amar chitra katha and its cultural ideology...the classic popular: amar chitra katha (1967-2007) by...

Review: Amar Chitra Katha and Its Cultural Ideology

Reviewed Work(s): The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha (1967-2007) by Nandini Chandra

Review by: Rupleena Bose

Source: Economic and Political Weekly , May 23 - 29, 2009, Vol. 44, No. 21 (May 23 - 29, 2009), pp. 33-35

Published by: Economic and Political Weekly

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40279032

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Amar Chitra Katha and

Its Cultural Ideology

RUPLEENABOSE

I have a passion for the epic: knights on chargers; two armies standing on either side of a dark plain on a misty morning three hun-

dred years ago, preparing for battle; luckless men downing raki and exchanging unhappy love stories in meyhanes on a winter's night; lovers disappearing into murky depths of the

city in pursuit of a dead secret - these are immortal tales I've longed to tell, but all god gave me was this column, which calls for an- other kind of story altogether. And He gave

me you, dear readers. - Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book

of brave warrior gods, conniv- ing demons, benevolent Hindu kings and clever ministers have

gripped the child growing up in post- colonial India. Stories of heroic battles and

stoic suffering brought to the comic book form meant for entertainment as well as

pedagogic purposes; Amar Chitra Katha has been associated uncritically with the

innocence and childhood memory itself.

However, the dark side of nostalgia often

comes to clearer light only in rare mo- ments of criticality. Housed in images from childhood and stories of a perfect

past, nostalgia translates into popular cul-

tural symbols remodelling itself as the classic. The contextual meanings of the terms classic and popular point to the way

studies of popular culture are necessary to

dig deeper into the so-called acceptable truths in popular imagination.

Nandini Chandra in The Classic Popular writes,

Hero worship, an integral part of children's literature is then put into the service of the life-narrative designed to foster national feeling. The premise of identifica- tion between hero and child is then magi- cally affected through a common religious bonding (ps).

Nandini Chandra's book intervenes

with the deepest insight into the nostalgic

glory of childhood, the heroes and myths that condition the minds of children and

The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha (1967- 2007) by Nandini Chandra (New Delhi: Yoda Press), 2008;

ppxv + 243,Rs395.

adults. In her exhaustive study of Amar Chitra Katha (ack) from 1967 to 2007, Chandra penetrates into the cultural pro-

duction of the popular comic strategically

started and marketed by Anant Pai as his

ideological project.

Hindu Myth, Hindu Nation Unlike the hyper-individualism portrayed

by the comic in the west, the comic in India

in an attempt to attract mass readership relies and furthers stereotypes from the

popular (read majoritarian) myths. Like the hero and heroine represented as the ideal masculine/feminine stereotypes in popular romance novels, ack found favour with the mass market with their careful

scripting of myth as history moulded into

dominant stereotypes. The "hero" is sel- dom secular and ack in its long history of

producing selective stories simply translates the communal subconscious of the

nation which saw Partition, 1984 riots,

Babri masjid demolition, Gujarat riots, and

so on. Through ack's communal agenda, Chandra further urges us to question our

own collective childhood in post-colonial

India and the apparatuses, which equate the Hindu with the national and the

Muslim with the invader. With visuals and

anchoring text, the child distanced from

the memory of Partition is conditioned with a skewed view of history and a hegemonic idea of culture under the authentic

claim of pedagogy by ack.

Using cultural theories of Walter Ben-

jamin, Barthes, Appadurai and others, Chandra looks not just at the comic form, but also at the interlinked economics of

popular forms like publishing, advertising,

cinema and the art form through the last five decades. What results is a brilliant

and an iconic study of the most popular comic book of post-colonial India and the

Hinduising ideology that it forwarded through the careful choice of stories from

an ideal "ancient" past. Charting ack as a

cultural product, The Classic Popular looks at the material conditions leading to the production of the comic which was

used by it's owner Anant Pai to posit an idea of "seamless Hindu tradition"

through tales from epics, freedom move-

ment and glories of the Vedic age against

the effects of colonial modernity and English education.

Chandra goes on to show how even sub- versive folk movements like Bhakti are

represented as symbols of liberal reforma- tive Hinduism. The reference to Bhakti as

religious as opposed to the radicalism of the Bhakti movement locates the comic

within a real market, a middle class/upper

caste readership and the prerogative of the editorial committee.

