Graphic Narratives and the Mythological Imagination in India 9780367272869, 9780367272876, 9780429295928

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
List of plates
Note on transliteration
Preface
1 Mythological revisionings
2 Comic gags and the Mahabharata War
3 From comic book to folk performance
4 Myths, science fiction, and Indian superheroes
5 Words and images: The craft of comics narration
References
Index

Citation preview

GRAPHIC NARRATIVES AND THE MYTHOLOGICAL IMAGINATION IN INDIA

This book explores graphic narratives and comics in India and demonstrates how these forms serve as sites on which myths are enacted and recast. It uses the case studies of a comics version of the Mahabharata War, a folk artist’s rendition of a comic book story, and a commercial project to re-imagine two of India’s most famous epics – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – as science fiction and superhero tales. It discusses comic books and self-published graphic novels; bardic performance aided with painted scrolls and commercial superhero comics; myths, folklore, and science fiction; and different pictorial styles and genres of graphic narration and storytelling. It also examines the actual process of the creation of comics besides discussions with artists on the tools and location of the comics medium as well as the method and impact of translation and crossover genres in such narratives. With its clear, lucid style and rich illustrations, the book will be useful to scholars and researchers of sociology, anthropology, visual culture and media, and South Asian studies, as well as those working on art history, religion, popular culture, graphic novels, art and design, folk culture, literature, and performing arts. Roma Chatterji is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. Apart from an abiding interest in folklore, art, and narrative theory, she has worked on illness narratives and collective violence. She is the author of Writing Identities: Folklore and Performance in Purulia, West Bengal (2009) and Speaking with Pictures (2012), and co-author of Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life (2007). She is editor of Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Instruction (2015) and co-editor of Riot Discourses (2007).

GRAPHIC NARRATIVES AND THE MYTHOLOGICAL IMAGINATION IN INDIA

Roma Chatterji

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Roma Chatterji The right of Roma Chatterji to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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. Efforts have been made to contact owners of copyright regarding the visual material reproduced in this book. Perceived omissions if brought to notice will be rectified in future printing. The author and publisher apologise if inadvertently any source remains unacknowledged. 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: 978-0-367-27286-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-27287-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-29592-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of figures vi viii List of plates Note on transliteration x Prefacexi 1 Mythological revisionings

1

2 Comic gags and the Mahabharata War

17

3 From comic book to folk performance

34

4 Myths, science fiction, and Indian superheroes

54

5 Words and images: The craft of comics narration

90

References105 Index111

FIGURES

0.1 1.1 1.2 1.3

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

The Birth of Christ, 1st Frame. Artist: Jaideb Chitrakar. Author’s Collection.xiii The Pinocchio Scroll, 1st Frame. Artist: Swarna Chitrakar, 2009. Author’s Collection. 4 Cover Page, Nagraj, Vol. 9. Artist: Pratap Mullick, n.d. Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics. 7 Nagayana, Varan Kaand, Vol. 1, 1st two pages, Chapter 1, “Paap ka Beej.” Artist: Anupam Sinha, 2017, pp. 6–7. Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics. 8 Chilka. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated. Courtesy of 24 Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura. Chilka. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated. Courtesy of 26 Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura. Chilka. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated. Courtesy of 27 Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura. Chilka. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated. Courtesy of 28 Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura. Mice Will Be Mice. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated. 40 Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura. Mice Will Be Mice. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated. 43 Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura. Mice Will Be Mice. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated. 44 Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura. Mice Will Be Mice. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated. 46 Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura. Mice Will Be Mice. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated. Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura. 49

Figures  vii

3.6 3.7 4.1 4.2 4.3

4.4

4.5

4.6

5.1

5.2

5.3

5.4

Mice Will Be Mice. Artist, Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated. Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura. Mice Will Be Mice. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated. Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura. Nagayana, Haran Kaand, Chapter 4, “Vanavaas.” Artist: Anupam Sinha, 2017, p. 39. Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics. Nagayana, Haran Kaand, Chapter 4, “Vanavaas.” Artist: Anupam Sinha, 2017, p. 43. Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics. Damned: Vampire Monks of Piyang, Vol. 1. Cover Page Art: Tarun Kumar Sahu and Tadam Gayadu, 2016. Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics. VRICA: Dawn of the Wolf. Art: Tamal Saha and Tarun Kumar Sahu, n.d. Unpaginated. Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics. Damned: Vampire Monks of Piyang, Vol. 1. Unpaginated. Art: Tarun Kumar Sahu and Tadam Gayadu, 2016. Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics. Damned: Vampire Monks of Piyang, Vol. 1. Unpaginated. Art: Tarun Kumar Sahu and Tadam Gayadu, 2016. Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics. Ramayan 3392 AD, Vol. 1 by Shamik Dasgupta, Deepak Chopra, Shekhar Kapur, Alex Ross (Artist), Abhishek Singh (Artist), Ashwin Chikerur (Artist), Virgin Comics/Liquid Comics, 2007. Unpaginated. Courtesy of Abhishek Singh and Graphic India. VRICA: Dawn of the Wolf. Art: Tamal Saha and Tarun Kumar Sahu, n.d. Unpaginated. Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics. Nagayana, Varan Kaand, Chapter 2, “Paap ka Beej.” Artist: Anupam Sinha, 2017, pp. 50–57. Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics. Nagayana, Grahan Kaand, Chapter 3, “Vidai.” Artist: Anupam Sinha, 2017, pp. 40–41. Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics.

50 51 67 68

76

78

80

81

92

94

98 99

PLATES

  1 The Pinocchio Scroll, 4th Frame. Artist: Swarna Chitrakar, 2009. Author’s Collection.   2 Cover Page, Nagayana, Varan Kanda, Vol. 1, Cover Page, Chapter 1, “Paap ka Beej.” Artist: Anupam Sinha, 2017, pp. 4–5. Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics.   3 The Mouse’s Story, First Three Frames. Artist: Dukhushyam Chitrakar, n.d. Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.   4 The Mouse’s Story, Last Two Frames. Artist: Dukhushyam Chitrakar, n.d. Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.   5 VRICA: Dawn of the Wolf. Art: Tamal Saha and Tarun Kumar Sahu, n.d. Unpaginated. Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics.   6 VRICA: Dawn of the Wolf. Art: Tamal Saha and Tarun Kumar Sahu, n.d. Unpaginated. Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics.   7 Ramayan 3392 AD, Vol. 1 by Shamik Dasgupta, Deepak Chopra, Shekhar Kapur, Alex Ross (Artist), Abhishek Singh (Artist), Ashwin Chikerur (Artist), Virgin Comics/Liquid Comics, 2007. Unpaginated. Courtesy of Abhishek Singh and Graphic India.   8 Ramayan 3392 AD, Vol. 1 by Shamik Dasgupta, Deepak Chopra, Shekhar Kapur, Alex Ross (Artist), Abhishek Singh (Artist), Ashwin Chikerur (Artist), Virgin Comics/Liquid Comics, 2007. Unpaginated. Courtesy of Abhishek Singh and Graphic India.

Plates  ix

  9 Ramayan 3392 AD, Vol. 1 by Shamik Dasgupta, Deepak Chopra, Shekhar Kapur, Alex Ross (Artist), Abhishek Singh (Artist), Ashwin Chikerur (Artist), Virgin Comics/Liquid Comics, 2007. Unpaginated. Courtesy of Abhishek Singh and Graphic India. 10 Ramayan 3392 AD, Vol. 1 by Shamik Dasgupta, Deepak Chopra, Shekhar Kapur, Alex Ross (Artist), Abhishek Singh (Artist), Ashwin Chikerur (Artist), Virgin Comics/Liquid Comics, 2007. Unpaginated. Courtesy of Abhishek Singh and Graphic India.

TRANSLITERATION

I have tried to approximate the North Indian pronunciation of names and commonly used words as far as possible and kept to their Sanskritic forms only when there is a reference to the classical texts. Thus, for example, “Ram” and “kaand” when the reference is to the comics text and “Rama” and “kanda” when the terms reference the Sanskrit texts.

PREFACE

Intermediality and the narrative tradition in India As a sociologist working on oral traditions, I have an abiding interest in myths, not merely as explicit tales based on authoritative sources but as narrative fragments that circulate in society through the currency of everyday speech. In India such narrative fragments are sometimes called kimvadanti, utterances that travel freely from mouth to ear. The idea that mythic lore is kimvadanti seems to suggest a fundamental truth about the nature of living myths – that they are omnipresent in society so that most people’s knowledge of their myths is fragmentary and illusive, but there is nevertheless an affective connection to an immanent tradition and to a narrative universe. Thus, myths are not author-driven texts but rather stories that are always in the process of being heard and narrated and carry an emotional charge precisely because any new telling will awaken memories of previous tellings and contexts of performance (Foley 1992). It is this aspect of living mythology that gave the impetus for this work – the fact that stories are ubiquitous, not just through repeated narration but also by the fact that the medium of their transmission is constantly evolving so that every act of narration is a kind of re-mediation. Comics, a contemporary medium with roots in both myth and traditional forms of storytelling, seemed to offer an appropriate frame through which the process of re-mediation could be studied. “Remediation” and “intermediation” are processes that acquire renewed currency in the study of new cross-over media such as animation and video games. But what is sometimes forgotten is that mythological texts like the Ramayana and Mahabharata continue to be an integral part of popular culture precisely through such processes. Scholars such as Ramanujan (1991) have shown how these epics are not merely discrete texts but rather meta-universes that provide pools of signifiers for new compositions. In a famous essay on the “task of the translator,” Walter Benjamin (1968)

xii Preface

says that the translation of a text from one language to another extends the scope of the original language of the text by enabling it to open itself out to the other and absorb its influence. It allows the text to circulate beyond its intended audience and acquire new significance and added layers of meaning (see also Barber 2007). One could extend the scope of the term “translation” and use it as a metaphor to refer to the processes of inter-medial exchange such as the process by which a story from an oral epic is re-made and narrated afresh as a comic book (see Chatterji 2012; McLain 2009). Such forms of “translation” may also lead to new paths of circulation for these traditional narrative forms as they are accessed by new kinds of audiences, resulting in further modification in the traditional genres as artists and writers adapt their narratives and storytelling traditions to the tastes and demands of such audiences, reconfiguring the whole narrative universe in the process (Kopytoff 1986). Garry Saul Morson (1994) uses the term “side-shadowing” to refer to the ways in which some texts are open ended, allowing their characters to explore alternative destinies within the space of the narrative. In India the epic provides such a space, enabling newer variants to link up with the larger narrative universe by providing alternative destinies for epic heroes in keeping with the changing times. After the slow decline of Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), the once-popular comics brand, India is witnessing a kind of comics renaissance with a host of new ventures that range from mainstream commercial adaptations of literary and mythic stories to small, self-published comics and intellectually ambitious graphic novels. Some of the more interesting projects involve translations between traditional forms of picture storytelling and the comics medium. Unlike the ACK project that tried to craft its brand identity in terms of a pan-Indian nationalism rooted in myth and history, many of these new experiments attempt a more reflexive engagement with “Indian” tradition by tapping into pictorial vocabularies that have not been influenced by either the dominant ACK style or those made popular by the American superhero genres. Among the more interesting aspects of these crossover experiments is the friction generated by the use of traditional pictorial narrative forms to tell new stories on the one hand and the presence of typical comic book gags in comics re-telling of episodes from epics like the Mahabharata on the other. I explore three such experiments – a comics version of the Mahabharata War, pictured in a hybrid manga style; a folk artist’s rendition of a comic book story into a form of bardic narration; and a commercial project that attempts to re-imagine the Ramayana and Mahabharata, as science fiction, superhero stories. This book has been long in the making, and I have incurred many debts along the way. Without the generosity of comics creators, publishers, and artists such as Vidyun Sabhaney, Shohei Emura, Abhishek Singh, Aniruddho Chakraborty, Anupam Sinha, Sanjay Gupta, Manoj Gupta, Amitabh Kumar, Dukhushyam Chitrakar, and Swarna Chitrakar, this book would not have been possible. Discussions with students Jyoti Gupta, Saumya Malviya, Virin Chopra and Amaan Shreyas have contributed to shaping my ideas. My former teacher Veena Das has always supported me in my research endeavors and encouraged me to work on visual images. I also thank Emma Dawson Varughese, Parul Dave Mukherji, Swayam Bagaria,

FIGURE 0.1  The

Birth of Christ, 1st Frame. Artist: Jaideb Chitrakar.

Source: Author’s Collection.

xiv Preface

and Sasanka Perera. My nephew and niece, Akshay Raj and Aditi Chatterji, photographed all the images that appear in this book. The initial research for this book was supported by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) with a grant from Titan Watches. I am grateful to Tanveer Ajsi for encouraging me to apply to the IFA. I am grateful to Vidyun Sabhaney, Shohei Emura, Aniruddho Chakraborty, and Chariot Comics; Abhishek Singh and Graphic India; and Manish Gupta and Raj Comics for permission to use images from their publications. Chapter 2, “Comic Gags and the Mahabharata War,” first appeared as an article in Society and Culture in South Asia, 2(1), 2015, pp. 127–146. The cover of the paperback edition of this book features a detail of the first frame of The Birth of Christ by Jaideb Chitrakar. Inspired by the design of the comics page, in the original frame (see Figure 0.1) the artist incorporates speech balloons in his painted scroll to narrate the story of the nativity, which would have been sung by a bard as an accompaniment to the display of the scroll as part of the traditional narrative performance.

1 MYTHOLOGICAL REVISIONINGS

Sita fills the sky, a woman clothed with the Sun. I watch as she descends through the atmosphere, bringing the light of day to the night sky to prove to the world her ordeal by fire. Agni Pariksha1

In Sita’s Descent, a short story by Indrapramit Das (2012), Sita is an artificial nebula sheathed in the fire of the sun that is in imminent danger of colliding with Earth. Along with two other such constructs, Rama and Ravana, she is a creation of the Indian government, which in an attempt to display its scientific and technological prowess to the world has created a cosmic drama based on the Ramayana. It is only when the nebula becomes aware of its identity as Sita that it changes its trajectory, affirming its role as a preserver of life and not a destroyer, and chooses to exile itself in space in the hope that it will meet species who are more appreciative of the goddess Sita’s benevolence. In another story, The Other Woman by Manjula Padmanabhan (2012) in the same science fiction anthology, Mandodari comes down to Earth to remind us, via cable television, that the protagonists of the Ramayana are creatures of myth who have nothing to do with earthly battles over birthplaces.2 As immortals they can neither die, nor are they born, and their stories are repeated again and again in mythic time. All the stories mentioned previously use the time-travel motif as a metanarrative device to align the time of the story with the reader’s own sense of temporality – a sense of a present future in which the “what if ” mode of the science fiction genre becomes a space for imaginatively exploring contemporary concerns (Wittenberg 2013). However, the palimpsestic nature of mythical stories already assumes a layering and juxtaposition of different chronicities as the idea of multiple re-tellings, across time and space, is built into the very structure of such narratives. Some contemporary

2  Mythological revisionings

authors use the chiranjeevi, the immortal, as a sutradhar or storyteller to cast light on particular aspects of these ancient tales. The two divine sages Narada and Vyasa are the sutradhars mentioned in some of the re-imaginings of the Mahabharata discussed in Chapters 2 and 4. Hanuman, the vanara (monkey) warrior and Rama devotee, is the sutradhar of a graphic retelling of certain portions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata by Vikram Balagopal (2014); the river Ganga and the cursed protagonist from the Mahabharata, Ashvatthama, are the sutradhars in two illuminated picture books by Amruta Patil (Patil 2012, 2016). In such cases the problem of “presentness” – the question of a past that is to be reconstituted within the present – becomes a “literal topos” narrated as an eyewitness account enabling an “authentic” re-telling which may be different from the dominant narrative (Wittenberg 2013:14). In many of these stories the motif of play is used as a theme, framing the events so that they appear as traces of a remote past, dismembered from their temporal context to appear in a present that is ours. Discussing the relationship between play and ritual, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben paraphrases Emile Benveniste to say that play transforms the realm of the sacred so that it becomes a “topsy-turvey sacred” (1993: 78). If rituals function to collapse the difference between the mythic past and our present, then play, transforming mythic events into hierophanies, does the opposite by breaking the connection between past and present and disaggregates the synchronic structures of ritual into discrete events (Agamben 1993: 83; Cantlie 2003: 836). In this volume we examine graphic stories that use temporal dislocation as a device to reframe the epics in novel ways. The efficacy of the comics medium in re-narrativizing Indian mythology has been amply demonstrated through the success of commercial imprints such as Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories) and Campfire comics. However, in these publications attempts at contemporization tend to be limited to the rationalization of discordant elements in the myths that may seem incongruous to our modernist temperament (McLain 2009). The comics that we examine tend to be more “irreverent” in their interpretations of the epics using the trope of fantasy to recast the epics as adventure stories with a cliffhanger structure (Wandtke 2012). One of the ways in which commercial comics sustain contemporary relevance is through the technique of “retcon” (retroactive continuity) – that is, by re-writing the “continuity” or history of long-running characters to retain their commercial viability. The comics discussed here do the same with the epics. The Ramayana and Mahabharata have been subject to re-visioning for centuries as they are adapted to different types of narrative and performative genres. The comic book re-tellings continue this tradition, requiring not just prior knowledge of the narrative universe but also a willingness to suspend this knowledge and participate in the act of re-visioning.

Comics and pictorial storytelling in India Comics in India have come a long way from their early beginnings as strip cartoons in newspaper supplements to become an autonomous medium able to experiment

Mythological revisionings  3

not only with thematic content but pictorial vocabulary as well. India has a flourishing industry in commercial comics that not only adapt well-known stories but also produce new characters inspired by vernacular culture around which specific narrative genres have developed. India also has a subculture of alternative comics with creators who are experimenting with different kinds of pictorial styles. The range is vast – spanning the dominant American style of superhero comics and adaptations of Japanese manga on the one hand to various indigenous painting styles on the other. Tara Books and Navayana are two publishers who have been at the forefront of such experimentations using folk styles to tell stories culled from genres as diverse as history, didactic reformist tracts, autobiography, and fairy tales. Since most folk-art forms have developed in ritual contexts, they tend to give a sacred aura even to supposedly realistic narratives. Thus in one of Tara Books’s cross-over projects the retelling of the life story of Martin Luther King by a traditional picture storyteller from Bengal gives the historical events in King’s life a folkloric aura (Flowers et al. 2010). In another of their projects in which a folk artist was asked to re-imagine Carlo Collodi’s classic children’s story, Pinocchio, not only did the artist use familiar figures from Indian mythology to bring the Italian story closer to home, such as modeling Pinocchio on the figure of the baby Krishna, but she also used traditional aesthetic devices such as frontality to create a face-to-face, two-way exchange between the viewer and the viewed – a feature that is normally associated with religious icons (Collodi and Chitrakar 2014).3 Swarna Chitrakar, the artist, was so inspired by the fact that narrative voices could actually be contained in the pictorial medium of comics that she incorporated the speech balloon as a figural motif in a scroll painting of the story. In the first frame of her scroll, the tree that will eventually provide the wood for the puppet Pinocchio is already animated by the addition of two wide, staring eyes, brimming with tears, looking out at the viewers in an act of direct visual communication that Diana Eck (1986) associates with sacred icons (see Figure 1.1). Further down in the depiction of an event that initiates Pinocchio’s adventures as a delinquent, i.e., when he kills the talking cricket, Chitraker shows the cricket’s life blood seeping out of its mouth in the form of an elongated, red speech balloon covered in symmetrical rows of black lines as if to suggest that its words were oozing out of its body along with its life (see Plate 1). The speech balloon as an iconographic element in comics seems to hold a particular fascination for folk artists, perhaps because of its synesthetic potential, bringing an aural dimension into the visual text, a subject discussed in Chapter 5. In the Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability, a comic re-telling of Bhim Rao Ambedkar’s life, the Pardhan-Gond artists Durga and Subhash Vyam use bird and insect silhouettes to connote auditory aspects of speech. Thus the outline of a dove is used for words uttered in a soft voice and a scorpion’s tail for harsh, hurtful speech.4 The transformation of the semantically neutral shape of the speech balloon into a meaningful form transforms utterances into metaphors that speak of the tension between different discourses on caste – the subalterns, the victims of the caste system who accept the system and naturalize it through their seemingly innocent speech, and

Pinocchio Scroll, 1st Frame. Artist: Swarna Chitrakar, 2009.

Source: Author’s Collection.

FIGURE 1.1  The

Mythological revisionings  5

those like Ambedkar who seek to problematize the system – whose words carry a sting like the sharp sting on the scorpion’s tail (Natarajan et al. 2011). Commercial Indian superhero comics may at first sight seem to follow conventional Western art styles to portray their characters, but closer attention to panel arrangement on the comics page reveals an emphasis on “aspect-to aspect” transitions between panels where the eye of the reader is expected to roam across the comics page, surveying a scene from multiple perspectives, absorbing details that may not be directly relevant for the situation being portrayed. In his influential book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud (1993) says that panel arrangements of this type are a characteristic feature of Japanese manga comics and are found very rarely in comics in the West, where “action-to-action” and “subject-to-subject” panel transitions may be the norm emphasizing the focused, “goal oriented” culture expressed in the latter (ibid. 81). According to McCloud, manga reflects a narrative orientation that works with cyclical time characteristic of Eastern literary traditions. Speaking from the vantage point of a different narrative medium, the avant-garde film maker Kumar Shahani has termed this the “epic mode” ( Jayamane 2015: 9). Using the parable of the archery contest in the Mahabharata where the young prince Yudhishtira is about to compete with his siblings, Shahani describes Yudhishtira’s inability to shoot at the bull’s eye as an example of the epic vision – of the eye that roams across the totality of a scene taking in details that disallow the kind of focused attention necessary to become a successful archer. The superhero stories discussed in Chapter 4 all use a de-centered approach, taking advantage of the serial format to open up multiple pathways in the story very much like the bards in the oral tradition who stitch together tales of epic proportions from narrative fragments. Terrance Wandtke (2012) has argued that superhero comics form a distinctive genre that is best understood within the perspective of oral literature since these comics pass through multiple creators and consist of complex layers of myths, folktales, and epic sagas that have an affinity with the oral repertoires of traditional bards. The evolution of extended story arcs, multi-part narratives, and serialization echoes the narrative rhythm of epic sagas, resonating with the pluri-centred character of the epics. In serialized comics, narratives are not arranged in a hierarchical order oriented towards a focal point. Instead they consist of open-ended episodes that form a metonymic series. Nagayana, a superhero series discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, also exhibits this kind of metonymic relationality with its chief protagonist appearing as an assemblage of qualities culled from different narrative sources.5 Thus, Nagraj (Serpent King), the hero of the series, has a body that is composed of myriad microscopic serpents that lend him their diverse powers (shakti), but each one of them is also a distinct personality that has the power to emerge from his body and take on anthropomorphic form. Unlike the shape-shifting snakes that inhabit his body, Nagraj is fully human but has been transformed by the poison (halahala) that he was forced to ingest when still a fetus in his mother’s womb – the poison causing his white blood cells to mutate into snakes. Nagraj’s world is shaped by the metonymic connections forged between the snakes, their venom, and Nagraj’s physical form. He has poison breath and a

6  Mythological revisionings

serpent’s scaly skin but like the archetypal superhero is attractive to women. Like his Western counterparts he is valorous and noble, but his generosity and protectiveness towards humans are most likely inspired by India’s serpent lore and his celibacy by her hero myths (Gill 1986). The Nagraj story arc that we explore in Chapter 4 is inspired by the Ramayana and conforms loosely to its overarching plot without engaging the spiritual aspects of the epic. However, like its source text it seeks to connect the disparate registers of the natural, the social, and the cosmic without necessarily arranging them in a hierarchical order (Danielou 2017). Instead the story reveals an expansive universe in which all things are connected through bonds of affinity and similitude (Silverman 2009). In Chilka and Mice Will Be Mice, stories discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, these ideas are explored through the stylistic choices made by the artist, Shohei Emura. He uses variable panel shapes to reflect the moods of his characters and the affects generated by the empanelled scenes so that style itself becomes a potentiality that enables certain narrative choices to be made.

Intertextuality and the language of Indian comics The characters of all the comics discussed in this volume have back histories that establish inter-textual relations with folktales, myths, and epics. But the particular visual styles in which these characters are imagined also have an afterlife. Thus, on the surface, Nagraj looks like a typical American superhero dressed in a skin-tight suit with boots and briefs that are worn over his pants. It is only through his back story that we learn that what appears as a tight-fitting green body suit is actually reptilian skin and the coif of hair on his head is shaped like a serpent’s hood but also echoes the sacred ushnisha that crowns the head of the Buddha icon and is a mark of his spiritual enlightenment (see Figure 1.2). The image of the Indian superhero is hybrid, composed of multiple narrative elements that reflect diverse iconological influences. The Nagayana story arc adds another layer to this hybrid image. Since the Nagraj of this series is layered over the persona of Rama, his image also carries some of the visual symbols that we associate with contemporary politicized representations of the warrior hero such as a bow and a quiver full of arrows strung across his shoulders, his muscular upper body draped in a flowing shawl (­angavastra) – attributes that are absent from the Nagraj image found in other stories associated with this character (see Plate 2).6 The serialized architecture of the comics page on which panels are arranged in sequence is particularly suited to the interlacing of different temporalities and is used in the Nagayana to juxtapose a back story set in Treta yuga (the second age in the cosmic cycle) in the time of Rama and Ravana with the story’s present. Anupam Sinha, the creative director of the series, uses the idea of cyclical time to bring the events of the Ramayana into his story. But unlike the mythic events of the Ramayana that stand outside time and emerge in our present through ritual repetition, for the purposes of the Nagayana they become part of its background history. Thus the opening pages of the story show a historian talking about a comet

FIGURE 1.2 Cover

Page, Nagraj, Vol. 9. Artist: Pratap Mullick, n.d.

Source: Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics.

Source: Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics.

FIGURE 1.3  Nagayana, Varan Kaand, Vol. 1, 1st two pages, Chapter 1,“Paap ka Beej.” Artist: Anupam Sinha, 2017, pp. 6–7.

