An art without a tradition: A Survey of Indian Comics

by Bharath Murthy

Summer, 2008. (revised, Oct. 2009) First published in Marg magazine, Vol.61, No.2, Dec. 2009. (For
some of the images, I haven't been able to find out the exact year of publication. Sorry!!)

Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer and Nobel laureate tells an amusing anecdote on art in one of his
essays. A sultan, wanting to find new ways to amuse himself, called for a painting competition, where
artists from the East were to compete with artists from the West (with the Muslim world being in the
centre of course). The Eastern artists were Chinese and the Western ones European. Each team was
given a wall to paint on. The walls faced each other, with a curtain between them. When the
competition started, the European artists promptly took out their colours and began to draw. The
Chinese artists, deciding that the wall was dirty, started cleaning it. Work continued for months. When
the curtain was finally drawn, the sultan saw that the Chinese had scrubbed their wall so well that it had
turned into a mirror which reflected precisely the paintings created on the opposite wall. The sultan
decided to give the prize to the Chinese. From this parable, Orhan Pamuk draws the idea that the mirror
in which the Easterners saw the Western “other”, “makes us feel as if we are somehow lacking, as if we
are a bit inauthentic or uninteresting.”

This story resonates with another one, relating to Indian art, told by Sir Thomas Roe, who represented
the Embassy of the East India Company (1615-18) in the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir.
Among the gifts he presented to Jahangir was a small oil painting of a woman, by Isaac Oliver. On
viewing the painting the impressed emperor came up with a curious wager – that his painters could
make such an exact copy of the original that one would not be able to distinguish between the two.
After three weeks, the emperor summoned Sir Thomas Roe to his ghusalkhana and by candlelight
showed him six identical paintings, five by his artists and the sixth the original one. The Englishman
was astonished.

These are two Eastern responses to the visual regime unleashed by Western art during the
Renaissance. As we shall see, in the narrow aesthetic bylane of Indian comics, artists, publishers, and
writers continue to engage with Western forms and have created a small body of work that is worth
evaluating.

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 V.S. Naipaul, another Nobel prize winning writer, wrote about India’s current lack of a painting
tradition in his book India: A Wounded Civilization (1977). He noted that while India had recovered its
traditions of classical dance, music and its weaving arts, the painting tradition had remained broken
ever since Mughal art died out. The Western artistic vision was too dominant and too varied, which
made Indian artists insecure and imitative. The irony is that art schools in India were established at the
very moment when Indian painting traditions were wiped out.

In Indian comics, one can see an aesthetic struggle to adopt and adapt a Western form to tell Indian
stories, while also competing with the overwhelming influence of other media like film and TV. The
difficulty in “reading” the genre of Indian comics arises first of all from its problematic status as art. It
has an obscure position at art schools in India. Since comics are considered low art anyway, they tend
to easily escape any critical scrutiny, so there are no standards except those set up by whoever is in a
position of power, which is most often the publisher/editor. There is no tradition to follow.

This article will stake out the territory of comics practice in India and some of its key players. The
boundaries are porous, and some areas are not discussed here – comics in the Northeast for example,
or the small vernacular comics companies, many of whom died out.

To start with, a distinction should be made between cartoons and comics, with cartoons denoting
single-panel combinations of text and image, and comics being those that also represent “time” using
multiple panels, thereby enabling narrative storytelling. Thus comic strips qualify as comics, while
R.K. Laxman’s “You Said It” is a cartoon. R.K. Laxman, though he is an important artist doesn’t
feature in this essay because he drew only single-panel cartoons. It is strange that he never tried his
hand at the newspaper comic strip.

Editorial cartoon by R.K.Laxman.

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It is interesting that cartooning, especially political cartooning, has enjoyed respectability and has been
able to build its own tradition in India, so much so that it has been institutionalized, possibly because of
its close connection to journalism. In the 19th century, the British introduced Indian versions of their
magazines like Punch which had political cartoons, and cartooning in India has continued in that
tradition. The Urdu language Oudh Punch, for example, was started by Munshi Sajjad Husain in
Lucknow in 1877, and featured political cartoons drawn by Indians.

Cover of the first issue of the 'Oudh Punch', one of the earliest Indian magazines featuring the modern cartoon/ comic strip.
Art by Wazir Ali. 1877. Lucknow. Courtesy: Wit and Humour in Colonial North India, by Mushirul Hasan, 2007.

