copies [300,000]; now it’s just 70,000 copies’. Cited in Manoj Sharma (2010) ‘The Return of Indian Superheroes’, Hindustan Times, February 14, www.hindustantimes. com/delhi-news/the-return-of-indian-superheroes/story-yOOLF47FdwD52hhHdYWqSK.html. Accessed: July 10, 2014. 3 See ‘Energy’ on the World Bank website at http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/ EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTENERGY2/0,,contentMDK:22855502~pagePK:21005 8~piPK:210062~theSitePK:4114200,00.html and ‘Much of Rural India Still Waits for Electricity’, Phys.org, November 4, 2013, http://phys.org/news/2013-11-rural-indiaelectricity.html. Accessed: July 20, 2014. 4 Leela Fernandes (2006) India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 5 Brad Weiss (2009) Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, p. 10. 6 ‘Indian Comic Stars get their Superpowers’ (2010) The Sunday Guardian, October 3, p. 22. 7 Nowadays, most middle-class parents, wherever they are placed, send their children to English-medium schools that have replaced the ones that were hitherto influenced by linguistic nationalism. As Devesh Kapur observes, English has now become the

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well-recognised ‘language of empowerment and social mobility’. (2010) ‘The Middle Class in India: A Social Formation or Political Actor?’, in Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 21, ed. Julian Go, Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, p. 156. See also Mark Liechty (2003) Suitably Modern: Making Middle Class Culture in a New Consumer Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 213–214. 8 Pao Collective (2007) ‘Raj Comics: A Brief Overview’, http://paocollective.wordpress. com/2010/03/11/raj-comics-a-brief-overview/. Accessed: June 28, 2014. 9 ‘Indian Comic Stars Get Their Superpowers’ (2010) The Sunday Guardian, October 3, p. 22, 10 ‘Warwan – Vinaash (Official Music Video). DOGA’ (2018) www.youtube.com/watch?v= DmAM5p6TNR8. Accessed: February 1, 2018. 11 Kishan Harchandani (2017) ‘Exclusive Interview of Sanjay Gupta: Comics is my Life. I am Comics’, August 19, Culture Popcorn, www.culturepopcorn.com/sanjay-guptainterview-raj-comics/. Accessed: November 11, 2017. 12 Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation were established in 2005 with Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Virgin was bought out and Liquid co-founded in 2008 by the CEO, Sharad Devarajan, and the managing partners, Gotham Chopra and Suresh Seetharaman. 13 http://graphicpop.com/about-us/. Accessed: December 10, 2017. 14 See Jeremy Stoll (2017) ‘Comics in India’, in The Routledge Companion to Comics, eds. Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook and Aaron Meskin, New York: Routledge, pp. 93–94. 15 www.holycow.in/ravanayan-details/. Accessed: January 9, 2018. 16 See Raminder Kaur (2017) ‘Mediating Rape: The Nirbhaya Effect in the Creative and Digital Arts’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42(4): 945–976. 17 https://killscreen.com/articles/enormous-beautiful-indian-transmedia-project-comesgames/. Accessed: November 19, 2017. 18 Jeremy Stoll (2013) ‘Bread and Comics: A History of the Pao Collective’, https://greatbearcomics.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/a-bit-more-research-a-history-of-the-paocollective/. Accessed: December 20, 2017. 19 Pramod K. Nayar (2016) The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique, New Delhi: Routledge, p. 6. 20 Ibid., p. 8. 21 Orijit Sen (1994) River of Stories, Pune: Kalpavriksha; and Sarnath Banerjee (2004) Corridor,New Delhi: Penguin. 22 https://appupen.wordpress.com/category/halahala-2/. Accessed: January 9, 2018. 23 Jai Undurti (2014) Hyderabad, A Graphic Novel: Every City is a Story, illustrated by Harsho Mohan Chattoraj, Hyderabad: Syenagiri. 24 Vishwajyoti Ghosh (2010) Delhi Calm, New Delhi: HarperCollins. 25 Vishwajyoti Ghosh (2013) This Side,That Side: Restorying Partition, New Delhi:Yoda Press. 26 Michael Galchinsky (2012) ‘Framing a Rights Ethos: Artistic Media and the Dream of a Culture Without Borders’, in Media, Mobilization and Human Rights: Mediating Suffering, ed. Tristan Anne Borer, London: Zed. 27 Ibid., p. 67. See Umberto Eco (1972) ‘The Myth of Superman’, transl. Natalie Chilton. Diacritics, 2(1): 14–22. 28 See Craig Jeffrey (2010) Timepass:Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, Chapter 3. 29 Steve D. Derne (2008) Globalization on the Ground: New Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India, New Delhi: Sage, p. 19. 30 David Harvey (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 31 Sunil Khilnani (2012) The Idea of India, New Delhi: Penguin Books, p. 2. 32 William Mazzarella (2003) Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 15. 33 Mark Liechty (2003) Suitably Modern: Making Middle Class Culture in a New Consumer Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 225. It was largely due to this global

