Amar Chitra Katha and Its Cultural Ideology...The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha (1967-2007) by...
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Review: Amar Chitra Katha and Its Cultural Ideology
Reviewed Work(s): The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha (1967-2007) by Nandini Chandra
Review by: Rupleena Bose
Source: Economic and Political Weekly , May 23 - 29, 2009, Vol. 44, No. 21 (May 23 - 29, 2009), pp. 33-35
Published by: Economic and Political Weekly
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40279032
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Amar Chitra Katha and
Its Cultural Ideology
RUPLEENABOSE
I have a passion for the epic: knights on chargers; two armies standing on either side of a dark plain on a misty morning three hun-
dred years ago, preparing for battle; luckless men downing raki and exchanging unhappy love stories in meyhanes on a winter's night; lovers disappearing into murky depths of the
city in pursuit of a dead secret - these are immortal tales I've longed to tell, but all god gave me was this column, which calls for an- other kind of story altogether. And He gave
me you, dear readers. - Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book
of brave warrior gods, conniv- ing demons, benevolent Hindu kings and clever ministers have
gripped the child growing up in post- colonial India. Stories of heroic battles and
stoic suffering brought to the comic book form meant for entertainment as well as
pedagogic purposes; Amar Chitra Katha has been associated uncritically with the
innocence and childhood memory itself.
However, the dark side of nostalgia often
comes to clearer light only in rare mo- ments of criticality. Housed in images from childhood and stories of a perfect
past, nostalgia translates into popular cul-
tural symbols remodelling itself as the classic. The contextual meanings of the terms classic and popular point to the way
studies of popular culture are necessary to
dig deeper into the so-called acceptable truths in popular imagination.
Nandini Chandra in The Classic Popular writes,
Hero worship, an integral part of chil- dren's literature is then put into the service of the life-narrative designed to foster national feeling. The premise of identifica- tion between hero and child is then magi- cally affected through a common religious bonding (ps).
Nandini Chandra's book intervenes
with the deepest insight into the nostalgic
glory of childhood, the heroes and myths that condition the minds of children and
The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha (1967- 2007) by Nandini Chandra (New Delhi: Yoda Press), 2008;
ppxv + 243,Rs395.
adults. In her exhaustive study of Amar Chitra Katha (ack) from 1967 to 2007, Chandra penetrates into the cultural pro-
duction of the popular comic strategically
started and marketed by Anant Pai as his
ideological project.
Hindu Myth, Hindu Nation Unlike the hyper-individualism portrayed
by the comic in the west, the comic in India
in an attempt to attract mass readership relies and furthers stereotypes from the
popular (read majoritarian) myths. Like the hero and heroine represented as the ideal masculine/feminine stereotypes in popular romance novels, ack found favour with the mass market with their careful
scripting of myth as history moulded into
dominant stereotypes. The "hero" is sel- dom secular and ack in its long history of
producing selective stories simply trans- lates the communal subconscious of the
nation which saw Partition, 1984 riots,
Babri masjid demolition, Gujarat riots, and
so on. Through ack's communal agenda, Chandra further urges us to question our
own collective childhood in post-colonial
India and the apparatuses, which equate the Hindu with the national and the
Muslim with the invader. With visuals and
anchoring text, the child distanced from
the memory of Partition is conditioned with a skewed view of history and a hege- monic idea of culture under the authentic
claim of pedagogy by ack.
Using cultural theories of Walter Ben-
jamin, Barthes, Appadurai and others, Chandra looks not just at the comic form, but also at the interlinked economics of
popular forms like publishing, advertising,
cinema and the art form through the last five decades. What results is a brilliant
and an iconic study of the most popular comic book of post-colonial India and the
Hinduising ideology that it forwarded through the careful choice of stories from
an ideal "ancient" past. Charting ack as a
cultural product, The Classic Popular looks at the material conditions leading to the production of the comic which was
used by it's owner Anant Pai to posit an idea of "seamless Hindu tradition"
through tales from epics, freedom move-
ment and glories of the Vedic age against
the effects of colonial modernity and English education.
Chandra goes on to show how even sub- versive folk movements like Bhakti are
represented as symbols of liberal reforma- tive Hinduism. The reference to Bhakti as
religious as opposed to the radicalism of the Bhakti movement locates the comic
within a real market, a middle class/upper
caste readership and the prerogative of the editorial committee.