Mythological revisionings  9

that is about to hit the planet Earth, comparing it to the comet that collided with the planet in the Treta yuga and unleashed chaos through the birth of Ravana and the actions of his demonic hordes – events chronicled in “historical” documents called puranas (see Figure 1.3). Mythic time takes on a different form of representation in 18 Days, a re-telling of the Mahabharata in the science fiction mode that is discussed in Chapter 4. The immortal (chiranjeevi) sage Markandeya is depicted as a supercomputer with a powerful memory bank in which events that took place in all the previous yugas (ages) are archived. For Grant Morrison, the writer, cyclical time is time as conceptualized by the virtual archive in which documented events from different times and places are co-present (Morrison 2014). The “spatialization” of time, a distinctive feature of the comics medium enabled by its serialized and sequential structure, is used to bring archaic elements into the present of these stories, creating a discordant rhythm in which the regular pacing of the story suggested by the grid-like arrangement of the panels is suddenly broken by the insertion of an event that occurs in a different place and time. Thus in an episode that is clearly inspired by Sita’s swayamvara (bridegroom selection contest) in the Ramayana, Visarpi, the female protagonist in the Nagayana, is in a dilemma about her choice of suitor. “Only God can save me now,” she exclaims. The next panel cuts to a different scene that shows the android simulacra of Drona, a warrior sage in the Mahabharata, coaching Nagraj in the use of advanced weapons technology. An ironic caption connects the two scenes: “But God does not incarnate himself again and again” (Sinha and Sinha 2017e: 64). What is implicit in this comment is that we now have superheroes instead – a connection that has deeper connotations that are likely to resonate with the readers of the series. Nagraj is supposed to be a favored disciple of Guru Gorakhnath, a historical figure who is associated with an important philosophical school of thought and yogic tradition but also appears in Indian folktales and hero myths. According to Gorakhnath’s yogic philosophy, we are what we consume – the consumer is also the consumed (Banerjea 1962). Thus Nagraj, who is poisoned while still in his mother’s womb, becomes the vessel that contains the poison now transformed into superhuman power (shakti) and a being who now shares substance with serpents, which are normally seen as enemies of human beings. Even though the creators of Nagraj acknowledge the influence of American superhero comics, there is also a subtext to his story that is rooted in Indian folklore – a source that is so much a part of the habitus of Nagraj’s reading public that it seems to go unnoticed.7 In an article on the politicization of Rama’s iconography, Anuradha Kapur (1993) shows how traditional representations of the serene, beatific images of the traditional icon gave way in the 1980s and 90s to a muscular, wrathful warrior figure poised in the act of shooting his weapon due to political mobilization around the Rama temple in Ayodhya. Traditional iconography forbids the depiction of bodily musculature in images of divine beings. Typically, gods are not shown in action poses, even when portrayed in the heat of battle, but rather hypostasized at the moment when the action has been completed (Kapur 1993: 89). Weapons become attributes that have a symbolic function revealing the divine energies associated with the deity thus depicted. What then are the iconographic sources that have shaped the contemporary political image of Rama as divine warrior? Among

10  Mythological revisionings

the diverse sources described by Kapur, two stand out for the ways in which they have shaped popular aesthetics in modern India. The first is the contribution of single-point perspective in painting and its ability to create the illusion of reality. Raja Ravi Verma’s realistic depictions of mythological scenes and figures enabled by his mastery of Western painterly techniques and his use of modern reproduction technology have had a lasting impact on popular religious art. Kapur mentions a second, less significant source – melodramatic Hollywood epics. But surely we must also consider the influence of American superhero comics of the 1930s and 40s that must have shaped cinematic depictions of epic action heroes in Hollywood and also appeared in India for the first time during the Second World War?8 In a series of essays on the multiple influences on Indian popular art, Christopher Pinney (1995, 1997) criticizes Kapur for assuming a direct causality between political events, geographical location, and popular iconography and shows how diverse historical forces such as theatre, photography, techniques of reproduction, previous iconographic traditions including conventional modes of image display, and nascent ideologies of nationalism worked in tandem throughout the 19th century to culminate in the conventions of realism associated with popular poster art in India today. In the light of Pinney’s insights into the multifarious sources that went into the making of contemporary poster art, we now explore some of the sources that may have influenced the imaging of Indian superheroes such as Nagraj. Amar Chitra Katha, one of India’s most successful comics publishers who specialize in rendering Hindu myths, had already transformed deities like Rama into superheroes in the 1960s. Its founder, Anand Pai, avoided frontality and other ritual modes of depiction in his imaging of divine figures. Not only did divine heroes like Rama and Krishna display musculature befitting their warrior status, but artists were also advised on how to position deities on comics covers so that their eyes never gazed directly outward to face the reader but instead looked at a point to the side (McLain 2009: 16).9 Nagraj’s billowing angavastra and archaic weaponry that seem out of place on the figure of the comics superhero become intelligible in the context of the Nagayana story arc that deliberately positions Nagraj as an embodiment of Rama in the Kali yuga (fourth age in the cosmic cycle).10 Anupam Sinha, the creative director of the Nagayana series, said that his biggest challenge was to create an image make-over for a successful character like Nagraj, especially since he already had mythic overtones culled from the superhero mythos as well as from folklore.11 The incongruity generated by the overlapping images of Rama, a god who is always portrayed with his iconic weaponry and traditional garb, and the superhero Nagraj attracts the attention of the potential reader and creates a sense of anticipation for the series as whole. There is a similar sense of incongruity when we compare the opening scene from 18 Days when the supercomputer Markandeya recounts the story of the four cosmic ages to the Pandavas on the eve of the Kurukshetra War. In the Mahabharata it is the eldest of the Pandava brothers, Yudhishthira, who asks the immortal sage to tell them about what he had witnessed in the repeated dissolutions and recreations of the universe. Markandeya describes the scene that he witnessed while he

Mythological revisionings  11

was swimming alone in the waters of dissolution (pralaya). He saw a baby lying on a banyan leaf. It was the divine Krishna in the form of Vatapatrashayin – one who lies on the banyan leaf. The baby suddenly swallowed Markandeya, who could see the whole universe in the baby’s body as it was before the dissolution. The baby then regurgitated him. Markandeya paid obeisance to the baby and asked him about his maya (divine illusion). While the sage is recounting this story along with the five Pandavas and their common wife Draupadi, Krishna is also an auditor. Markandeya then asks them to take refuge with Krishna, their companion who is seated with them (Hiltebeitel 2018: 2). In the 18 Days, Markandeya’s story begins with Brahma, “the self aware immensity” in whose awareness a single day spans the four ages of the earth (Morrison et al. 2014: unpaginated). The four ages refer to Greek mythology, to the successive ages of humanity, viz. the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron ages. Grant Morrison, who conceived this project, turns the focus away from Markandeya’s epiphany and the description of Krishna’s maya through this interpolation from Greek mythology. By referring to the four ages of humanity he is able to frame the Mahabharata story as belonging to the Bronze Age, the age of warriors in which the Greek epics, familiar to his Western audience, are located.12 The story ends with a close up of Krishna’s blue-tinted hands clapping in ironic appreciation of the supercomputer’s closing statement: “We speak of the past and the future both. A twisted ribbon of time spied through the crucible of the present” (Morrison et al. 2014: unpaginated). The mood shifts from Markandeya’s grave utterances to a lighter, more casual tone as Krishna takes up the story speaking of the last and most desperate age, telling them that future generations will look to them for instruction while at the same time he is seen biting into a juicy apple. There is a reference to bhakti – to the spirit of unquestioned devotion to a personal god: “any man or woman living in this dire time of emergency need only once SPEAK MY NAME and they will be saved” (ibid.: unpaginated). But within the heroic frame in which this story is cast and without the evocation of wonder or sense of the uncanny that we saw in the Mahabharata story, this reference to bhakti seems incongruous and disrupts the coherence of the comic book narrative pointing to the larger meta-narrative universe of the epic. Each of the stories discussed in the chapters that follow uses quotation as an inter-textual device to gesture towards alternative registers of meaning as if to say that a story that is rendered ironically or playfully in the comics mode has deeper connotations elsewhere in the narrative universe. Incongruity is a commonly used technique to evoke laughter in comics stories. The juxtaposition of different registers of meaning or the introduction of the absurd into an otherwise serious or even tragic scene leading to situations of semantic incongruity are used as distancing devices that evoke laughter. Distance is an important feature discussed in Indian aesthetic theory. Aesthetic experience is conceptualized as rasa – a juice or taste that is savored by the reader or spectator. Works of art, poetry, and drama are supposed to represent events that are distanced from our everyday lives so as to enable such an aesthetic experience of moods and emotions (Masson and Patwardhan 1969). Chamatkara, or wonder, is the state in which such a tasting occurs in the high arts (Gnoli 1985). In the “low arts” such

12  Mythological revisionings

as comics, incongruity suggested by the juxtaposition of incommensurate registers of experience or states of being may bring about a similar distancing effect. Thus in Chilka (literally “banana peel”), a parodic interpretation of the great Mahabharata War discussed in Chapter 2, heroism is overlaid with irony and humor to produce affects far removed from the rage and despair of the original story. Chapter 3 describes the translation of a comics story about the adventures of a lab rat that grows to gigantic proportions brought on by the unintended consequences of a scientific experiment into a pictorial performance by a bard in rural West Bengal. Dukhushyam Chitrakar, the bard, frames the story in myth by turning the lab rat into the vehicle (vahana) of the elephant-headed god Ganesha. Bards like Dukhushyam may not be well versed in textual theories of aesthetics, but the idea of rasa is central to their compositions. I have been told that it is important to evoke at least two contrasting moods in a single performance to enable a proper aesthetic immersion in the narrative performance (Chatterji 2012). In this story the fact that the vehicle of a much-loved god such as Ganesha can actually become a victim of a scientific experiment evokes not only laughter but also wonder and a sense of the uncanny. The very fact of framing the story in myth distances the protagonists from our world of experience and places them in a wondrous realm. Dukhushyam’s interpretation of the comics’ story draws attention to the play between illusion (maya) and our everyday notions of reality, which at a deeper and more profound level was the paradox explored in the Mahabharata story as previously recounted.

Indian comics – a national tradition? Comics studies is still a nascent field in India, and what little scholarly work there is in this field is dominated by studies of Amar Chitra Katha. Book-length works by Nandini Chandra (2008), Deepa Srinivas (2010), and Karline McLain (2009) in spite of differences in disciplinary perspective tend to converge on their evaluation of the Amar Chitra Katha project of popularizing Indian mythology and history, characterizing it as largely Hindu and male-centric with a tendency to marginalize alternative histories. There are a few studies of other commercial comics series produced by Raj Comics and Graphic India from the vantage point of a globalizing India where comics seem to reflect trans-cultural rather than purely local or national concerns. By far the most interesting, however, are works that explore the alternative comics scene and the spate of auteur-driven projects that attempt to understand contemporary Indian politics by exploring the possibilities that the comics medium offers in linking fantasy with real events (Berman 2001). Recent works by Jeremy Stoll (2012), Amitabh Kumar (2008; Kumar et al.2009), and Emma Dawson Varughese (2018) explore such links between “story worlds” and “real worlds” by using a mix of genres such as long interviews, analysis, and the comics form (Berman 2001: 14). Vidyun Sabhaney (2014) is one of the few practitioners who also theorizes her own creative practice and writes about the comics medium from a comparative perspective on traditional forms of picture storytelling.

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Whether there is an Indian way of seeing is a question that occurs repeatedly in discussions of art in contemporary India. Inspired by Diana Eck’s (1985) seminal work on darshana, scholars such as McLain (2009), Stoll (2012), and Dawson Varughese (2018) have argued for a distinctive Indian aesthetic in comics that is influenced by the way in which sacred icons are positioned to face the viewer frontally to see and be seen. Parul Dave Mukherji (n.d.) criticizes this as a form of neoorientalism that attempts to sacralize all aspects of knowledge and life in India. In a nuanced reading of the Chitrasutra, a puranic text on painting, Mukherji (2001) says that traditional image makers in India were taught to distinguish between sacred and secular images. Not only were images categorized into types with distinguishing features prescribed for the two classes of images as well as bodily positions and perspectives, but the unit of measurement for each class of image was also different. Eck’s discussion applies only to the icon located in the garbhagriha or inner sanctum of the temple and not to images displayed on its outer walls and surrounding spaces that often reflected secular scenes where figures were displayed in a variety of postures. Words like anukriti (imitation), satya (world resembling or naturalistic), and sadrishya (resemblance) refer to the importance given to “naturalism” or the “imitation” of the visible world (Mukherji 2001: xxxiv). Why then do comics’ producers and artists speak of Indian ways of seeing and telling stories? Modern Indian artists have valorized the use of abstraction and simplification in the folk arts to express conceptual ideas and the use of mythology to frame everyday experience so that they may also be projected on a transcendental plane beyond specific times and places (Chatterji 2012). Comics practitioners such as Scott McCloud (1993) have also emphasized the iconic value of cartoonish figures for their ability to transcend individual particularities and allow identification and empathy with a host of readers with very different life experiences. The comics medium with its multiple-panel structure enables the juxtaposition of different registers of meaning and experience. This feature enables not just successful hybrid experiments such as the Indian superhero Nagraj, who is a composite of American and Indian cultural symbols, but also alternative comics stories that have achieved cult status. Thus Orijit Sen’s River of Stories (1994) juxtaposes Adivasi origin myths with everyday life experiences of such people to achieve a powerful critique of the state’s policies towards its citizens, who have been marginalized by large-scale development projects. Sen (1994, 2012) uses a variety of different painterly styles, culled from various traditional schools of art, to move between different temporal and experiential registers, a feature he also employs in a more recent work on the mystic medieval poet Kabir, using the styles of the Rajasthani miniaturists, Pichwai folk painters from Maharashtra, and modernist realism to evoke the universalistic humanism of his poetry. Therefore, rather than conceiving of India as a distinct space or even as a specific orientation to the world, I constitute it as a field of dispersal as is the comics culture in India criss-crossed by influences from different pictorial styles, genres, and media. My initial idea when I began researching comics was to explore the ways in which myths mutate and adapt themselves to the different media and forms of

14  Mythological revisionings

storytelling in which they are expressed. A fortuitous encounter with Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura enabled my entry into the exciting field of comics production, and I was given access to their notes and sketches for Chilka, a parodic retelling of the Mahabharata War which forms the subject matter of Chapter 2. Their engagement with the comics medium led them to research other forms of pictorial storytelling including the style used by folk bards from rural Bengal. As part of their research they asked one of the bards to translate one of their comics into his own narrative medium. I had not initially planned to include this experiment in my research project since it did not involve a mythic narrative, but a closer examination of the bardic story made me realize that it too was an attempt at mythological storytelling by which events in the present are sought to be embedded in a larger cosmic notion of time (Chatterji 2015). From a narrow focus on myths my project expanded to include questions pertaining to time and to the narrative universe in which myths circulate. Methodologically speaking, both these chapters are based on an ethnographic approach – a way of knowing from the standpoint of social relationships. From this viewpoint, then, the text is not treated as a fixed entity but rather as an emergent that coalesces through the process of transmission between readers and producers of previous texts who appear as points in a chain of circulating referents. The chapter on superheroes also came about by serendipity rather than deliberate design. I came across Virgin Comics’ attempts at mythological transcreation while browsing through the comics section in a book shop and discovered that similar experiments have been attempted by commercial comics publishers in India as well. The superhero genre may in fact be the ideal site for exploring narrative transmutation in mythology since the rotation of writers and artists on major superhero comics titles means that such stories become collective creations that are passed down to successive generations of readers. In countries such as the US, superhero comics provide a kind of living mythology and cultural heritage in ways that may be similar to the epics and puranas in India (Wandtke 2012). Each of the chapters in this book is self contained but also linked by a common concern with pictorial storytelling and the way time is shaped through the choice of a particular narrative genre. Even though comics studies is still a nascent field in India, scholarly interest in this field has increased in recent years. Apart from historical reviews of the comics tradition (Rao 2001; Stoll 2012), scholarly writings tend to be divided between studies of commercial brands that deal with myths or adventure stories (McLain 2009; Chandra 2008, 2012; Scott 2008; Srinivas 2010; O’Rouke and Rodrigues 2007; Dave 2013; Mathur 2010; Kaur and Eqbal 2019) and those that focus on alternative auteur-driven “graphic narratives” inspired by the political climate in present-day India (Nayar 2016; Dawson Varughese 2018). In this work I have chosen to present a mix of comics genres – auteur driven as well as commercial comics that are linked by the kinds of stories they have chosen to narrate. Each of the chapters offers a particular perspective on mythology. Rather than assuming mythology to be a generic field, I focus on specific stories taken from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. In so doing I am able to go beyond the plot

Mythological revisionings  15

or storyline of the epic to consider the affective dimension of these much-loved stories and to engage with the feelings that motivate Indians to turn repeatedly to particular events in these two epics and reframe them in ways that appeal to our post-modern sensibilities. Audrey Cantlie (2003) says that it is the listener or reader who fixes the thinkable content of a mythic text as she does for its context which can be expanded in the direction of her interest. “After its performance the myth does not die . . . but [rather] it goes away to another place,” waiting to be resurrected in a different time and perhaps novel context (ibid.: 837). I have already alluded to the centrality of “time” as a thematic link between the different chapters in this work. The conventions of the comics medium juxtapose different registers of time. The organization of the comics page involves duration, as the reader must move along the sequence of empanelled images that narrate the story, but also simultaneity, as the page as a whole acts as a hyper-frame bringing all the panels together into a synchronous whole. Sociologically speaking it is also important to engage with historical time when addressing the subject of comics studies. Not only is this a relatively young medium that is fundamentally engaged with issues that concern our contemporary time, but its origin in the early decades of the 20th century in the US and Europe – at a time when newspapers became significant through the reportage of spectacular events like the two world wars – meant that the medium as such is sensitive to contemporary events whether it chooses to address them directly through witness accounts or indirectly in the mode of fantasy and adventure (Chute 2018). Each of the chapters deals with questions of temporality from the vantage point of a specific genre – parody, bardic performance, and science fantasy, using myth to authorize diverse intentions and practises. Mythical symbols often enter secular political spaces as allegories that allow such symbols to be refashioned in a fictional mode. Scholars who work on Western myths have said that allegory is the aesthetic mode through which old myths survive once their place in religion becomes inauthentic (Chatterji 2014; Meyer 1990). In India myths are still part of living religions but, as we shall see, they are also used allegorically to enliven not only modern political discourse but popular culture as well, thus revealing the heterogeneity that characterizes the contemporary in India.

Notes 1 Das 2012: 105. 2 Anil Menon and Vandana Singh, eds., 2012, Breaking the Bow. Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana. Delhi: Zubaan. 3 In a popular article, Diana Eck adapts the argument of her famous book to say that the act of darshana – seeing and being seen by the god – can be expanded to include the human imagination that in its effort to visualize the divine, ‘juxtaposes earthly realities in an unearthly way’ (Eck 1986: 49). Swarna Chitrakar evokes the idea that the material from which an icon is made is already an embodiment of the deity by giving the log eyes, as if to say that the tree is unique and waiting to be revealed in its ultimate form as Pinocchio. Lisa Lau and Emma Dawson Varughese (2015) extend Eck’s argument to suggest that the frontal gaze (darshana) is used also in non-sacred contexts such as the

16  Mythological revisionings

design of book covers and is characteristic of a distinctive form of visuality. I am wary of such generalizations, however, especially in the context of Indian comics. Thus the Bangalore-based Sufi Comics that focus on the stories of Muslim saints follow a distinctive iconographic style by covering the faces of the saints with a veil of light in keeping with the Islamic proscription against showing the faces of important religious figures (Stoll 2017). 4 The idea seems to have come from their daughter, Roshni Vyam, who, as a contemporary Adivasi artist, straddles two aesthetic traditions – the modern as she is being trained in an art school and the Gondi that she has learned through apprenticeship from her parents. 5 Sanjay and Manoj Gupta, the creators of Nagraj, told me that they referenced snake lore from all over the world to create Nagraj’s composite personality (personal conversation, 6 March 2019). 6 In traditional Hindu iconography, only demons are represented as muscular figures. Gods, even when shown as human as was Rama, are smooth skinned, without muscles, and tranquil. Hanuman is one example of a muscular hero, a sign perhaps of his subaltern status (Nardi 2006; Lutgendorf 2002).   Sanjay and Manoj Gupta gave a specific brief to their artists – their superhero, following international convention, was to be modeled on the image of a devata (god), but unlike the Amar Chitra Katha characters who were the dominant comics’ models of that time, their character was to be a combination of softness (komalta) and warrior-like qualities. 7 See Kaur and Eqbal (2019) for a detailed discussion of Raj Comics’ reading public. 8 PAO Collective, “Raj Comics: A Brief Overview,” https://paocollective.wordpress. com/2010/03/11/raj-comics-a-brief-overview/ downloaded 13 December 2018. 9 The superhero mythos is not restricted to an urban audience, and we find folk representations of superhero figures in folk art as well. Thus Mayank Shyam chose to depict the cosmic spider of Gond cosmology in anthropomorphic form remarkably similar to the Marvel comics’ character, Spiderman. When asked he professed to be ignorant of the superhero character and said that this was his way of showing the spider’s strength (takat). In Gond mythology it is the spider’s web that supports the earth (private conversation, June 2011). 10 This is the last and the most decadent of the four cosmic ages before the dissolution of the world (pralaya) and the one we live in. 11 “In Conversation with Anupam Sinha – Creator of Super Commando Dhruv,” Posted by Team Wishberry, www.wishberry.in/blog//in-Dayconversation-with-anupamsinha, downloaded 26 October 2018. 12 Hindu mythology also conceives of four cosmic ages, but since time is cyclical these ages are repeated with periods of dissolution at the end of each age. The events described in the two epics belong to separate ages and none of the four ages could be defined as the age of warriors.

2 COMIC GAGS AND THE MAHABHARATA WAR1

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted. Arthur Miller2

The Mahabharata in comics Elaborate intertextual epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata encourage movement across genres and media, and allow for a kind of self-reflexivity that is eminently suited to the post-modern sensibility. Even more than the Ramayana, the Mahabharata has an “emboxed” frame with multiple narrators and listeners so that the text becomes a palimpsest of previous tellings that are recovered each time a narration occur.3 It is as if each new telling becomes a commentary on the history of such tellings, encouraging a kind of hybridity that becomes a part of the epic tradition itself. Each telling adds or subtracts from the corpus of stories, its selection determined by the choice of genre and the particular interests of the ­audience – thus enabling the epics to continually renew themselves. It is precisely this dialogical aspect of the epic tradition that inspired a pair of young comics creators, Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura, to tap into the Mahabharata multiverse4 and place their own story within the ever-expanding frame of the text. Their intervention, of course, is not unique. Anand Pai, the founder of Amar Chitra Katha, pioneered the retelling of epic stories in the comic book mode. Concerned with the increasing disconnect of the urban educated youth from their cultural heritage, Pai’s goal in retelling these stories in a form expressly designed to appeal to their tastes was pedagogical. The phenomenal commercial success of the Amar Chitra Katha project has inspired others such as Campfire to follow in Pai’s footsteps, selecting stories of “human values” and “great deeds” to inspire the young through a mix of entertainment and education (Campfire 2012: i). More irreverent attempts

18  Comic gags and the Mahabharata War

to retell the Mahabharata through a combination of words and images include Amruta Patil’s Adiparva (2012) and Grant Morrison’s 18 Days (2013). Neither of these falls in the conventional category of comic book – the former being composed as a picture book and the latter as an electronic story released in the form of five-minute web episodes on YouTube (Kumar 2013). Acclaimed for transforming what was thought of as essentially a low-brow superhero genre into a sophisticated, self-conscious form of myth-making, Grant Morrison has acknowledged the Mahabharata as a source of inspiration for some of his most famous comic book anthologies such as The Invisibles (Morrison 2011, Meany 2010). In 18 Days, he recasts the Kurukshetra War into an apocalyptic battle between rival teams of genetically modified super warriors that has ramifications for the shape of the earth as we know it. Even though 18 Days, as the title suggests, restricts itself to the Great War, transformed into a science fiction adventure set in the dawn of our time, it is an adventure story, yet a comparison with the Amar Chitra Katha Mahabharata reveals a common concern. Both Pai and Morrison think of their work not just as a re-telling of the Mahabharata story but also as a serious meditation on the human condition with the Bhagavad Gita as their inspiration (see Pai 1998a, 1998b, 1998c). Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura, in contrast, are more faithful to the mood of the medium that they have chosen to tell their story, playing on the irreverent tone of the comics form and allowing it to dovetail with the Mahabharata’s mood of moral uncertainty. They play on some of the subterranean themes present in the Mahabharata, such as the clash between bhakti, or an orientation of unquestioning devotion to one’s personal deity, and kshatriya dharma with its emphasis on valor, not so much articulated as critical questions in the mouths of tragic figures such as Draupadi and Karna but rather in the figures of old men like Bhishma and Vidura, who, though valorized as embodiments of dharma, are helpless in the face of its violation.5 Krishna is somewhat of a trickster figure in the Mahabharata, constantly challenging the conventional ethical code of the times. Unlike Rama in the Ramayana, who was not conscious of his divinity for much of the story, Krishna’s divinity is present on the surface of the Mahabharata text – expressed not merely in his trickster-like behavior that reveals the relativity of all things, but also in visions of his divine form that reveal him to be the stable centre in his aspect of Kala or Time itself.6 Vidyun and Shohei’s story, set in the time of the Mahabharata War, revolves around two characters – Baba, an elderly and somewhat demented warrior who tries to hold on to his kshatriya code of dharma in a world where values seem to be rapidly changing, his grandson Arjun,7 and a mysterious weapon that is supposed to have a decisive influence on the trajectory of the war. Orphaned at an early age, unable to bear the weight of his grandfather’s expectations, Arjun runs away from home and at the point when our story begins he is a spy for the Kaurava camp. Lonely and frustrated, Baba spends his time regaling the children of his village with stories about his own adventures. He lives in a small border village that has tried hard to keep a distance from the Great War. Unable to sustain their position of neutrality, the village elders are leaning towards what they consider to be the

Comic gags and the Mahabharata War  19

winning side – a decision that Baba, a staunch supporter of the Pandavas, finds impossible to accept. He is visited by a mysterious stranger who tells him about a wondrous weapon that can help the Pandavas win the war. The stranger, whom we the readers recognize as Narada as he appears as the sutradhar (narrator/commentator) in the opening frame of the story, speaks in riddles which Baba understands only imperfectly: Not far from this village is an old hill. On the hill’s peak is a shrine that is to be the home of an ancient weapon. But it is an obscure weapon. Only a true hero would even consider this weapon to seek it is to seek the monkey’s path. Ofcourse, the rishis say the weapon can win the entire war for the Pandavas. (Sabhaney and Emura 2012a:265, emphasis in original) Not sure about what he is really looking for, Baba sets off on his trusty donkey cart. He follows the monkey trail, identifies the shrine by the Hanuman banner that still adorns it – but what about the weapon? All that he sees are trees laden with ripe bananas. Baba grabs a banana and leaves for Kurukshetra immediately, convinced that the “weapon” will reveal its secret in due course. He arrives at Kurukshetra on the fifteenth day of the battle – Acharya Drona has just died and Ashwatthama, crazed with grief at the dishonorable way in which his father was killed, has let loose the mighty Narayanastra, a weapon whose power increases each time that it is countered. Baba arrives at Kurukshetra to find all the warriors on the Pandava side kneeling on the battlefield with heads bowed. Terrified that the Kauravas have won, Baba rushes to the Pandavas’ defense only to be tackled by one of the Pandava soldiers – supplication before the Narayanastra is the only way to counter its destructive force, he is told.8 Arjun recognizes his grandfather but does not reveal his identity to him. Living incognito in the Pandava camp, he is supposed to discover the secret weapon in Baba’s possession. Knowing his grandfather’s penchant for exaggeration and cynical about the values he upholds, worried about his safety, he tries his best to persuade Baba to go home but to no avail. Baba, clinging to the vain hope that the weapon will reveal its secret, is desperately trying to find the “monkey’s path.” Finally the day of reckoning is at hand – Karna and Arjuna are to engage in combat. Karna has sworn to avenge the insults hurled at him by the Pandavas over the years by killing Arjuna, the Pandava. The battle chariots of the two combatants face each other – Baba knows that the moment of truth is at hand but is no closer to discovering the secret. In desperation he climbs onto the pole carrying Arjuna’s banner – the “living banner” in which Hanuman has promised to reside for the duration of the war.9 Oblivious to the monkey staring down at him from the fluttering banner, Baba looks in all directions, desperately searching for a sign from the heavens. Hanuman spies the banana clutched in Baba’s hand and snatches it from him, leaving the peel behind. It falls from Baba’s fingers onto the path of Karna’s chariot. The chariot wheel skids on the slippery peel, Karna is flung out, and he is promptly killed by Arjuna. Baba’s faith in his secret weapon is vindicated – he has saved Arjuna and

20  Comic gags and the Mahabharata War

helped the Pandavas win the war. The other Arjun leaves the battlefield confused. He too has played a role in the Great War and inadvertently helped save dharma by trying to protect his grandfather from Duryodhana’s soldiers.