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orientation and awareness that test-runs for a Nagraj television series in the late 1990s were not accepted as ‘world-class’ even by long-term Raj Comics fans. The series was dismissed very early on for its poor special effects: one young person even regarding it as ‘sad and unbearable’, out of kilter with his view on the relatively sophisticated and original presentations of the comic book series. On the ‘world-class’ aesthetic articulate among metropolitan middle classes in India, see below and Christiane Brosius (2010) ‘India’s Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure’, Consumption and Prosperity, New Delhi: Routledge. 34 Danny Miller (2009) Stuff, London: Polity Press. 35 See Christopher Pinney (2003) ‘Introduction: Public, Popular, and Other Cultures’, in Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, eds. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 18. 36 Brosius, India’s Middle Class, p. 3. 37 See Rayna Denison and Rachel Mizsei-Ward, eds. (2015) Superheroes on World Screens, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 38 See Alondra Nelson, ed. (2002) Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; and Lisa Yaszek (2006) ‘Afrofuturism, Science Fiction and the History of the Future’, Socialism and Democracy, 20(3): 41–60. 39 On a diasporic and ‘transactivist’ approach to Indofuturism, see Pravin Pillai’s paper, ‘Consciousness as a Site of Subversion: Rupturing Rational Process and Linearity through Indofuturism’ (n.d.) www.academia.edu/3857643/Consciousness_as_a_Site_ of_Subversion_Rupturing_Rational_Process_and_Linearity_through_Indofuturism. Accessed: January 10, 2017. 40 Nyay Bhushan (2011) ‘Stan Lee to Create Indian Comic Superhero “Chakra – The Invincible” (Exclusive)’, The Hollywood Report, December 21, www.hollywoodreporter. com/news/stan-lee-indian-comic-chakra-invincible-275922#sthash.hqoAQo3Q.dpuf. Accessed: July 10, 2014. 41 www.graphicindia.com. Accessed: June 20, 2014. Veenu Singh (2013) ‘Meet the Indian Superheroes’, Hindustan Times, December 6, www.hindustantimes.com/brunch/meetthe-indian-superheroes/story-KoVxA0ouITMA3DBrmxVXlJ.html, www.hollywoodre porter.com/news/stan-lee-indian-comic-chakra-invincible-275922#sthash.MwKh7CBp.dpuf. Accessed: July 10, 2014. 42 See Ravinder Kaur and Thomas Blom Hansen (2015) ‘Aesthetics of Arrival: Spectacle, Capital and Novelty in Post-Reform India’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 23(3): 265–275. 43 ‘Chakra the Invincible: Stan Lee’s New Indian Superhero Storms Comic Book World’ (2013) Metro, December 3, http://metro.co.uk/2013/12/03/chakra-the-invinciblestan-lees-new-indian-superhero-storms-comic-book-world-4206221/. Accessed: July 8, 2014. 44 Khilnani, The Idea of India, p. 151. 45 See Uma Chakravarti (1998) ‘Saffroning the Past: Of Myths, Histories and Right-Wing Agendas’, Economic and Political Weekly, 33(5): 225–232. 46 Jon Russell (2017) ‘Graphic India Raises $5m to Build a Marvel-Like Digital Comic Brand for India’, TechCrunch, November 30, https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/30/ graphic-india-raises-5m/. 47 See Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan (2004) So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press; and Kaur, ‘The Fictions of Science and Cinema in India’. 48 ‘Tendulkar Achieves Superhero Status’ (2007) BBC Sport, March 17, http://news.bbc. co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/6462199.stm. Accessed: June 20, 2014. 49 The comic was created by Alok Sharma, Neha Sharma and pencilled in by Dilip Kadam from Kadam Studio. Initially, Rannade Prakashan and Blue Snail Animation had come out with Bal Narendra (Narendra as a Child, 2014). The comic highlights the exploits and life of Narendra Modi as a child – showing him to be fearless and heroic – someone who even swims across a crocodile-infested lake to change a temple flag. It was written in a