Pointing to the use of the "life narra-

tive" to tell the story of heroic figures in

history by Amar Chitra Katha, Chandra

compares it to the biographies in popular Hindi films, where both subsume the

conflicts of class, community and gender. And within the rubric of the comic/

pedagogic form that ack identified itself with, it creates a fable like heroism, where

conflict is only between the Hindu hero/

good and the deviant other/evil. This is easily achieved by ack as children's litera-

ture is seen as a genre defined by a specific market, where innocence and naturalness attributed to children demand

superficial meanings.

Commenting on Pai's interpretation of

history, Chandra reveals how parallel his-

tory normally associated with comics becomes in the case of Amar Chitra Katha, a

nationalist, Vaishnavite mode of history informed by the caste/class conditioning

and political leaning of Anant Pai. This is,

in turn, executed in the organisation through careful editorial control of the stories, texts, visuals and their possible meanings authenticated as glorious tales of Indian tradition. Writing on ack's align-

ments with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

Economic & Political weekly 12933 may 23, 2009 vol xliv no 21 33



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and the Hinduising drive of pedagogy by

the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), Chandra refers back to the National Democratic

Alliance government's attempts to doctor and communalise the National Council of

Education Research and Training text- books with the help of populist forms.

The becoming of ack comics as pedagogy and bjp's admiration towards Pai re-

veal the dangers of nationalism bordering on Hindutva, which draws its definition

from the 19th century anti-colonial strug-

gle. Where the comic in India has attem- pted to identify itself as indigenous by re-

working the form associated with western ideas, the effect has been the creation of

an idea of tradition which was projected as "modern". In post-colonial societies popular forms like comic, cinema become the vehicle of nation-building, where the "nation" is seen as monolithic and needs

to be defined in opposition to the value system created by colonialism. However, it needs to be noted that the idea of "tradi-

tion" upheld by nationalists in popular im-

agination was a historical construct as co-

lonialism needed to create the category of

"tradition" against which colonial moder-

nity was defined.

Both popular cinema and popular comics like ack are realistic art built on such

an hegemonic idea of "Indianness" that seeks to create a nation, where history is

synonymous with Hindu myths and the Muslim invaders are shown to be outsiders

violating the purity of brahminical system

of culture and governance.

Picture Book Realism

Ravi Varma, it appears here, was crucial not so much for his trademark realism but

for being Ravi Varma, a highly revered

symbol of Hinduness. Consequently, when

ack artists invoked Ravi Varma, they were

using his name as shorthand for a national

consensus on what was Indian (p 87). Sandria Freitag mentions that visual

culture in India dates from the religious

act of darsan prevalent in the act of view-

ing god (Christopher Pinney and Rachel

Dwyer, éd., Pleasure and the Nation (New Delhi: oup) 2001: 35-67). The film narrative was an extension of the visual culture

dramatising mythologies for the viewers

along with calendar art which used aca- demic realism of Ravi Varma's portraits to

create popular visual references of Hindu

gods and goddesses. The comic too through the picture tales of religious myths is part of the same visual culture of

darsan premising itself on the realistic style of painting used by Varma.

Chandra's interview with artist Waeerkar

reveals that the Ravi Varma style of draw-

ing was chosen to create the warrior, ro-

man image of Ram and the Kannadapot/n

tradition of bearded Ram initially drawn

by him for ack was rejected. The symbolic

world of illustrations leads the young read-

ers to associate fair, roman, upper caste Hindu features as naturally good and the

bearded sharp-jawed signifying the evil and lecherous Muslim. The illustrations

are used to draw a recognisable visual link

between upper caste brahmins, gods, and

finally, Ram. Chandra analyses the illus-

trations used in ack through her extensive

study of the class and ideological positions

of the artists rendering the images of her-

oism, valour, evil into styles borrowed from the cinematic angles and frames of

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34 may 23, 2009 vol. xi. iv no 21 GEES Economic & Political wkkki.i



- - -

mainstream film industry. Discussing the

caste and class compositions of the editorial and artistic team of ack, Chandra dis-

cusses the brahmin hegemony of the per-

sonal and political space of the ack team. Through interviews and cultural context of the artists, Chandra weaves forward

her argument of ack's liberal Hindu poli-

cies which cleverly exploits the "uneven split between the visual projected as pop-

ular and textual as elite" (p 12).

Bringing out the clash between the illu-

strators' own artistic styles and the over-

arching policy of Pai, Chandra gives the

example of the Mira/Krishna story in ack.