Manga, slapstick, and the Chilka project Vidyun told me that Shohei wanted to use a modified manga style to tell their story.10 They wished to remain faithful to the comics genre and introduce a touch of comedy, with dark undertones to adapt the tragic story of the Mahabharata to the comic mode. Slapstick suits the exaggerated emotionality of the manga style. Manga, the distinctive comic book style that emerged in post-World War II Japan and combines a specific set of symbolic, graphic, and acoustical codes to create a fast-paced, action-oriented style of narration, has achieved international recognition with translations and adaptations in all the major world languages. What sets the Chilka project apart is the way in which its creators combine the melodramatic, even manic quality of manga action figures and iconic tropes from Western comedy with a story that manages to embody some of the values of critical reflection that we associate with the Mahabharata tradition. Following Henri Bergson’s seminal work on humor, many scholars have emphasized the significance of deadpan and slapstick as forms of anti-sentimental humor that convey the sense that human beings inhabit a world that is radically contingent, where conventional forms of subjective expression no longer carry meaning (Bergson 1911). The deadpan style presents human characters as mechanical in their expressions and alienated from their emotions. Thus Justus Nieland (2004) quotes Bergson in saying that “comic automatism in humans” signals an “absentmindedness on the part of life,” suggesting a “dangerous unsociability” that evokes laughter at the self ’s undoing (ibid. 66). A form of “active nihilism,” adoption of the deadpan style embraces “the experiential poverty of the modern” (ibid. 74). What does the slapstick imperative of the comics genre do to the Mahabharata story? At first sight the tragic mood of the Mahabharata seems to be far removed from the affect generated by the modernistic use of deadpan. Yet we know that there are many incidents of “low humor” in the epics that are associated with physical deformity and bodily mutilation that may be thought to evoke the kind of sentiment that Bergson and his followers are talking about (Gitomer 1991). Manga itself embodies a style that uses forms of energized action and stylized gesture and expression in a way quite close to Indian dramatic art (Galassi 1977).11 Thus slapstick gestures and physical distortion are used to somaticize internal states. Manga uses sweat drops, facial distortion, blushing, large bulging eyes or conversely slit eyes, and action lines in a graphic code that conveys the language of emotion to its readers. This graphic code is combined with elaborate sound effects to create a powerful narrative style that uses a variety of environmental cues from the setting, landscape, and bodily gesture to tell its story in a dynamic fashion similar to the dramatic editing techniques used in cinematic storytelling. Tezuka Osamu, one of the most influential artists in manga, adapted techniques such as close ups, pans, zooms, and jump cuts by using

Comic gags and the Mahabharata War  21

the gutter, the space between the panels on a comic book page, like the break between film frames. He also used sound effects not just in action scenes but also everyday background sounds to suggest that the setting, including the page layout of the comic book, was an important player in the story being narrated. However, the choice of manga to tell a story in India seems somewhat e­ ccentric – was it determined by the nationality of the artist/illustrator, or are there other, more intellectual reasons for this choice of style? When I put this question to Vidyun, she said that it was Shohei’s choice, as was the decision to work on something from the Mahabharata. Deeply committed to the manga way of telling stories, Shohei was inspired by the ambitious multi-volume Buddha series of comics creator Tezuka Osamu and hopes someday to do the same with the epic. Vidyun, as an Indian who had grown up with Amar Chitra Katha and had worked in commercial comic book projects on the Mahabharata, was less than enthusiastic in retelling the Mahabharata story. “I’ve been there and done that,” she said. But the creative mix of the Mahabharata and manga did inspire the two of them to sustain a conversation in which the epic became the space within which they could intervene to tell their own story.12 “The story began with the characters first,” Vidyun said. Shohei wanted a central figure with memory loss – “I think there is a relative or friend of his back in Japan who has suffered amnesia.13 Then we started playing around with this idea – to make forgetfulness a part of the story and build memory loss into one of the comic characters.” I asked how the story emerged. “The characters came first – Baba, who is now old and forgetful but still clings to the values that he grew up with. He suffered great loss as a child – he lost his parents at a young age and had to take responsibility for his younger siblings. A sense of destiny plays an important part in forming his character and he tried to instill this in his grandson Arjun.” Interestingly, it was not Arjun that was the next to emerge but rather Narada – the catalyst – the character that intervenes in the main story of the Mahabharata, bringing it closer to us, the readers. Even though he has only a cameo role in Chilka, Vidyun said that she had researched Narada’s character intensively for the Chilka project. His humorous and slightly cynical observations provided a much-needed leaven to the dark and fatalistic mood of the story. “His reputation as a trouble maker made him a wonderfully predictably, unpredictable catalyst,” she said. The tragic mood of the Mahabharata posed an enormous problem for them. It did not fit into their conception of a comics story. It was Shohei who came up with the idea of the banana peel gag – a device commonly found in early manga comic books – and they decided to introduce it in the scene when Karna’s chariot wheel is stuck in the slush during his fatal encounter with the Pandava hero Arjuna. Working on the actual plot, trying to weave inspired ideas into the texture of the narrative so that they seem plausible, is one of the most difficult aspects of story construction, and many ideas were rejected before they decided on the gag. “We had to figure out exactly where to introduce it, and how. Here, the fact that Karna was previously cursed was really important,” Vidyun said. “This curse was initially a recollection I had of Karna’s story (probably based on earlier reading/ television etc.), but then when I confirmed this version (only with further reading,

22  Comic gags and the Mahabharata War

of course) – I went forward and decided on that particular moment as it fit very well.14 Somehow, being associated with the curse makes the banana’s entry into the Mahabharata universe more believable.” However, the texture of conversation and the general tone that they wanted to achieve for their comic book did not quite fit with their understanding of the Mahabharata story, the time in which it was set, and the values that they thought it represented. “These values are difficult to relate to for someone who has grown up with comics. Educational comic books that tell a straight story in a realistic style can be quite boring,” Vidyun said: “they don’t always make contemporary sense.” We introduced the character of Arjun, Baba’s grandson, as a contemporary voice to act as a counterpoint to the voice of Baba. “His presence is quite jarring because it does not fit in with the concerns of the other characters, but that was the only way we could bring the story closer to our time. One of the difficulties that we had to deal with was how to intervene in a time other than our own. Once Arjun was ­introduced – the theme of old age and the tension between generations became inevitable and Baba became outdated – completely disconnected from our concerns.” Arjun, whose sole purpose in the story is to serve as a counterpoint to Baba, is a somewhat ambiguous figure. His whole life has been shaped by the kshatriya values that Baba exemplifies. He tries to turn his back on these values by running away but ends up in Kurukshetra, and since “war is the family business, it is on the battlefield that he has to figure out what these values ultimately mean.”“He is cynical and cunning but somehow true to himself. He is itching to find out if there is a truth behind the fighting and madness – the crazy weapons – and he takes the Pandava’s superhero skills with a pinch of salt.” These are extracts from Vidyun’s notes summing up the many conversations that she had with Shohei.

Gutters, panels, and graphic narration “Comic book stories are enacted rather than narrated, and font size, panel position, and page layout are very important in the enactment – they help create background atmosphere and project the emotions of the characters,” Vidyun told me in response to my question about the style of narration in Chilka (see also Sabhaney 2014). Shohei’s distinctive arrangement of panels on a page, some horizontal and some vertical, seemed very different from the page layout of mainstream Indian comic books, and I was curious to know if his background in manga had any influence. “It’s not the panels themselves but the space between the panels that interests me,” he said. “This space (gutter) marks what we call a scene change in films. A narrow gap denotes a slight change in perspective or a small shift in time. A wider gap marks a longer passage of time. In Japan we use many vertical panels because the script is vertical. I had to get used to composing from left to right for Chilka and that may have influenced the panel arrangements on the page. I sometimes juxtapose diagonally shaped panels with rectangular ones for alignment – so that the eye is forced to move across the page in a certain way. If they were all of the same size

Comic gags and the Mahabharata War  23

it would be boring for the reader. Similarly I show characters breaking out of their panel frames to enliven the page just as I often juxtapose a panel that is crowded with figures with another that is text heavy. The alteration between text and image makes the page more dynamic.” Comics are a sequential art using juxtaposition in space to suggest duration and movement. The panels divide space and time, presenting a “jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments” (McCloud 1993: 67). Each panel will show a fragment of a scene or a part of an action sequence, but the eye of the reader, moving from one panel to the next, apperceives a whole from the fragments presented in successive panels. It is in the gutter, the empty space between the panels, that the imagination takes over and connects the parts to transform them into a continuous scene. This phenomenon in comic art is called closure. Closure is an important part of perception, used in all the creative arts, but unlike movies or animation films, comics rely on forms of closure that involve active participation and a constant back and forth of the hand and eye of the reader (McCloud 1993). Consider the following (see Figure 2.1.). This page follows our first introduction to Arjun and Baba – Arjun’s difficult childhood, his inability to bear the weight of Baba’s expectation, and his escape from home. It shifts our attention to Baba as we see a fierce old man vanquish a mysterious enemy, presented in the first panel only in shadowy form. It is only when we come to the sixth panel that we realize that it is a scarecrow. Just like the panel on the top left corner of the page, the one at the bottom right corner also evokes suspense as the reader is made aware of a new voice intruding into the scene depicting Baba and his child admirers – we hear a loud “Ahem!” but do not see the person. To connect the voice to the person we will have to turn the page. The introduction of a new idea at the top and bottom of the page – the “page flip”– is a device used in comics to hold the reader’s attention, forcing her to turn the page and read on. Other noteworthy features on the page are the energy lines around some of the figures – sometimes they are used to focus the reader’s attention on the image, at other times they suggest movement and the force of impact as in the panels that depict Baba’s attack on the scarecrow. Manga comics have also developed a whole range of motion lines to suggest emotion, which Shohei has used effectively to depict Baba’s shifting emotional state. Apart from stylized motion lines, sound effects also have a life of their own in manga comics, reminding us that comics are a medium in which stories are dramatized rather than merely narrated. If we compare Chilka with the Amar Chitra Katha Mahabharata, what strikes one immediately is the sheer range and number of sound effects in the former. Take, for example, the sounds depicted on the page discussed previously: #baba holds sword tightly “gmp” #baba leaps whoosh #sword slash SHHHKKK-K #kids hand clap “Clap!! Clap!!”(SMALL FAST SOUND) #village Shakuni coughs “Ahem!”(BIG SOUND)15 In comics the visual shape of the writing informs the sound qualities of the action (Peterson 2007). The presence of assorted vowels and consonants – not even

FIGURE 2.1  Chilka. Artist:

Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

Comic gags and the Mahabharata War  25

complete words – draws our attention away from meaning to the actual sound shape of these word images. Sound animates the comic world – visual clues such as the scale of the letters and the varying shapes of speech balloons not only convey emotion and sound quality but also transform everyday objects into actors imbued with the same vitality of the human protagonists in the story. Let us turn to panel 3 on the comics page given previously – we see a fist clenched on the sword handle and the onomatopoeic word “gmp.” The juxtaposition of the sword and its sound shape turns the sword into an actor possessing an identity of its own so that Baba and the sword are on the same action plane as it were (McCloud 1993). Let us look at some other examples (see Figure 2.2). We see a series of aspect-to-aspect panels of Narada’s and Baba’s first encounter. The reader’s eye travels from left to right and then downwards where it is suddenly comes to rest on a small panel that depicts rain splashing on the ground and the sound words “tup-tup.” The panel is positioned between dialogue boxes that are crucial for taking the story forward. Panels function like habitats, and the placement of onomatopoeic sound images animates the space as I have just said, creating the sense of lived sensation (Peterson 2007). The page layout, the way the panels are arranged on the page, creates the sensation of a scene unfolding before us – sometimes showing us snippets of conversation between Baba and Narad and at others glimpses of the storm raging outside, each panel separated by a narrow border of white space. This is the reading space as Shohei put it – “free space,” in which there is no immediate contact between the reader’s eye and the figures in the panels, space which provides the distance necessary for the reader to connect the different words and images being presented on the page and see in them a story unfolding. I quote the psychologist Eugene Minkowski, who says that distance is the value that “unites us with life . . . contact with ambient becoming is achieved across or rather with the help of a distance which unites us with it” (1970:403). But there is also another sensation at work here. The panels themselves are dark – night-time scenes in which the dark envelops us and space becomes auditory rather than visual, evoking a kind of synesthetic effect wherein the eye seems to be listening to the sounds of the night. Lived distance gives way to the tactile sensation of dark space. The scope of alternating between visual and auditory sensations is possibly what sets the comics medium apart from other visual media. Now consider this set of panels – the soldiers’ derisory laughter depicted on the previous page seems to follow Arjun to his tent. Brooding over the ridiculous scene in which Baba is supremely unconscious of the ludicrous figure that he presents of himself with his secret weapon, Arjun falls gradually into sleep. The upper margin of the panel is shown slanting downward, reflecting his drowsy state (see Figure 2.3). In the traditional comic form, as exemplified in Amar Chitra Katha comics, the consistency of panel size and their linear arrangement tend to de-emphasize the medium so that previous panels are pushed back by the forward movement of the narrative. In Chilka the entire page becomes the narrative unit as the juxtaposition of differently sized panels emphasizes their co-presence, sign-posting the

FIGURE 2.2  Chilka. Artist:

Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

FIGURE 2.3  Chilka. Artist:

Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

FIGURE 2.4  Chilka. Artist:

Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

Comic gags and the Mahabharata War  29

medium itself. Panels are not just windows into other worlds but are co-actors reinforcing the mise-en-scène on the comic book page (Pearson and Uricchio 1991). Comics are a conceptual art form. Images are iconic – simplified forms that evoke affective qualities. Mimetic representations of “real-world” phenomena tend to be complex, made up of diverse aspects. Comic book artists attempt to reduce this diversity by adopting the simplified style of the cartoon. Realistic images give too much information. They are hard to control because it is difficult to suppress information unnecessary for the story (Speigelman 2011). In Shohei’s modified manga style the two main characters Arjun and Baba have large, round eyes and exaggerated movements embedded in settings that are delineated more realistically. This creates a cartoon-like effect productive of irony and critical reflection. Other characters that appear fleetingly such as Duryodhana or Karna have normal, human-shaped eyes – though Duryodhana seems to suggest caricatural elements from a different aesthetic code – his high, ridged forehead reminds one of Captain Worf, the alien Klingon warrior in the sci-fi television series Star Trek (see Figure 2.4). As Scott McCloud (1993) tells us, it is easier to identify with characters that are sketched in broad strokes since they have a universal, truth-telling potential. Realism, an aesthetic style that emphasizes location in space and time, tends to restrict identification and consequently the appeal that characters so rendered may have for the comics-reading public. Images that approximate codes of “realism” in painting, caricatures that rely on the suggestive appeal of the graphic line, and word pictures that convey not just meaning but also their sound shapes and volume – all these together make up narrative tools used in this form of picture storytelling. But this is not the whole of it – even the material shape and volume of the book form, the page, and even the panels and frames serve an expressive purpose. Given the complex process of reading that comics entail, it is not surprising that they are increasingly viewed as a medium that lends itself to critical self-reflection. The gutter, i.e., the gaps between panels, prohibits the domination of an authorial voice. Meaning constituted in the gutters is indefinite – left to the reader to determine (McCloud 1993). What are the implications of the comic form for a story located in the Mahabharata universe?

Comics culture as social critique “We needed all the elements of the plot in place – we wanted to keep a certain fidelity to the text so we chose the Ramesh Menon Mahabharata story that Shohei was reading (Menon 2004). We flagged some chapters like the one on the Narayanastra and Karna and his chariot wheel and used the bones to construct our story. We also had to think about introducing the banana peel gag and we picked on the Hanuman flag emblem on Krishna’s chariot as an effective way of getting the gag into the story. Shohei then drew thumbnails of the whole story as a guide. We had to know what was going to happen on each page,” said Vidyun at one of the discussions I had with her and Shohei about the making of Chilka. “In comic books the page is the basic unit,” Shohei said, and “we had to know exactly what was going

30  Comic gags and the Mahabharata War

to happen on each page, how many panels were going to fit in. I had to imagine the script visually and then draw the panels. I also had to draw the speech balloons beforehand so Vidyun would know how much text space there was in each panel.” The Chilka story idea was accepted by the Pao Comics Collective for one of their anthologies published by Penguin, a recent entrant into the comics field in India. The Pao Collective consists of a group of comics creators based in Delhi who are trying to reconfigure the culture of storytelling through comics as a socially aware medium. Catering largely to an audience who is familiar with international trends in comics culture, members of Pao are keen to encourage new talent and open up spaces for storytelling that traditionally belong to the domain of folk culture (Stoll 2012). Vidyun, unhappy with her experience of commercial comics production in which script writers and artists have minimal contact with each other, was keen to self-publish comics, and the Pao initiative gave her opportunity to work with Shohei, who belonged to a very different comics culture than the one that Vidyun had grown up with. “It wasn’t so much Amar Chitra Katha that influenced me but rather Asterix and Tin Tin,” she said. “Animal companions like Snowy in the Tin Tin stories can do things that the main characters cannot. We gave Baba a donkey companion to add to the comic element. Baba goes to Kurukshetra to win the war with his donkey and a banana – a ludicrous proposition. I also got the idea of giving Baba five child companions and having Arjun surrounded by five soldiers who are also spies from the Asterix comics. The soldiers were added later to act as catalysts – to allow the action to move the story towards its logical ending. But the children are undifferentiated – they like the donkey have a cartoony, manga-like feel – almost like counterpoints to the more developed characterization of Baba and Arjun.” Let us now turn to the question with which we ended the last section. What is it about the Mahabharata and especially the war that makes it appealing for the comics medium? The main story in the Mahabharata reflects a rupture in the established order as is reflected on several overlapping registers – the socio-­ political, cosmological, theological, and temporal. Thus the Kurukshetra War occurs in the liminal period between the Dwapara and Kali yugas (third and fourth ages in the cosmic cycle) when established traditions are no longer in sync with the changing times. Articulated as a clash between cousins, the crisis in the polity is also reflected at the theological level in the clash between two religious orientations. Duryodhana represents kshatriya dharma, now considered old fashioned, and the Pandavas, with their single-minded devotion to Krishna and their belief in his divinity, the new form of religiosity – Bhakti (Malinar 2012; Reich 2011). The Pandava victory, based as it is on trickery and half-truths, is justified by the new religious orientation embodied in Krishna’s divinity. Thus all of Duryodhana’s flaws, all his wrong-doings, are subsumed under a single overarching flaw, that is, his blindness to Krishna’s divinity and his failure to understand that the kshatriya dharma no longer carries the same meaning in the new spiritual dispensation (Gitomer 1992; Malinar 2012).

Comic gags and the Mahabharata War  31

The Chilka story deliberately locates itself in the milieu of the Kurukshetra War. It assumes an Indian readership that is familiar with the Mahabharata story and does not require too much background information. The choice of the fifteenth day for Baba’s entry on the battlefield sets the tone of the story.16 Acharya Drona, the guru of both the warring factions – Pandavas and Kauravas – is dead as a result of a half-truth uttered by Yudhishtira, the embodiment of righteousness, on Krishna’s advice. Baba’s and Arjun’s are the two contrapuntal voices through whom we hear the Chilka story. Baba’s is the voice of passionate intensity, a desperate certainty in the face of the confusion brought on not just by memory loss but by the contingencies of war itself. Arjun’s voice, however, resists a simple identification as it mutates from cynicism to irony as Arjun begins to listen to what Baba is actually saying. As Arjun’s gaze shifts from the war to his grandfather’s role in it, we, the readers, come to read the war story through their relationship. As we listen to Baba’s senile voice along with Arjun’s, it takes on an ironic tone. In a sensitive essay on senility and the ironic voice, Lawrence Cohen (2003) says that listening to the senile voice often reveals unexpected truths. The senile voice threatens because it challenges the order that we take for granted. As Arjun comes to hear Baba’s voice freed from the memory of their shared history, it acquires an unexpected relevance as his words give meaning to the contingent events of the war. The evocative open-endedness of the comics medium, the disjuncture between words and images that gives interpretative initiative to the reader, enabling a humorous critique of modern warfare, echoes the dialogical texture of the Mahabharata text (Maggio 2007). Stories seem to erupt from the body of the main narrative, allowing the text to speak to a meta-textual universe in which characters slip in and out of the framing narrative. Thus questions posed by the main protagonists are answered in the form of stories by meta-textual figures like Vyasa – the composer of the text who is also a character within it – or by Krishna, the figure of Time itself. The dialogical structure of the text allows for different ways of interpreting the narrative, and within the bhakti context some of these are radically subversive. But what about the particular form of humor presented in this story? Can the epic form enable slapstick? Traces of extravagant humor bordering on the slapstick are not absent from the rendition of epic stories in the traditional performing arts in India (Gitomer 1991). Demonic figures such as Ravana and his sister Surpanakha are often portrayed as clumsy – their unrestrained sensual appetites reflected in expansive, uncoordinated gestures that evoke laughter. But in Chilka it is the warrior code itself that is the theme of slapstick comedy. Slapstick, a form of performance that emphasizes the fragmentary, the discontinuous, and the tactile, is eminently suited to the manga mode of storytelling that emphasizes enactment over narration (Bailes 2011). Slapstick tends to present the world as absurd and disruptive – by foregrounding accidents and mistakes as determining factors that change the status of the event being narrated. A slapstick variant of the Mahabharata War impacts the larger narrative, re-emphasizing and thus reminding us of the critical anti-sentimentalism of the epic itself.

32  Comic gags and the Mahabharata War

Notes 1 This chapter first appeared as an article, “Comic Gags and the Mahabharata War,” Society and Culture in South Asia. 2(1), 2015, pp. 127–146. 2 Quoted in Morrison 2011: 387 3 In the Ramayana, Lava and Kusha, Rama’s twin sons, also known as the kushilava bards, are seen reciting the text composed by Valmiki. The Mahabharata recounts successive events of narration, first by Vaishampayana, one of Vyasa’s direct disciples, who is overheard by Ugrasravas at Janmajaya’s snake sacrifice, who then narrates it to the sages of the Naimisha Forest during their prolonged sacrifice (Reich 2001).   I am grateful to Vidyun and Shohei for their time and interest in this project and for their comments on initial drafts of this chapter. 4 I borrow this term from Grant Morrison’s (2011) characterization of the intersecting fantasy worlds occupied by the characters of Marvel comics. Commercial comics use the serial format to create different universes that are linked solely by the endurance of the Marvel brand. Thus in the “Marvel multiverse” the worlds of characters from different comics series such as Batman and Superman can intersect. 5 David Gitomer (1992) examines the figure of Duryodhana across a variety of classical theatre and other genres to show how the latter exemplifies older heroic values associated with the kshatriya dharma that are hostile to the “new” form of Krishna bhakti. According to Gitomer, Duryodhana’s biggest sin seems to be the fact that he consistently refuses to recognize Krishna’s divinity. Edwin Gerow (1985) also points to a different interpretation of Duryodhana’s character in his analysis of Bhasa’s play Urubhanga that recounts the episode in the Mahabharata when Bhima, the Pandava hero, causes his arch rival Duryodhana’s death by breaking his thigh, an act contrary to dharma as it violates the rules of combat with the gada (mace). 6 According to the Bhagavad Gita Krishna’s appearance is tied to the decay of dharma in each yuga. This in itself points to the decay of kingship as it is the king’s duty to uphold dharma (Malinar 2007). 7 I use the sanskritized “Arjuna” to refer to the Pandava hero and the more colloquial “Arjun” for the Chilka character. 8 Baba mimics the behavior of the second Pandava hero, Bhima, when facing the Narayana astra. Bhima embodies the unrestrained and violent aspect of the warrior code in the Mahabharata unlike the disciplined and reflexive actions of his younger brother Arjuna, who represents another dimension of kshatriya dharma. 9 Bhima meets Hanuman during the Pandava exile in Badarika ashram on Mount Gandhamadana while he is hunting for fragrant saugandhika flowers for Draupadi. According to Ramesh Menon’s (2004) adaptation of the epic story, Hanuman is presented as a warrior from a much grander time than that of Bhima’s “dwindling” time. Hanuman first appears to Bhima as an aged monkey and only reveals his true identity as son of the wind god and hence Bhima’s elder brother after defeating him. He then promises to support the Pandava cause in the war to come by appearing in the banner on Arjuna’s chariot. I have used Menon’s adaptation as my source text as this was the reference text used by Vidyun and Shohei for Chilka. However, following in the tradition of comics’ humor, their interpretation of Hanuman’s character tends to emphasize his simian qualities. 10 The word “manga” was coined in 1814 by a Japanese woodblock artist named Hakusai to suggest whimsical sketches. Tezuka Osamu, one of the most influential of manga comics creators, was inspired by cinema and the cartoons of the Fleischer brothers, the creators of characters such as Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor Man, and also by Walt Disney (Brenner 2007). 11 Western slapstick has roots in Indian theatre, in Commedia dell’arte, and vaudeville. It uses easily comprehensible tactile spectacles to achieve a “codification of the Absurd” (Galassi 1977: 55). 12 Even though this was never mentioned, I wonder if the anti-militaristic and anti-statist stance of the manga genre did not also play a part in their choice of genre.

Comic gags and the Mahabharata War  33

13 Further conversation with Shohei makes me suspect that this relative may be showing symptoms of dementia. 14 Karna becomes the irascible sage Parashurama’s disciple under false pretenses and is cursed to forget the secret mantra that will activate his most powerful weapon when he needs it the most (Menon 2004). 15 The quotation is from Vidyun’s notes on sound effects for each page in the comic. 16 The Kurukshetra War lasted for a total of eighteen days.

3 FROM COMIC BOOK TO FOLK PERFORMANCE

To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it. Let us first posit the idea of a triumphant plural, unimpoverished by any constraint of representation (of imitation). Roland Barthes, S/Z. An Essay1

A concern with the grammar of visual storytelling has energized the work of many graphic novel creators in India today. There is an awareness of the many forms of pictorial narration present in India and their diverse histories and a desire to interact with some of these forms so as to expand their visual vocabulary beyond the conventions of realism associated with commercial brands like Amar Chitra Katha and Campfire. This has led to an eclectic use of style –such as hybrid forms of manga, and the use of pastiche as a form of quotation and parody to draw out hidden lines of readability from stories that we think we know well (Chatterji 2012, 2015b). In this chapter I describe the process by which a text emerges through successive stages of re-inscription as it moves between different narrative genres – the story embodied in the text revealed through successive acts of translation and realignment with other mediums such as traditional folk performance, puppet play, and graphic novel. But what is the story – is it one or many? Keeping the wellknown structuralist dictum in mind that texts become intelligible in the process of transmission, the contours of a story – any story –are shaped by the readers, the so-called author being one possible reader among many.2 The story that I first encountered was in the form of a comic with the title Mice Will Be Mice (2012b), produced by Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura, whose parody of the Mahabharata War was discussed in the last chapter. As the title suggests the main protagonist of the story is a mouse, who, when the story opens, is housed in a small cage in

From comic book to folk performance  35

a laboratory and subject to a series of extraordinarily cruel experiments that lead to a variety of physical and mental transformations culminating in a monstrous expansion in size. The giant mouse breaks free from its cage but is quite unaware of its size until it overhears one of its captors, a scientist, exclaiming, “It’s a monster!” Abruptly made conscious of its transformed state, and enraged by the remark from the very person responsible for its condition, it pursues its captors, unmindful of the destruction that it leaves in its wake. Emergency is declared in the city, the army is called out, an air-born attack is underway, but none of these measures seem to have any effect on the mouse. It swats the missiles aimed at it as if they were flies. Nothing, it seems, can stop the mouse from its destructive rampage – until it sees a small cat. Gripped with fear at the sight of a mortal enemy, unmindful of its size, it runs away screaming, “It’s a monster!” By a bizarre stroke of luck the scientists are saved by the very disposition of the mouse, a disposition that they were trying so hard to change. The manga style’s techniques of alternating panel size, action lines, and onomatopoeia to suggest sound effects and to dramatize key moments seem to make it the obvious choice for telling this story. As far as the comics genre is concerned the voice of the author is reflected in the style chosen to tell the story – the story begins at the very moment when the genre in which it is to be narrated is selected (Chatterji 1986; Vishwajyoti Ghosh 2011). But, as I discovered later, this story was not originally conceptualized as a comic book. Mice Will Be Mice began as a shadow puppet play put together at an arts workshop for slum children in Delhi. It acquired yet another life when Vidyun and Shohei showed their newly finished comic strip to a group of folk artists in a village in West Bengal that they were visiting as part of a project on traditional forms of picture storytelling. As actual practitioners of a form of pictorial narration, they were interested in the formal aspects of these traditional forms. Hampered by a constraint on time – their visit was very brief – and by language – they were forced to communicate with the folk artists through an interpreter – they decided to ask one of the artists, Dukhushyam Chitrakar, if he would adapt their comic book to his style of storytelling. The Chitrakar are a community of picture storytellers. Unlike other bardic communities in India, however, their performances are not seen as ritual events and their repertoire includes stories based on Hindu and Islamic myths as well as worldly events such as natural disasters and, more recently, themes with social messages. Naya, a village in West Medinipur, is one of the few surviving villages that has a flourishing community of Chitrakars who still paint and perform stories in the traditional manner. Dukhushyam is a senior artist and is well known for his compositions on “social” themes such as communal harmony, adult literacy, etc., subjects that first brought him to the attention of the state government and gave him a reputation outside Bengal.

