Abstract
The cumulative effect of the (post)colonial predicament is to see cultural productions in the global South such as films, comics and artworks, as imitative, transformations or, at worst, travesties of originals in the West, thus denying agency to those who develop them. Eurocentric legacies impel the development of discursive approaches which enable an appreciation of postcolonial cultural productions without seeing them as shadows of a master print. In this article, I propose that theories of mimesis need to be shifted away from planar mirrors of reflection and adaptation to coeval vectors of parabolic intersections where the ontological status of ‘original’ and ‘copy’ is put under question. With this approach, I consider the emergence of superhero comics in the context of a post-liberal and nuclearized India with a particular focus on fictions of science, superheroism, the state and gendered universes with respect to the comic book series on the atomic superhero Parmanu.
A police inspector is shot dead by a horde of gangsters while his son, Vinay, who went out to help him, loses consciousness in front of a divine statue of Shankar after himself being struck by a bullet. Vinay wakes up to find himself in bed, tended to by his uncle, a professor of science, who had come in the nick of time after being informed of his whereabouts. Suddenly, a monstrous hybrid of human and buffalo enters the room. They both run from this beast called Buffalo. The uncle instructs Vinay to put on a costume. Quick as a shot, he dons the green and red outfit with a flashy belt, topped off with an atomic logo on the chest. He is immediately transformed into Parmanu, ‘the atomic wonder man of India’, as he storms in and defeats Buffalo with acrobatic electricity, before going on to vanquish Buffalo’s master and other devilish fiends that threaten the safety and integrity of India.
The creation of Parmanu is in the vein of a long run of superheroes who, through the use or misuse of atomic powers, find they have developed extraordinary abilities. For instance, an accident with a radioactive spider leads to mutations in Peter Parker, giving him spider-like capacities and the ability to become Spider-Man; Bruce Banner turns into the Incredible Hulk after he is subjected to radiation from a nuclear bomb testing site, leading to pigment distortion and affecting the secretion of adrenaline and testosterone. In comparison, Parmanu’s emergence as an atomic superhero in comic books is more by design than by default or freak accident. His powers are less to do with the entry of radioactivity into the human body, and more to do with a decision to don a formidable costume, as illustrated in the aforementioned edition of the Parmanu series, Revolver, from the early 1990s. In their particular ways, all these examples indicate how nuclear issues enter in the realm of vernacular culture, in the process concretizing a complex of currents to do with modernity and globalization, and enlisting its consumers into the contested fold of a ‘nuclear national’ citizenship.
In this article, I consider the emergence of superhero comic books in the context of a post-liberal and nuclearized India, with a particular focus on notions of superheroism, villainy, the state and gendered universes with respect to the comic book series, Parmanu. 1 The Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of 1998 launched the two countries into a regional arms race while, nationally, these events paved the way for the intensification of nuclear issues in the public arena. Behind these highly symbolic events were decades of nuclear activities, including the operation of nuclear power stations for civilian use, a clandestine nuclear weapons programme, a ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’ in India in 1974 and, more generally, an inveterate fascination with atomic power across the populace which may be traced back as far as the mid-1940s (Abraham, 1999). Remarkable among these earlier developments was the emergence of the superhero Parmanu comic book series from 1991 catering to a young audience of 8–16 year-olds in urban India. The 1998 nuclear tests may have connoted a sense of arrival on the international stage of nuclear weapons politics after years of deferrals and denials, but the attraction to nuclear power was already anticipated in cultural productions where fantasies of omnipotence to do with science and nation were being played out throughout Indian youth culture in vivid technicolour.
The temptation is to analyse these comics with comparative reference to Western comics such as those featuring Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, but in doing so a hierarchical ontology of original and copy, identity and imitation, creation and corruption is implicated. These Hindi-language comics have evolved their own aesthetic, combining contemporary superheroes in modernized mythologies where a conflation of ideas from the scriptures (shastra) or ‘ancient spiritual science’ (paravigyan) and developments in modern science and technology (vigyan) battle it out in dynamic graphics. Too often the West is seen as originator and everywhere else (‘the rest’) as the terrain of copies (Sayyid, 1997). This is perhaps an overwrought dualism as well as a geopolitical generalization, but, nevertheless, the legacies of colonialism cannot be denied in the international analysis of cultural productions of South Asia. As Jyotika Virdi observes, the internationalization of cultural studies has meant that it is still under ‘Euro-Anglian hegemony’ (2003: 9).