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hagiographic style akin to the style adopted by the Amar Chitra Katha series on legendary Indian leaders and deities. See also its ambivalent reception by Samit Basu (2014) ‘Bal Narendra: A Deeply Dull Comic Book That I Cannot Imagine Any Child Voluntarily Reading’, The Caravan: A Journal of Politics and Culture, April 28, www.caravanmagazine. in/vantage/bal-narendra-deeply-dull. Accessed: November 23, 2017. 50 ‘We Have No Orders to Save You: State Participation and Complicity in Communal  Violence in Gujarat’ (2002) Human Rights Watch, April, 14(3), www.hrw.org/reports/2002/ india/. Accessed: July 15, 2014. 51 See Friedrich Nietzsche (2006 [1891]) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, transl. Adrian del Caro, ed. Robert Pippin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 52 Sanjay Srivastava (2015) ‘Modi-Masculinity: Media, Manhood, and “Traditions” in a Time of Consumerism’, Television and New Media, 16(4): 331–338, p. 331. 53 See Christopher Kelen and Bjorn Sundmark, eds. (2013) The Nation in Children’s Literature: Nations of Childhood, New York: Routledge. On the BJP rhetoric of ‘India Shining’, see Brosius, India’s Middle Class. 54 On parallel debates, see Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke. 55 See Raminder Kaur (2013) Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns, New Delhi: Routledge, p. 82. 56 Brosius, India’s Middle Class, p. 29. 57 Stuart Hall (2006) ‘New Ethnicities’, in Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan Hsuen-Ching, London: Routledge, p. 442. 58 Lewis R. Gordon (2018) ‘Black Aesthetics, Black Value’, Public Culture, 30(1): 19–34, p. 32. 59 E. Dawson Varughese (2018) Visuality and Identity in Post-Millennial Indian Graphic Narratives, London: Palgrave MacMillan, p. 18. 60 ‘The Ghost Still Walks’ (2008) The Times of India, June 1, http://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/articleshow/3089506.cms? Accessed: July 15, 2014.

GLOSSARY OF KEY INDIAN ADVENTURE COMIC BOOK CHARACTERS GLOSSARY OF KEY INDIAN ADVENTURE COMIC BOOK CHARACTERSGLOSSARY OF KEY INDIAN ADVENTURE COMIC BOOK CHARACTERS

Adrak, Dhania, Haldi and Mirchi (Raj Comics): The four brothers who took care of Suraj (the alter ego of Doga) and trained him in various physical activities including weight lifting, boxing, martial arts and shooting. Agnimukh (Raj Comics): Grand Master Robo’s henchman who was created by getting caught in a nuclear blast ordered by Robo. Angara (Tulsi Comics): Created after several animals with different capabilities were combined by the surgeon, Dr. Kunal, and given the face of a human. Anthony (Raj Comics): An ‘undead’ superhero who has a pet crow, Prince, that looks out for him and helps him fight crime. Ashwaraj (Raj Comics): An ancient prince from the half-human half-horse world called Ashwalok, he is a shape-shifter and rides a five-horse chariot. Badman (Raj Comics): A CIA agent from the US and a friend of the superhero, Yodha. Bahadur (Indrajal Comics):The son of a dacoit who fights crime and runs a training centre to help citizens fight crime with their wits, physical prowess and organisational capabilities. Bankelal (Raj Comics): A mischievous anti-hero who is an advisor to King Vikram Singh of Vishalgadh. Bela (Indrajal Comics): Bahadur’s aide, kung fu aficionado and love interest. Bharti (Raj Comics): Nagraj’s aide who owns Bharti Communications where Raj, the superhero’s alter ego, works. Bhatiki (Raj Comics): Kobi/Bheriya’s mentor from 50,000 years ago, he separated them into two parts, the human Bheriya and the animalesque Kobi. Bhokal, Prince Alop (Raj Comics): A winged fairy prince whose powers are akin to He-Man when he shouts the magic name of the royal sage and mentor, Mahaguru Bhokal.