Intertextuality and Dukhushyam’s song As I have said, it was to understand the actual structure of narrative composition and more specifically the relationship between words and images that Vidyun and

36  From comic book to folk performance

Shohei asked Dukhushyam to adapt Mice Will Be Mice to his narrative genre. The Chitrakar mode of narration is a multimedia performance in which the artist sings a song while displaying a scroll on the same subject, his or her finger pointing out different figures that are mentioned in the song. Dukhushyam had a song ready in two days and a rough sketch of the painted story. According to Shohei, Dukhushyam had conceptualized the story, composed the song, and left the actual execution of the scroll to his son who is an accomplished painter. To become “storyable,” an event has to be located within a narrative universe that is familiar to potential addressees. The narrative structure of a story is not a given but is generated in relation to another pre-existent structure (Kristeva 1986). Thus Mice Will Be Mice was conceived for a readership that was familiar with the Godzilla story and with the trope of genetic mutation caused by unrestrained scientific experimentation. Dukhushyam’s story referred to a different set of narrative tropes. For the Chitrakars, to be worthy of being narrated as a story an event has to be framed within the mythic universe. Thus to become the chief protagonist of this story the mouse had to acquire a mythic status as the vahana (steed) of the god Ganesha (see Plate 3). K.G. Subramanyan says that “eclectic interactions are most rewarding when the contact with an alien art form clarifies for an artist a special feature of his own work” (1992: 41). Traditional Chitrakar stories begin with an invocation to the deity whose story is being sung. By aligning the mouse protagonist with Ganesha’s vahana, Dukhushyam’s story plays with the trope of incongruity through the contrasting sizes of the cat and mouse in the comic but in an entirely different way. For him the play on size in the comics’ story resonates with the incongruity in the Ganesha icon itself (Gandhi 1984). The image of the portly, elephant-headed deity who sits lightly atop his tiny mouse companion who seems to bear his weight effortlessly is extremely popular in India – a charming manifestation of the god’s divine lila (play). There are popular Bengali folktales that recount stories about Ganesha’s unhappy childhood and how he came to acquire his mouse companion. Friendless, teased by other children because of his ungainly appearance, Ganesha went crying to his father, the great god Shiva. The ascetic Shiva had no possessions that he could sell to buy a toy to comfort his little son. Nevertheless he delved into his beggar’s sack and found a mouse that had been nibbling on the rice that he had received as alms that day. He blessed the mouse and bestowed it on his son, saying that from then on Ganesha would be known as the god who helped in the overcoming of hurdles and hence one of the most loved gods in the divine pantheon. Mahadeva’s son is Ganesha His vahana is a mouse Trapped in a cage By doctors is the mouse kept This is the way of doctors This is the way they learn By experimenting with the mouse3

From comic book to folk performance  37

This is the first stanza of Dukhushyam’s song. It does not tell us how Ganesha’s vahana became the subject of a laboratory experiment. Chitrakar compositions use the technique of parataxis, which allows contradictory ideas to co-exist. Unlike the comics narrative that used the manga style to exaggerate the effects of the scientific experiment, Dukhushyam’s song emphasizes its banality – the paradox of Ganesha’s vahana being subject to a routine scientific procedure is enabled by the paratactic structure of the song. Bengali folklore is full of stories about divine beings reincarnated on Earth as punishment for minor transgressions. Dukhushyam expects his audience to fill in the missing links in his composition from the stories available in the narrative universe. The doctors give it medicines The mouse grows large With a voice like thunder The mouse charges on the doctors The mouse’s strength broke the cage What a wondrous event The mouse grew so long It broke a building of hundred floors Those who saw it all said Leave the city – run4 Chitrakar narratives about natural calamities tend to emphasize the uncanny affects generated by such events, beginning with the phrase “wondrous event” (ajob ghautona) to describe the event that is then repeated as a sort of refrain after every stanza (Chatterji 2015). These are contrasted with songs based on myths which always begin with an invocation praising the attributes of the god whose story is being sung. Dukhushyam’s composition seems to merge both types of songs, beginning with an invocation and including the phrase “wondrous event” in a subsequent stanza. After having established the uncanny nature of the event the song goes on to describe the scene of devastation, lingering on the pathos evoked by the scale of the human suffering (see plate 4). In Indian drama it is the aesthetics of rasa, i.e., flavor of emotion, that marks out a good performance. Karuna rasa, the flavor of compassion, is one of the most significant and most commonly evoked in Chitrakar performances. However, in this song pathos is evoked by presenting the mouse as a witness to the crowd’s panic. Enflamed by the destruction that it unwittingly causes, its heart bursting with sorrow, it begins a frenzied attack on its surroundings. In the comics story it is the scientist’s panic-stricken exclamation that shocks the mouse into awareness. In Dukhushyam’s song the specific target of the mouse’s wrath is not mentioned – he is not familiar with the mad scientist trope familiar to urban audiences through Hollywood remakes of the Frankenstein and Godzilla stories. Instead he draws from mythology the figure of the divine witness. Compositions about natural disasters like the floods that intermittently ravage the Bengal countryside are often framed by the figure of a deity – usually the river goddess, an embodiment

38  From comic book to folk performance

of nature fury, standing by and impassively observing the destruction (Chatterji 2015). Playing with this motif Dukhushyam portrays the mouse as a tragic figure, both agent and witness to the destruction around it. In sorrow it becomes frenzied What can I do it thinks Its heart full of sorrow It runs here and there5 Manga, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, often constructs its plots around a series of comic gags. The two significant gags in Mice Will Be Mice are the sneeze and the small cat. According to Vidyun the sneeze was the catalyst for the scenes of chaos, enabling Shohei to compose a series of panels showcasing the special effects favored by the manga style. In Vidyun’s words, “We used the sneeze gag in the puppet play first. We needed the buildings to fall over but needed the motivation­ – why and how? It was a logical decision – we had the smoke and dust, we had the army planes buzzing around so the sneeze made perfect sense.” Dukhushyam mentions the sneeze in his song, but as we see it does not have much significance for the story as a whole. In fear the doctors hide In the inner courtyard of the building Roofs break houses break Like in an earthquake Helicopters come from the station Bringing teams of soldiers Causing smoke and dust to fly Such confusion there was In the midst of this confusion Such a sneeze the mouse gave6 The other gag comes at the end as the story draws to a close with the introduction of the little cat who unwittingly becomes the monster mouse’s nemesis. “We didn’t want the mouse to die as this was conceived as a children’s story,” said Vidyun, “but we needed a drop after the heightened excitement of the previous pages that culminates in the sneeze.” The cat motif also allowed them to retain the fable-like quality of the puppet play that ends with the homily that the mouse in keeping with its true nature is terrified of the cat and yet the scientists do not recognize this fact. This is the scene in Dukhushyam’s song, Dust flies sand flies People are terrified Suddenly a small cat appears

From comic book to folk performance  39

Seeing it The mouse gets a fright What should I do [it thinks] Suddenly the mouse spies A small cat This is the end, my time of death Seeing the cat and the mouse run away The doctors are struck with amazement7 From the ubiquitous Kalighat painting of the cat with a vaishnava mark (tilak) on its forehead and stolen fish in its mouth – a symbol of hypocrisy to the proverb that calls the cat the tiger’s aunty – the cat is a familiar trope in Bengali folklore.8 Dukhushyam turns the cat motif into a parodic inversion of the disaster narrative which ends with an epiphany in which the river goddess is shown to be both an embodiment of the river and witness to its fury. The figure of the divine witness in the disaster narratives of the Chitrakars serves as a metaphor for a deeper mythic truth that disasters are a sign of the cosmic play of the gods (Chatterji 2015). In the previous chapter I have discussed the way in which the figure of the witness functions as a mirror in the disaster narratives, allowing multiple perspectives and multiple registers of time to co-exist. The witness is present in the scene of devastation but also stands outside it as a detached observer. This is an ancient literary device used in religious poetry that describes the play of the gods. The voice of the poet is often included in a colophon in the last stanza presenting himself as a witness. Modern Chitrakar poems based on secular themes use this literary device to refer to the performer and the performance event as well. Naya village in West Medinipur Pingla is my thana (subdivision) Dukhushyam’s song is presented to you9 To commemorate the visit of the researchers from Delhi and the special performance of this new story Dukhushyam also included stylized images of Shohei, Vidyun, the interpreter, and himself as the performer in the scroll (see Plate 2). The use of such mirroring tropes may be a recent innovation as far as the painted scroll is concerned but is a well-known device in the Indian narrative tradition and is found in such well-known texts as the Mahabharata and Ramayana in which the act of narration is embedded in the narrative as a metatextual tool by which the text constantly reflects upon itself. Incidentally, such metatextual mirroring devices are also used in the comics text of Mice Will Be Mice – indirectly in the sense that the mouse learns to see itself through the eyes of the scientist, a point emphasized by the large spectacles that the scientist has perched on his nose as well as more directly in the framing of the scene of destruction through the monitor screen in the airplane (see Figure 3.1). The monitor screen is a metaphor of the panel in a comics page which is considered to be a window that enframes a world – a world that announces its

FIGURE 3.1  Mice

Will Be Mice. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

From comic book to folk performance  41

presence as different and set apart from the common, intersubjective world of the readers (Morson 1994). As this section shows, we can read Dukhushyam’s song as a “mosaic of quotations,” to use Julia Kristeva’s apt formulation (1986:37). Kristeva describes a literary text as a dialogue between several discourses – that of the writer, the addressee, and the contemporary and prior cultural contexts. Each new composition, or “writing,” as Kristeva says, can also be thought of as a kind of metatext or a “reading of the anterior literary corpus” so that the text becomes an “absorption of and a reply to another text” (1986:39). Let us explore this further through a reading of the comics text.

Intermedial explorations As I mentioned earlier, Mice Will Be Mice was first conceived as a play with shadow puppets. In one of our conversations about the subject, Shohei told me, “Vidyun and I designed a set of animal puppets to be sold as a package by a foundation that works to promote art among slum children. They were inspired by Panchatantra characters – we had a mouse, a crow, a tortoise. . . . Then this puppet workshop happened. We already had a mouse puppet left over from the previous project and we decided to build a play around it to show the children all the techniques that can be used in shadow puppetry to animate the shadows on the illuminated screen. We wanted to demonstrate techniques such as torch light effects, colour changes, and the expansion and contraction of the images by moving the puppets closer to or away from the screen.” “The story was very simple – more like a fable really,” Vidyun added. “We had very few props – a flat projection screen and paper cut outs of skyscrapers – we cut them in the middle so they could open out like box lids and we used cotton wool for smoke. We could include many more mice and scientists because the projection screen is quite large. We had to reduce the numbers for the comic because the panels are smaller. Shohei really liked the idea of the mouse expanding exponentially and everyone knows the Godzilla story.” The visual narrative of this comic is characterized by well established tools of the comic form, an expansion and contraction of time using panel size, panel shape, gutter space, action lines and layout. These enable minute attention to movement, which is critical to encourage the reader to suspend disbelief, thereby making the climatic irony of the story possible. In retrospect, the possibility of manifesting the story using these tools defined some of the story itself. (Sabhaney 2014: 6) Dukhushyam used some of the elements in our story. He kept the cage, the plane, and the sneeze but couldn’t understand why the mouse became small again in the last panel of his scroll (see Plate 4). When I asked him why he said that small size denotes fear –he has used different options for the end. In

42  From comic book to folk performance

our story the giant mouse runs away. In Dukhushyam’s story he becomes a religious figure once again. (Emura, private conversation, May 2015) Both these quotations point to the contrast between the Chitrakar mode of rendering a story and the comics way. Comics narratives are based on succession, on the linear ordering of time. Events may be expanded or contracted, there may be jumps where phases of the action sequence may be elided, but diachronic movement is essential in maintaining the coherence of the plot. Consider the following sequence in Mice Will Be Mice: The mouse is in its cage resting after a whole series of procedures that are described in graphic detail. Night has fallen – we know this because of a blank panel, a black rectangle cut across with vertical white stripes. The next panel shows the mouse’s face cut across with dark stripes – a reverse image suggesting the shadow of the bars on its cage, and thus daybreak (see Figure 3.2). The gutter between the two panels indicates the passage of time from nightfall to daybreak with great economy. The gutter enables closure as Scott McCloud (1993) says, enabling the reader to connect the disconnected moments depicted in the panels and construct a unified reality. “Suspension of disbelief ” is enabled by the page layout and the sequence of panels on the page, but also by a close attention to detail as we saw in the previous example. To be able to draw the introductory panel in the comic book that shows the laboratory, Shohei needed to know where it was located. “If it had been in Patparganj I would have drawn rickshaws outside the building, if it was South Delhi or the Kutub Institutional area it would have to be cars and autos.” Thus while the presence of cartoony animal figures may break the mimetic illusion, the fact that comics are based on the code of realism whereby pictures always have an element of indexicality in the story is sustained by these examples. To reinforce this point, Vidyun said that “we could get away with generalities in the puppet play but for the comic book we had to think of specific locations for each event even if they are not going to be depicted – so, for instance, where are the planes going to take off from – Dwarka air base?” Realistic detail gives the story weight and takes it beyond the fable-like texture of the puppet play. In contrast, Chitrakar images are iconic rather than indexical. A triangle can simultaneously suggest a small hillock or the mythic Mount Meru; one tree can be used to denote a whole forest as well as the heavenly tree of life (Kalpavriksha). As icons they have an element of darshana – of allowing themselves to be viewed as an act associated with religious devotion (Eck 1985). This is true even in the case of scrolls that depict secular stories such as Mice Will Be Mice which are framed to be intelligible within a mythic framework. A particular feature of myth that is important for the way that these narratives are structured is the fact that they are known in advance. No one hears a myth for the first time – it is part of a timeless present. Thus Chitrakar stories are recounted while stories in comic books are enacted. The difference in performative intention between the two modes of narration also structures the word-image relationship in specific ways. While both forms of pictorial narration build on the discordance between words and images – comics

FIGURE 3.2  Mice

Will Be Mice. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

FIGURE 3.3  Mice

Will Be Mice. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

From comic book to folk performance  45

being a genre that is strongly plot-centric – this discordance is used to slow down the narrative so that the reader lingers on the page. Thus action sequences like the sneeze and the resultant havoc are broken down and stretched over several pages while in Dukhushyam’s scroll several different events – the missile attack, the sneeze, and the building collapse – are all squeezed into one frame (see Plate 4 and Figures 3.2, 3.3, 3.4). The images on the scroll gesture towards the story, and they help to enliven the song without being fixed by it. The painter of the scroll may not always be the narrator of the story, so images must be abstract enough to yield other possible interpretations. Even though Dukhushyam also plays with variation in panel size, the dissonance between the song and scroll means that this does not affect the pace of the story, unlike the comics page where panel size and layout are used as narrative tools that affect the rhythm of storytelling. Tableauxlike depictions suggest that sometimes time is frozen as in the first and last registers of the scroll that depict the mouse as a mythic character along with other divinities in a timeless present, disjunct from the middle registers that display the episodic structure of the narrative. These scrolls play with two registers of time – the time of events but also a cosmic time in which events are just a reminder of the god’s presence. But what about the cat who is also depicted in the last register along with Dukhushyam, Vidyun, Shohei, and everyone else who was present at that event of narration? Dukhushyam’s explanation to Shohei that fear of the cat makes the mouse shrink back to its normal size seems ironic. Would Ganesha’s vahana be afraid of a mere cat? But myths are often playfully ironic in the folk imagination – the mythic is often revealed through the prosaic and the everyday so that even Dukhushyam’s performance – a one-off event sponsored by a workshop with a specific research goal – takes on the quality of a sacred ritual with the potential of being repeated again and again, very much like the narrations that are embedded within the texts of sacred epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata.10 The use of incongruity – the juxtaposition of different perspectives not usually associated with each other – creates humor reminding us that in the folk orientation the sacred realm is often viewed as a fragmented sphere revealed through multiple narratives and types of practise (Hiltebeitel 1992).

Translation, semiosis, and the work of time “Translation is a matter not of finding equivalent words to convey information about a single world but of identifying different worlds to which the same words apply” (Lloyd 2014:221). Words, as this quotation suggests, are not merely signs waiting to be decoded but also open-ended gestures oriented to dialogue. C.S. Pierce (1960) used the term “semiosis” to characterize the continuous and selfreflexive interplay between expressive elements, their objects, and the process of interpretation by which the two came to form a relationship. This relationship is brought about by previous signs and in turn will generate other signs in the future. Thus in Mice Will Be Mice, motifs such as the mouse become reflexive terms that gesture towards the possibility of re-imagining the story and transmitting it

FIGURE 3.4  Mice

Will Be Mice. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

From comic book to folk performance  47

across different mediums. To elaborate on this we have to go back to the context in which the story first emerged – that is, a stick puppet in the form of a mouse and the technique of playing with light and shadow so that the projection of an image on a screen can appear much larger than the actual object. These two objects inspired the initial composition. They cannot be thought of as signs with pre-given meanings but rather as possible openings for dialogue that has yet to happen. We can consider each event of composition as an act of re-imagining in which the composer or interpreter explores the gestures within the composition that make it intelligible. In the rest of this section I will explore the gestural aspects of the story and of storytelling in general by focusing on the word-image relationship in the two compositions. An origin myth of the Chitrakars describes how the painted scroll became an aid to narration, lending credibility to the story being recounted. Thus an ancestor of the Chitrakars was able to rescue members of his community from a ferocious demon who had been preying on them. The man was able to trick the demon into killing himself but no one in his village believed that the demon was dead until he painted a scroll showing the sequence of events as they had taken place and used it to recount his story. According to the Chitrakars this is the way their particular mode of picture storytelling was first conceived (Chatterji 2012). Mere words were not enough – stories had to be both showable and tellable to be persuasive. But what is it that is seen and heard in a Chitrakar story performance? The art form is not based on the convention of realism and eschews empirical detail, thereby allowing multiple interpretations as different songs can be sung using the same scroll (Singh 1995). The performer unfolds the scroll one frame at a time with one hand, recounting his story through the song. He uses the forefinger of his other hand to point out figures in the scene being displayed, thus bringing the events being recounted to life. The story is thus recounted on two registers using two different mediums – sound and visual images. The two work in tandem, but the resultant story does not from a seamless whole as both verbal and visual images tend to leave an iconic surplus that is not immediately reducible to the storyline. This may stagger the process of reception and also allow for repetition so that visual and verbal images recur in different contexts during both a performance and subsequent ones. Time is a crucial resource used to defer meaning. The story takes time to unfold – the sequential arrangements of pictures on the scroll displayed one after the other seem to follow the temporal unfolding of the story. But there is more to the word-image relationship in a Chitrakar narration. Thus the first and last frames of Dukhushyam’s scroll seem to be disjunct from the rest of the story. The first frame introduces the protagonists, tells us why we should listen to their story and how the mouse becomes a storyable persona, but it doesn’t really serve as the beginning of the story itself – we have to wait for the second frame for that to happen. Similarly the last frame of the scroll has nothing to do with the story as such; instead it tells us about the narrative event and the characters who participate in it – the protagonists of the story, the performer and his audience.

48  From comic book to folk performance

In contrast to Chitrakar performances, where the temporal dimension is incorporated into the narrative through the time it takes the performer to sing the song and unroll the scroll, in comics narratives, time and space are supposed to be one in that time is presented spatially on the page through the sequential arrangement of panels. Thus the episodic structure of the story is represented as an architectural structure (Speigelman 2011). But just as the performer’s song and hand movements create an impression of passing time, so also in a comics story the reader’s hand turning page after page generates a sense of duration. Speech balloons incorporated within panels slow down the reading process as the reader’s eye roams over the images presented in each panel.11 But sound images are also used in another way in comics – as sound effects. If the sequence of panels creates the impression of a continuous flow of time in which one moment succeeds another, then sound effects – especially in the manga style of comics production – often break this temporal continuity. Thus in Figure 3.5 we see panels that look like window panes flying across the page as chunks of rubble fall from the sky, shattering the world as represented by the panel sequence, defying “the normally unspoken assumption that the panel constitutes a frame that opens into a representational space rather than being part of the representation itself ” (Singer 2012: 216). Comics creators often play with the double registers of space and time presented on the comics page by dislocating the aural and visual aspects of the scene. Thus in the sneeze scene shown in figure 3.3 the panel frame seems to explode from the force of the mouse’s sneeze. In these examples, panels seem to function as icons – expressing particular kinds of emotional affect. Other panels serve as traces carrying indexical properties far beyond the limits of the text itself, reaching back to anterior texts, tracking its history across different narrative genres. Thus in Figure 3.6 we see the shadow of the mouse looming menacingly over the tiny, terrified figures of the scientists, reminding us that this comics story had its origin in a shadow puppet play. Panels are doing more than organizing the movement of time and space in this story. They are also metatextual devices that draw attention to the way in which a story might come to dwell in a particular form of narration. All narrative genres embody specific models of temporality. Chitrakar narrative, as I have said, works on two different temporal registers – the time of myth, which is synchronic and teleological, in which all narratives are always already known, and the time of events, which is characterized by the open-ended presentness of everyday life. Gary Morson refers to these two modalities of narrative time as “foreshadowing” and “sideshadowing.” The former projects onto the present a shadow of the future and the latter projects from the side, as it were the shadow of an alternate present – a possible present that may change our perspective on what is (1994: 11).12 By locating the chief protagonist, the mouse, in two different orders of existential reality – by the deliberate use of sideshadowing – the events acquire a resonance that is enhanced by the repetition of the refrain telling us that the mouse, as Ganesha’s vahana, has another life in another story. Just as in the case of the Chitrakar narrative, the comic book also plays with the friction generated by juxtaposing disjunctive models of time. Temporal continuity

FIGURE 3.5  Mice

Will Be Mice. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

FIGURE 3.6  Mice

Will Be Mice. Artist, Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

FIGURE 3.7  Mice

Will Be Mice. Artist: Shohei Emura, 2012. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

52  From comic book to folk performance

suggested by the sequence of panels is disrupted when the focus shifts to page layout with its metatextual references to synchronicity. Open-ended time reflected in the dialogic character of speech balloons is juxtaposed with the closed, fable-like structure of the story indicated by the disembodied voice of the all-knowing narrator – another trace of the comics pre-history, reminding us that the puppet play was conceived as a fable with a moral message that nature is what it is and should not be tampered with.13 The mouse is predestined by nature to be frightened of the cat whatever its size (see Figure 3.7). It has no conception of agency or free will, unlike Arjun, one of the main protagonists of Chilka discussed in the last chapter, whose self-reflexivity was also reflected in the open-ended structure of the story with its emphasis on the contingent quality of events. The workshop in Naya village that resulted in Dukhushyam’s translation of a comics story into a Chitrakar performance was conceived as a metacultural and transmedial experiment, an attempt to understand contrasting modes of picture storytelling by making a story move between these different forms. Not just Dukhushyam’s performance, however, but every stage in the composition of Mice Will Be Mice was also a reflection on the very process of narrativization itself. It is an established truth in folklore scholarship that stories have an inbuilt vector of movement – across space and across time. What this experiment has shown is that they also create pathways along which they can travel (Urban 2001). Thus the different narrative genres through which this story circulates become the moulds through which it is continuously re-fashioned, but in the process the genres are also transformed into hybrid spaces of metacultural commentary as they now come to acquire a self-consciousness in relation to the other forms through which the story has come to life.

Notes 1 Quoted in Barthes 1970: 5. 2 I am also inspired by Pierce’s (1960) idea of semiosis as a continuous process. 3 Mahadeber putro Ganesha   Indur hoe bahon   Shei indur ke khanchae bhore   Rakhe daktar gaun   Daktarder chhilo kintu eibhabe shikhha   Indur niye daktarera korbe shomikhha 4 Daktarera oushod khawayey   Indur gelo bere   Indur kintu daktarder je   Gorje ashe tede   Khancha bhanglo gayer jore   Aschorjo ghauton   Indur eto laumba holo   Bhanglo eksho taula   Je dekheche she boleche   Shauhor chhere pala 5 Dukkhe indur hoye utola   Ki kori ekhon

From comic book to folk performance  53

  Moner dukkhe indur kintu   Edhar odhar jaye 6 Bhauye daktar nukayilo   Badir anginaye   Dak pala ghaur bhenge jaye   Bhukaumper moton   Daroga theke helicoptare   Ashe shena bahinir daul   Emon bhabe dhuya chhure   Emni gedakaul   Dekho emni gedakaul   Indur taukhon hanchhe probaul 7 Dhula ure bali ure   Manush she bhoye paye   Hautat ekta chhoto beral   Beralo shethaye   Dekho beralo shethaye   Dekhe indur bhoye pe jaye   Ki kori ekhun   Hautat indur dekhte pelo   Chhoto ek beral   Bujhe nilo eta kintu amar mrityu kaal   Daktar indur beral niye hauye dausha chona 8 The Vaishnava mark is a sign of asceticism, a fact belied by the fish in the cat’s mouth. 9 Naya Paschim Medinipur   Pingla amar thana   Dukhushyamer gaan udbodhon kori (rest is unintelligible) 10 In fact, the workshop mode allowed Dukhushyam the luxury of playing with the idea of “difference” at several levels – not only with the difference between the mythic and the mundane registers, which is intrinsic to the performance of myths in Indian folk traditions, but also to signpost the fact that the mouse could have been part of a different story, as Ganesha’s vahana suggested by the refrain. He uses the subjunctive mode to show this using the refrain to self-consciously signpost the difference in form between his story and the one in the comic. 11 In fact reading gestures such as page flips are incorporated into the architecture of story composition as we discussed in the previous chapter. 12 There is a third model of narrative chronicity called “backshadowing,” in which the present casts its shadow on the past so that events that have already occurred are read for their significance for the present. 13 Godzilla, the fictional pre-historic character that achieved monstrous proportions by feeding on radiation, was conceived as an allegory for nuclear weapons and the danger of tampering with the forces of nature.

Pinocchio Scroll, 4th Frame. Artist: Swarna Chitrakar, 2009.

Source: Author’s Collection.

PLATE 1  The

Page, Nagayana,Varan Kanda,Vol. 1, Cover Page, Chapter 1, “Paap ka Beej.” Artist: Anupam Sinha, 2017, pp. 4–5.

Source: Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics.

PLATE 2 Cover

PLATE 3  The

Mouse’s Story, First Three Frames. Artist: Dukhushyam Chitrakar, n.d.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

PLATE 4  The

Mouse’s Story, Last Two Frames. Artist: Dukhushyam Chitrakar, n.d.

Source: Courtesy of Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura.

PLATE 5  VRICA:

Dawn of the Wolf. Art: Tamal Saha and Tarun Kumar Sahu, n.d. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics.

Dawn of the Wolf. Art: Tamal Saha and Tarun Kumar Sahu, n.d. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics.

PLATE 6  VRICA:

PLATE 7  Ramayan

3392 AD, Vol. 1 by Shamik Dasgupta, Deepak Chopra, Shekhar Kapur, Alex Ross (Artist), Abhishek Singh (Artist), Ashwin Chikerur (Artist), Virgin Comics/Liquid Comics, 2007. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Abhishek Singh and Graphic India.

Source: Courtesy of Abhishek Singh and Graphic India.

3392 AD, Vol. 1 by Shamik Dasgupta, Deepak Chopra, Shekhar Kapur, Alex Ross (Artist), Abhishek Singh (Artist), Ashwin Chikerur (Artist), Virgin Comics/Liquid Comics, 2007. Unpaginated.

PLATE 8  Ramayan

Source: Courtesy of Abhishek Singh and Graphic India.

3392 AD, Vol. 1 by Shamik Dasgupta, Deepak Chopra, Shekhar Kapur, Alex Ross (Artist), Abhishek Singh (Artist), Ashwin Chikerur (Artist), Virgin Comics/Liquid Comics, 2007. Unpaginated.

PLATE 9  Ramayan

Source: Courtesy of Abhishek Singh and Graphic India.

3392 AD, Vol. 1 by Shamik Dasgupta, Deepak Chopra, Shekhar Kapur, Alex Ross (Artist), Abhishek Singh (Artist), Ashwin Chikerur (Artist), Virgin Comics/Liquid Comics, 2007. Unpaginated.

PLATE 10  Ramayan

4 MYTHS, SCIENCE FICTION, AND INDIAN SUPERHEROES

The biggest action story of all times is back! Ramayan 3392 AD

If this blurb wasn’t enough to catch the eye, it was inscribed on a bright, orange and yellow book cover with a muscular, blue-tinted figure flying in the air about to let loose a laser beam from what looked like a high-tech mechanized bow – was this really Rama or a newly minted oriental superhero from the Marvel Comics stables? Having worked on folk myths for many years where epic heroes take on unexpected forms, my curiosity was piqued and I bought what turned out to be the first volume of a science fiction version of the Ramayana, produced by the self-help guru Deepak Chopra and the film director Shekhar Kapur and published by Virgin Comics in 2006 (Chopra and Kapur 2006). I soon discovered that this comic book was merely the tip of the iceberg and that there were numerous superheroes inspired by Indian mythology not just in our fledgling comics industry but in the big commercial houses in the US as well. Further exploration revealed that this phenomenon was not restricted to productions in English but that India’s preeminent superhero comics publisher, Raj Comics, had also adapted the plot of the Ramayana to create an alternative universe for one of its oldest superhero characters, Nagraj. Coincidently the Nagayana series in which Nagraj is a Rama substitute also started in 2007. Is this the age of the Indian superhero? But first, a brief history of the superhero genre. Even though Amar Chitra Katha, begun in 1967, was the first publishing house to indigenize the superhero culture generally associated with the US comics tradition, these were largely based on divinized heroes from Indian mythology or kings and other famous historical figures. It is really in the 1980s with the inception of Raj Comics that we have a fictitious set of characters that conform to the superhero

Myths, science fiction, Indian superheroes  55

mythos. The universe of superheroes created by Raj Comics continues to flourish today, though with a somewhat diminished readership after some unsuccessful forays into television and animation.1 However, we do see a resurgence of interest in the superhero mythos with many small, self-publishing authors taking up this genre to explore wider issues relating to culture and politics in India.