Shankar’s Weekly, an influential magazine started by the political cartoonist Shankar (and which
closed down during the Emergency in 1975) gave a voice to a whole generation of cartoonists.
Recently in Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Cartoonists (a take-off from Indian Institute of Science?)

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opened a large gallery space exclusively for cartoons. V.G. Narendra, a cartoonist and Managing
Trustee of the Institute, mentioned that they also planned to build a cartoon library.

Shankar's Weekly cover. (1971)

There is almost a class divide between “cartoonists” and “comics artists”. The difference is mainly
because comics artists are mostly salaried employees in an industrial system, drawing whatever story is
thrust upon them, while cartoonists are responsible for both text and image, so that each of them has a
signature style. This difference doesn’t exist in the world’s largest comics industry, Japan, because
there comics artists draw as well as write the story and so are regarded as authors. Till a couple of
decades ago, comics artists in America and England worked by page and had almost no rights to their
work, while even then cartoonists and newspaper comic strip artists like Charles Schulz of “Peanuts” or
Bill Waterson of “Calvin and Hobbes” had author status and earned royalties.

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 From 'Khaleefa ki Shaadi', by Pran. (Diamond Comics).

The newspaper comic strip in Hindi caught on in the early 1960s. Pran Kumar Sharma, a graduate of
the J.J. School of Art, Bombay (Mumbai), started with a comic strip, then in 1969 moved on to create
Chacha Chaudhury, the wisecracking old man, and other characters who were very popular among the
Hindi readership. Pran’s characters were some of India’s earliest “indigenous” comic characters.
Chacha Chaudhury, specifically, is a representation of a Jat farmer. In popular culture, Jat farmers are

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satirized by other communities as muscular hard-working fellows but with little or no education. Pran
created a Jat character that broke the popular stereotype. Chacha Chaudhury was a smart Jat, and the
tagline in the comic was “Chacha Chaudhury’s brain works faster than a computer”. Pran is one of the
few comic artists who kept copyright of their work (Toms, who is discussed later in this essay, is
another) and distributed it themselves. He also formed one of the first syndication companies, Diamond
Comics, which published and distributed most of his work. Diamond is one of the two big comics
publishing companies from Delhi, the other being Raj Comics. In the pages of one of their comics
magazines, Comic Pitara, one finds hysterical hybrids of hastily copied Disney characters fighting it
out with “indigenous” characters. In recent years, the popularity of Pran’s comics has reduced. Now
Pran runs a media institute and is producing animated versions of his work.

'Dabbujee', by Aabid Surti, circa 1960s.

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“Alturam Falturam” from Comic Pitara, by Diamond Comics. Author unknown.

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Another popular Hindi comic strip was “Dabbuji” by Aabid Surti which appeared in Dharamyug. A
Hindi novelist and artist, Aabid Surti created other comic characters in the ’70s – Bahadur, Inspector
Azad, and Shuja, the desi version of Tarzan. Bahadur was his most popular character, with artwork by
Govind Brahmania, and featured in Indrajal Comics. He was the lone Indian hero to have successfully
competed with Western characters like Phantom and Mandrake who also featured in Indrajal. For
Bahadur, Aabid informed me that he was inspired by a book written by Taroon Kumar Bhaduri, a
journalist (and father of the actress and politician Jaya Bachchan), on the dacoits of Chambal, called
Abhishipth Chambal. Bahadur is a hero who protects the town of Jaigarh against dacoits by forming a
vigilante militia. In later issues, he becomes somewhat a James Bond-like character, solving
international crime with girlfriend Bela in tow. Indrajal Comics was an initiative by The Times of India,
launched in 1964, and closed in 1990. The comic has enjoyed a minor nostalgic revival in recent times,
thanks to NRIs hunting for old issues over the internet.

“Inspector Azad”, story- Aabid Surti. Art- by Pratap Mulick.