Glossary of key Indian adventure comic book characters  217

Blackcat (Raj Comics): Super Commando Dhruv’s aide who has an alter ego, Richa, who loves Dhruv and is an expert computer programmer. Her father was killed by the supervillain, Grand Master Robo, so she became a crimefighter to avenge her father. Bokaraksha (Raj Comics): Born as a dead child to a shape-shifting snake, he was activated by Dev Kaljayi’s immortal poison after Dev was cursed by the mother. The boy grows up to create a zombie army through his bite. Chacha and Bhatija (paternal younger uncle and nephew, Diamond Comics): This duo used to solve problems with the help of a very powerful djinn, a supernatural creature from Islamic mythology and theology. Chandika (Raj Comics): A science genius, inventor and the most important superheroine to aid Super Commando Dhruv. As her alter ego, Schweta, she is the adopted sister of Dhruv. Devas (Raj Comics): A word Meaning demi-gods, they are friends of Super Commando Dhruv, who live in an underwater city, Swarn Nagri (City of Gold), as part of a highly advanced civilisation. Devi (Liquid Comics): Loosely based on the Hindu goddess, Durga, she is Tara Mehta, believed to be the next reincarnation of a celestial warrior goddess created by the gods to defeat their enemies. Dev Kaljayi (Raj Comics): Literally meaning ‘God who can defeat death or time’, he is the family deity of Nagraj, protector and king of the snake realm. Dhananjay (Raj Comics): Super Commando Dhruv’s friend and an inhabitant of an underwater highly advanced world in Swarn Nagri. He belongs to a race that was mentioned as Devas or Gods in ancient Hindu texts. Doga (Raj Comics): An angry superhero, he uses extreme and brutal violence to eliminate criminals. He can talk to dogs who aid him in his endeavours. Fauladi Singh (Diamond Comics): A robotic superhero with human emotions. Fighter Toads (Raj Comics): Four genetically modified toads with various powers and humorous wit, akin to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Gagan (Raj Comics): A superhero with a scientific mind and armed with gadgets in the form of rings that can release deadly rays and help him fly. Gamraj (Raj Comics): A superhero who is the son of Yamraj, the god of death. He is fond of humour and has a buffalo as a vehicle that can shape-shift to a car. Gojo (Raj Comics): Created out of a yagna (fire rite) to rid the world of demons, the superhero has seven mystical powers and a spider as a vehicle. Gorakhnath (Raj Comics): A mystical character who inhabits the forests of Assam and who broke Nagraj free from Professor Nagmani’s control to put him on the path of superheroism. Grand Master Robo (Raj Comics): Natasha’s father and Super Commando Dhruv’s archenemy he has a half-human and half-robotic body with a laser gun fitted in his robotic eye with which he can vaporise his enemies. Gufeena (Fort Comics): An alien princess from planet Muler who is stranded on Earth and pairs up with a female thief to fight crime.

218  Glossary of key Indian adventure comic book characters

Haru (Raj Comics): Probably the most powerful supervillain, this extraterrestrial comes from a race who live in a distant galaxy where the basic laws of physics and morality are confounded. He is a god from a different realm. Inspector Cheetah (Raj Comics): Doga’s friend and the brother of his aide, Monika, he was a very honest police officer and later after taking retirement works as a private detective. Inspector Steel (Raj Comics): A superhero with the body of a robot and the mind of a human being similar to Robocop. Jambu (Tulsi Comics): A superhero who was an extremely brilliant robot fitted with the brain of a scientist. Jane (Raj Comics): The love interest of Kobi/Bheriya, who earlier was a spy for the French government. Jingalu (Raj Comics): An immensely powerful yeti who inhabits the deep and inaccessible regions of the Himalayas. Kaaldoot (Raj Comics): A sage with three male torsos and the lower body fused to form one snake tail, he is the protector of the snake realms and is a constant guide to Nagraj. Kobi and Bheriya (Raj Comics): A superhero duo who are the antithesis to each other. They have the same soul with different bodies that got separated into two due to magic.While Kobi is a half-wolf half-human violent entity, Bheriya is a compassionate human-looking being. Lamboo: A constant companion to Fauladi Singh (Diamond Comics), he is a miniature human being (due to the effects of a potion). He is also one of the names of the detective duo, Lamboo-Motu (Diamond Comics). Makdi Rani (Manoj Comics): A superheroine who is a science genius and an inventor. Miyan Faulad (Shama Group): A hero who fights smugglers and rescues abducted children. Monika (Raj Comics): Doga’s love interest who as the superheroine, Lomri, helps the superhero. Nagin (Raj Comics): Created from a yagna (fire rite), she is a tantric who also tries to seduce and hypnotise her enemy, Nagraj. Nagina (Raj Comics): A powerful tantric and a contender to the throne of Nagdweep, she is unscrupulous, sometimes contesting Nagraj and, at other times, might even team up with him. Nagpasha (Raj Comics): Nagraj’s uncle and a constant nemesis of Nagraj, he is immortal and, despite repeated efforts, Nagraj is not able to kill him. Nagraj (Raj Comics): A superhero with snake skin and shape-shifting powers. He has a body that allows thousands of snakes to reside in the form of blood drops and can breathe poisonous fumes at will. Natasha (Raj Comics): Super Commando Dhruv’s love interest and aide, she was also the commander of the supervillain Grand Master Robo’s army. Parmanu (Raj Comics): A superhero who has a belt created from nuclear physics that gives him flying, shrinking and fighting powers.