Indian superheroes: An overview What exactly are the features of the superhero genre? The golden age of American comics that lasted from the 1930s to the 1950s established the characteristics of the superhero archetype, which include extraordinary powers giving the character the status of a demi-god, a strong moral code that establishes a clear-cut division between good and evil and creates in the character a personal rather than legal sense of justice, villains also with extraordinary powers which are used for evil rather than good ends, a secret identity, a costume, and an origin story that establishes the motivation for the superhero’s actions and explains how he or, less often, she acquired these powers. The superhero often has an ambivalent relationship to the political establishment, and the genre of superhero comics usually consists of a blend of science, magic, and myth (Hatfield et al. 2013). American comics heroes such as Superman were inspired by Greek and Roman myths, and Karline McLain (2009), the author of several important works on Indian comics, claims that mythical heroes from the Indian epics such as Rama also fit the superhero archetype. But superhero comics are usually set within an urban landscape, and Rama would make an extremely unusual superhero since his human incarnation makes him unconscious of his divinity and his extraordinary destiny! Be that as it may, superhero comics have found new roots in metropolitan India, tapping diverse sources for inspiration such as mythology, contemporary politics, and the American superhero culture. Even though the 1980s is the period when indigenous superhero comics take firm root, Indian audiences have been familiar with superhero characters for much longer through newspaper comic strips based on Tarzan, Phantom, and Mandrake the Magician. Made up of a mix of magic and adventure set in exotic locations, these characters were so popular that a publication devoted to their adventures, Indrajal Comics, was launched by the Times of India Group and Bennet and Coleman in 1964. The fact that these stories were translated into Indian languages gave them a wide appeal, and there are influential graphic novel creators like Sarnath Banerjee who claim to have developed an interest in the comics medium by reading Phantom comics (Debroy 2011). Bahadur, the son of a criminal who becomes a crime fighter and heads a private force of citizens, is one of the Indian heroes created by Indrajal Comics. Indrajal Comics was wound up in 1990, but Diamond Comics had already taken over and published translations of stories about a whole range of action heroes that included, apart from the three already mentioned, Superman, James Bond, He-Man, and Spiderman. Indian action characters such as the mighty jungle king Mahabali Shaka, modeled on Tarzan and Phantom, Fauladi Singh, and Chacha Chaudhuri, a wise old villager and his alien companion Sabu, all

56  Myths, science fiction, Indian superheroes

from Diamond Comics, also date from this period (Debroy 2011).2 However, one of the earliest Indian superheroes is Batul the Great, created by Narayan Debnath for a Bengali children’s magazine called Shuktara in the mid 1960s, though Batul acquired superpowers only in the 1970s (Chanda 2015). Superhero stories in films and electronic media have had indifferent success apart from the wildly popular television serial Shaktiman that began in 1997 and continued for 400 episodes.3 Unlike the early Indian superhero characters mentioned previously, they all refer even if elliptically to Indian mythology. Thus Krrish on whom three films have been made so far (2006, 2013), is an abbreviation of Krishna, Captain Vyom (1998) refers to the sky and to the atmospheric gods mentioned in the Vedas, and G-One, the hero of Ra.One (2011), is Jeevan or Life – the film’s title, Ra.One, a pun on the demon king, Ravana (Chanda 2015). After a brief lull in the first decades of the 1990s when satellite television seemed to overshadow the comics industry,4 the Indian comics scene received a boost when the US-based Gotham Comics5 started to distribute Marvel and DC titles in India in 1998. Gotham Comics produced a transcreation of the Spiderman story for India in 2004 and started their mythological transcreations in 2006, using myth as a backdrop for modern superhero stories. The Comic Con that was held for the first time in Delhi in 2011 gave a boost to many independent creators who began to self-publish their comics, tailoring their productions and print runs to the traction that they got from the Comic Cons held in different cities. Publishers like Holy Cow Entertainment, Chariot, Yali, and Meta Desi Comics all work in a mix of genres such as fantasy, science fiction, superhero, and gothic which has zombie and vampire heroes. Web comics have also begun to explore the superman theme in a small way with Apupen creating an ultra-nationalist character called Rashtra Man – a satirical spin on Superman – who only drinks green tea because it destroys “free radicals” (Apupen 2018). In fact many of these new superhero-themed comics use the superhero archetype to critique the current social climate in India, and I shall have more to say on this later though one of the potentially more serious experiments in the genre is a short story by Amitabh Kumar titled Helmetman in Zamzamad. In homage to the seminal role of Raj Comics in inventing the Indian superhero, Kumar has created Helmetman, the everyman – literally every man – who can take on the superhero persona as soon as he dons the magical helmet (Kumar and Raj Comics 2012).

Comic book companies and secular mythologies Virgin Comics LLC, which produced largely Indian theme-based comics for a global audience, was founded in 2006 by a group that included Richard Branson, the millionaire; the film maker Shekhar Kapur; Deepak Chopra, the author of books on holistic health; and three other entrepreneurs, Sharad Devarajan, Suresh Seetharaman, and Deepak Chopra’s son Gotham Chopra, the founder of Gotham Entertainment, which has contracts with important American publishers to provide superhero comics for the Indian market. After a management buyout in 2008,

Myths, science fiction, Indian superheroes  57

Virgin Comics was renamed Liquid Comics and shifted its headquarters from New York to Los Angeles. The Bangalore office was run by the former advertising executive Suresh Seetharaman (Scott 2008). Virgin Comics had initially proposed an ambitious plan of modernizing Indian mythology and the visual language of her comics to reach out to a global audience. It established links with major film companies like Warner Brothers, Sony Online Entertainment and Sci Fi Channel. It also recruited celebrity directors like John Woo and Guy Ritchie to explore ideas in comics that might be more difficult to realize in film. Shekhar Kapur’s Snake Woman was the first title to come out in this line called “Director’s Cut.” Concepts were to be developed and co-produced as television shows, films, video games, and digital platforms for short animation films that could be shown on mobile phones.6 In fact comics were viewed not as an independent and autonomous medium but rather as an “incubator for big seed ideas” that could be translated into other types of entertainment media (Scott 2008). The focus was on developing characters as intellectual property, about possible story worlds and conceptual landscapes – to take India’s rich mythological heritage and her creative talent to the West and bring the best of Western technology and organizational skills to India. But in spite of these ambitious plans only some of these projects have actually reached fruition, and apart from a few issues of the many comics series that were announced, they are extremely difficult to find in India (Scott 2008).7 Inspired by animation shows on the Marvel comics superhero Spiderman on Indian television, Sanjay Gupta and his brothers Manoj and Manish decided to create Indian superheroes, and Nagraj was born in 1987 under the banner of Raj Comics, an offshoot of their father’s pulp fiction business called Raja Pocket Books. Unlike the phenomenally successful Amar Chitra Katha that had the explicit pedagogical goal of bringing India’s cultural heritage to the urban, English-educated, middle-class youth, Raj Comics was meant for a Hindi-speaking readership with the sole object of entertainment. They produced a galaxy of superheroes that may have been inspired by American comics characters but were informed by a distinctly Indian imagination. “We used to watch Spiderman and discuss what an Indian superhero would look like and the powers he would have,” said Sanjay Gupta in an interview with Manik Sharma of the Indian Express.8 Raj Comics was extremely popular, with distribution chains even in Nepal and Bangladesh and translations in Bengali and other Indian languages. It was only in the late 1990s with the advent of liberalization, competition from international publishers and distributors, satellite television, and video games that their sales began to diminish.9 However, Hindi film director Anurag Kashyap was planning to make a film on Doga, one of the Raj Comics action heroes, a project that is temporarily in abeyance because of financial constraints, and the Gupta brothers are planning a web series and a live action film based on their fictional characters at some future date.10 In the following sections we shall be discussing Ramayan 3392 AD, one of the first titles to be published by Virgin Comics LLC, and 18 Days, a web-based animation series based on the Mahabharata and conceptualized by Grant Morrison,

58  Myths, science fiction, Indian superheroes

who is known for his re-visioning of many of the popular DC and Marvel superheroes. By way of contrast to these “Western” transcreations of the Indian epics, we shall also include a discussion of Nagayana, a series based on the Raj Comics superheroes Nagraj and Dhruv, loosely based on the Ramayana storyline. While all three superhero-themed comics attempt to contemporize mythology by including elements from science fiction, new age spiritualism, and fantasy, Nagayana has a distinctly Indian flavor because of the inclusion of elements from folklore and popular culture.

Indian epics for the modern age Ramayan 3392 AD was amongst the first works produced by Virgin LLC. After a story arc consisting of eight issues brought together in a volume titled The Age of the Mahavinaash, the series was re-booted under the editorship of Ron Marz, who has a vast experience working in mainstream American comics publishing. Graphic India, Singapore; and Westland, Chennai have published two other volumes: The Tome of the Wastelands (2013) and In the Clutches of Baali – The Monster King (2014). To the best of my knowledge no further volumes have been distributed in India. In 2014 Graphic India and Westland published Grant Morrison’s 18 Days – a book that includes his concept note and some original scripts for the forthcoming animated web series as well as illustrations by Mukesh Singh. 18 Days – the title refers to the Kurukshetra War that lasted eighteen days – was launched as an animated digital series in partnership with YouTube India as I have mentioned in Chapter 2. Envisioned as a video game and animation movie that could be broken into short episodes, initially the project did not include a comic book, perhaps because Morrison had an exclusive contract with the US-based DC comics for his comic book work.11 More recently, however, a comics series based on the 18 Days has been published by Graphic India and Westland with issues scripted by Gotham Chopra, Ashwin Pande, Samit Basu, and Sarwat Chadda and art work by Jeevan J. Kang, Francesco Biagini, and Saumin Patel (Devarajan et al. 2016).

Ramayan 3392 AD – plot summary Set in a time after the Mahavinaash (Great Destruction) which destroyed human civilization as we know it, Aryavarta, the dominant continent after the post-­ Mahavinaash period, became home not only to the surviving humans but also to other creatures who rival humans in their cultural sophistication such as the vanaras, bhalus, garudas, etc. The dominant race of humans who live in Armagarh have inherited solar technology (shakti kundali) that protects them from the toxic atmosphere, a relic of the great war that led to the Mahavinaash and gives them a developmental advantage over other species. The state of Armagarh is governed by a council headed by Maharaj Dashrath. Ram12 and Lakshman are the sons of his first wife, Kaushalya, who is dead at the time when the story begins, and Bharat and Shatrughan are the sons of his second

Myths, science fiction, Indian superheroes  59

wife, Kaikeyi, who is also a councilor. The brothers are close though Ram is marked out by his distinctive blue skin, a sign that he originated in another loka as we shall learn later. Nark is a dark continent to the south of Armagarh and is ruled by Ravan, the Asura Prime. Ravan, an artificial being created as a weapon during the Great War, played an important role in re-creating civilization on Nark. Badly affected by nuclear radiation during the Great War, all life was reduced to “primal jelly” (2014: unpaginated). Ravan re-created many of the species that inhabit Nark by infusing them with artificial technology. Rakshasas, Pishachas, Daityas, Brischik, and Yakshas are among the many species found on Nark. At the time when the story begins, Ravan is bent on expanding his empire, threatening the outposts of Aryavarta. The councilors of Armagarh, made complacent by their superior technology and civilization, refuse to acknowledge the threat posed by Ravan. In fact the council has been infiltrated by asuras disguised as humans to weaken it from within, and even the gods who are supposed to guide the day-to-day affairs of the state are revealed to be holographic simulations manipulated by the asuras.13 Ram and Lakshman are sent to govern the sleepy outpost Janasthan that lies on the outskirts of Ayodhya. It is attacked by Ravan’s army soon after Ram and Lakshman arrive there. Ram’s army is heavily outnumbered though they put up a brave fight much to the surprise of Vivshan (Vibhishana), the leader of the asura army and Ravan’s younger brother. Ram and Vivshan agree on a truce against the advice of their senior officers as this act is supposed to be a violation of the warrior code of humans and asuras alike. Ram agrees to surrender if the women and children are allowed safe passage out of Janasthan, and Vivshan, impressed with Ram’s compassion, agrees. Back in Ayodhya, Ram is exiled for fourteen years as punishment for violating the kshatriya code of honor. The story then shifts to the deserts of Jara where Lakshman is seen fending off a savage attack by the kiraat, the wild assassins of the dessert. We learn that he has left Ayodhya in search of his brother after evading several assassination attempts. He is rescued by Vishwamitra, one of the seven seers who helped restore human civilization after the destruction wrought by the Mahavinaash. In the meantime Ram has joined Guha, the Nishaad chieftain. Lakshman and Vishwamitra find him, and the latter reveals the secret of Ram’s birth, caused by the weakening of the barriers between the lokas after the Great War and his destiny as the potential savior of the world. Vishwamitra takes the two brothers to the secret city of Mithila that lies deep within the Dandakaranya forest close to Janasthan. (We learn that the true intention of the asura attack on Janasthan was to locate and gain control of Mithila.) Our heroes arrive in time to save Sita from the asura hordes led by Tadaka and her two sons, Marich and Subahu. Vishwamitra reveals that it is Ram’s destiny to protect Sita, the daughter of the earth, who, with her power to transform and regenerate nature, is the key to the world’s salvation.14 Bharat, who had been sent to protect the isphat mines in another part of Aryavarta, is captured by the asura who try to clone his DNA to make super warriors of their own but is saved by Shatrughan and his underground army. They

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return to Ayodhya just in time to save it from a palace coup led by the asuras who had infiltrated the council. Bharat dissolves the council and declares himself the sovereign ruler of Armagarh until such time as Ram returns. This story arc is spread over eight issues collected together in one volume. Ramayan 3392 AD was then “reloaded” with Ron Marz as editor, who sought to locate it within the framework of the archetypal hero myth elaborated by Joseph Campbell (1949). The story continues with the escape of Ram, Sita, and Lakshman to the city of Panchavati ruled by the three asura siblings, Dushan, Khara, and Soornaka (Surpanakha). Related by kinship to Ravan, they fled Lanka many years ago to escape from his control. Panchavati, portrayed as a city of unimaginable depravity, is modeled on Rome in the last days of the Roman Empire, complete with gladiatorial games in which warriors of different species fight with each other. Sita is captured by Ravan, disguised as Vishwamitra, who we later learn was killed during the escape from Mithila. Ram and Lakshman are sold as slave combatants in the Games. They manage to escape from Panchavati and wander into Kishkinda, where they join Shugreav’s rebel army to fight against the tyrant Mahabali, ruler of the vanara kingdom. As I have said, after the three issues mentioned here Ramayana 3392 AD is no longer available in India. Reviews of the series on the internet suggest that it received a somewhat muted response from the public though it has been praised for its imaginative approach and visual sophistication and has been translated into several languages.15

The 18 Days – plot summary Let us now turn to another venture by Virgin Comics, the Mahabharata project, in which the comics creator Grant Morrison was brought in expressly to transform the epic into a Western-style story “for people raised on movies, comics and video games” (2013: 3). The 18 Days, as the title suggests, focuses solely on the Mahabharata War. Stories about important episodes in the Great War, and flashbacks that make up the background of the characters and explain the build up to war, are envisioned as spiraling forth from what Morrison calls the “singularity” that is Krishna’s message to Arjuna enshrined in the Bhagavad Gita – “the moment when time is stopped while the true nature of the cosmos is revealed” (Morrison 2013: 6). As Morrison explains in the companion volume to the web stories, the Gita is at the heart of the story of war between fraternal kin. In his concept note included in the book he says that he plans to develop a loose, mosaic-like structure that will enable the addition of new modules around the war – cutting back to the past and moving forward into the future. He likens Krishna’s revelation to the Big Bang that led to the formation of the Universe and plans to begin the 18 Days from the moment when Arjun re-enters time to pick up his bow to fight. Krishna is envisioned as an alien, representative of “intelligent Other races that haunt our stories and folk tales” (2013: 18). He belongs to the future – a Golden Age that will succeed the

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dark Kali Age – and like a “Terminator of Peace” he has been sent from the future to make sure that the world is not destroyed in the Great War (ibid). The Pandavas are all “super warriors,” and the Kauravas and their allies are portrayed as somewhat bestial characters to enhance the contrast between the two warring camps. Morrison is aware that the Mahabharata does not make stark distinctions between good and evil, but he chooses to amplify the cruelty and violence of the Kauravas to give the story a tone more in keeping with a pop culture that is dominated by action films and video games. Thus in one of the comics Duryodhana is shown to have sponsored the creation of giant reptilian monsters (rakshasas) to augment his army. The story is set in a primordial supercontinent, Pangaea or Bharat, that split two hundred million years ago at the end of the Treta yuga (Morrison 2013, 2014). It is on the ninth day of the Great War that Bharat is split apart, Morrison says; there is a crack in time and the Iron Age begins. Morrison describes the setting and context of the story in great detail to justify the futuristic “look” of his characters and their advanced weaponry. The age of our planet is estimated at six billion years. The dinosaurs reportedly died out sixty five million years ago and the first homo sapiens are believed to have appeared forty five thousand years ago. In the last two thousand years of history, human cultures have advanced from blacksmith’s forges to atomic power. My conceit here is that the great kingdoms of Bharat . . . had plenty of time to flower to their technological peak and then disappear. I’m setting the date for this version, somewhere around 10,000 BC before the various Floods of the world traditionally at the beginning of the present Kali Yuga. (2013: 8) Both these narratives assume a desacralized world in which technological advances have taken on some of the wondrous quality that we associate with the landscape of traditional myth. The style of narration assumes a kind of pseudo-historicity that defamiliarizes the past and the future while still allowing us to recognize it as plausible. This kind of pseudo-realistic historicity presents itself as a form of modern myth-making that can be mapped onto “a patterned representation of the world” (Pollock 1989:606). Pollock defines myths in terms of such patterned representations that have a “continued and vital relevance” to the cultures to which they belong and which provide a “conceptual grid upon which variable and multiform experiences can be plotted and comprehended” (ibid.). Thus one could say that science fiction creates modern myths for contemporary audiences.

Gods and superheroes In his editorial foreword to Tome of the Wastelands, the first of the rebooted issues of Ramayan 3392 AD, Ron Marz discusses Joseph Campbell’s archetype of the hero and his quest and how it influenced his depiction of Ram in the comic series.

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“Rama’s [the god] journey was already familiar to me. He’s Beowulf, he’s Luke Skywalker, he’s any of the other heroes that you care to name” (Marz 2013: 3). Campbell’s (1949) monomyth16 of the hero’s quest is based on the tripartite structure of the rites of passage – separation from the community, initiation, andreturn and incorporation into the community (van Gennep 2004, 1960). The hero journeys into a wondrous realm, encounters fabulous creatures there, achieves a decisive victory over them, and returns from his adventures with new gifts and with the power to bestow boons and rid his community of the evils that beset it and which were the prime motivators for his quest. The hero, according to this archetype, is a solitary figure cut off from others, and he accomplishes the task of redeeming his community on his own. Deeply influenced by Jung’s theory of universal archetypes present in the collective unconscious through concrete mythic images, Campbell believed that the universal fascination with the hero myth revealed a form of camouflage by which the sacred was available to popular culture even when society lost interest in religion per se. The hero monomyth carried a numinous charge so that images from popular culture such as the comics character Superman still carried traces of mythic heroes such as Indra or Hercules. Campbell thought that all societies believe in the myth of a savior who is born in successive ages to reenergize humankind, which in modern times is associated with a gnostic interpretation of religion as a form of individualistic and mystical spiritualism (Ellwood 1999). His idea of a gnostic savior may not have much traction among serious scholars of mythology and folklore but has had a huge impact on mass media and on people who actually shape popular culture. Thus George Lucas, the producer of the iconic Star Wars films, has publicly stated that he was inspired by Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Ellwood 1999: 128). Can Indian epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata be read as superhero stories? Are the figures of Rama, Arjuna, or Bhima still recognizable when they are moulded to fit Campbell’s heroic monomyth? To address these questions I turn to a comics story arc about the Indian superhero Nagraj produced by Raj Comics.

Nagayana: The Ramayana for our time The Nagayana series (2007–9), envisioned by Anupam and Jolly Sinha and Sanjay Gupta, who is the creative director of Nagraj publications, is set in an alternate universe in the year 2023 CE when the threatened impact of a comet from outer space has driven most of Earth’s population underground where they live in scattered megacities. The opening scene takes place in an underground laboratory in an undisclosed location where a team of experts is strategizing on how to destroy the comet before it actually impacts the Earth’s surface (see Figure 1.3). One of the experts, a senior army commander, is an alien in disguise, a shape-shifting serpent (ichhadhari naga) who through a network of naga spies is keeping watch on the comet. The comet, we are told, is constantly shifting direction as if it is searching for a specific location near the Indian Ocean. The shape-shifting serpents have infiltrated the human populations, even intermarried with them in secret. Their

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intentions are benign – to protect the earth from evil, as they are the only ones who can actually see the black powers that are invisible to human eyes. We soon learn that the location that the comet is searching for is the secret laboratory of Gurudev, the evil genius behind Nagraj’s greatest enemy, his uncle Nagpasha. Secreted away on a small, uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean, Gurudev is trying to enhance Nagpasha’s powers and make him the ultimate supervillain, removing the two defects in his personality – sloth and cowardice – that prevent him from overpowering Nagraj. Nagpasha is immersed in a chemical solution that is supposed to alter his personality when the comet strikes and he is split into three – the supervillain Krurpasha, and Bhirupasha and Suptapasha, who personify his two character defects – cowardice and sloth respectively. Nagpasha’s tripartite personality represents the three brothers Ravana (Krurpasha), Kumbhakarna (Suptapasha), and Vibhishana (Bhirupasha) in the Ramayana. Introduced as the maryada purushottam17 of the Kali Age in this series, Nagraj (literally “king of snakes”) is the first superhero character created by Raj Comics. Originally conceived as an enemy of international terrorism, Nagraj is the disciple of Guru Gorakhnath and like all superheroes has a secret identity – he works for a television channel in the fictional city of Mahanagar (Great City). Born from a boon given by Dev Kaljayi, who is the sacred serpent around Lord Shiva’s neck, to King Takshakraj and Queen Lalita of the kingdom of Takshaknagar, Nagraj was initially thought to be a still birth and thrown into the river.18 The evil younger brother of the king, Nagpasha, demanded that the treasures of the kingdom be handed over to him as he was now the royal heir. But Dev Kaljayi, who was also the keeper of the royal treasure, refused and told him that the true heir to the throne was still alive. Nagpasha raised his sword against the deity only to be flung aside by a flick of his divine tail. Nagpasha fell upon two bowls containing halahala, an extremely potent form of venom that destroyed his face and entered his bloodstream, and amrita (the nectre of immortality). The combined effects of both halahala and amrita made Nagpasha immortal and poisonous. Meanwhile the baby that was to become Nagraj floated into a clump of reeds while still in an unconscious state. Dev Kaljayi appeared in the dreams of King Maniraj and Queen Manika, the rulers of the long-lived ichhadhari nagas on an invisible island in the Indian Ocean, and asked them to rescue the baby. The baby was found to contain venom that was even more powerful than that possessed by the shape-shifting snakes. It took many years before he started to respond to the treatment of the king’s physician, a treatment that had been revealed to him by Dev Kaljayi. The royal couple who were childless had decided to adopt the stillunconscious baby but were thwarted by an evil tantric who stole the baby, but out of fear of Mahatma Kalduta, the most powerful shape-shifting snake on the island, he did not kill the baby but abandoned him in the same reed cluster where he had originally been found. The infant regained consciousness and was found crying by a priest of a nearby temple, who gave him to Professor Nagmani, an evil scientist. Professor Nagmani discovered that the infant’s body was filled with microscopic snakes that took the place of white blood corpuscles. The baby had extraordinary

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powers of healing and was also extremely poisonous, its body infused with a venom that was divine. Initially the evil scientist passed him off as a product of his own experiments but was foiled by Guru Goraknath. Meanwhile, back in the invisible kingdom of the shape-shifting snakes, Queen Manika gave birth to the princess Visarpi, who was to become Nagraj’s love interest in later issues of this series.19 Nagraj’s body houses millions of microscopic snakes that he can eject to form weapons. Some of these have distinct personalities, such as the Egyptian shapeshifting Saudaangi, who is a direct descendant of Cleopatra, and Naagu, a comic snake character. Nagraj has venomous breath which he uses to make his enemies unconscious and can turn his body into microscopic particles, thus making him somewhat ethereal and also immune to physical danger. He uses telepathy to communicate with snakes all over the world. His best friend, who also appears in Nagayana, is Super Commando Dhruv, who is not superhuman like Nagraj but can communicate with birds and animals because he was brought up in the circus. Dhruv has his own series. Nagraj also has a son, Nagsheesh, by Nagrani in a parallel dimension. She is a female equivalent of Nagraj and a very minor character in the Nagayana series. Nagpasha, Nagraj’s evil uncle, is his foremost enemy – a supervillain to match our superhero’s abilities. To return to the Nagayana – the phrase Jab jab paap dhara par aayi, katha jai puni puni dohorai (whenever evil appears on the earth the story is repeated again and again) appears at the beginning of each kaand (book), identifying the series as the Ramayana for the Kali yuga. Super Commando Dhruv is brought into this story to serve as Lakshmana to Nagraj’s Rama. The two heroes, who are usually weaponless in their separate story arcs, are shown on the splash page that begins the series wielding high-tech bows and arrows, electrical currents flowing through the bow strings (see Plate 2). Driven by the popular demand to bring more heroes into the Nagraj stories and to extend their range of superpowers (shaktis), the editors decided to set this series in an alternate universe (Gupta 2017:245). The long story arcs and parallel series that characterize the narrative structure of popular superhero comics allow their characters to exist in multiple worlds and diverse stories simultaneously. While the initial impetus for this was probably commercial as it allowed characters to be constantly rebooted and thus remain contemporary, it also had important consequences for plot and narrative structure as it allowed characters to die in one issue, then come alive again in the next one, acquire powers or lose them depending on the intricacies of plot design – in short to lead different lives in different story arcs. The fact that these stories unfold over a continuous series allows for such possibilities. Thus in the first issue of the Nagayana we are told that Nagraj is married to Bharati, who appears as his colleague in the television company that he secretly owns.20 The marriage is in name only to allow Bharati to become the company’s legal owner and assure her future in case Nagraj should die in one of his adventures. This episode is narrated as a back story by Bharati to Dhruv, as she stands beside a comatose Nagraj, a series of robotic Nagraj replicas lining the walls of the secret underground laboratory in which this episode unfolds. She tells Dhruv that Nagraj