In 1971 Aabid Surti started a comics syndicate called AFI Features owned by Advertising Films of
India (AFI). Along with Rangarekha Features started by Anant Pai in 1970, AFI Features competed
with King Features Syndicate, the powerful global agency that was responsible for Phantom,
Mandrake, and Tarzan becoming household names in India. King Features is a part of the Hearst

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Corporation’s global media empire. Its role in the development of newspaper comics cannot be
underestimated. AFI Features tried, via imitation of its business model, to kickstart an Indian comics
scene. Even though it was short-lived, AFI Features was a successful venture. In fact “Inspector Azad”
and “Shuja” which appeared in The Illustrated Weekly of India managed to usurp the place of Tarzan
and Phantom for a while. Pratap Mulick, the artist on “Azad”, did a skilful black-and-white job on them
that seems very influenced by Milton Caniff’s famous action adventure strip “Terry and the Pirates”,
that was syndicated by King Features. “Azad” was an adventure story very much in the mould of the
’70s Hindi films featuring policemen and dacoits. Azad was the dashing young cop who, girlfriend by
his side, cracked down on goons. Perhaps that’s what prompted Raj Kapoor, the famous film-maker
and actor, to ask Aabid to write a feature script based on the comic. However, the project kept getting
postponed for various reasons, and when the film was to get started and the actors finally signed on,
Raj Kapoor died after receiving the Dadasaheb Phalke Award. A lot of Aabid’s papers were
permanently damaged in a Mumbai flash flood. Drawings and press cuttings were drenched in
Mumbai's polluted waters. Thankfully, some of his work had been digitized and was thus preserved.

The comics that Aabid Surti created were an attempt to provide an indigenous substitute for the
Western crime/adventure genre of comics that were available in the Indian market at the time. Raj
Comics, the most successful of the Hindi comics companies, in a similar vein, took on the superhero
iconography and grafted it into the Indian psychic topography. They came up with a whole range of
superhero characters with loose associations to Indian mythology that struck a chord with readers of
Hindi pulp fiction. Like its “original” Western counterpart DC Comics, Raj Comics is inspired pop
trash, organized around characters like Nagraj, Doga, Super Commando Dhruv, Parmanu, Bheriya,
Bhokal, Fighter Toads (an imitation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Inspector Steel (a version of
Robocop). Many of these characters are strange mutated versions of American superheroes. Their
superpowers are odd and awkward. Bheriya, the wolf man, can grow his tail as long as he wants and
uses it as a weapon. Nagraj, “King of Snakes”, literally throws snakes at his enemies. He even has an
alter ego like Superman’s – exactly the same nerdy character with glasses who works in the media. In
one of the early Nagraj stories, “The Dictator”, an exorcism experiment goes wrong and the spirit of
Adolf Hitler enters a boy, who now wants to continue World War II and rule the planet. But what’s
ingenious here is the way in which Hitler’s fascism is represented. He mind-controls people in such a
way that hundreds of humans merge to form a huge humanoid, with Hitler as the brain – an interesting
visceral way of portraying the mob hysteria that dictatorships feed on. This image also reminds one of

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certain Indian miniature paintings where animal forms are created using a composite of human
postures. Yet, in these comics, there seems to be a lack of faith in the image. The text is expository,
often describing what is in the visuals, as if the image is somehow not adequate, as if the text has to
authenticate it. The images don’t have “equal rights” with the text (to borrow a phrase from the scholar
W.J.T. Mitchell).

“The Dictator”, by Raj Comics. Story and pencils by Anupam Sinha

The Raj Comics brand of pulp violence is very different from Amar Chitra Katha’s (ACK) investment
in real-life heroic figures. Started by Anant Pai at the end of the ’60s, ACK strikes me as a rather odd
edifice in India’s pop culture. The story told by Anant Pai about its origins is now legendary. He says
that once he happened to attend a school quiz competition where he was upset that urban Indian
students could remember the names of Greek gods and goddesses, while they did not know the name of
the brother of Rama. He took it upon himself to educate Indian youth in its rich cultural heritage. His
choice of the medium of comics now seems an obvious one, but back then, there were hardly any

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examples to follow. Pai visualized ACK as a replacement for the traditional role of the grandmother.
Comics, he decided might be an entertaining way to transmit Indian heritage to urban kids from nuclear
families, who didn’t have their grandmothers to tell them these stories. In this aspect, Pai’s ambition
goes beyond the confines of the comic medium and into the cultural psyche of the country itself.