The limits of language and discursive regimes mean that the West sees itself in and through the Other (Inden, 2000; Said, 1978), and it is hampered in recognizing agency and inventiveness outside of its narrow dualistic parameters. The colonial legacy has meant that whereas the subcontinent may have been a land valued for its resources, it is not a place for the autochthonous invention of ideas. The subcontinent is deemed to persist in an ‘allochronic’ time-space, denied its contemporaneity, and this assumption taints all of its products (Fabian, 2002): it is frozen in time, and if it is seen to ‘catch up’, then it is more often than not in a second-class carriage on a travelling chronotope behind pioneers and developments, the drivers of history and culture, firmly located in the West.
Theories of mimesis in the discourse of aesthetics and criticism hark back to the time of Plato and Aristotle where nature is the realm of the universal ‘real’ or transcendent ‘truth’ and the mimetic arts become its servant (Halliwell, 2002). When theories of mimesis are transposed to colonial politics, the colonizer takes on the status of the ‘real’ and the colonized its handmaiden. This hierarchical debate where the first series of terms are given priority in both temporal and qualitative terms is echoed in discussions about the spread of post-Enlightenment concepts such as democracy and nationalism to the former colonies (Chakrabarty, 2000; Chatterjee, 1986). Although deserving of lengthier analyses than can be provided here, the cumulative effect of the colonial predicament is to continue to see developments in the global South as imitative, transformations or, at worst, travesties of originals in the West, thus denying agency to their protagonists.
Eurocentric legacies impel the development of discursive approaches which enable an appreciation of postcolonial cultural productions without seeing them as shadows of a master print. These Indian superhero comics occupy, in Homi Bhabha’s (1994) terms, an ‘enunicative space’ that is neither an instance of mimicry nor of its obverse, alterity, but one that negotiates the terrain between these two poles in a dynamo of consonance and dissonance. They compel an engagement on their own Hindi-language terms, for certain registers of meaning are lost or transformed in the process of cultural and linguistic translations, although their graphic style, sequential narrative strips and word balloons are not unfamiliar to the outsider.
Aside from critiques of the historical and material basis for colonial mimicry (Parry, 1996; Young, 2004), Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimesis contains two main oversights. One is that the point of mimetic reference is inferred as a cohesive subject that is then mimicked, leading to a split in the colonial presence (Bhabha, 1994: 153): in Robert Young’s terms, ‘narratives of fixity that become uncertain, stories of original plenitude … that become ambivalent as soon as they are translated elsewhere’ (2004: 191). However appreciative Bhabha is of the ambivalent zone of mimicry enabling co-option as well as resistance, his proposition does not account for mimetic instances where the locus of the ‘original’ or ‘the subject of the scopic drive’ (1994: 127) does not have clear demarcations. The second assumption is that mimetic ambivalence lies primarily between subject and object, the colonizer and the colonized, marked by culture, race and power rather than between subjects or even between the subjected. Mimicry matrices based on other power differentials contingent on intra-cultural textuality, gender and class, for instance, are overlooked.
This is where I invoke the metaphor of the parabola. A reflective parabola optimizes a profusion of reference points where planar mirrors of mimicry, along with their reflections, shadows, phantasms, repetitions and differences, fall flat on a linear axis. The Indian comics instantiate what may be described as parabolic mimesis with regard to the West, or a ‘transcreation’ of Western superhero comics for the indigenous contexts of modern India – that is, they constitute creative endeavors born out of a response to transnational and translational modernity located in the expressive cultures of urban India.
In my use of the concept of parabolic mimesis, I am indebted to theorizations of mimesis as the capacity to produce parallels whether they be in their ‘world-reflecting’ or ‘world-creating’ capacities (Halliwell, 2002: 24), while simultaneously producing something inventive where ‘the copy takes power from the original’ (Taussig, 1993: 59). But I diverge from such theorizations of mimesis in terms of an interrogation of the original in a Derridean sense, because of the impossibility of there being a cohesive ‘original’ for mimetic production, such that it too is ambiguous, ‘doubled’ and intertextual. This strategy of deconstruction has a metaphysical as well as geo-political bearing. As Barbara Johnson, the translator of Jacques Derrida’s text, Dissemination, observes, ‘Through the pun linking “Est” [“East”] and “est” [“is”] …“Dissemination” inscribes the West’s orientation toward Being as a relation to the Est it both desires and shuns’ (in Derrida, 2004: xxxiii). This oscillation of desire–disdain is articulated towards an East or Other conceived as alterity: in Derrida’s words, ‘the “est” that assures the West of all its fantasies of mastery’ (2004: 386). Whereas the ultimate outcome of a Derridean approach is the undefinability and unlocatability of mimesis, with the notion of parabolic mimesis a contingent matrix is provided to illuminate specific intra- and inter-cultural vectors of mimesis, temporally and contextually.