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was severely injured while trying to combat the “black powers” that had come to inhabit the body of Nagpasha. Dhananjay, a swarna manav (golden man) descended from the devas (gods), has come up from Swarna Nagari (Golden City which lies at the bottom of the ocean) in an attempt to discover the source of the black powers. A member of the deva species with technological knowledge far in advance of humans, Dhananjaya has created a series of robot Nagrajs to protect humans from the black powers that are slowly infiltrating their underground cities. Interestingly, both the nagas and devas are presented here as alien species. The devas, as I have said, are denizens of an advanced civilization with a superior technology, and the shape-shifting nagas have supernatural abilities such as agelessness, telepathy as far as their own species is concerned, and an ability to detect the black powers even when they are disguised as humans. In keeping with naga folklore, the intimacy between the nagas and the humans is emphasized though the stress on the term “species,” and this also marks the difference between this story, written for our contemporary time, and traditional folk stories. A small side story about a scientist who upon returning to Earth from an interplanetary mission discovers to his horror that his wife is a naga reveals the familiar theme of naga-human marriage in Indian folklore but sets it in a different universe by comparing it to inter-caste marriage (Pandeya 1967). The shape-shifting naga wife calls him old fashioned and says that inter-species marriages are the hallmark of societal evolution just as intercaste marriages were in the 20th century. Meanwhile the scene has shifted to Alandhya, Krurpasha’s kingdom, which is in a separate dimension sealed off from Earth. Krurpasha is shown kneeling before a hunched reptilian creature who is Mahakala Chhidra, the personification of the powers of the Black Hole, the dark world into which all things are absorbed and which can only be vanquished by pure light (see Figure 1.3). He tells Krurpasha that Lanka was sealed off after being sent to another dimension by Rama in the Treta yuga because the latter did not trust Vibhishana’s ability to control the rakshasas. Alandhya is Lanka and Krurpasha is Ravana, the Lord of the Black Powers. Suptapasha (Kumbhakarna in the Ramayana), who has been asleep ever since he split from Nagpasha’s body, is the Lord of Dreams with the power to manipulate the images thrown up by the unconscious in sleep. Bhirupasha, who is supposed to embody all Nagpasha’s “weaknesses,” is like Vibhishana and like the latter wishes for peace between the black and white powers. Under threat once again from this new avatara of Ravana, the human species is protected by the shape-shifting nagas. Nagina, a female shape-shifting naga tantric with secret ambitions to rule the black powers as well, offers a solution to Krurpasha’s problems. If he marries Visarpi, the naga princess and ruler of Naga dweep, the nagas will be forced to abandon the humans and come over to the side of the black powers. Fortunately for Krurpasha’s plan for world domination, Visarpi’s swayamvara (bridegroom selection) is announced. Krurpasha is on his way to Nagadweep when Nagraj suddenly awakens from his coma. He manages to defeat Krurpasha in the contest of skill set up for the bridegroom selection. Visarpi is in a dilemma as she has no desire to marry Krurpasha but is also jealous of the other women in

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Nagraj’s life, Bharati and Nagrani.21 Nagraj too feels an obligation to Bharati, but bound by their mutual obligation to save the human race they marry and return to Mahanagar. The way back is strewn with obstacles, and Visarpi is sent on ahead escorted by Shikangi, a bird-human hybrid, similar to the popular representations of the vulture Jatayu in the Ramayana. Bharati’s grandfather Vedacharya is a powerful sorcerer and creates a magical (tilisimi) fire to block Visarpi’s path into the city, but Bharati rushes into the fire to save Visarpi and no damage is done. Bharati, knowing that Nagraj’s only love is Visarpi, generously accepts her as co-wife and welcomes her with appropriate rituals into her home, dressed in a power suit, the uniform of the female CEO. Iconic images from the Ramayana such as the fire test (agni pariksha), the figure of the anthropomorphic bird Jatayu, Visarpi walking in the jungle flanked by Nagraj and Dhruv (see Figure 4.1), Dhruv making a shelter for the bridal couple from the damaged space shuttle in which he had followed them (see Figure 4.2), the bridging of the ocean (setu bandhan), and a multiform of Hanuman ( Jingalu) who destroys Lanka, recur across the series as if to remind us of the epic as it is rendered in the popular performance traditions in India. However, not all these scenes seem to be significant for the plot per se and are often presented as incidental details, as if to remind the readers that this is not the world of the Ramayana but a future world where science and religion co-exist. Anxious about Bharati’s own mental state as she was aware of her unrequited love for Nagraj, Visarpi secretly files a case against her own marriage, challenging its legality since Nagraj already had a spouse – a fact that is disclosed later in the story. She wins the case and the newly wed couple is banished from Mahanagar. Nagina, an evil tantric naga woman who has purportedly sided with Krurpasha, formulates a plan by which he will abduct Visarpi by disguising himself as Dhruv, who has decided to accompany the couple into exile. The story shifts to the scene of exile and we see the citizen of Mahanagar going into the jungle preparing themselves to share the exile of Nagraj and Visarpi. The two slip away at night accompanied by Dhruv. The trio soon realize that the way out of the jungle is blocked by an invisible force (badhaband shakti) that has been generated by Vedacharya, who feels that the presence of Nagraj and Visarpi in Mahanagar is inauspicious. While Vedacharya is devising magical ways to keep Visarpi and Nagraj at bay, his granddaughter, Bharati, is fasting and performing rituals to bring them back. As Saakaar Aakaar (also known as the Faceless in the regular Nagraj series), Bharati’s alter ego, she has powerful magical abilities (tilisimi shakti) and when a powerful quake flings her out of the window is able to save herself by transforming herself into her ethereal form. In the meantime, Visarpi’s case against her own marriage is repealed as it is discovered that she is nonhuman and therefore her marriage to Nagraj cannot be judged by human law. Nagraj leaves Visarpi in what he thinks is Dhruv’s protective custody while he goes to another part of the jungle to battle various black powers, one of the most dangerous of which is Blackyuum, a galactic being who can suck out all the oxygen

FIGURE 4.1  Nagayana,

Haran Kaand, Chapter 4, “Vanavaas.” Artist: Anupam Sinha, 2017, p. 39.

Source: Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics.

FIGURE 4.2  Nagayana,

Haran Kaand, Chapter 4, “Vanavaas.” Artist: Anupam Sinha, 2017, p. 43.

Source: Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics.

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from the air to create a vacuum and has a vast body that spans the universe, engulfing stars and planets. Nagraj is aided in his battle against such dark forces by a cast of superheroes such as Flemina, who has the ability to burst into flame, introduced into the story in response to readers’ request as we are told in the editorial pages of the volume. While Nagraj is battling these dark forces, Krurpasha, disguised as Dhruv, manages to abduct Visarpi and break out of the magical force field surrounding the jungle. We learn that Bharati’s transformation into her discorporate form when she fell from her window inadvertently broke the badhaband created by her grandfather and also allowed Krurpasha to escape with Visarpi to Alandhya. Nagraj, Dhruv, and Bharati, now in her incorporeal, magical form as SaakaarAakaar, set out in different directions in search for Visarpi. Nagraj and SaakaarAakaar use their powers of telepathy and enchantment respectively and Dhruv a technologically advanced “sniffer satellite.” The adventures of Dhruv and Nagraj are tracked consecutively in the story – one ending in a cliff hanger to allow the other to be taken up. Nagraj uses his naga telepathic connection with Visarpi to follow a trail that leads to a maze of tunnels that are inhabited by a race of yetis, descendants of Hanuman and the vanaras of the Ramayana. These erstwhile denizens of the Himalayas had to leave their homeland due to environmental pollution caused by their co-inhabitants, the sheet nagas (winter serpents). The yetis believe that the sheet nagas had turned against the yetis and had destroyed the poison lake that contained the virulent poison (halahala) that the god Shiva had once ingested at the time of the churning of the ocean. The poison had seeped into the land, making it uninhabitable and killing their ruler Jingalu in the process. The sheet nagas, who have a telepathic connection with Nagraj, send a representative to refute this story, claiming that it was Jingalu himself who destroyed the poison lake (halahala kund). The seeming impasse between the nagas and yetis is temporarily resolved by Nagraj’s decision to help restore the poison lake once Visarpi is recovered and the yeti army, led by their Queen, Yeti Rani, agrees to take him to Alandhya. While Nagraj is moving towards Alandhya with the yeti force, Dhruv after many adventures against the black forces also manages to gather together an army of exsoldiers who had been part of a battalion trained to test advanced weaponry before the black powers decimated their ranks. Vishank, Visarpi’s half-brother, temporary ruler of the nagas, furious at Nagraj’s supposed inability to protect Visarpi, gives an order that all nagas are to withdraw their support from humankind and search for his sister instead. He is laboring under a misapprehension, however, as her naga bodyguards sent secretly to follow her to Mahanagar and beyond had failed to protect her from Krurpasha and had lied to Vishank, placing the blame for her abduction on Nagraj instead. The scene is now set for a great battle as Nagraj at the head of the yeti army, Vishank with his naga force, and Dhruv with an army of highly trained soldiers all converge on Alandhya. Guru Goraknath, Bharati in her discorporate form, and other protagonists normally associated with the Super Commando Dhruv storyline also begin their journey towards this place that now has a concentration of all the black powers. Vishank, as a shape-shifting naga with mystical powers, is able to penetrate the dimension in which Alandhya is located,

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only to be brainwashed by Krurpasha. The yetis under the leadership of their queen are soon revealed to have double crossed Nagraj in their ambition to having sole dominion over the Himalayas. A blood bath seems imminent when suddenly Jingalu, the yeti king, appears, brought back from the dead or so it seems. Yeti Rani reveals to her husband that she was being blackmailed by Krurpasha to join the black forces. He had trapped their son in another dimension and stolen the key (ayamak) entrusted to the yetis by their ancestor Hanuman. Jingalu, a bosom friend of Dhruv and thus on the side of Nagraj and the white powers (shweta shakti),22 volunteers to go to Alandhya as Nagraj’s messenger. He shrinks to the size of an ant and manages to sneak into Alandhya. He finds Visarpi but she refuses his offer of escape, convinced that he is Krurpasha’s spy. Images of Jingalu’s presence are revealed by the CCTV cameras surrounding Alandhya, and Vishank as the loyal son of Krurpasha binds him with bonds created by dark magic. What follows is a scene clearly inspired by the Sundara kanda of Valmiki’s Ramayana.23 Jingalu treats these powerful dark bonds like elastic bands and starts swinging from the banisters of the palace, causing untold damage. His punishment by electrocution leads to a total blackout in Alandhya as all its power stations burn down. Jingalu manages to escape, only to accidently reveal his true identity as Naagu, one of the serpents that live in Nagraj’s body. Naagu, a manidhari (jewel-bearing) naga, has the power to enter alternate dimensions, a fact that had puzzled Krurpasha since yetis do not have that power. Mahakala Chhidra (literally, the great tear in the fabric of time – the Dark Lord, master of all black powers),24 who has bitter memories of Ravana’s defeat at the hands of a supposedly rag-tag army of animals led by a “human,” tries to warn Krurpasha about the enemy and appraise him of his fatal flaw – arrogance. However, the latter, confident that only the black powers can enter Alandhya, dismisses his fears. Mahakala Chhidra’s fears are soon realized, however, when Nagraj, using his divine powers to create a serpent bridge between the earthly realm and Alandhya, is able to send across the human army led by Dhruv and the yetis right into the heart of Krurpasha’s kingdom. Dhruv is mortally wounded by Vishank in a battle that is reminiscent of the scene in the Ramayana where Lakshmana is wounded by Ravana’s son Megnad. Awakened from a deathlike trance by Dhruv’s agonized cry, Jingalu, the true yeti king, finds his way to Alandhya, and together with Vishank, now freed from Krurpasha’s mind control, manages to retrieve the antidote that will save him. In the meantime Nagraj is engaged in combat with Krurpasha. Since every cell in Krurpasha’s body is surrounded by a protective shield of amrita, he is immortal and Nagraj finds it impossible to kill him using conventional weaponry. Using his own dark serpent power, he forces his body to discorporate, enters Krurpasha’s body, and implodes from within. The victory of the white forces led by Guru Gorakhnath are short lived, however, when Mahakala Chhidra reveals that the black powers are now released in the galaxy and will soon vanquish all that stand in his way. Mahakala Chhidra, having learned from his experience with Ravana, who died as soon as Rama managed to penetrate the store of amrita hidden in Ravana’s navel, had made sure that the elixir of immortality was spread throughout Krurpasha’s

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body so that it could protect the black powers contained within. The four heroes, representative of the dominant species of the universe – Dhananjay, the deva; Nagraj, the human-naga hybrid; Dhruv, the human; and Jingalu, the yeti – decide to continue the war against the black powers by sacrificing their bodies so that their souls (atma) can more easily engage with the latter. There are numerous adventures with the black powers and several sub-plots that involve secondary characters from the Dhruv story arc as well as from other Nagraj series. The Nagayana series ends with a set of adventures that involve the second generation of heroes, the sons of Nagraj, Dhanajay, Dhruv, and Jingalu, who have to save the bodies of their fathers from being taken over by a sect of evil tantrics led by Nagina, one of Nagraj’s old opponents, and turned into zombies – a story that will continue in a sequel that is to be launched by the end of the year and is inspired by the Mahabharata.

Magic, science, and myth The creators of Ramayan 3392 AD and 18 Days use the hero monomyth to anchor the stories in a mythic universe that is shaped by science fiction and fantasy. They are aware that their comics will be read by Americans who are unfamiliar with the Indian epics and whose social imagination is shaped by a specific socio-political, scientific, and religious history (Kripal 2011; Scott 2008). Global myths that are commonly deployed by the American comics industry such as Greek and Norse myths have already been appropriated by literary genres and are no longer part of living religious traditions. Superheroes may be easily recognizable allegories of Greek gods like Superman (Zeus), the Flash (Hermes), or magical incarnations of gods in human bodies such as the Norse thunder god Thor, who miraculously enters into the body of a human to become a superhero. Gods are transformed into space aliens, enlightened superbeings with highly developed technologies who become the saviors of humankind. Myths are camouflaged in popular culture as timeless, disembodied stories about great individuals that seem to have eternal significance and can therefore appeal to everyone regardless of social context. Indian myths, however, are embedded in living religious traditions, and the producers of these science fiction transcreations of the epics are probably scared of hurting local sensitivities, particularly in the present political climate of hyper-nationalism, and are not looking to markets in India to sell their mythological comics. The Nagayana, however, is anchored in a mythic universe in which every performance and telling resonates with an immanent tradition of Ramayana narration even though the myths are contemporized by being clothed in the garb of pop science.25 The framing of the series in cyclical time, evoking Nagraj as the maryada purushotam of the Kali Age, and references to earlier yugas when the story was narrated locate the series within a form of ritual narration that is familiar to Indian readers of the series while also conforming to the serial nature of the comics form.26 Grant Morrison had a similar idea for the 18 Days when he cast Krishna in the role of a time-traveling alien who reveals the world’s destiny to the Pandavas before the war begins. It is left to Bhima to ask him if their story has a goal, if

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their exile and suffering is pointless since the war will lead to the destruction of their world. Krishna’s answer is that bhakti, individual devotion to a personal god, is only possible in the dark age of Kali when all other values that upheld the world have crumbled. In Western popular culture the emphasis on individual spirituality can also take the form of a kind of magical thinking that emphasizes the power of human will to choose what to believe in and a sense that real life can be moulded by the power of this belief unanchored in institutionalized religion. Belief itself can become a kind of will to power especially in the comic book world, and divinity tends to transmute itself into the extraordinary power of superheroes on the one hand and occult fantasy on the other (Kripal 2011). Modern forms of Gnosticism have inspired writers like Morrison, who claims to have had visions of transcendence that have inspired his stories (Kripal 2011). Morrison calls himself a magician, a practitioner of “chaos magick,” a form of personalized magic that borrows symbols indiscriminately from diverse magical and ritual systems as well as from pop culture. The expressive form of the comic book, the particular use of icons, plot and narrative structure, the conflation of time and space on the comics page that allows the reader to be both inside the narrative as well as take a position outside it, allow the comic book to become a kind of magical symbol that can directly affect one’s life in the real world. The Invisibles, inspired by the Mahabharata, is famously the work where Morrison tried out these mystical ideas (Meany 2010). It is unclear from the web episodes of the 18 Days that I have seen on YouTube whether his ideas have been successfully executed. In the Nagayana series characters acquire their powers either through technological or magical means, though the difference between the two is only recognizable because of the terminology used by the author. There is a clear separation between two sets of characters associated with the story arc of Super Commando Dhruv who have acquired their powers either through bodily discipline or through science. Thus Dhruv, his wife Natasha, and several other heroic characters in this story arc are all experts at martial arts. His father-in-law, the evil Grandmaster Robot, is a cyborg and a brilliant scientist who uses his inventions to harness the black powers. The characters in the Nagraj story arc have powers whose source is always supernatural, inspired by traditional folklore. The nagas as a species have supernatural powers, and even though Nagraj is human he acquires his powers through the grace of Dev Kaljeyi and the protection of Guru Goraknath, the legendary founder of the Nath Sampradaya in the 11th century. Bharati is able to transform herself into Saakaar-Aakaar through the power of her magic (tilism), and Nagina the naga villainess is a tantric and ruler of a sect of Aghoris. The “black powers” are also occult forces but are distinguished from the former by the use of the English term as if to suggest that scientific technology may have some role to play in their source. In a discussion of the fantasy genre in post-millennium India, Emma Dawson Varughese (2017: 22) describes the ways in which tropes pertaining to the cosmic and the occult create an atmosphere of “looming numinosity” that threatens to undermine the stability of the everyday. Certainly, the ways in which the epics

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have been transcreated by Marz and Morrison’s creative teams do create a sense of impending doom, with references to seers like Vishwamitra, Krishna, and Markandaya who are envisioned as supra-temporal beings, masters of a kind of technology that few can understand in the worlds in which the comics’ stories take place. Thus Markandeya, in Morrison’s imagining, is a supercomputer from a previous time with memories of past ages, and Krishna, inspired by the Terminator films, is a being from the future, who goes back in time to ensure that the proper sequence of yugas is not disturbed. Depicted like a science fiction alien, he not only has blue skin but pointy ears as well, like the alien Dr. Spock from the popular American television series Star Trek. References to mysterious forms of technology associated with these superior or alien beings seem to be closer to the occult and to the numinous as a threatening presence rather than science as a form of enlightened knowledge. References to evil tantrics, naga, and tilisimi shakti and black powers in the Nagayana seem to indicate a similar thematic and suggest perhaps that references to religion are only possible when translated into mysterious, mystical, and occult presence, beings that are transcendent as well as terrifying because the powers that they embody seem to defy the laws of nature and society. But even though Nagraj is a semi-divine figure, he is usually portrayed as a crime fighter, very much like Superman, one of the first American superheroes in the late 1930s. Though, unlike the Superman of the 1930s, he fights on the global stage against drug lords and international terrorists. Superman was inspired by solar mythology and modeled on the Greek god Zeus, who no longer has a presence in living religion. It is true that the Nagayana is not set in the familiar quotidian world of its readers, but it is inspired by a text that is very much part of a living religious tradition. Nagraj’s savior Guru Gorakh Nath appears in folklore – in the story of Puran Bhagat for instance – and performs the role of savior to the hero (Gill 1986). Snakes are a source of sacred power in India, and the figure of Nagraj itself and the story world that he occupies resonate with popular vrata kathas (ritual stories) associated with naga festivals. Readers of the comics will know that Nagraj’s father, Raja Takshak, is also Takshaka naga, the legendary founder of the ancient city of Takshashila (Taxila), as well as a character who appears in the epics and puranas. In keeping with the superhero mythos Nagraj has a strict and uncompromising moral code and seems at first sight to be far removed from the naga characters mentioned in mythology (Fingeroth 2004). Yet a close reading of the vrata kathas and folk stories about nagas shows them to be fair minded and generous – quick to anger and to take revenge for acts of perceived injustice to their kind but equally quick to forgive and always mindful of their devotees on whom they bestow untold treasures (Pandeya 1967). Many of the hero cults associated with pastoral deities in India exhibit qualities of asceticism and self-sacrifice that we see in Nagraj’s persona. The Nagayana, as befitting the “scientific” garb in which the story is clothed, refers to the nagas as a species, thus normalizing their presence among the humans.27 The powers of occult figures such as the galactic character Blackyuum or Mahakala Chhidra himself are explained “scientifically” so that they do not remain mysterious. Additional superpowers and weapons given to Dhruv and Nagraj in this series are also the gift of

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androids like Dronacharya, a key figure in the Mahabharata, presented here as a simulacrum created by the deva species who are masters of advanced technology. In an important paper on the distinction between the genres of fantasy and science fiction, Carl Malmgren (1988) says that while both genres necessarily presume a disjunction between the natural world and the world in which the narrative unfolds and are therefore free to invent and fabulate, this license is somewhat restricted in the case of science fiction. Once the representational disjunction between the writer’s natural world and the world of the narrative is established, the laws of causality, possibility, and intelligibility are strictly followed. In fantasy, by contrast, various forms of magic and supernatural actants can flourish without clear “motivation or rationale” (1988: 260). Ramayan 3392 AD and 18 Days both seem to fall within the fantasy genre, using science fiction notions of technological singularity to generate an atmosphere of looming numinosity that undermines the quotidian world of the epics as they are popularly represented in India, transforming it into something alien (Dawson Varughese 2017). Vernor Vinge, the science fiction writer, posits the concept of technological singularity, which hypothesizes an artificial superintelligence with more and more rapidly generating self-improvement cycles which will result in an explosion of artificial intelligence that will surpass human intelligence and create runaway technological growth.28 The term “singularity” best describes the state which will exceed any plausible prediction about the future state of the world and provides a frame for the “what if ” mode in science fiction (Card 1990). The term can allow for the possibility of thinking about another time, and even more importantly, it can describe transcendence in technological terms and takes the place of the mythical in a desacralized world. Thus Ravan in Ramayan 3392 AD is an example of such technological singularity. The creators of the Nagayana series also use a mix of science fiction and myth to contemporize the Ramayana story, but the fact that the epic is part of the quotidian world of their readers through traditional theatrical forms and modern media like television forces the authors of the series to make the characters and events plausible and intelligible in terms of that world. Unlike the comics produced by Graphic India, in which Indian mythology is Orientalized to reach out to a global market, the Nagayana tries to contemporize mythology by infusing it with popular science (Kaur 2012).

Demi-gods, zombies, and the superhero genre American superhero comics are inextricably tied to the politics of the nation-state. Superman, one of the first superheroes, caught the popular imagination in the late 1930s, at a time when the United States was going through a period of social upheaval. He came to be seen as a moral anchor and the savior of humankind ( Jones 2004). Even though later generations have criticized him for his unquestioning acceptance of the status quo, it is precisely this lack of moral ambiguity that made him a popular figure and probably led to the mythicization of the

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superhero narrative in the United States. The Indian superhero Nagraj is also a morally unambiguous figure and like Superman, he too is born at a time when the idea of India as a modern nation with a diverse population and composite culture was being questioned by repeated incidents of collective violence, and her borders were threatened by international terrorism. As a force of righteousness he accepts the values of society and the nation unquestioningly, often at the expense of his personal happiness.29 More recent iterations of the superhero narrative tend towards a somewhat nihilistic perspective where its characters struggle to find meaning in a polity that can no longer be accepted as a given. Reflecting a genre self-awareness, some of the new self-published Indian comics depict the superhero as enacting a tense relationship between the political order and individual consciousness. One could say that in doing so they reflect an international trend in which superheroes are depicted realistically as vigilantes. While this may be true, the use of pastiche in the Indian context that allows vigilante-type superheroes to co-exist with figures from fantasy and myth on the same page in what Linda Hutcheon (1994) calls a “scene of irony” sets them apart from more mainstream commercial comics. Chariot Comics, an independent publishing house started by Aniruddho Chakraborty in 2011, peppers stories with vampires, zombies, and other folkloric monsters to explore the inherent cruelty in the theme of exalted individualism at the heart of the superhero mythos. With a regular production of two titles a year that cover separate story arcs, his future plans include a conception of a “Chariotverse”30 series of fantasy worlds connected by the serial format such that characters from different series published by Chariot Comics will cross over into each other’s stories. The two series that I am familiar with are VRICA – which narrates the story of an officer in the Indian army and his special ops team who have been miraculously enhanced by a “god element,” vricadium, released by a meteor crash on planet Earth – and the Damned, which is also about vricadium-enhanced beings, but they take the shape of the undead, such as mummies, vampires, and shapeshifting creatures. A third series, Zombies, appeared at the Delhi Comi Con of 2018 (see Figure 4.3). Vricadium Retrieval Combat and Intelligence Agency, or VRICA, tells the story of Major Rohan Dingwal, the commander of a special ops unit charged with investigating “event zero” – a meteorite crash in Firozpur that released vricadium or the god element. A portion of vricadium bonds with Rohan’s cellular structure and transforms him into a super soldier with enhanced powers. Rohan having become a celebrity overnight, Indian leaders realize the danger of having such a weapon in their midst as neighboring countries, worried about the balance of power in the region, form an alliance against India. As Rohan and his team go on secret missions to retrieve fragments of vricadium-enhanced material from different parts of the globe they also realize that they are implicated in a secret scientific experiment involving supposedly rival nation states to create vricadium-enhanced zombies out of the bodies of dead soldiers. Once the scale of the experiment is revealed and the fact that India, Pakistan, and China have collaborated in this horrific project is

FIGURE 4.3  Damned: Vampire Monks of Piyang, Vol. 1. Cover Page Art: Tarun Kumar

Sahu and Tadam Gayadu, 2016. Source: Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics.

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disclosed to Rohan by one of the victims of the experiment, his team goes rogue and engineers a coup against the Indian state. Narrated through a series of flashbacks, the story is set in an interrogation room where Rohan is being questioned about his role in the escape of the “Reaper,” the zombie super soldier produced by the collaborative project of the three rival nations. What is the difference between a soldier and a patriot. . . . A soldier knows how to follow orders and a patriot knows the ones that need to be followed. (Chakraborty 2013: unpaginated) The splash page of the first issue of VRICA: Dawn of the Wolf depicts a team of five warriors dressed in contemporary superhero costumes, the Indian flag flying overhead (see Plate 5). Rohan’s prophetic words, addressed to Brigadier Rathore, his interrogator, are not anchored in any of the characters present at the scene but are the utterances of characters depicted on the next page (see Plate 6). The words, however, seem to create an echo effect, stretching the temporal frame of the narrative backwards so that the present encompasses the past. The story moves back and forth in time, from the scene of interrogation after the team has presumably been captured, to back stories about the lives of the various team members and their adventures in the Himalayas along the Indo-China border as they seek out and destroy the various agents involved in the monstrous vricadium experiments. The narrative is discontinuous; the adventures presented as discrete episodes in the past made meaningful by the back shadow of the coup, an event that is set in the present of the comics’ story. Symbols of sovereignty are prominently displayed on the first and last pages of the comic book – the national tricolor displayed on the splash page that opens the story and the house of parliament on the last page (see Figure 4.4), which serves as a backdrop for Rohan’s address to the nation: Citizens of India, it is with great regret that I inform you that the state of the Republic of India is no longer strong. Your apathy towards your fellow men, your cowardice to stand up for the truth and your choice of leaders . . . has resulted in a nation that is not a billion strong, but a billion weak. I Rohan Dingwal, citizen of India, soldier of the Republic now rightfully claim what is mine. . . . My Country! In case any state, institution, armed force or other such bodies have any reservations or protest feel free to face the combined might of India’s armed forces and strategic nuclear assets, both of which are in my control. . . . Welcome to the Republic Union of India. May you all as a nation hang your head in shame that this came to pass. May all of you accept your failure as citizens having squandered away your freedom your fore fathers bought with blood and sweat. . . . May you all rise together against the evil that will soon be upon us. May you in this new order be all that world needs you to be. . . . Jai Hind! (Chakraborty 2013: unpaginated)

FIGURE 4.4  VRICA:

Dawn of the Wolf. Art: Tamal Saha and Tarun Kumar Sahu, n.d. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics.

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Subsequent issues depict the descent of the world into chaos as more and more states come under the powers of the ever-growing number of vricadium-infected superbeings as governments are replaced by gangs of vigilantes. Damned, a new series that began in 2016, introduces us to the Chariotverse as the characters in the VRICA series encounter vricadium-enhanced beings from another time and space. The first issue, The Vampire Monks of Piyang, is set in 2020, where the two heroes of the story are about to cross over from India into China in a ramshackle truck (see Figure 4.5). The conversation is light hearted: But Anga, you could have got a better ride than this desi Tata truck – no? Since we’re crossing into China. National pride and all. . . Penny-wise Morphuz! And aren’t you the one who has to pay off a home loan? I mean how does a meta-human demi-god get a bad CIBIL rating? (Chakraborty 2016: unpaginated) Unlike the VRICA series, there are no back stories to introduce us to the characters. The readers are taken straight into the action, thus adding to the sense of mystery. The two enigmatic characters in the truck are revealed as magical beings – Morphuz is a shape-shifting lion man and Anga, the centuries-old “Lightbringer,” is on a mission to rescue his beloved, the mummified demi-goddess Karki, queen of Kalinga, who has been captured by the vampire soldiers of King Asok. Karki, who is a seer and is able to show Asok one of the possible futures that may come to pass if he continues with his plan of world conquest, turns him away from this bloody path. But his single-minded vampire warriors continue to wreak havoc and manage to capture Karki, who has been held captive by the Dalai Pischama, the head of an order of warlike vampire monks in a monastery in Piyang. The narrative includes elliptical allusions to Emperor Ashoka and the Kalinga War as well as humorous references to our quotidian world and contemporary slang which enhance the overall sense of mystery. Thus for instance, when Morphuz first realizes that their mission involves fighting vampires, Anga says, “I even sent you their wikipage,” to which the vampires reply even while they are dragging our heroes out of the truck, “should have checked our whatsapp group!” The characters also display a very postmodern awareness of their location in a specific narrative genre, that of action comics. Thus in a scene where our heroes are battling the vampires, Morphuz turns to Anga, asking, “Why are you using guns and godfire alternatively?” To which Anga replies, “Godfire takes time to recharge – and face it, slow-mo [slow motion] gunfire looks cool” (see Figure 4.6). It is only at the end, in the postscript of the book, that the reader acquires a glimpse of the diegetical horizon of the story as the truck is stopped by Rohan Dingwal, the vricadium-enhanced super soldier from the VRICA series, and Anga reveals that he too is a vricadium-enhanced metahuman even more powerful than Rohan and that vricadium may have been present on Earth long before the meteorite crash and may have had a major influence on the shape of human history.