When I met him, Anant Pai came across as a quaint figure in his plush new office in Mumbai. (ACK
has been bought over by NRI businessmen looking to reap a rich harvest from this venerable
institution.) Comics didn’t seem to gel with his wide knowledge of the classic Sanskrit texts, which he
quoted in original Sanskrit. The classics were all there on a shelf behind him, one of his favourites
being the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita, drawn by the late Pratap Mulick, is as far as I know the only ACK
comic which is based on a philosophical/theological text and where visuals are used as metaphors. Yet,
the images need the qualifying text to make them work. For example, one of the panels talks about
desires being like the wind that rocks the boat of life. The image is of a boat on the high seas being
tossed about by the waves and the wind. It is realistically drawn, but the image doesn’t really work as a
metaphor. What we see is merely a boat that is rocking on the waves. It is only the text that tells us to
read the image metaphorically.

“The Gita”, from Amar Chitra Katha. Art- Pratap Mulick.

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In ACK’s mythological comics the gods and goddesses can be experienced as “real” people, with
“personalities”, as opposed to religious icons to be worshipped. It was a logical step forward from Raja
Ravi Verma’s realistic paintings of gods and goddesses, only now they spoke and made faces!
Ramanand Sagar, the maker of the Ramayan, the mega hit TV serial, was apparently influenced by
ACK. Anant Pai told me that he actually touched Pai’s feet during a public meeting. From Ravi
Verma’s realistic gods to Dadasaheb Phalke’s screen gods to Anant Pai’s comic-strip gods to
Ramanand Sagar’s TV gods – ACK’s mythological comics were an important component of popular
culture. The depiction of gods and goddesses as “real” people on TV had an even more powerful effect
than it had in comics. Some time ago, Arun Govil, the actor who played Ram in the TV serial, spoke on
TV about how his career was effectively destroyed after that part. Nobody would give him roles
because viewers would always associate him with Ram.

Another telling statistic is provided by Anant Pai himself. His first comic, the mythical story of
Krishna sold more than 11 lakh copies, while the sales of Nehru, (drawn by Yusuf Lien, the only
Muslim artist in ACK) a biography of the first Indian Prime Minister, totalled about 50,000. If the gods
are humanized, then real people have to be mythologized in order to be successful characters. Through
this rationale, the most popular character of ACK comics is Anant Pai himself. As “Uncle Pai” he
addresses thousands of children who write him letters every month. In order to mythologize himself, he
has to be “invisible”, in a reversal of the process of humanizing the gods by giving them a face. Uncle
Pai’s photograph or image never appeared in any of the comics, except once, at the end of the Nehru
issue, where a two-page comic about the “Making of Amar Chitra Katha” portrays how well researched
their comics are. Recently, a school in Mumbai introduced ACK as part of the teaching material on
history, and there was a public debate on whether it could be considered authentic. Interestingly, one of
the keys to ACK’s success was the support it received from the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan during
its early days.

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. “The Making of Amar Chitra Katha”.

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Some of the best comic artists of the ’70s worked for ACK, and a few of them spent their entire careers
there. The ACK house style is due to artists like Ram Waeerkar, Dilip Kadam, Pratap Mulick, Pradeep
Sathe, Souren Roy, Savio Mascarenhas, and Archana Amberkar (one of the few women artists), and
writers like Margie Sastry, Kamala Chandrakant, and Subba Rao. Anant Pai spoke about the difficulty
of finding suitable artists in the beginning. Even though some of them were trained in art schools like
the J.J. School of Art, he says they had little idea about how to draw images from a script. There was
also the problem of artists considering comic art as “commercial” or infantile. The early scripts of ACK
comics were written by Anant Pai himself. He claims to have given his artists details of costume and
other minutiae of the period that he gleaned from reading the originals in Sanskrit. Nandini Chandra's
book 'The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha- 1967-2007' (2008), the first book-length study of
comics to be published in India, argues that ACK was part of the recreation of a Hindu past that was
analogous to the emergence of Hindu nationalism as an ideology.