Glossary of key Indian adventure comic book characters  219

P.O.E.M.: Protectors of Earth and Mankind, Raj Comics’ version of DC Comics’ Justice League. Pralayanka (Raj Comics): Parmanu’s aide and Probot’s assistant, she has special powers due to a suit made by Probot. Her alter ego is Mamta Pathak. Probot (Raj Comics): Parmanu’s robotic uncle, he took over Parmanu’s mentorship after his blood uncle turned towards crime. Professor Anees (Raj Comics): Inspector Steel’s scientist friend, he performed the operation of converting a nearly dead Inspector Amar to Steel. Professor Kamal Kumar Verma or K.K. (Raj Comics): A scientist who created his nephew Parmanu’s powerful costume and designed the cyborg Probot. Rajan-Iqbal (Diamond Comics): A teenage detective duo, one a Hindu, the other a Muslim. Ram-Rahim (Manoj Comics): A teenage detective duo, one a Hindu, the other a Muslim. Sadhu (Liquid Comics): A British soldier who discovers that he is a reincarnation of an ancient sage. Saudangi (Raj Comics): A superheroine aide of Nagraj, who is an Egyptian shapeshifting snake with thorns on her body. Shakti (Raj Comics): The most prominent independent superheroine, who responds mostly to cries of women in trouble and has been granted divine powers by the goddess, Kali. Sheetnag (Raj Comics): A powerful snake friend that resides in the body of Nagraj. Snake Woman (Virgin Comics): With the alter ego, Jessica Patterson, and the mythic power of snakes, she fights crime in Los Angeles. Super Commando Dhruv (Raj Comics): Renowned for his quick wit and action-packed stunts, the superhero emerged from a circus and is able to communicate with animals and birds. Super Indian (Raj Comics): A clone of a dreaded insurgent, he was cleansed of evil by a mystic. Even though he battles crime, he treats all major villains and superheroes as uncles as he had been trained by them. Supremo (Star Comics): A superhero who is the alter ego of the Hindi film superstar, Amitabh Bachchan. He solves mysteries and fights crimes with the help of two children, a falcon and a dolphin. Tauji (Diamond Comics): He is a powerful magician with a small and handy jadu ka danda (magic stick or wand) who carries around an otherworldly dwarf, Rumjhum, in his pocket. Tausi (Tulsi Comics): A shape-shifting snake with scaly brown skin similar to Raj Comics superhero, Nagraj. Tiranga (Raj Comics): A patriotic detective and poet, he is a specialist of unarmed combat. Vedacharya (Raj Comics): Bharti’s grandfather and the court astrologer to Nagraj’s father Takshakraj, he is blind but is an expert in the making and breaking of labyrinths or tilism.

220  Glossary of key Indian adventure comic book characters

Vinashdoot (Raj Comics): An alien superhero who has a mechanical horse that can fly as his vehicle. He has X-ray vision and releases powerful rays from his hands. Visarpi (Raj Comics): Nagraj’s love interest and sidekick, she is the ruler of the mythical island, Nagdweep, which is home to shape-shifting and other magical humanoid snakes. Yodha (Raj Comics):  An ancient warrior who has slept through the ages to reappear in contemporary times and fights crime with his uniquely crafted ancient weaponry.

INDEX

Page numbers in italic indicate a figure on the corresponding page. Adrak 59, 121 adventure comics 3 – 12, 196, 207; in the Golden Age 47, 60; Raj Comics 87 – 88; readers of 152 – 153, 158; the rise of 19 – 20, 25 – 28, 27, 35 – 36, 39 – 40; and the state 116; see also specific titles Agnimukh 136 alien 12 – 13, 47, 126; and evil 132, 141, 143; readers and 156, 160, 178; and the rise of adventure comics 27 – 28, 32, 34 – 37, 39; see also Vinashdoot alter ego 1, 4, 12, 37, 91; and gender 71, 76; readers and 164, 193; and the state 118 – 119 Angara 35 Anthony 38, 58, 107 avatar 10; and the fantastic familiar 102, 108, 109; and gender 65 – 66, 68; and Raj Comics 94, 98 Bachchan, Amitabh 12, 30, 32, 37 – 39, 53, 88 Badman 122 Bahadur 12, 30 – 32, 31, 81n1, 197 Bahadur 85, 88 Bankelal 87, 91 banning 20, 39, 156 – 158 Barf Ki Chita 70, 126, 127 Bela 12, 30 – 32, 31, 81n1, 197 Bharti 51 Bhatija see Chacha and Bhatija

Bhatiki 57 Bheriya see Kobi and Bheriya Bhokal 47, 61n12, 91 Blackcat 167, 190 Bokaraksha 113 Border 124, 125 border conflict 47, 55, 116, 118, 128, 149 brahmand rakshak 12 caste 4, 8, 10, 59, 151n12, 206; gender and 77; readers and 159, 172n8, 183 Chacha and Bhatija 28 Chacha Chaudhary 12, 26, 28, 52 Chandika 1, 12, 108, 128; and gender 63 – 65, 64, 70, 81n1; and readers 162, 164, 167; see also Schweta China 7, 47, 126, 161, 183 – 184 comic books 196; adult dismissal of 41 – 42; debates surrounding 39 – 41, 156 – 158; future potentials for 208 – 210; government and 36 – 39; and imparting of values 158 – 162; present trends in 197 – 205, 201; see also adventure comics Dark Age 19, 196 DC Comics 25, 49, 54, 60, 74, 107, 133 desi superheros 4 – 7, 12, 14, 39, 98, 196, 205; godfathers of 84 – 86 Devarajan, Sharad 48, 60, 200, 207 Devas 104, 107, 113, 142