Source: Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics.

Vampire Monks of Piyang, Vol. 1. Unpaginated. Art: Tarun Kumar Sahu and Tadam Gayadu, 2016.

FIGURE 4.5  Damned:

Source: Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics.

Vampire Monks of Piyang, Vol. 1. Unpaginated. Art: Tarun Kumar Sahu and Tadam Gayadu, 2016.

FIGURE 4.6  Damned:

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Recent experiments in the superhero genre play with the idea of locating these exalted beings in the real world (Morrison 2011). Questions like what would happen if there were multiple superheroes in the world: Would they work harmoniously with each for the good of society or would their internal rivalry lead to chaos? Or why would an exalted being with god-like powers be at all interested in the affairs of the human race? The VRICA and Damned series both work with deconstructed heroes – in the first case with realistically drawn superheroes and with creatures from folklore and fantasy in the second. Ironically it is the second type, the creatures from the realm of the undead, who are more true to the personality of the superhero. While redressing wrongs and rescuing defenseless victims from the calamities caused by supervillains, they do not actively seek to change society. They have no political agenda. Their actions are reactive in nature, responses to the actions of the villains who do have powerful agendas for change and the ruthless desire to achieve them. Anga and Morphuz may look like monsters, but they are quite close to superheroes like Nagraj in that they see themselves as protectors of society and not reformers like Rohan whose reformist zeal is a recipe for disaster. Subsequent issues in the VRICA series show Rohan blinded by hubris, becoming more and more autocratic as the world around him descends into chaos. The political philosopher Claude Lefort (1988) famously described democracy as a form of anonymous and impersonal power that is not embodied in the person of a ruler. State power works through the expansion of faceless bureaucracies and the separation of the institutions of administration, law, and politics. By reconfiguring political power within the body of the vigilante superhero, are comics authors like Chakraborty expressing a form of dissatisfaction with democracy per se or showing us how difficult it is to sustain political freedom and prevent democratic institutions from succumbing to the personal ambitions of those who occupy authoritative positions within it? By subverting the superhero narrative from within, by showing us what would happen to the world if superpowered beings really did live among us, Chakraborty is using fantasy to hold a mirror to contemporary society. Scholarly engagement with superhero comics is a fairly recent phenomenon, and apart from exceptions such as Umberto Eco (1973), the scholars who did turn their attention to the genre criticized it for its hyper-masculine and proto-fascist aesthetic.31 Since the 1980s there has been a more nuanced interpretation of the genre, and scholars have shown how a blend of science, magic, and myth allows for the creation of extraordinary “what if ” scenarios that enable comics creators to explore serious socio-political issues (DiPaolo 2011). In this chapter the choice of texts has been determined by the range of superhero personalities that they offer. The heroes of Ramayan 3392 AD and 18 Days are very much in the contemporary superhero mould – reflexive and imperfect but also capable of displaying flashes of grandeur and heroism as they struggle with their doubts and imperfections. Nagraj displays no such ambivalence as he has no inner life. He is completely at one with his public persona. The interesting feature about Nagraj is not so much his personality but rather his body that houses so many different beings with distinct and varying personalities – from Saudangi, the Egyptian snake princess,

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descendant of Cleopatra to Naagu, the clown. In the West, Nagraj may be typified as a schizophrenic personality, but in India notions of self tend to be fluid, expansive, and inter-relational, articulated in the Nagayana through the many forms of cross-species encounter. Cross-species encounters are among the significant traits that superhero stories borrow from science fiction, where such contacts are used to explore a range of issues. Thus the theme of alien encounter may be used to amplify particular traits in humanity, to discuss the politics of ethnicity, or to explore the limits of human knowledge and our empathy with or understanding of the Other. Ramayan 3392 AD presents a scenario where different species (a recognizable substitute for ethnic groups) co-exist in mutual antipathy. It takes Ram, a being from a different dimension (loka) to establish communication. Similarly in 18 Days the enemy is portrayed as the monstrous Other and it is easy to forget that the two warring sides are kin. It is in the Nagayana that we find the most interesting relations between species. In fact, no character in the story is simply human. Transformations occur by means of magic (Bharati as the Sakaar Aakaar), scientific technology such as brain implants, and genetically engineered weaponry (Grandmaster Robot’s army, Dhananjay and Dhruv); environmental vectors such as poison that carry new evolutionary codes and lead to mutation (Nagraj, Nagpasha); and interspecies breeding that leads to the more evolved offspring of the nagas and humans. Chariots Comics also plays with these cross-species interactions but in ways that seem to subvert the superhero genre by presenting a possible world littered with superbeings, all products of mutations caused by the god element – vricadium. We know that expansive body imagery is fundamental to the worldview of superhero comics, but is there something about the use of body imagery in the Nagayana and Chariotverse that is distinctively Indian? In an important essay on Hindu ethnosociology, McKim Marriot (1989) says that traditionally, in India, categorical distinctions between spirit and matter – ­animate and inanimate – words, thoughts, and actions are non-existent. These are all “substances imbued with relational properties” (1989: 2). There are congruencies and mutualities between layers – “sheaths” (koshas), bodies (shariras), and “spheres” (lokas) (1989:7). Beings or entities are not discrete or self-sufficient but are to a greater or lesser extent dependent on others for their qualities. There is a mixing of properties in all beings and a constant balancing of qualities. Jeffrey Kripal discusses the influence of Gnosticism on some of the important superhero comics writers today, such as Grant Morrison, who use the structure of the comics narrative to discuss abstract ideas such as time-space conflation, multiple worlds, the presence of a transcendent supra-consciousness that limited humans understand as divinized or demonized aliens from outer space, and so on (Kripal 2011). According to him the superhero myth contains the following mythemes: Divinized or demonized superbeings; a sacred source of occult power that is located elsewhere – in the mystical East or in a mythical place like Atlantis or as the world appears increasingly more knowable this place comes to be located in outer space or in a different dimension; the gods become aliens

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from outer space or creatures from another time; radiation or the realization that matter is energy that can transform us or reveal hidden (occult) powers within us; mutation or the knowledge that our forms are not eternally fixed but are constantly evolving and must be thought of as transient. There are two other my themes that follow from the five already mentioned – the fact that our lives are already authored, caught up in a story imagined by a super consciousness that may be simultaneously located in an alien world and in our genetic codes and that we may, once we are conscious of this fact, participate in this story as authors, reimagining our lives and the immense possibilities that they may offer. (Kripal 2011: 25–27) Abhishek Singh, the artist who worked on Ramayan 3392 AD and who may have been responsible for some of the initial ideas that went into the making of the book, spoke to me about his desire to explore some of the deep spiritual ideas in Indian mythology through popular media such as graphic novels. A graduate of the prestigious National Institute of Design in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, he had some experience of working in animation when he approached Graphic India with a view to creating longer stories based on myths. “Superhero stories or science fiction is just the external packaging,” he said, I was interested in the way in which the invisible forces that move the universe i.e. sound or sonic vibrations and kinetic movement, are made visible through color and form. I conceptualized the futuristic technology in Ramayan 3392 AD as a way of harnessing the sonic vibrations perfected by the ancient seers. The gods are like the periodic tables of elements used in chemistry. The different colors and forms in which they are conceived represent the different energies and movements in the universe. They are the equivalent of what we call algorithms, ways of making abstract ideas visible, of embodying and harnessing divine energy in humanoid form. (Private conversation with Singh, 15 September 2018) He said that he tried to use some of the decorative elements that we see in folk art, such as the use of flat, patterned panels to bisect or frame some of the images, to move away from the realism that we normally associate with comics art to suggest a deeper, spiritual register (see Plate 7).32 In spite of the liberal use of gothic motifs such as zombies, evil tantrics, and black powers, the Nagayana seems far removed from the “looming numinosity” that dominates the Graphic India productions that have been discussed here (Dawson Varughese 2017). Nandini Chandra (2012), one of the early scholars to work on Raj Comics, says that the arrival of the Indian superhero marks the movement away from the Nehruvian conception of the state with its emphasis on planning and development and the valorization of scientific rationality to the security-conscious neoliberal state whose citizens live in an oneiric climate of fear, constantly alert to

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attack from unknown and irrational beings. Certainly the line between scientific reason and the occult is not easy to distinguish in superhero comics, and it is the supervillains more often than the superheroes who make grandiose plans for world domination. Amitabh Kumar (2008) and Kumar and Raj Comics (2012), a comics creator and researcher of the Raj Comics universe, have a more sympathetic view of the superhero mythos and one that is closer to that of Morrison. He says that superheroes express the desire of society as a whole for a simple moral world in which justice is personalized and where crime has a face – villains are identifiable and can be vanquished, however powerful they may seem. The structure of superhero narratives enable the reader to come to terms with the complexities of the modern world by juxtaposing the gigantic scale of our industrial-urban societies with the scale of human experience in the register of fantasy (see also Thurtle and Mitchell 2007). In this chapter I have focused on the genre of superhero comics to explore some of the ways in which myth finds expression in popular culture. Umberto Eco says that superheroes tend to combine the “immutable characteristics and an irreversible destiny” of mythic heroes with novelistic elements such as the “unpredictable nature of what will happen” (1973: 15). As archetypes superheroes remain eternally unchanging, but their adventures must have an element of uncertainty. According to Eco, comics creators have resolved the contrary demands of the two genres by setting superhero stories in a kind of eternal present – events unfold in the course of the narrative, but the past and future against which they unfold tend to be vague, and there is no continuity between different stories that involve the same character. Superheroes remain unchanged through all the adventures they have, none of which have any relationship with a past or a future. Eco was writing in the early 1970s, when comics stories were generally confined to single issues. Later writers have used the serial form of commercial comics to experiment with long story arcs that span decades. Popular commercial comics imprints such as DC and Marvel in the US create alternative universes for their characters in which they explore destinies that may be radically different from the main story line. Terms such as the “Marvelverse” that refer to the many alternate worlds in the universe of Marvel comics tend to mimic the ways in which myths co-exist in a narrative universe – a technique also exploited by small, experimental publishers in India like Chariot Comics, whose stories reflect a self-reflexive awareness of the superhero genre. Thus Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, may be predestined to figure in a particular story where the events in his life are known in advance, but there will be many other stories in the mythic universe where Rama has a different destiny (Chatterji 2012). These alternative stories co-exist with the Ramayana and cast a shadow from the side on the main story similar to the “what if ” mode in which story arcs like the Nagayana create alternative destinies for Nagraj and the characters in his comics’ universe, giving the stories a form of open-ended temporality. Umberto Eco (1973) felt that the oneiric space and temporal stasis that characterized superhero narratives as a hybrid genre were techniques that allowed for the mediation of the contrary demands of myths and novelistic storytelling. What he

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does not seem to realize is that myths too use the oneiric as a meta-textual device to enable the juxtaposition of narratives that may involve the same characters but give them different destinies. Thus popular narrations about the divine hero Rama often frame his actions in terms of future adventures that he is destined to undergo in a later avatar as Krishna. Krishna’s story, even though it is set in a different yuga, gives a kind of open-ended temporality to the story of Rama as if to suggest that what was not possible for Rama to achieve within the predetermined course of his life is possible for him in another life as Krishna (Chatterji 1986). It is the simultaneous presence of these stories in a mythic universe that makes this open temporality possible. Commercial superhero comics, precisely because they do not bear the stamp of a single author, acquire over time the autotelic or self-generating and meta-textual character of myths in which a single story, even if it is restricted to a single issue of a comics series, is necessarily aware that it is unfolding in a universe of similar stories. The serial form of such commercial comic books requires a relatively consistent and continuous story line but also allows for disruptions by setting up parallel dimensions or dream worlds to enable endings to be deferred. In a milieu in which superheroes are marketed as commercial brands, the use of the oneiric may be considered to be a successful sales technique, but also it serves to give these characters the durability of myths and enable them to become part of our everyday lives.

Intertextuality and the superhero genre When Sanjay Gupta, one of the founders of Raj Comics, was asked about the inspiration that led to the creation of Nagraj, he said that it was the televised animation series of the Marvel Comics superhero Spiderman – specifically Spiderman’s ability to emit fibers with tremendous tensile strength and elasticity. Spiderman’s web-making power is a product of his own scientific experiments. He invented a powerful liquid that has the properties of a spider’s web when ejected from a set of small tubes attached to his wrists. By contrast Nagraj’s serpentine powers are divine attributes and like the divine attribute of Vishnu, the Sudarshan Chakra, have the potential to be anthropomorphized and depicted as separate entities with their own personality. This anecdotal detail serves as a kind of “third meaning” to the image of Nagraj, an interruption in the plot, but is part of the narrative’s diegetic horizon.33 The image of Nagraj ejecting snakes from his wrists has powerful intertextual connotations, creating associations in the reader’s mind not only with American superheroes but also figures of divinity in India. In a similar fashion iconic images from popular enactments of the Ramayana described in a previous section create an affective and sensual connection with the larger universe of the Ramayana that is present to the readers in their everyday lives as memory traces and sensory impressions. Finally, can the comics medium bear the weight of the Ramayana? What would a contemporary Ramayana look like? Answers to such questions involve not just

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a reflection on the ways in which epics like the Ramayana are received and have a continuing presence in India but also on myth, not so much as a separate textual or narrative domain, as literary critics would have us believe, but rather as a phenomenological orientation revealing the world in particular ways. The cosmos is the ground that myths use for semiosis, bringing the past and the future to bear on the present. What are the narrative genres that can carry the weight of time itself? I suggest that it is the comics form that can in the mode of playful fantasy be best suited to this task.

Notes 1 The first Indian television superhero is Shaktiman. The serial was telecast in the late 1990s. The popularity of the serial was such that the character of Shaktiman became “real” for the audience, who began writing letters to him asking his opinion on issues concerning their lives. Even though the superhero genre may be a late arrival in India, its popularity is attested to by the fact that the founders of Raj Comics were inspired by the Spiderman animation shows on television. Nagraj is supposed to have been inspired by the antics of Spiderman, particularly his ability to produce tensile cobwebs from his wrists and use them like ropes to swing from roof tops. Nagraj similarly is able to eject snakes from his wrists which he uses in much the same way. Raj Comics was licensed to produce Shaktiman comics as well. 2 Chacha Chaudhary first appears in a Hindi children’s magazine called Lotpot (Debroy 2011). 3 Manik Sharma,“The League of Extraordinary Gentleman,” Indian Express, Delhi, 1 October 2017. 4 See previous note. 5 Gotham Comics was founded by Gautama Chopra, the son of the New-Age guru Deepak Chopra who changed his name to Gotham, the fictional city where many of the Batman stories are located. 6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Comics, downloaded 13 April 2017. 7 According to the information uploaded on their website in 2018, their current focus is on animation and film production rather than comics. 8 Manik Sharma, “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” Indian Express, Delhi, 1 October 2017. 9 Ibid. 10 “Why Nagraj, Dhruva, Doga aren’t Finding Space on Big Screen?” www.indiatvnews. com/entertainment/bollywood/nagraj-dhru, downloaded 28 August 2017.   “In search of the Indian Superhero.” www.livemint.com/Leisure/vMe55AvdjgR0uPZB 2nhUqI/In, downloaded 28 August 2017. 11 “The Long and Winding Road – Grant Morrison’s 18 Days,” By Ben Hansom posted 5 July 2015, https://sites.google.com/a/deepspacetransmissions.com/site/news:-I, downloaded 13 February 2017. 12 I shall use the colloquial forms of the names of the epic heroes when I refer to the comic book representations and the Sanskritic versions of the name when referring to the classical texts. Thus “Ram” when speaking of the comic book character and “Rama” when Valmiki’s epic is mentioned. 13 The seven legendary seers had created the divyadrishti, the god programme, to provide legitimate authority to re-establish political order in the world after the Mahavinaash. 14 This is a new Mithila, created magically from an enchanted tree in Dandakaranya, after Ravan’s son Meghnad destroyed the old Mithila. 15 As told by Abhishek Singh in an interview with the author on 15 September 2018.

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16 Campbell borrows the term “monomyth” from James Joyce’s Finnegan’sWake and uses it to signify the universality of the hero archetype. Monomyths are repetitive narrative patterns in myths that are found worldwide. 17 This epithet that means “the man who follows the path of truth” is usually reserved for Lord Rama. 18 The evil younger brother had himself caused Dev Kaljayi to curse the queen by substituting a dead mongoose instead of the auspicious offerings that she presented to the deity as part of her puja. In anger the deity breathed his poison breath on her. He relented when he realized that she was innocent but could only save her by redirecting the poison in her body towards her womb into the body of her unborn child, who was to become Nagraj. 19 Like all still births Nagraj’s body was not cremated but thrown into the river. However, there is also the belief that those who die of snake poison should be thrown into a river and not cremated as they are not properly dead. 20 However, Bharati is also the granddaughter of Vedacharya, a former royal wizard attached to the court of Nagraj’s parents and a master of tilism (magic, enchantment) in her own right. 21 Even though Nagraj and Visarpi love each other – their relationship is established in previous stories – she is jealous of the fact that she will never be the first to bear him a child. This status has already been taken by Nagrani, the last of her species from another dimension who is able to bear a child through IVF technology with sperm donated by Nagraj. 22 While the English words “black powers”are a constant in the text, the Hindi “shwetashakt” is used for white power. 23 In which Hanuman allows himself to be captured by Ravana’s army so that he can set fire to Lanka. 24 He enters Earth’s dimension through the comet that appears in the first issue of the series. 25 Anupam Sinha spoke to me about the difference between his story where a “realistic” character like Dhruv without supernatural powers with his technical and machinic support co-exists with a folkloric character like Nagraj: “In the Valmiki and Tulsidasi Ramayanas Rama is god and all other characters are subservient to him. In adventure comics both Dhruv and Nagraj are equal partners in adventure and have complementary sets of characters from their separate series who support them in their adventures. The two Ramayanas are not able to fully explore the potential of their characters and I have taken these as hooks on which I can hang particular story events” (private conversation 31 January 2019). 26 Apart from the Nagayana series that is self-consciously set in a mythic time, characters in the main Nagraj stories also refer to synchronic time, as do myths. Thus Mahatma Kaladut, the protector of the naga island, is an incarnation of the sacred poison bearers of the past and the future and is depicted with three human heads ending in a serpent tail. 27 The term for “species” is “jati,” which is also used to refer to caste in many Indian languages, though the Nagayana makes the distinction clear by reserving the term “parjati” for “species.” 28 Vinge, V. (1993) “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post Human Era,” http://mindstalk.net/vinge-sing.html, downloaded 26 May 2017. 29 A possible reason for the popularity of the Nagayana series is the fact that it enables its readers to read the superhero story against their own myths. Thus Nagraj’s moral career as a savior of the world at the expense of his relationship with his beloved Visarpi is similar to Rama’s tragic loss of Sita even while he is hailed as the ideal monarch. The Nagayana contemporizes myth. 30 Modeled on the Marvelverse of Marvel comics. 31 See Hatfield et al. 2013 for a review of early criticism of the genre.

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32 I interviewed Abhishek Singh on 15 September 2018 in New Delhi. See also Sivana Podcast Eastern Spirituality Yoga Philosophy and Conscious Living. Exploring Mystical Ideas through Art. Interview with Artist and Author Abhishek Singh [Episode 12] 3 May 2016. www.acast.com//sivanpodcasteastern spiritualityyoga philosophyand consc iousliving’exploringmysticalideasthrough art, downloaded 11 November 2018. 33 The diegetic horizon of a narrative is the background that may suggest ideas and possible meanings to the reader or auditor without necessarily being explicated in the story. Diegesis involves the activity of showing rather than telling.

5 WORDS AND IMAGES The craft of comics narration

Comics narratives are characterized by a distinctive chronotope that involves a conflation of time and space so that time literally becomes a dimension of space. In our everyday lives we tend to experience time through the sequence of events – time as duration. Duration assumes a temporal flow with the past flowing away from a present that is constant and a future always in prospect (Luhmann 2017: 13). Comics tend to mimic this mode of experiencing time by juxtaposing a series of empanelled images on a page, thus simulating a sense of duration. Events are presented as points of action on a scale that measures the time taken for the reader’s eye to follow the sequential presentation of the phases of the event – lingering on an image in a panel, anticipating what is to come next, and storing it in memory, transforming it into a past event.1 But unlike the experience of events in the real world that unfold in a continuous and constant present, in comics events are bound by the overarching frame of the page that serves to organize the sequence of panels spatially and determine the relationship between them. The reader experiences two dimensions of time simultaneously – a synchronic grasp of the page layout which is a global image available at a glance and a diachronic sequencing of events depicted in the linear arrangement of panels that move the narrative forward. The double chronicity that characterizes the relationship between the page and the sequence of panels is also replicated at the level of the panel in the relationship between words and images (Groensteen 2007; McCloud 1993).

The architectonics of comics narration In this chapter I discuss some of the formal devices used for comics narration, especially in the way that they are adapted to the demands of the superhero adventure stories. Comics offer a distinctive kind of synesthetic experience by transforming sounds into visual images. Unlike picture books that also combine words and

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images, devices such as speech balloons allow comics readers to actually see the act of hearing by visually representing the breath that supports the sounds emerging from the mouth and the texture of the voice through the use of stressed words and variable fonts (Eisner 1992). Similarly flexible panel sizes and the ways in which empanelled images are positioned on the page enable ways of calling attention to the person or object depicted therein so that they generate an emotional charge, allowing the reader to move beyond the mere viewing of the image to the actual experience of the event being depicted (Cavell 1979). The first two chapters in this volume have already alerted us to the role of these formal devices in amplifying the sensory and emotional dimensions of the narrative. Manga, the particular style in which Chilka and Mice Will Be Mice were narrated, has symbolic features such as extensive use of onomatopoeia and eidetic imagery that make it quite distinctive within the comics medium. However, there are features that are essential to all forms of comics narration – viz., that the cadence and rhythm of the text are largely determined by the succession of frames. Panel breakup, gutters, and the selective representation of particular moments in the flow of action create an intermittent, elliptical, and staccato rhythm. Captions, speech balloons, and color density also affect the rhythm, amplifying emotional affects, slowing down or speeding up the pace of action, and serving to suture disconnected moments in the action sequence (Eisner 1992; Groensteen 2007; McCloud 1993).

Ramayan 3392 AD The artists of Ramayan 3392 AD use a dark color palette to produce wide-angled and atmospheric scenes, as if to suggest that the readers are viewing the landscape of Aryavarta through a haze of radioactive dust (see Plate 8). Elongated panels spread across double pages alternate with small, narrow ones dominated by solitary figures, frequently close-ups of a single face. The blurred contours of the figures and lack of background detail contrast with the close attention given to facial expression, especially to the image of Ram, and give the book a hybrid quality. Ram, with his muscular figure and expression of brooding intensity, is somewhat different from the typical superhero as he is seen to be struggling to reconcile his humanity with the innate violence of his warrior code. But in keeping with the larger science fiction theme of the story, the ambivalence between the contrasting values in his personality is tied to his status as an alien – a visitor from another loka. As if to acknowledge the divine status of our hero and to point to the mythic universe from which this story gains significance, there are iconic scenes in which Ram is positioned as the divine blue archer, the panel framed by a broad paisley border inspired by popular conventions of depicting religious icons (see Plate 7, Figure 5.1). Even though the editors of the comic book claim that theirs is not a simple retelling but a transcreation of the epic for an audience who may have no knowledge of Indian mythology, such scenes clearly point to a potential readership that is well aware of the religious significance of the story. In this book more than the others discussed in

Source: Courtesy of Abhishek Singh and Graphic India.

3392 AD, Vol. 1 by Shamik Dasgupta, Deepak Chopra, Shekhar Kapur, Alex Ross (Artist), Abhishek Singh (Artist), Ashwin Chikerur (Artist), Virgin Comics/Liquid Comics, 2007. Unpaginated.

FIGURE 5.1  Ramayan

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the last chapter the act of empanelment establishes the perspective that the reader is supposed to take vis-à-vis the narrative (Groensteen 2007). Such elaborately framed panels freeze time and interrupt the temporal rhythm of the plot. Just as panel arrangement disrupts the flow of the narrative, speech is also disruptive as dialogue balloons are often de-centred and dissociated from the image of the character who is supposedly uttering the words. Captions with voiceover texts also seem to take the place of dialogue balloons, giving voices an enigmatic, elsewhere quality. The abundant use of captions in the book, the rectangular boxes that usually encapsulate the disembodied voice of an anonymous narrator, indicates the presence of multiple narrators that are either internal to the text – present as characters in the narrative – or stand outside it (see Plate 9). The artists use the diegetic horizon2 of the Ramayana as it is ritually known in India through enactment or narration to speak to the readers of the comic book in ways that transcend the language of comics. Thus the artist moves beyond conventional compositional devices such as the ordering of successive images to control the transition between panels and the pace at which the story unfolds to emphasize the single frame (see Figure 5.1). The still image seems to disrupt the temporal rhythm of the story, suggesting obtuse meanings beyond the text itself (Barthes 1977b). Consider the following images. Valmiki’s prophetic vision that shows Ram’s destined future spread over a double splash page not only offers elliptical images of Ram and Ravan but also suggests Ram’s divine origin not otherwise mentioned in the text. The words “Ram, Ram, Ram,” unconfined by captions or speech balloons, serve as an aural frame, a kavacha, to amplify and set this scene apart from story as it unfolds in a sequence of events (see Plate 10). Indian readers who are familiar with ritual enactments of the epic would be familiar with this interrupted mode of narration, whereby particular episodes are foregrounded in performance and framed by ritual gestures to mark their special significance, but not readers who are unfamiliar with the immanent Ramayana tradition and who are the proposed audience for this comics series – according to the publishers, at least. The pages that follow Valmiki’s epiphany show the main protagonists – Valmiki, Lakshman, and Ram – in a series of small and mid-length panels that focus on their facial expressions with minimal attention to background detail and a sparing use of text. We see Ram deliberately turning away from the divine vision and repudiating the role that Valmiki seemed to have assigned to him, claiming to be nothing more than an ordinary human – a claim belied by the perspective and framing of his image, a pictorial clue for those familiar with sacred art in India though not perhaps for the intended audience of the series (Figure 5.1).

The Chariotverse Captions are put to a variety of uses in the comics that we have been discussing. They may serve to introduce the back story, to disturb the relationship between a character and his/her utterances, or even as an ironic comment on a scene being

Dawn of the Wolf. Art: Tamal Saha and Tarun Kumar Sahu, n.d. Unpaginated.

Source: Courtesy of Aniruddho Chakraborty and Chariot Comics.

FIGURE 5.2  VRICA:

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pictured on a page. In VRICA: Dawn of the Wolf  it also has the added role of conveying the tone in which a character speaks. Consider the following passage: Major Rohan Dingwal’s voice comes to us from far away, boxed in a series of rectangular, blue-colored captions set against a page-length panel that depicts a team of five grim-visaged super soldiers with the Indian tricolor flying above. From the first person mode of address it is clear that it is not uttered by an anonymous or extradiegetic narrator but by a character inside the story whose identity is revealed as soon as the page is turned and we see the brooding face of Rohan Dingwal speaking in a deliberate and dispassionate tone. Unlike the blue-colored caption boxes, the speech balloon that seems to emanate from his mouth is white. But the flat, uninflected tone of his voice indicated by the blue-colored caption boxes is reiterated by the even font size of the text that makes up his utterance in the speech balloon. Blue and red are the colors used to indicate the contrapuntal voices of the two characters that introduce the story in this book – Rohan and his interrogator. Rohan’s uninflected speech and dispassionate voice is in contrast to the angry, frustrated, and incredulous voice of his interrogator – indicated by the use of stressed words and the dark red color of his speech balloons and captions (see Plate 6). The narration constantly shifts between the past and the present, and much of the story is told to us in flashbacks – indicated by deliberate alterations in color and width of the gutters. Insets that frame the image of the narrator of a particular back story are juxtaposed with action sequences that are meant to be flashback scenes. The page layout with the use of insets to juxtapose past and present events, alterations in vocal tones and emotions through color coding and varying font sizes, and the depiction of selective moments in a continuous action sequence indicate a mastery of the superhero action genre (see Plates 5, 6, Figure 5.2). That the creators of the Chariotverse have a reflexive relationship to their work is revealed even more clearly in the series titled Damned which juxtaposes gothic characters inspired by Western horror comics with the colloquial speech of contemporary Indian speakers of English (Figures 4.5, 4.6).