Anant Pai’s comics were only a small part of his larger project to build “self-esteem” in our country’s
youth. He ran a hugely successful “personality development course” in many parts of the country,
based on the teachings of the Gita. It is probably due to Anant Pai’s intellectual investment in nation-
building that none of the ACK comics ever indulged in satire. That genre was more successfully
employed by “Toms”, the pseudonym of a self-taught Malayali comic artist named V.T. Thomas. For
over 50 years he has been drawing black-and-white comics in Malayalam and is an institution in
Kerala. He started off as a cartoonist in Malayala Manorama, and inspired by Laxman and foreign
strips like “Dennis the Menace”, created two ageless naughty kids named Boban and Molly. Soon his
one-page comics and three-panel strips featured all kinds of small town eccentrics, including Toms
himself as a henpecked husband. The success of his comics, which combined political satire with
children’s gags, increased the sales of Manorama. When he decided to leave, they continued the
comics with other artists. This enraged Toms, who filed a court case, that went up to the Supreme
Court. Eventually the matter was settled and Manorama desisted from using his characters. When I met
Toms he told me that the case is now studied in law colleges, and the book jacket of an English
translation of some of his work proudly announces that this is the only instance where a cartoonist sued
his publisher! Toms then began a self-publishing enterprise that is the most successful example in
Indian comics publishing. Each comic is priced cheaply at Rs 10, printed in black-and-white (except
for the cover) on cheap paper, and appears monthly in 34 pages. Most of the comics are written and
drawn by Toms, while some are contributions. He directly distributes them to agents all over Kerala,
with a circulation of around 1.5 lakh copies.

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 Autobiographical story by writer/artist V.T. Thomas aka. Toms

On a lazy, sultry afternoon at his house in Kottayam, the old man comes across not as an artist, but as a
craftsman, or even an artisan. There is a sense of daily labour in his drawings, which are swiftly and
sketchily drawn, as if he might lose sight of the idea if he doesn’t hurry. He says that his comics are
social criticism, and not to be taken as mere entertainment. I asked him if he liked superheroes, and he

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replied that he wanted comics to be moulded out of reality, and so he always avoided excessive flights
of fancy. I have not seen an Indian comic that is closer to its audience than this. He plays with the form
by creating entirely wordless pieces, repeating panels, and sometimes doing away with panel borders.
He insists that comics should be in black-and-white, and not only because this is cheaper to print. He
says the line in comic art is important and it would get obscured by colour. This is similar to Japanese
manga, which are entirely in black-and-white, printed on cheap paper, a lot of them self-published,
with most stories written and drawn by the same person, a not-so-common feature in Indian and
Western comics.

. “Khape Dhaka Torbaar”, by Bengali artist Mayukh Choudhury, Deb Sahitya Kutir, Kolkata.

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 A Bengali thriller from New Bengal Press, author unknown.

Bengal is another state that has produced an indigenous comics culture. Narayan Debnath and Mayukh
Choudhury were the two towering figures in the Bengali comics scene in the ’60s and ’70s. Both were
artists of considerable skill, and both were published by Deb Sahitya Kutir, a publisher from Kolkata’s
book hub, College Street. I went to College Street looking for some of these old comics. Deb Sahitya
Kutir, the company that published Bengali comics, was near India Coffee House, the old, decaying
hang-out of intellectuals in the city. There, in the shop smelling of damp moss, I found fresh reprints of
“Batul the Great”, a prankster boy with superhuman powers, by Narayan Debnath, and some comics by

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Mayukh Choudhury. Mayukh drew realistic stories in the historical action-adventure vein. Mayukh is
no more, but Narayan Debnath continues to draw titles like “Nonte Phonte”, “Handa Bhonda”,
“Bahadur Beral”, in magazines like Shuktara and Kishore Bharati. His work is very influenced by
British “funnies” of the ’50s like Beano and Rodger the Dodger. While many Bengalis are nostalgic
about these comics, there is little in Bengali comics today that bears any connection to them. Once
again the tradition is not passed on, so there’s little to improve upon. In recent times, Ananda Bazaar
Patrika, the largest publishing house in Bengal, has entered the field by publishing Tintin-style
“albums”, mainly comic versions of Satyajit Ray's Professor Shonku stories.

“Nonte Phonte”, written and illustrated by Narayan Debnath, from Deb Sahitya Kutir, Kolkata.

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An episode from 'Batul the Great', by Narayan Debnath,

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From a biography of Indira Gandhi, author unknown.

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 “

Krishna and Rukmini”, story and art by Bharata Dasa, published by Sri Sri Sitaram Seva Trust, Mumbai. 1999.