Pointing to the use of the "life narra-
tive" to tell the story of heroic figures in
history by Amar Chitra Katha, Chandra
compares it to the biographies in popular Hindi films, where both subsume the
conflicts of class, community and gender. And within the rubric of the comic/
pedagogic form that ack identified itself with, it creates a fable like heroism, where
conflict is only between the Hindu hero/
good and the deviant other/evil. This is easily achieved by ack as children's litera-
ture is seen as a genre defined by a specific market, where innocence and naturalness attributed to children demand
superficial meanings.
Commenting on Pai's interpretation of
history, Chandra reveals how parallel his-
tory normally associated with comics be- comes in the case of Amar Chitra Katha, a
nationalist, Vaishnavite mode of history informed by the caste/class conditioning
and political leaning of Anant Pai. This is,
in turn, executed in the organisation through careful editorial control of the stories, texts, visuals and their possible meanings authenticated as glorious tales of Indian tradition. Writing on ack's align-
ments with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
Economic & Political weekly 12933 may 23, 2009 vol xliv no 21 33
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and the Hinduising drive of pedagogy by
the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), Chandra refers back to the National Democratic
Alliance government's attempts to doctor and communalise the National Council of
Education Research and Training text- books with the help of populist forms.
The becoming of ack comics as peda- gogy and bjp's admiration towards Pai re-
veal the dangers of nationalism bordering on Hindutva, which draws its definition
from the 19th century anti-colonial strug-
gle. Where the comic in India has attem- pted to identify itself as indigenous by re-
working the form associated with western ideas, the effect has been the creation of
an idea of tradition which was projected as "modern". In post-colonial societies popular forms like comic, cinema become the vehicle of nation-building, where the "nation" is seen as monolithic and needs
to be defined in opposition to the value system created by colonialism. However, it needs to be noted that the idea of "tradi-
tion" upheld by nationalists in popular im-
agination was a historical construct as co-
lonialism needed to create the category of
"tradition" against which colonial moder-
nity was defined.
Both popular cinema and popular com- ics like ack are realistic art built on such
an hegemonic idea of "Indianness" that seeks to create a nation, where history is
synonymous with Hindu myths and the Muslim invaders are shown to be outsiders
violating the purity of brahminical system
of culture and governance.
Picture Book Realism
Ravi Varma, it appears here, was crucial not so much for his trademark realism but
for being Ravi Varma, a highly revered
symbol of Hinduness. Consequently, when
ack artists invoked Ravi Varma, they were
using his name as shorthand for a national
consensus on what was Indian (p 87). Sandria Freitag mentions that visual
culture in India dates from the religious
act of darsan prevalent in the act of view-
ing god (Christopher Pinney and Rachel
Dwyer, éd., Pleasure and the Nation (New Delhi: oup) 2001: 35-67). The film narra- tive was an extension of the visual culture
dramatising mythologies for the viewers
along with calendar art which used aca- demic realism of Ravi Varma's portraits to
create popular visual references of Hindu
gods and goddesses. The comic too through the picture tales of religious myths is part of the same visual culture of
darsan premising itself on the realistic style of painting used by Varma.
Chandra's interview with artist Waeerkar
reveals that the Ravi Varma style of draw-
ing was chosen to create the warrior, ro-
man image of Ram and the Kannadapot/n
tradition of bearded Ram initially drawn
by him for ack was rejected. The symbolic
world of illustrations leads the young read-
ers to associate fair, roman, upper caste Hindu features as naturally good and the
bearded sharp-jawed signifying the evil and lecherous Muslim. The illustrations
are used to draw a recognisable visual link
between upper caste brahmins, gods, and
finally, Ram. Chandra analyses the illus-
trations used in ack through her extensive
study of the class and ideological positions
of the artists rendering the images of her-
oism, valour, evil into styles borrowed from the cinematic angles and frames of
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34 may 23, 2009 vol. xi. iv no 21 GEES Economic & Political wkkki.i
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- - -
mainstream film industry. Discussing the
caste and class compositions of the edito- rial and artistic team of ack, Chandra dis-
cusses the brahmin hegemony of the per-
sonal and political space of the ack team. Through interviews and cultural context of the artists, Chandra weaves forward
her argument of ack's liberal Hindu poli-
cies which cleverly exploits the "uneven split between the visual projected as pop-
ular and textual as elite" (p 12).
Bringing out the clash between the illu-
strators' own artistic styles and the over-
arching policy of Pai, Chandra gives the
example of the Mira/Krishna story in ack.