222 Index

Devi 200 Dev Kaljayi 50 – 51, 113 Dhananjay 106 Dhania 59 Dhruv see Super Commando Dhruv Diamond Comics 145, 197 – 198; and Raj Comics 85, 88, 90; and the rise of adventure comics 19, 25 – 29, 32 – 33, 33, 42n6 distribution 20, 153 – 156, 154 Doga 12, 83, 93, 98, 199; and evil 147 – 148, 150; gender and 68, 71, 72, 77 – 79, 78; in the Golden Age 58 – 59; readers and 160, 167 – 169, 181, 189; and the state 117 – 118, 120 – 121, 128 Doga Hindu hai 120 Doga ka Curfew 121 Doga series 71, 138, 177; see also Doga Doga-Shakti 74, 76, 78 dreams 1, 8, 13 – 14, 23, 148, 198, 208; readers and 173 – 179, 193 – 194 dystopia 2, 13, 105, 131, 149, 203 Europe 3, 44n37, 135, 161, 187, 194n13 evil 2, 4, 13, 97, 131 – 132, 149 – 150; and the fantastic familiar 105, 107, 111 – 112; gender and 65 – 66, 74; in the Golden Age 46 – 47, 58; and readers 164, 169 – 170, 180, 184 – 185; and the state 126; see also horror; villainy fabulous science 32, 101 – 103; and entangled narratives 113 – 114; multilinearities and 107 – 111, 109, 110; source of 103 – 107, 106; time-crossing and 111 – 113 Fauladi Singh 32, 33, 39, 88, 197 Fighter Toads 92 – 93 folklore 3, 13, 48, 87, 141; and the fantastic familiar 103, 113; and the rise of adventure comics 21, 40, 44n33 Fort Comics 35 gender 4, 9, 12 – 13, 63 – 65, 64, 79 – 80; and evil 150; millennial masculinity 66 – 70, 67, 69; and readers 192; sidekicks and 70 – 73, 72; the super-other and 74 – 79, 76, 78; super women 65 – 66; villainy and 73 – 74 Gojo 87, 99n11 Golden Age 8, 12, 18 – 19, 98, 155, 196, 210 Gorakhnath 49, 50 government 7, 26; in the Platinum Age 203, 209, 211; reader dreams and 182, 187; readers and 152, 159, 164, 166, 170; and the rise of superhero comic books

36 – 39; see also national discourse; state, the Grand Master Robo 53 – 54, 135, 136, 162, 180, 184 Groensteen, Thierry 6 Gufeena 35 Gupta, Manish 52, 84 – 85, 87 – 90, 92, 98 Gupta, Manoj 84 – 85, 87 – 90, 92, 98 Gupta, Prem 199 Gupta, Raj Kumar 84 Gupta, Sanjay 44, 84 – 90, 92, 98 – 99; and evil 147 – 148; and the fantastic familiar 115; in the Golden Age 49, 51; in the Platinum Age 196, 199, 212n2; and the state 126 Haldi 59 Haru 107, 141 – 142 Hinduism 14, 200, 206 – 207; and evil 131, 135, 141, 147; and the fantastic familiar 103, 111 – 112; and gender 65 – 66, 69, 77, 79; in the Golden Age 49, 51, 58 – 59; and Raj Comics 87, 98; readers and 157, 168, 178, 187; in the rise of adventure comics 20 – 21, 41, 43n18; and the state 117, 120, 129n7; see also Hindus Hindus 4, 12, 29, 53, 68 Hitler, Adolf 1 – 3, 130n9, 133, 143, 181, 187 horror 13, 39 – 40, 45n51, 87, 143 – 147, 144, 146 independence 12, 19 – 20, 23, 28; see also Nascent Age Indofuturism 14, 205 – 207, 209 Indrajal Comics 25, 30, 31, 88, 99n7 Inspector Steel 12, 48, 54 – 56, 107 internet 149, 175, 187 – 189, 191 – 193, 199, 211 Islam 28, 131, 184; see also Muslims Jambu 35 Jane 57, 68, 167 Japan 3, 7 Kaaldoot 136 Kathamala, Chitra Bharti 29, 32, 90 K.K. see Professor Kamal Kumar Verma Kobi and Bheriya 12, 57, 68 Kohram 107, 131, 142 Lamboo 32, 145 Lamboo-Motu 29, 145 Liquid Comics 51, 65, 200, 206 Maine Mara Dhruv ko 165 Makdi Rani 35