Outsourcing (yes, this industry is no exception) has enabled some artists to draw for American and
European comics. Dheeraj Verma is one of the top Indian comics artists right now who’s drawing
horror stories for the American “Avatar Comics”. He and his wife, also an artist, run Edge
Entertainment on the top floor of a shopping complex in Delhi’s Janakpuri area. It is almost invisible
among various offices and shops. Only one tiny detail gives it away. In the shopping area on the ground
floor, among sellers of bhelpuris and kolhapuris, an artist has set up shop, selling instantly drawn
portraits of people. He advertises himself as a student of the creator of “Bheriya”, Dheeraj Verma.
Before striking it out on his own, Dheeraj was the star artist of Raj Comics, and trained many younger
artists there. At his office, he employs a team of artists who do the finishing work for his pencilling.
“Indian comics are dead,” he told me, while I looked at zombies drawn by him. “They need to be

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revived.” He spoke of reinventing Indian mythology, presenting it in new ways, the mantra of most of
the new comics companies. He talked about how our culture was being lost amidst all the
Westernization. The irony was all there to see while we spoke: right behind us, one of the artists was
laying blonde touches on a big-breasted American girl, sitting in this shopping complex in Janakpuri.

. “Devi” Issue 6, Virgin Comics, Bangalore. Script- Samit Basu, Art- Aditya Chari

Among the new publishers trying to infuse fresh blood into the field, Virgin Comics took the lead. It
was established in 2006, with Deepak Chopra, the spiritual guru, Shekhar Kapur, the film-maker, and
Richard Branson, the business tycoon, being its “chief visionaries”. They came up with what they
thought was a highly original idea of repackaging Indian mythology for the West. At a nondescript
building in a residential area in Bangalore, India’s IT capital, new tales were being spun out of the old

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myths, with titles like “Ramayan 3392 A.D.”, “Devi”, “The Sadhu”, and “Snake Woman”. When we
went there, Jeevan Kang, the artist who made his name doing “Indian Spiderman” was running the
studio.Their attempt to create a DC Comics-style assembly-line of comics with copyrighted characters
has met with limited success. The overall strategy behind the stories is of “secularizing” Indian
mythological characters, that is, presenting them as “characters” with “psychology”. In the century-old
transformation of the gods kickstarted by Ravi Verma, this seems merely like another step. But here is
a conflict. How do you give “psychology” and inner life to mythological characters and still retain their
archetypal qualities? What it ends up as eventually is an imitation of the Western fantasy genre. Thus
Rama in “Ramayan 3392 A.D.” is a deadly Kshatriya warlord fighting hordes of “Asuras” (demons)
led by Ravana from “Nark” (“hell” in Hindi). The imagery is borrowed from Gothic fantasy. It even
has a Lord of the Rings-style map showing exactly where “Nark” is situated. Its bizarre mash up of old
Hindu icons with Western science fiction and fantasy imagery is both artistically daring and a
spectacular failure at the same time. By sexualizing the Hindu gods and goddesses, and making them
“superhuman”, they have given them an existential identity crisis that is difficult to resolve. In “Devi”
when the spirit of “the fierce female warrior” takes possession of the heroine, she appears dressed in
sado-masochistic fetish gear. After the gods became TV soap opera characters, this is where they have
ended up. Since my visit to their studio, the company itself has shut down. However, a new company
called 'Liquid Comics' has emerged from the ashes, but without the 'chief visionaries'.

'Santa, Banta, and Trendy', Illlustrated Orchid Studios, Singapore.

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 While this is one end of the contemporary comics scene, at the other end we have comics that wear
their newly acquired self-respect on their sleeve in the form of the “graphic novel”. Though marketers
have advertised it as such, Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor (2004), published by Penguin, is not the first
graphic novel in India. A little known publication called River of Stories by Orijit Sen can claim that
title. Yet another precursor was G.Aravindan's 'Cheriya Manushyarum, Valiya Lokavum' (Small Men
and the Big World) that first appeared as a strip in the Malayalam magazine 'Mathrubhoomi
Alzchapathipu', from 1961 to 1973. It was later collected in book form in 1978. This strip is unique in
that it forms a continuous narrative and the characters age as the story progresses.