The Nagayana All the books discussed so far assume a level of visual literacy among its readers that is far higher than was found in Indian comics of the 1970s and 80s. Even early issues of Nagraj used the conventional grid pattern with regular panels and captions and speech balloons to indicate the distinction between voiceover and dialogue to ensure that nothing came in the way of narrative flow. The Nagayana, however, assumes a more sophisticated readership that is presumed to have a greater familiarity with the comics medium and with the superhero genre in particular. The challenge for the creators of long duration series like the Nagayana is to make sure that they have stories that work in installments but which also hang together as a coherent whole. Each of the nine books that make up the Nagayana consists of a number of issues that present narrative segments that are complete in themselves to the extent that they offer a resolution and yet achieve a kind of anticipation for readers to want to buy and read subsequent issues. Thus the story has to appeal to the reader at two levels – the single issue that presents an episodic sequence with its

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own temporal rhythm, and the larger whole made up of multiple, semi-independent sequences. However, there is a danger that readers may immerse themselves in the complex action sequences elaborated in the separate installments of the series and lose the thread of the larger narrative. This is why recaps and “green pages” where the editor seems to be talking directly to the readers, responding to their comments and giving out hints of future plot developments, become important. The presumed familiarity of readers with the story of the Ramayana gives the Nagayana an advantage. But the story is by no means a Ramayana transcreation, and it is through the judicious arrangement of comics devices such as page flips, cliffhangers, speech balloons, and captions that creators are able to maintain narrative continuity through numerous adventures that involve a host of characters that are otherwise part of two separate series published by Raj Comics. As I mentioned in the last chapter, Nagayana includes the full cast of characters from two separate series involving the heroes Nagraj and Super Commando Dhruv. Other minor characters such as Flemina and Vanputra have been introduced at the behest of Raj Comics fans. Subplots have to be composed that not only display the enhanced powers of the different characters in this alternate series but also develop on their relationships with other characters in new and exciting ways. Small, uneven panels packed with action scenes that end abruptly and are cut off by the page border, the absence of the white margins that conventionally constitute the hyperframe so that images are flush with the page, narrow black gutters that hardly allow the reader to pause for reflection, and panels that simultaneously present a scene from more than one perspective are some of the devices used to create an experience of total immersion in the adventure story (see Groensteen 2007). Rapid scene shifts and the juxtaposition of very different themes in panels that are adjacent to each other create a sense of continuous anticipation. Thus in this page from the Sharan Kaand (the book of refuge), there is a rather folkloric depiction of Vishank, Visarpi’s cousin, rallying his serpent forces in an attempt to storm Alandhya and rescue the latter. This scene is spread over a series of panels covering three quarters of the page. At the bottom of the page, however, there is a long, narrow panel that depicts a laboratory with two scientists discussing the location of the seat of the black powers. “High resolution satellite images show an area surrounded by magnetic waves that shield it from our satellite,” one scientist tells the other. The two disjunct scenes are sutured by the cryptic caption, “Krurpasha’s obstacles were increasing” (Sinha and Sinha 2017a: 55). Since new characters with black powers are introduced every third page or so, fight sequences tend to be suspended abruptly, only to be taken up much later after many diversions into other subplots. Thus in Dahan Kaand (the book of the burning) the story of Dhruv’s battle with the monstrous whirlwind, Ghanghor, is left hanging and a tiny panel at the end of the page marks a scene shift to Naagu’s secret entry into Alandhya (Sinha and Sinha 2017b: 65). The narrator shifts the story to Alandhya and to Krurpasha, who is easily able to overpower Vishank by magically enslaving his consciousness. Dhruv’s battle and victory over Ghanghor is taken up in the next book, Rana Kaand (the book of war). The battle scene continues for

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five pages before the story shifts again to Naagu’s adventures in Alandhya Sinha and Sinha 2017c: 6–9). In contrast to the frantic pace of the action are the long chains of text-heavy speech balloons that crowd each panel. Voiceover captions are rare in the Nagayana, and back stories are mostly narrated through speech balloons. All the features that are used to characterize the texture of the voice in comics such as broken or spiked balloon frames, variable font size, bold lettering, etc. are absent. Speech balloons are not used to amplify images as in manga comics but to make them intelligible (see Figure 5.3). Since the innumerable subplots make the storyline difficult to follow, the speech balloons slow down the pace of reading and interrupt the rhythm of the action sequences. Captions are used largely as page flips or to suture disjunct scenes. Alterations between dialogues and captions allow for the play between absence and presence and give a rather disjunctive rhythm to the text. Captions indicating a distant scene are used for ironic effect, as in a particular scene in the Grahan Kaand (the book of receiving) when Vedacharya and Bharati are discussing the effects of the solar eclipse on her marriage. Bharati is confident that her conjugal bond with Nagraj is strong enough to overcome the dangers posed by the eclipse and says so to her grandfather Vedacharya. We do not see Bharati when she is making this confident utterance; instead, the words are presented within quotation marks in a caption box that frames the joyous scene of Nagraj’s homecoming with his new bride Visarpi (see Figure 5.4, Sinha and Sinha 2017d: 40–41). Thierry Groensteen (2007) says that the relative autonomy of utterances allows them to be perceived as links in a chain that is parallel to or interlaced with the empanelled images. The desynchronized relationship between a chain of speech balloons that suggests a passage of time and the image of the characters living in the moment that is captured in the panel forces the reader to shift constantly between images and words, disrupting the mimetic illusion of three-dimensional space by the presence of flat, white spaces within it. Thus comics literacy assumes a negotiation between two zones – the zone of images and the zone of text (Groensteen 2007).

Indian superheroes Aspects of reality – of historical time and space – have been assimilated and problematized in different ways in diverse literary genres. The science fiction genre uses the future as a device to project problematical aspects of the present embodied in stereotypical images of the past (Hammar 2017). In the Nagayana, for instance, there are repeated references to Ravana and the Treta yuga, to a Rama Rajya in an idyllic future world where there are no national boundaries and no political conflicts, a world suddenly threatened by the advent of black powers in the form of Ravana and his asuras. The opening scene of the first book of the Nagayana makes this explicit. In a meeting of a high-powered group regarding the impending arrival of the mysterious comet, one of the members, an archeologist, remarks that ancient Indian documents called the Puranas have referred to such an incident that led to the incarnation of the black power called Ravan (Figure 1.3). The other comics

Kaand, Chapter 2, “Paap ka Beej.” Artist: Anupam Sinha, 2017, pp. 50–57.

Source: Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics.

FIGURE 5.3  Nagayana, Varan

Kaand, Chapter 3, “Vidai.” Artist: Anupam Sinha, 2017, pp. 40–41.

Source: Courtesy of Manish Gupta and Raj Comics.

FIGURE 5.4  Nagayana, Grahan

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discussed here are less explicit in their reference to classical texts, but Ramayan 3932 AD and the Damned do use free-floating and stereotypical images of ancient Rome such as the gladiatorial games to suggest imperial decadence and gothic representations of vampires and mummies to problematize the political culture of contemporary India. Without explicitly referring to the epic, Ramayan 3392 AD also acknowledges the mythological significance of the text by depicting the frame story of the Valmiki Ramayana – the lament of the krauncha bird – in a side panel on a page devoted to the confrontation of Sita and Ravan in Nark. The Indian epics found a new readership in the 1970s through the efforts of Anand Pai, the founder of Amar Chitra Katha comics (McLain 2009). But unlike the Amar Chitra Katha imprint that was started with the stated goal of making Indian mythology available to the urban, westernized youth who were losing their connection to tradition, the Gupta brothers who established Raj Comics used mythology and folklore to create superheroes that were distinctively Indian. The Nagayana project was conceived as a response to the question, “What would the Ramayana look like if it was composed today?” There could be many possible answers to this question, but the one they came out with was “as a superhero adventure story.” They did not see themselves using the comics medium as a pedagogical tool to transmit Indian mythology but used the latter to create a new comics genre in India. The superhero genre is considered to have originated in the West with its roots in Norse and Roman mythology and the classical Greek adventure tale. Bakhtin (1981) describes the Greek adventure story as composed of short segments made up of discrete adventures set against an expansive geographical landscape. Events are dramatic and governed by chance. Time is organized by the logic of “random disjunction” (ibid.: 92). Moments of adventure time intervene at the points at which normal quotidian life is interrupted. These unexpected and “chance” interruptions enable “irrational” or mysterious forces to intervene in human societies who have been waiting for just these kinds of chance interruptions. The hero is conceived as a static and unchanging subject constituted purely by the challenges that he responds to rather than initiates. According to Bakhtin, the hero of the classical adventure stories retains some of the attributes of the folkloric hero in that he embodies an indestructible faith in the power of humanity to overcome inhuman and malevolent forces. The Nagayana, like its Western counterpart, displays all the features of the classical adventure story contemporized for a 21st century audience. It emphasizes its affinity with global culture through deliberate quotations not only from American giants such as Marvel and DC Comics, as we saw in the last chapter, but also with Japanese manga and anime by including machines that have human personalities such as “Sniffer,” the satellite that helps Dhruv track Krurpasha’s secret lair, not to mention the android copy of Dronacharya and various lethal weapons that have distinct personalities and can take on humanoid shapes. But at the same time, the Nagayana emphasizes its roots in Hindu myth and folklore. Recent pop cultural representations of Hindu mythology have been critiqued for reinforcing a muscular form of cultural nationalism (Pritchett 1995). However,

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Suchitra Mathur (2010) has argued that Nagraj, unlike American superheroes such as Captain America, does not embody the nation. Instead his identity is rooted in a distinctly regional context, and even though his stories assume a largely Hindu worldview, there is no reference to militant nationalism.3 Rather, Nagraj’s scale of operations transcends national boundaries to encompass the universe. It is the assumed readership of superhero comics, made up largely of adolescent boys, that determines the choice of male superheroes and action plots. Female superheroes, and there are many in the Raj comics stable, tend to play supportive roles unless they are cast as villains. While being tough action figures, they are also highly eroticized and largely subservient to the “hegemonic masculinist gaze” (Kaur and Eqbal 2015: 371). Does the insensitivity of superhero stories to changing perceptions of gender make them old fashioned, unable to address the seismic changes taking place in the fabric of Indian society? An important development in the superhero genre in India has been the two novels of speculative fiction written by Samit Basu – Turbulence (2012) and Resistance (2014). Set in contemporary India, Turbulence assumes a familiarity with a popular culture that includes not only gods, film, and television heroes but also superhero comics, manga, anime, and video games. Its protagonists are suddenly endowed with superhuman abilities based on their secret desires. Apart from two Superman clones, most of the protagonists have unconventional superpowers more suited to India’s complex reality. Aman, the hero, is an internet wizard with the power to infiltrate cyber space; Tia, a housewife, can multiply herself and take on a multitude of different tasks; Uzma, a British-Pakistani Bollywood aspirant, comes to possess infinite charisma; Namrata, a television news reporter, acquires the ability to create newsworthy events wherever she goes; Sundar invents fantastic machines in his dreams; Anima, a young girl, can take on the form of an anime-style cartoon warrior, etc. Uzma finally takes over as leader of a team of superheroes who are able to defeat the organized might of an international consortium of powerful billionaires who aspire to world domination. Basu adapts the tropes of the global comics culture to the urban Indian landscape, producing superheroes whose field of action is shaped by the internet and media technology rather than by the stereotypical conception of the tough action hero. His audience is not restricted to India as both novels were first published in the UK but do not exoticize India by presenting it in a way that will be easily consumable by a Western audience. Instead the novels use a mix of action, speculative fantasy, mythology, and science fiction to present a vision of India that is optimistic, true to the spirit of the superhero genre, but also tinged with a dose of cynicism in the way that it mirrors the real-world context in which the story unfolds. Finally, a few words on the science fiction mode in which all these narratives are cast – does it extend the scope of the adventure story, and if so, how? Heroic stories tend to work with predictable plots and protagonists whose lives follow a predetermined telos. The social world in which these narratives unfold has clearly defined limits to social communication – limits that are defined by the villain or anti-hero. What science fiction enables is an expansion of this sphere by introducing the

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concept of alien intelligence, thereby enabling, at least as far as these stories are concerned, a problematizing of the boundary between the human and nonhuman and a questioning of the status of the human in the hierarchical ordering of the social world by posing bonds of affinity between different species.

Conclusion: Transmediation and the shape of narrative Comics, more than any other medium, perhaps, make us aware that narratives have material shape. Art Spiegelman uses the analogy of a multi-storied building to describe the comics page – a flat surface that can be stamped with a grid-like pattern, each panel a window, offering a view onto the world (2011: 166). Comics narratives, as we saw in the previous chapters, lend themselves to transmediation, producing stories that can move between different forms of narration. Graphic India, the company that published Ramayan 3392 AD and 18 Days, is self-conscious about its use of the medium as an incubator to create characters and plot ideas as “properties” that can be transposed onto other narrative media such as animation films and video games. From comics to video games and cartoon films may seem a small step since all three share techniques of narration that have been inherited from cinema such as the use of the altering frame to call attention to objects and scenes, as well as qualities such as abstraction and interactive immersion (Cavell 1979 Kinder 1991; McCloud 1993). Video games and animation may still be at a nascent stage in India, but comics creators have borrowed stories and techniques of pictorial storytelling from other traditions and rendered them in terms of their own medium. Such borrowings demonstrate the ways in which the medium selfconsciously addresses its conventions and location within the world of storytelling. The epic, with its encyclopedic vision and multiple storylines, is the form that has traditionally lent itself to transmediation. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata have been associated with traditions of reading and narration that involve “repetition” and “rhythmic recurrence,” which foster movement between different modes of storytelling (Ramanujan 1991: 40). These two epics have been transmitted in many different ways – as oral tales, enacted performances, songs, riddles, and more recently as feature films and television serials. Each narrative medium takes up a particular strand of the epic and shapes it to suit its mode of expression. In this volume we have largely, though not exclusively, restricted ourselves to the comics medium. But unlike Amar Chitra Katha and Campfire, the two Indian commercial comics publishers who have made traditional stories available to young people, the comics that we are looking at transform the stories in ways that throw light on the medium itself. In his seminal work on films, The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell defines a medium by the significance given to its properties, to the possibilities that are specific to it, so that to discover “a new possibility is to discover a new medium” (1979: 32). What are the specific possibilities of the comics medium? We have already discussed the narrative significance of the altering frame that not only allows shifts in perspective but also has an iconic function that reflects the emotional content of the scene it

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enframes and the gutter that forces the reader to become an ally in the construction and interpretation of the story. But what about the stories themselves – these simple morality tales with starkly drawn characters? Comics, a narrative medium that uses physical action to convey meaning supplemented with minimal text that can be condensed to fit caption boxes and speech balloons, tend to work with typical plots and individualities with “fixed iconographies” (ibid.: 33). Comic book characters are recognizable types that exemplify moral attitudes.4While this particular feature may limit the possibilities of plot and action, it also provides a focal point of disagreement and critique (MacIntyre 1981). Nagraj and Dhruv from Nagayana, Rohan from VRICA: Dawn of the Wolf, the characters from Ramayan 3392 AD, Baba from Chilka, and even the giant mouse from Mice Will Be Mice are all figural types that embody specific sets of moral qualities. Superheroes like Dhruv and Nagraj may be the true inheritors of the mythic adventure story and represent the heroic virtues that were meaningful in a stable moral world, but Rohan, Anga, and Baba, who embody exaggerated forms of these very virtues, also reflect the medium’s ability to turn a reflective gaze on itself through humor or satire. Are the properties that distinguish comics as a medium unique to it, or do we find them also in other media that deploy narration? The idea of the altering frame that is used to signify shifts in perspective is commonly used in cinema, but the recognition of its narrative potential by the comics medium has turned the frame itself into an icon with the capacity to mimetically reflect the emotional moods of characters thus enframed. Thus the frame has the potential of becoming the diegetical horizon of the story if not an actual actor within it. The gutter, another feature that helps define comics as a distinctive medium, is also found in many traditional forms of picture storytelling in India. The Chitrakars of Bengal leave spaces between scenes in their narrative scrolls to segment their stories into narratable parts. However, by filling these spaces with decorative motifs they turn the scenes depicted on the scrolls into immobile tableaux that have to be narrativized by some other medium – in this case the voice of the Chitrakar performer (see Chapter 3 for details of the performance). Leaving the space between scenes or enacted moments of the story allows for the juxtaposition not only of different spaces but also of different kinds of temporality in comics stories. Interestingly it was Dukhushyam, a Chitrakar artist, who recognized the potential of radical juxtaposition that the gutter enables and used it to shape his transcreation of Mice Will Be Mice. Thus he shaped his story in a way that would allow his chief protagonist, the mouse, to move between two registers – the mythic and the mundane – thus turning the poor mouse, a victim of a monstrous scientific experiment, into the vehicle (vahana) of a powerful deity and the mouse’s misadventure into a story about lila – the play of the gods. Perhaps it requires an outsider to recognize that comics are the narrative form best suited to narrate myths and fables in our time. In our everyday lives myths typically exist as memory traces, as felt connections to the past. As contemporary transcreations of myths these comics are intertextual – oriented vertically to a corpus of texts, literary as well as visual, synchronically present in the universe of mythology. Julia Kristeva (1980), who is among the first

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to popularize the term “intertextuality,” described texts as processes intersected by two dimensions – a horizontal dimension that encompasses the writer and reader, marking the lateral movement of events as the textual discourse unfolds, and a vertical dimension in which the words and images of the text are oriented to a literary corpus, the cultural horizon to which the text refers, the points at which the presence of other texts, anterior in time, impinge on the consciousness of the reader. Thus a text is necessarily traversed by many others that may have preceded it in time but are now co-present on the material surface of the page. If all texts are crisscrossed with citations, “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,” then writers are inevitably readers providing the space on which these quotations are inscribed (Barthes 1977a: 146). As a relatively new medium in India, comics are self-consciously intertextual using a range of citational devices such as allusion, pastiche, and satire to communicate with a culture of reading, a trend that may cut across geographical boundaries rather than be confined to a community of readers circumscribed in space and time.

Notes 1 Since panels freeze moments in time, readers have the freedom to move back and forth in time, as it were. 2 The background knowledge that readers bring to the text that aids in its interpretation and may not be explicitly conveyed by it. Diegesis works by showing rather than instructing or telling, thus allowing for differences in interpretation depending on the kind of knowledge that the reader may bring to the text. 3 The style of drawing that emphasizes musculature in the men as much as the choice of plot is what tends to lead to the stigmatising of such comics as misogynistic and protofascist. Such criticism does not take into account the importance of abstraction and stereotyping as elements of narration in the adventure genre, where realistic details of character and appearance may be deliberately eschewed to focus on specific features that amplify and project meanings that will further the movement of the narrative (Lee and Buscema 1977; McCloud 1993). 4 The impact of the figural representation of moral virtues in the form of comics superheroes is seen in the incorporation of such images on battle shields used by the Wahgi people of Papua New Guinea, where Superman and the Phantom have come to stand for the value of heroic goodness (O’Hanlon 2006).

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate figure page numbers action-to-action panel transitions 5 active nihilism 20 Adiparva (2012) 18 aesthetic experience 11 Agamben, Giorgio 2 Age of the Mahavinaash,The 58 Amar Chitra Katha 2, 12, 17, 21, 25, 30, 34, 54, 57, 100 Ambedkar, Bhim Rao 3, 5 American comics, golden age 55 archetypes superheroes 85 Asterix comics 30 “authentic” re-telling 2 Bakhtin, M.M. 100 Balagopal,Vikram 2 Banerjee, Sarnath 55 Basu, Samit 101 Bengali folklore 37, 39 Benveniste, Emile 2 Bergson, Henri 20 Bhagavad Gita 60 Campbell, Joseph 60 – 62 Campfire comics 2 Cantlie, Audrey 15 Captain Vyom (1998) 56 captions 97 cartoonish figures 13 cat motif 38 Cavell, Stanley 102

Chakraborty, Aniruddho 75 Chamatkara 11 Chandra, Nandini 12, 84 Chariot Comics 75, 83, 85 Chariotverse 93 – 95 Chilka 20 – 22, 24, 25, 26 – 28, 31, 91 Chitrakar, Dukhushyam 12 Chitrakar, Swarna 3 Chopra, Deepak 54 closure 23 Cohen, Lawrence 31 Collodi, Carlo 3 comic automatism in humans 20 comic book: artists 29; characters 103; companies 56 – 58; folk performance and 34 – 53; re-tellings 2; stories 22 Comic Con 56 comic gags 17 – 33 comics: creators 48; Mahabharata in 17 – 20; practitioners 13 comics culture: as social critique 29 – 31 comics medium 12, 13, 15, 86, 102, 103; efficacy 2; evocative open-endedness of 31 comics narration 37, 42, 48; architectonics of 90 – 91; craft of 90 – 104; transmediation and 102 – 104 comics-reading public 29 commercial Indian superhero comics 5 commercial superhero comics 86 contemporary poster art 10 conventional compositional devices 93

112 Index

conventional grid pattern 95 cosmic drama 1 cosmos 87 cynicism 101 Dahan Kaand 96 Damned:Vampire Monks of Piyang 76, 79, 80, 81 dangerous unsociability 20 Das, Indrapramit 1 deadpan style 20 demi-gods 74 – 86 demonic figures 31 Diamond Comics 56 diegetic horizon 93 Dingwal, Rohan 75, 77, 95 Director’s Cut 57 direct visual communication 3 double chronicity 90 Dukhushyam’s song 35 – 41 Eck, Diana 3, 13 Eco, Umberto 85 educational comic books 22 eidetic imagery 91 18 Days (2013) 18, 57, 58, 60 – 61, 71, 82, 102 Emura, Shohei 14, 17, 18, 34 – 36, 41, 45 epic mode 5 epics 2, 45, 62; see also Mahabharata; Ramayana events, diachronic sequencing 90 evil tantrics 73 female superheroes 101 flashback scenes 95 folklore scholarship 52 folkloric aura 3 foreshadowing, modalities 48 global myths 71 gnosticism 72, 83 gods 61 – 62 Gotham Comics 56 Grahan Kaand 97 Graphic India, Singapore 58, 74 graphic narration 22 – 29 Groensteen, Thierry 97 Gupta, Sanjay 57, 62, 86 gutters 22 – 29 hegemonic masculinist gaze 101 Helmetman in Zamzamad 56 hero monomyth 62

Hero with a Thousand Faces,The 62 Hutcheon, Linda 75 images 42, 90 – 104 incongruity 11, 12 Indian action characters 55 Indian aesthetic theory 11 Indian comics 2 – 6; language 6 – 12; national tradition 12 – 15 Indian superheroes 6, 55 – 56, 97 – 102 indigenous painting styles 3 Indrajal Comics 55 intermedial explorations 41 – 45 intertextuality 6 – 12, 104; Dukhushyam’s song and 35 – 41; superhero genre and 86 – 87 In the Clutches of Baali – The Monster King (2014) 58 Japanese manga comics 3, 5 Kapur, Anuradha 9, 10 Kapur, Shekhar 54, 57 Kashyap, Anurag 57 King, Martin Luther 3 Kripal, Jeffrey 83 Kristeva, Julia 41, 103 Kumar, Amitabh 12, 56, 85 language, Indian comics 6 – 12 Lefort, Claude 82 Liquid Comics see Virgin Comics LLC literal topos 2 living banner 19 Lucas, George 62 magic 71 – 74 Mahabharata 2, 11, 21, 22, 30, 61, 62; in comics 17 – 20 Mahabharata War 17 – 33 Mahavinaash period 58, 59 Malmgren, Carl 74 manga comics 20 – 23, 35, 37, 38, 91, 97 Marriot, McKim 83 Marvel comics 54, 57, 85, 86 Marz, Ron 58, 60, 61 Mathur, Suchitra 101 McCloud, Scott 5, 29, 42 McLain, Karline 12, 55 melodramatic Hollywood epics 10 metatextual mirroring devices 39 Mice Will Be Mice (2012b) 34 – 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49 – 51, 52, 91, 103 mimetic representations 29 Minkowski, Eugene 25

Index  113

modern Chitrakar poems 39 Morrison, Grant 9, 18, 57, 58, 60, 61, 71 – 73, 85 Morson, Gary 48 Mukherji, Parul Dave 13 myth 71 – 74 mythical symbols 15 mythic time 9 mythological revisionings 1 – 16 mythological storytelling 14 Nagayana 5, 58, 62, 95 – 97, 100 Nagayana, Haran Kaand 67, 68 Nagayana story arc 6 Narayanastra 29 narrative transmutation, mythology 14 Navayana 3 Naya village 35, 52 nebula 1 Nieland, Justus 20 onomatopoeia 91 open-ended presentness 48 Osamu, Tezuka 20, 21 Other Woman,The, 1 Padmanabhan, Manjula 1 page flip 23 page layout 25, 90 Pai, Anand 10, 17, 18, 100 Panchatantra characters 41 panels 22 – 29, 48 Pao Comics Collective 30 Patil, Amruta 2, 18 Phantom comics 55 pictorial storytelling 2 – 6, 35, 102 Pinney, Christopher 10 Pinocchio Scroll 3, 4 Pollock, S. 61 presentness, problem 2 protagonists 47, 69, 93 pseudo-realistic historicity 61 Raja Pocket Books 57 Raj Comics 54 – 58, 62, 63, 84 – 86, 96, 100 Ramayan 3392 AD 57 – 61, 71, 74, 82 – 84, 91 – 93, 100, 102 Ramayan 3932 AD 100 Ramayana 1, 2, 62; for modern age 58 Rana Kaand 96 random disjunction 100 Ra.One (2011) 56 Rashtra Man 56 realism 29, 34, 47

Resistance (2014) 101 retroactive continuity 2 River of Stories 13 Sabhaney, Vidyun 12, 14, 17, 18, 34, 35, 38, 41, 42, 45 science 71 – 74 science fiction 74; anthology 1; genre 97 secular mythologies 56 – 58 semiosis 45 – 52 Sen, Orijit 13 Shahani, Kumar 5 Shaktiman 56 Sharan Kaand 96 Sharma, Manik 57 Shuktara 56 sideshadowing, modalities 48 Singh, Abhishek 84 Singh, Mukesh 58 singularity 74 Sinha, Anupam 6, 10, 62 Sinha, Jolly 62 Sita’s Descent 1 slapstick 20 – 22, 31 Snake Woman 57 social themes 35 spatialization, time 9 speech balloons 3, 25, 48, 52, 91, 93, 95, 96 Spiegelman, Art 102 Srinivas, Deepa 12 Star Trek 73 Stoll, Jeremy 12 storytelling 102; culture, reconfigure 30 subject-to-subject panel transitions 5 Subramanyan, K.G. 36 superhero comics 3, 55; readership 101 superheroes 61 – 62, 71; genre 74 – 87; stories 56 sutradhars 2, 19 Tara Books 3 temporal continuity 48 time-travel motif, metanarrative device 1 Tome of the Wastelands,The (2013) 58 topsy-turvey sacred 2 traditional Chitrakar stories 36 traditional iconography 9 transcendent supra-consciousness 83 translation 45 – 52 transmediation 102 – 104 Turbulence (2012) 101 Understanding Comics:The Invisible Art 5

114 Index

US-based DC comics 58 US comics tradition 54

vricadium-enhanced zombies 75

Varughese, Emma Dawson 12, 72 Verma, Ravi (Raja) 10 Virgin Comics LLC 14, 54, 56, 57, 60 visual literacy 95 visual storytelling 34 vowels and consonants 23 VRICA: Dawn of the Wolf  77, 78, 94, 95

Wandtke, Terrance 5 Web comics 56 Westland, Chennai 58 word-image relationship 47 words 42, 45, 90 – 104 work of time 45 – 52 World Viewed,The 102 zombies 74 – 86