Index  223

Manoj Comics 12, 29, 35, 57, 145 masculinity see gender McLain, Karline 4, 65, 99n7 Mirchi 59 Miyan Faulad 24 Modern Age 18 – 19 modern mythologies: and debate 39 – 41; and dismissal 41 – 42; early adventure in India 25 – 28, 27; government and 36 – 39; making of 18 – 19; nascent age of 19 – 25; pocket novels and 28 – 29; superheroes and 30 – 35, 31, 33, 34 Modi, Narendra 207 – 208, 214n49 Monika 59 Mrityujivi 74, 112 147 Mulick, Pratap 37, 88 – 90, 94, 95, 97, 99n11, 100n16 Muslims 29, 148; and gender 68; in the Golden Age 53, 59, 61n14; readers and 168, 178 – 179, 184; and the state 117, 120, 123 mutant 13, 132, 140 mythology 3, 5, 13, 103, 200; and evil 132; and gender 65 – 66; in the Golden Age 48, 51, 60; and Raj Comics 86 – 88, 91, 99; see also modern mythologies Nagin 135, 137 Nagin 86; see also Nagin Nagina 135 – 137 Nagina 86; see also Nagina Nagpasha 50, 93, 147, 150n1, 170 Nagraj 1, 7, 12, 83 – 91, 93 – 98, 95 – 97; and evil 131, 135, 137, 139 – 141, 142, 147 – 150; and the fantastic familiar 107 – 113, 109, 110; gender and 69 – 70, 73 – 74; in the Golden Age 48 – 52, 50, 61n11; in the Platinum Age 197, 211 – 212, 214n33; reader dreams and 175, 186, 190; readers and 152, 155 – 156, 161, 165 – 166, 170; and the rise of adventure comics 35, 37, 39 Nascent Age 19, 196 Natasha 70, 135, 163, 190, 191 national discourse 116 – 118; superheroes and 118 – 127, 125, 127; see also patriotism nationalism 14, 80, 103, 185, 206, 212n7; in the Golden Age 48, 51, 55; and the rise of adventure comics 40, 42 nation, the see national discourse Negatives 123, 197 neoliberalisation 7, 9, 14, 17n39, 19; and gender 64, 74; and the Golden Age 48, 51, 56; and the Platinum Age 198 – 199, 207 – 209; readers and 176, 183 – 185, 190

Pakistan 28, 47, 55, 62n19, 122 – 127, 125 Parmanu: and evil 138 – 139, 140, 143, 144, 150; and gender 71; and the Golden Age 54 – 55; and readers 186, 190 – 191; and the state 118 – 119, 129 patriotism 13, 117, 119 – 123, 128 – 129, 138, 160; and gender 73; in the Golden Age 52 – 53; and Raj Comics 86; and the rise of adventure comics 32, 38, 41 Phantom, The see Vetal Platinum Age 12, 14, 19, 196 pocket books 12, 28 – 29, 35, 49, 84, 88 pocket novels see pocket books P.O.E.M. 49 postcolonialism 9, 12, 19, 80, 104 postmodernism 87 Pralayanka 71 Probot 138 Professor Anees 56 Professor Kamal Kumar Verma (K.K.) 139 Protectors of Earth and Mankind see P.O.E.M. Rai, Gulshan 19, 52, 57, 298 Rajan-Iqbal 29 Raj Comics 6, 12 – 13, 83 – 84, 98 – 99; development of 87 – 93; and evil 133, 135, 138, 145 – 147, 146; and the fantastic familiar 103, 106, 111; founding of 84 – 86; and gender 64, 64, 65 – 66, 67, 72, 73; in the Golden Age 46, 49, 51 – 52, 57 – 58; in the Platinum Age 196 – 202, 207, 210, 212; and readers 152 – 153, 155, 163, 192 – 193; and the rise of adventure comics 29, 32, 35, 41; and the state 123, 126; stylistic developments of 93 – 98, 95, 96, 97; see also specific titles Ram-Rahim 29, 145 readers 152 – 153, 170 – 171; ageing 210 – 212; and banning 156 – 158; and distribution 153 – 156, 154; imparting values to 158 – 162; and narrative intent 167 – 168; and science 162 – 167, 163; and transgressors 168 – 170 Reddy, B. Nagi 20 religion see Hinduism; Islam; Sikhism revenge 30, 53, 58, 200; and evil 135; readers and 180 – 185, 190, 193 robot 12, 32, 39, 162; see also Falaudi Singh robotics 54, 56, 135, 165, 180; see also robot Roman Hatyara 100n15, 133, 134 Sadhu 200 Saudangi 69 – 70 Schweta 1, 12, 63, 70, 149, 163 – 164, 167

