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ABSTRACT
From the 1980s to the early 2000s, Raj Comics went from selling 3 lakh copies a year to adorning railway bookstalls in Central India. Despite being absent from the multimedia convergence moment enjoyed by comic book characters worldwide in the first two decades of the 21st Century. Nagraj, their most successful superhero character boasts a dedicated fanbase that continues to engage with the rapidly vanishing superhero Nagraj. This paper focuses on ‘Khajana’, the Nagraj mini-series, to study the technique of serialisation and its contribution to the creation and endurance of such a fanbase online. The paper examines ‘Khajana’ by locating it at the intersection of the commercial superhero genre in India and the interactive felicity of millennial Nagraj fans. Such an intersection conceives serialisation and interactive felicity as the conditions of possibility for a fandom around an absent commercial entity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. 300,000 Copies.
2. We use genre here to designate an orientation framework for the production and repetition of a discourse (Barber Citation2007).
3. The authors interviewed Sanjay and Manoj Gupta at their office in Burari, Delhi on 6.3.2019. The authors also interviewed Anupam Sinha at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics in January 2019 and February 2020. In addition to the interviews, the authors exchanged their thoughts with these creators over Facebook and telephonic conversations. The authors are also grateful to Amitabh Kumar for sharing the transcripts of his interview with Sanjay Gupta that conducted for his project on Raj Comics for the Sarai Media Lab Project at CSDS in 2009.
4. Interviews with Sanjay and Manoj Gupta dated 6.3.2019.
5. The mini-series displays a nuanced understanding of nationalism. At its end, the immediate threat has been averted but the larger question remains – the passionate sense of injustice borne out of national pride that drives people to commit acts of terror, does not disappear and will surface again in new locations, posing new challenges to Nagraj as he travels the globe.
6. Usually rendered as ‘Khazana’, the comic uses ‘Khajana’- marked by the use of the voiced palato-alveolar sibilant affricate ‘j’ (dʒ-as in Jump) as opposed to the ‘z’ (as in zoo), which is present in loanwords from Urdu and Persian. The assimilation of the ‘z’ in to dʒ is a common, although non-standard practice in Hindi speaking Northern India.
7. Raj Comics ordered, shot and produced four episodes of a television adaptation of Nagraj, which never aired. Diamond Comics’ ‘Chacha Chaudhary’, however, had a fairly successful TV adaptation that managed over 400 episodes on air.
8. Sight, the sense associated with reading creates a distance from the text so that it appears as an object rather than a sequence of utterances that call forth responses from the audience. Oral narration also assumes a collective audience different from the solitary reader of a printed book (Ong Citation1982).
9. The Guru is accompanied by a Mongoose, the mortal enemy of the snake in Indian Lore.
10. The Gupta brothers scoured Delhi’s second-hand bookshops for books on serpent lore, fantasy and science fiction to build a cast of villains that include humans, hybrids, occult mummies and alien magicians.
11. Interview Sanjay and Manoj Gupta at their office in Burari, Delhi on 6.3.2019.
12. Interview with Anupam Sinha at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics on 26.02.2020.
13. He contributed to the successful Visarpi ki Shaadi Issue.
14. See footnote 6.
15. In January 2020, the Raj Comics page had 21,467 followers. The r/Rajcomics subreddit has a measly 37 members, but fans often express their devotion to Nagraj by posting on larger subreddits like r/India, r/indiaspeaks, r/chodi etc. Quora does not offer clear numbers for users on its platform due to its call and response nature but there are numerous posts that have people other than those on Facebook addressing queries.
16. Interviewed on 6.3.2019.
17. Mostly on the personal accounts of Mr. Sinha and Mr. Gupta, occasionally on the Raj Comics Official page as well.
18. Interviewed on 31.1.2019.
19. Taken from specific debates on several issues authored by Jolly Sinha on Quora and Reddit.
20. A sociopolitical history of the internet is too discursive to be sketched here. One could be mindful of a medium embedded in economic transformations of ‘opening’ the Indian economy in 1991; political commitments to ‘transparency’; the emergence of the IT sector in Bangalore; symbolic attribution of aspirational status to computers and the Internet.
21. The figure indexes a fan’s desire to continue associating with a character that is vanishing from print. RC has also refrained from merchandising efforts in the past, although their offices have beautiful action figures and life-size sculptures.
22. Other aspects of comics storytelling that are similar to oral narration is firstly, the lack of authorial signature such that script writers write under a variety of different names and work in collaboration with a creative team and secondly, the achievement of narrative homoeostasis by which the past is made relevant to the present by sloughing of discordant memories. Comics stories achieve this through the process of ‘retcon’ as we have shown (Ong Citation1982, 45).
23. These references are gathered from scraping Mr. Anupam Sinha’s Facebook page and have been discussed here with his approval.
24. The Hindi Belt loosely refers to the predominantly Hindi speaking regions in the states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh (UP), and Madhya Pradesh (MP).
25. (AMA thread on r/indiaspeaks, 22.0.16).
26. While they were cognisant of a language distinction that materialised in terms of family pressures of reading ‘books’ in English rather than comic books in Hindi. Both respondents insisted on an awareness of the simple plotlines that were being presented by Nagraj.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Roma Chatterji
Roma Chatterji recently retired as Professor of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Her recent work is on pictorial and graphic storytelling. She has previously worked on Collective Violence and Illness Narratives.
Amaan Shreyas
Amaan Shreyas M. Phil, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Amaan Shreyas- Writing Fellow, Undergraduate Writing Programme, Ashoka University