Drawn by the only Muslim illustrator in ack, Yusuf Lien, Chandra narrates the dis- illusionment of Yusuf Lien from the work-
ing system of ack and its right wing agen-
da. She goes on to notice that the Yusuf s strokes of Mira and Krishna creates a fluid
androgynous image of the man making him softer than the hardened masculine
figures in other ack comics. Yet interest-
ingly, it is revealed that Yusuf Lien was
never used to sketch the stories of Mughal
kings most of which were done by other Hindu illustrators, who worked on the
given brief and were politically inclined towards Pai and the ack ideology. This argument further suggests that like any market- driven exercise, Pai used the indi-
vidual skills of the artists leaving them little autonomy or authorial control to visualise their imagination.
What surfaces from The Classic Popular
are important questions on the cultural conditions leading to the current polar- ised present of south Asia. Further, it urges us to locate ack in the context of waning ideas of Nehruvian socialism and the radical questioning of the foundations
of the state during the Naxalite move- ment. The late 1960s leading to the emer-
gency saw the basic foundations of democracy and the Indian nation state questioned. Possibly one of the reasons leading to reactionary nationalism, where
the comic form instead of bringing forth the alternative forwarded the values of
the mainstream and a problematic idea of the secular. The non-conformism of the
1960s towards the state machinery is silenced instead creating a historical dis-
tance from the present by locating the stories in an "ideal" past.
Chandra's analysis leads one to imagine the possibilities that could have come out of ack instead of the Hinduised nation
that it attempts to build. As the longest running comic book, ack still inhabits a symbolic space in popular imagination, where the stories like nostalgic old film tunes are now available through Vodafone
with advertisements emphasising on the contemporary appeal of the stories.
In such a moment Chandra's book
urges the reader into a steady admittance of the way nostalgia left attended often leads the collective consciousness to cre-
ate "classics" out of popular forms, where
history is scripted out of communal and
caste stereotypes.
Email: [email protected]
The High Priests of Mammon
ANAND CHANDAVARKAR
universe divides naturally into the trinity: god (divinity); Caesar
(polity), and mammon (economy), whose high priests are the principal pro-
tagonists of this fascinating book detailing the lives and career of the central bank
governors of the United Kingdom (Mon-
tagu Norman, 1920-44); United States (Benjamin Strong, 1914-28); France (Emile Moreau, 1925-30); and Germany (Hjalmar Schacht, 1923-30, 1933-39); and their role
in the world economy. Largely unheard of
in 1914, the Big Four constituted by 1926,
just before the onset of the Great Depres-
sion of 1928-32, the "most exclusive club in
the world". They were determined in con-
cert to resolve the depression through an
unwavering adherence to the gold stand- ard - "a barbarous relic" (John Maynard
Keynes). They had the capacity and power
to "crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,"
which they fulfilled very much in the spirit
of captain Ahab's relentless pursuit of
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the
World by Liaquat Ahamed {New York: Penguin Press),
2009; pp 564, $32.95 (hardcover).
Moby Dick, or, the White Whale, in Hermann Melville's classic.
Biographical History of Depression This book could be regarded as a bio- graphical history of the Great Depression
written from the novel perspective of the
governors of the principal central banks (Bank of England, the Federal Reserve System, the Reichsbank, and the Banque de France) who sought to reconstruct the
system of international finance after the
first world war, deriving their mandate
from their governments who then believed
- mistakenly as it turned out - that mat- ters of finance are best left to bankers,
who alone can fathom the mystique and arcana of finance. Winston Churchill was
not the only finance minister to be
stumped by those "damned dots" of budget
figures. Small wonder, finance has always been the Petri dish of conspiracy theories
to which even the economist prime minis-
ter of Britain, Harold Wilson and a former
Oxford don, fell prey when he accused the
gnomes of Zurich of sinister intent against
the British pound.
The epistemic stance of the book is well conveyed by its lead epigraph: "Read
no history - nothing but biography, for that is life without theory" (Benjamin Disraeli). An approach not too dissimilar
to that of the distinguished Oxford histo-
rian, Lewis Namier, well-described by Isaiah Berlin as a "sort of Pointillism, the
'microscopic method', the splitting up of social facts into details of individual
lives - atomic entities, the careers of which could be precisely verified; and these atoms could then be integrated into
greater wholes... with a marvellous power
of imaginative generalisation" (Personal
Impressions, Viking Press, New York, 1980; 81-2). Traditionally, central banks have been the subject of institutional histories like those of the Bank of England
by John Clapham, John Fforde and R S Sayers.
Economic & Political weekly ISSE3 may 23, 2009 vol xliv no 21 35
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