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Abstract
With a focus on the Hindi language superhero comics produced by Raj Comics since the 1980s, this article investigates instances of “modernities in the backyard” and their implications for studying postcolonial popular culture. The graphic narratives in the comic books are neither simply Westernized or transgressive, nor necessarily framed by a mythicized or Orientalised discursive framework. Instead, they register a distinctive heritage combining vernacular and mythic prototypes with hypermodern visions with which to imagine new powers for Indian men and women, even though women may continue to be shaped by the masculinist, desirous gaze and modulated by patriarchal expectations to do with female docility and marriageability. The enquiry provides unique material to chart out the lineaments of postcolonial culture, gender, and power in order to provincialize the scope of cultural studies.
Acknowledgments
We would like to wholeheartedly thank Raj Comics for permission to reproduce the illustrations and the many people whom we have talked to about the comics for their valuable comments.
Notes
[1] Raminder Kaur, “Atomic Comics: Parabolic Mimesis and the Graphic Fictions of Science,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2011): 329–47.
[2] See Rosie Thomas, Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies (New York: SUNY Press, 2015).
[3] Sherrie A. Inness, “’Boxing Gloves and Bustiers’: New Images of Tough Women,” in Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1–17; Jennie Leland, The Phoenix Always Rises: the Evolution of Superheroines in Feminist Culture (MA dissertation, University of Maine, 2007); Noah Berlatsky, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics 1941 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
[4] Inness, “‘Boxing Gloves and Bustiers’,” 8.
[5] Jeffrey A. Brown, “Gender, Sexuality and Toughness: The Bad Girls of Actions Films and Comic Books,” in Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 49.
[6] See Patricia Uberoi, “Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Indian Calendar Art,” Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 17 (1990): WS41–48.
[7] Raminder Kaur, “Atomic Comics.”
[8] For example, see Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, ed., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992); Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1983); and Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (London: Palgrave and Macmillan, 2000).
[9] Scott Lash, Michael Featherston, and Roland Robertson, ed., Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995).
[10] See, for example, the works of Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) and Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, ed. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
[11] See, for example, Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepentla: Views From the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80.
[12] This latter phrase is adapted from Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6.
[13] Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
[14] Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
[15] Ibid., 4.
[16] Kaur, “Atomic Comics.”
[17] Karline McLain, India's Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings and Other Heroes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 84.
[18] Nandini Chandra, The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha, 1967–2007 (New Delhi: Yoda, 2008). See also Frances W. Pritchett, “The World of Amar Chitra Katha,” in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, ed. Lawrence A. Babb and Susan Wadley (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1998), 76–106.
[19] Sara Austin, “Sita, Surpanakha and Kaikeyi as Political Bodies: Representations of Female Sexuality in Idealised Culture,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5, no. 2 (2014): 125–36.
[20] Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, ed., Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
[21] For a comparable debate on comic books in the West, see Carol L. Tilley, “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications that Helped Condemn Comics,” Information and Culture: A Journal of History 47, no. 4 (2012): 383–413.
[22] On the trope of Mother India, see Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
[23] Purba Das, “National Integration Campaigns of India,” Communication Currents 8, no. 5 (2013); Ravinder Kaur and Thomas B. Hansen, “Aesthetics of Arrival: Spectacle, Capital and Novelty in Post-Reform India,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (2015): 1–11.
[24] See Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State (London: Zed Books, 1998); and Raminder Kaur, Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns (New Delhi: Routledge, 2013).
[25] Kaur and Hansen “Aesthetics of Arrival,” 6.
[26] For a comparison, see Anuradha Kapur, “From Deity to Crusader: The Changing Iconography of Ram,” in Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today, ed. Gyanendra Pandey (New Delhi: Viking Publishers, 1993), 74–109.
[27] Gyan Prakash, Mumbai Fables (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2010).
[28] Patrice A. Oppliger, Wrestling and Hypermasculinity (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004).
[29] See Joseph S. Alter, The Wrestler's Body: Identity and ideology in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 144.
[30] See Nandini Chandra, “The Prehistory of the Superhero Comics in India (1976–1986),” Thesis Eleven 113, no. 1 (2012): 57–77.
[31] For parallels in Indian popular cinema, see Deshpande Sudhanva, “The Consumable Hero of Globalised India,” In Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (New Delhi: Sage, 2005).
[32] Partha Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: The Contest in India,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989): 622–33. On feminist critiques of this dichotomy, see Janaki Nair, Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); and Himani Bannerji, Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology (New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2011).
[33] Brown, “Gender, Sexuality and Toughness,” 61.
[34] See Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's Rights and Feminism in India 1800–1990 (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997); and Rashmi Luthra, “The Women's Movement and the Press in India: The Construction of Female Foeticide as a Social Issue,” Women's Studies in Communication 22, no. 1 (1999): 1–24.
[35] The invocation of such feminist themes in a comic book that is primarily addressed at young men indicates the mainstreaming of women's oppression in contemporary India, particularly amongst its youth population.
[36] Doga-Shakti, 7–10.
[37] Ibid., 11.
[38] Ibid., 11–12.
[39] Ibid., 13.
[40] Ibid., 14.
[41] Issues to do with caste are ambiguous in the comic books. Surnames indicating caste are not clearly marked although middle class values appear throughout the comic books. So the appearance of tribal imagery is more an Othering device, as might occur with the goddess Kali portrayed as a warrior hermit.
[42] Ibid., 25.
[43] Ibid., 32.
[44] See also the transnational comic book production, Priya's Shakti, which appeared in 2014 (http://www.priyashakti.com/).
[45] Parmanu-Shakti (Delhi: Raj Comics Viseshank [Special Edition], 1998), 45.
[46] See Rosie Thomas, “Melodrama and the Negotiation of Modernity in Mainstream Indian Cinema,” in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (London: University of Minnesota Press), 157.
[47] Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
[48] Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
[49] Jane Cowan, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, and Richard Wilson, Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, ed., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).