From 'Cheriya Manushyarum, Valiya Lokavum,' (Small Men and the Big World), by G.Aravindan. 1960s.

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The “graphic novel” is an awkward term that has entered popular discourse. One can actually club all
full-length comics under this rubric. But the accepted distinction seems to be that graphic novels should
be one long comic story dealing with “serious” issues and “complex” characters. This distinction
between comics and graphic novels doesn't exist in Japanese manga.The recent interest in graphic
novels is largely due to the availability of Western comics that have greatly enlarged the potential of
the form. Works by Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, and others are now
available in Indian bookshops. The internet has also helped spread awareness of the medium, since one
can illegally download scans of expensive graphic novels at no cost.

From 'The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers', by Sarnath Banerjee,published by Penguin. (2007)

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 . “River of Stories”, a graphic novel by Orijit Sen. (1994).

River of Stories was published by an NGO, Kalpavriksh, in 1994, and is a polemical tract on the
resistance to the Narmada Dam project. It was ironically, partially funded by the Ministry of
Environment and Forests. Orijit Sen showed me his other work in his tiny studio in a posh suburb of
Delhi, which reflected his wide knowledge of various comic art styles and techniques. For River of
Stories, he said, he wanted to bring authenticity to his characters and the landscape. So he went to the
actual locations and made sketches. This is a rare instance in Indian comic art. For him, this need for
authenticity came from his early experience of reading Tintin, which was and still is a favourite among
urban English-speaking Indians. In his teenage years, he had tried to redraw a Tintin comic with Indian

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characters. In fact, there was a comic series in the ’80s called Adventures of Timpa, by Jahangir
Kerawala and Sarbajit Sen, which was a take-off on Tintin but set in Kolkata.

The Adventures of Timpa: The red­hooded gang, story by Jahangir Kerawala, art by Sarabjit Sen

Such efforts speak of a need to imagine a contemporary Indian comic landscape, with its own particular
iconography, which is missing in Amar Chitra Katha with its preoccupation with history and myth, or
even in Raj or Diamond comics, but half-glimpsed in the work of Toms. The English children’s
magazine Target addressed this issue for a short while during the ’80s. Started by Rosalind Wilson, an
expatriate British educationist,Target’s major draw was the scattered pages of comics that appeared
between puzzles and knowledge-based articles. “Detective Moochwala” by Ajit Ninan and “Gardhab
Das”, the singing donkey, by Neelabh and Jayanto were among the more popular ones. These comics
showed signs of a fresh visual approach that could have been explored further. Target also featured
illustrations by one of the few women cartoonists, Manjula Padmanabhan. Her comic strip “Suki”

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(figure 13) featured in newspapers in the ’80s and early ’90s. In its self-reflexive approach, playfulness
with form, and in simply having a female protagonist, it is different from the predominantly male-
centric world of Indian comics. The urban adolescent male is the implicitly assumed generic reader of
an Indian comic and there are hardly any comics in India which express female points of view. For
Indian comics to evolve and nurture new expressions, they have to reach out to new readers, and
addressing a female readership would be part of the process. Of late there have been comics by women
like Amruta Patil and Parismita Singh, and I see this as a healthy trend.

“Suki”, by Manjula Padmanabhan. c.1980s.

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'Detective Moochwala', by Ajit Ninan, Target childrens magazine, 1982.

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 BONUS IMAGES!!

“Trikaaldev”, script: Nazra Khan, art: Bane Singh, published by Manoj Comics.

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“The Cure”, part of “Granny’s Gupshup” series, script: Paro Anand, artist: Natraj. Published in Target, a magazine from
Living Media India Ltd (India Today Group) . 1982.

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From an Amar Chitra Katha mythological story about Shiva and Parvati. Art by Ram Waerrkar.

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From a Bengali biographical comic of Swami Vivekananda.

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From 'Treacherous Vandals', a Bahadur story, written by Jagjit Uppal, drawn by Govind Brahmania. 1982. Indrajal
Comics,a Times of India publication.

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A 2-page comic by Toms.

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  An 8-panel Tamil comic strip by Raji. 1944. Reprinted by Vikatan Publications, Chennai, 2008.

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A 3-panel Tamil comic strip by Thaanu. 1944. Reprinted by Vikatan Publications, Chennai, 2007.

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