224 Index

science 5, 23, 25, 48, 53; and evil 132, 139; and gender 63, 71; and Raj Comics 84; readers and 162 – 167, 163, 192; and the state 125 – 126; see also fabulous science; science fiction; techno-science science fiction 33, 36 separatism 47, 116, 122 sex 14; evil and 135; gender and 77, 79; readers and 175, 189 – 193; and the rise of adventure comics 39, 45n51 sexuality 9, 68, 203, 206 Shakti 12; and evil 138, 140, 149 – 150; and the fantastic familiar 105 – 107; and gender 65 – 66, 73 – 80, 76, 78; and the Golden Age 47 – 48; and readers 161, 168; and the state 124 – 126 Shama Group 24 Sharma, Parshuram 49, 88 – 89, 94, 97 Sharma, Pran Kumar 12, 25 Sharma, Rakesh 36 Sharma,Ved Prakash 29 Sheetnag 69, 97 sidekick 65, 70 – 73, 72 Sikhism 47, 129n6, 131, 183 Silver Age 18 – 19 Sinha, Anupam 32, 90 – 92, 94 – 95, 97, 199; and evil 149; and the Golden Age 51 – 52, 54 Sino-Indian War 130n12 Snake Woman 200 space programme 12, 36, 122 space travel 32, 34, 165, 202 Star Comics 37 Star Trek 12, 32, 36 – 37 state, the 13, 68, 93, 150, 156, 160, 203; see also national discourse; patriotism Super Commando Dhruv 1, 12, 90 – 91, 93, 98, 100n15; and evil 131, 133, 135, 136, 145, 148 – 149; and the fantastic familiar 101, 104 – 108, 106, 110 – 111; and gender 63, 64, 67, 67, 70 – 71, 74; and the Golden Age 52 – 53, 61n13; and the Platinum Age 197, 199, 211; reader dreams and 176, 180 – 181, 184, 190, 192; readers and 155, 162 – 170, 163; and the state 116, 118, 123, 126, 128 – 129 superheroes: angry 58 – 59; (extra)ordinary 52 – 54; forest guardian 56 – 57; golden age of 46 – 47; millennial 205 – 208; mytho-modern 49 – 52, 50; and national discourse 118 – 127, 125, 127; transhuman 54 – 56; the world of Indian

60; zeitgeist of 47 – 48; see also specific superheroes superheroism 203, 206 – 208; development of 30 – 35, 31, 33, 34; and gender 74; in the Golden Age 46, 49, 52, 60; and Raj Comics 86; readers and 168, 186, 191; and the rise of adventure comics 38, 41 – 42; see also desi superheroism; superheroes Super Indian 117 superpower 207; and evil 137, 149; and gender 77, 79; in the Golden Age 60; readers and 169, 183, 190; and the rise of adventure comics 30, 32; and the state 126 Supremo 12, 37 – 38, 53, 209 Tauji 28, 90 Tausi 35 techno-science 185 – 187, 193 television 7, 9, 12, 14, 197, 214n33; and evil 148; in the Golden Age 49; readers and 153, 164; and the rise of adventure comics 36; and the state 121 Tiranga 107, 150, 166; and the Golden Age 52 – 54, 60; and the state 116 – 120, 123, 128 Tiranga series 138, 160; see also Tiranga transgressors 168 – 170 truth 13; and gender 77; and the Golden Age 46, 59; readers and 158, 168, 171, 185; and the state 117; in superhero comics 121 – 127, 125, 127 Tulsi Comics 29 United States 3 – 4, 7, 12, 122; and evil 132; and the Golden Age 47 – 48, 54, 56; and the Platinum Age 202, 205 – 206, 209; and readers 182 – 184, 186; and the rise of adventure comics 19 – 20, 24 – 25, 32 – 33, 35, 38 – 39, 44 Vedacharya 51 Vetal (The Phantom) 12, 21, 24 – 25, 30, 43n18, 168 villainy 3, 6, 29, 48, 120; diversity in 133 – 143, 134, 136, 137, 140, 142; gender and 73 – 74; readers and 164, 184 – 185, 193 – 194; scenarios for 147 – 149; villain as homo bestia 132 – 133

Index  225

Vinashdoot 12, 39, 47, 88 Vinashdoot 34 Virgin Comics 200, 213n12 Visarpi 69 – 70, 135 – 136 Wahi, Tarun Kumar 51, 58, 74, 90, 93, 99n11 Weiss, Brad 198

women see gender Yodha 52, 92, 122 youth 4, 6, 11, 39; in the Platinum Age 198 – 200, 202; as readers 153, 166; youth culture 3, 8 – 10, 13 – 14, 204 Zero G 139, 140 zombies 52, 113, 147