Drawn by the only Muslim illustrator in ack, Yusuf Lien, Chandra narrates the dis- illusionment of Yusuf Lien from the work-

ing system of ack and its right wing agen-

da. She goes on to notice that the Yusuf s strokes of Mira and Krishna creates a fluid

androgynous image of the man making him softer than the hardened masculine

figures in other ack comics. Yet interest-

ingly, it is revealed that Yusuf Lien was

never used to sketch the stories of Mughal

kings most of which were done by other Hindu illustrators, who worked on the

given brief and were politically inclined towards Pai and the ack ideology. This argument further suggests that like any market- driven exercise, Pai used the indi-

vidual skills of the artists leaving them little autonomy or authorial control to visualise their imagination.

What surfaces from The Classic Popular

are important questions on the cultural conditions leading to the current polar- ised present of south Asia. Further, it urges us to locate ack in the context of waning ideas of Nehruvian socialism and the radical questioning of the foundations

of the state during the Naxalite movement. The late 1960s leading to the emer-

gency saw the basic foundations of democracy and the Indian nation state questioned. Possibly one of the reasons leading to reactionary nationalism, where

the comic form instead of bringing forth the alternative forwarded the values of

the mainstream and a problematic idea of the secular. The non-conformism of the

1960s towards the state machinery is silenced instead creating a historical dis-

tance from the present by locating the stories in an "ideal" past.

Chandra's analysis leads one to imagine the possibilities that could have come out of ack instead of the Hinduised nation

that it attempts to build. As the longest running comic book, ack still inhabits a symbolic space in popular imagination, where the stories like nostalgic old film tunes are now available through Vodafone

with advertisements emphasising on the contemporary appeal of the stories.

In such a moment Chandra's book

urges the reader into a steady admittance of the way nostalgia left attended often leads the collective consciousness to cre-

ate "classics" out of popular forms, where

history is scripted out of communal and

caste stereotypes.

Email: [email protected]

The High Priests of Mammon

ANAND CHANDAVARKAR

universe divides naturally into the trinity: god (divinity); Caesar

(polity), and mammon (economy), whose high priests are the principal pro-

tagonists of this fascinating book detailing the lives and career of the central bank

governors of the United Kingdom (Mon-

tagu Norman, 1920-44); United States (Benjamin Strong, 1914-28); France (Emile Moreau, 1925-30); and Germany (Hjalmar Schacht, 1923-30, 1933-39); and their role

in the world economy. Largely unheard of

in 1914, the Big Four constituted by 1926,

just before the onset of the Great Depres-

sion of 1928-32, the "most exclusive club in

the world". They were determined in con-

cert to resolve the depression through an

unwavering adherence to the gold stand- ard - "a barbarous relic" (John Maynard

Keynes). They had the capacity and power

to "crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,"

which they fulfilled very much in the spirit

of captain Ahab's relentless pursuit of

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the

World by Liaquat Ahamed {New York: Penguin Press),

2009; pp 564, $32.95 (hardcover).

Moby Dick, or, the White Whale, in Hermann Melville's classic.

Biographical History of Depression This book could be regarded as a biographical history of the Great Depression

written from the novel perspective of the

governors of the principal central banks (Bank of England, the Federal Reserve System, the Reichsbank, and the Banque de France) who sought to reconstruct the

system of international finance after the

first world war, deriving their mandate

from their governments who then believed

- mistakenly as it turned out - that mat- ters of finance are best left to bankers,

who alone can fathom the mystique and arcana of finance. Winston Churchill was

not the only finance minister to be

stumped by those "damned dots" of budget

figures. Small wonder, finance has always been the Petri dish of conspiracy theories

to which even the economist prime minis-

ter of Britain, Harold Wilson and a former

Oxford don, fell prey when he accused the

gnomes of Zurich of sinister intent against

the British pound.

The epistemic stance of the book is well conveyed by its lead epigraph: "Read

no history - nothing but biography, for that is life without theory" (Benjamin Disraeli). An approach not too dissimilar

to that of the distinguished Oxford histo-

rian, Lewis Namier, well-described by Isaiah Berlin as a "sort of Pointillism, the

'microscopic method', the splitting up of social facts into details of individual

lives - atomic entities, the careers of which could be precisely verified; and these atoms could then be integrated into

greater wholes... with a marvellous power

of imaginative generalisation" (Personal

Impressions, Viking Press, New York, 1980; 81-2). Traditionally, central banks have been the subject of institutional histories like those of the Bank of England

by John Clapham, John Fforde and R S Sayers.

Economic & Political weekly ISSE3 may 23, 2009 vol xliv no 21 35



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