For the purposes of superhero comics, I also recognize the parable in the parabolic where the tales, while illustrating a futurist vision, convey a tale about good, evil and variations thereof, and impart a moral lesson about ideal conduct, citizenship represented as patriotic loyalty, and the nation-state. Fighting the villain, which is largely a form of ‘bare life’ as elaborated in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, is a sure way of asserting the sovereignty of the superhero, the part-object of a metonymy of national presence, born out of a fictive struggle between ‘the good and the bad, the just and the unjust’ (Agamben, 1998: 8).
Indian comics and young people
To date, Indian adventure comics have met with little scholarly theorization, in marked contrast to the plentiful attention accorded the comic book series Amar Chitra Katha (see Hawley, 1996; McLain, 2009; Nayar, 2006; Pritchett, 1996; Rao, 2000; Sircar, 2000). 2 Amar Chitra Katha emerged in 1967 and has since become almost a public institution due to its role in educating children about India’s national and cultural heritage with stories from the ancient epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana, Indian saints and freedom fighters. Despite the distinctive conventions of the comic strip form, the Amar Chitra Katha oeuvre occupies a space of alterity, with tales that exemplify what Hegel would describe as a dream-like world view outside of the ‘the West’s masculine, world-ordering rationality’ that dictates the master narrative of modernity (Inden, 2000: 4). While it may be contended that stories about freedom fighters are located in a chronotope consonant with colonial history, the comic book narratives nevertheless feed a hagiography where mortal deeds and characteristics are magnified to divine proportions in the tradition of timeless, religious parable. Predominantly bought by parents for their children, even schools in India have subscribed to the series as a pictorial form of pedagogy. By contrast, Indian superhero comics stand at the parabolic intersections of, among others, Western adventure comics and Amar Chitra Katha, mimesis and alterity. Unlike the familiar stories recounted in Amar Chitra Katha, the stories in these comics may follow a mythic template of heroes pitched into a battle of good against evil and invoke customary ideas to do with ethical conduct, but, as will be evident in plot descriptions below, they are not entirely predictable, underlining their affinity to the revelatory sequence of the modern novel rather than the pre-learnt familiarity of mythic tales. 3
Not only do the superhero comics occupy an ambivalent space with respect to the Eurocentric gaze of copy and containment, they also constitute an alternative public sphere for young people away from the paternalism of cultural probity. 4 This alternative space is not altogether distinct from mainstream currents in its emphasis on the benefits of science and ‘good citizenship’ in terms of patriotism and civic conduct, but it is definitely characterized by specific traits which the majority of adults do not fully appreciate, share or empathize with.
It is primarily young people, not their parents, who buy these adventure comics, elders passing them down to the younger ones, and peers sharing them as the comics do the rounds in school playgrounds or in other social arenas where young people congregate. They constitute literature which educationalists and many parents frown upon: first, due to their view that they do not promote ‘Indian culture’ whereas young readers recognize the updating of ancient tales, principles and themes filtered through the dynamic urban setting of modern India; and, second, for their reliance on what conservative adults would describe as ‘violence’, but young readers would refer to as ‘action’. Violence is a morally loaded term that connotes disapproval of aggressive conduct and the use of lethal weapons that leads to casualties, destruction and/or death. In comparison, action connotes revelry in the choreography of competitive conflict and the ingenuity of gadgetry and quick thinking, an arena which young readers with whom I discussed the comics with found most compelling. 5
Whereas Amar Chitra Katha encourages convention and conservatism, these superhero comics encourage invention and, to some extent, transgression. The comics contain a smattering of swearwords, particularly in interrogation scenes where law-abiding policemen (who could turn into a superhero when they so wish) are wont to shout at the villain or his henchmen with invective such as ‘kamina’ (rascal), ‘haram zada’ (bastard) and so forth in their quest for information. They are to some extent indebted to popular Hindi film culture’s use of descriptive terms, dialogue, action sequences and battles with villains, but this is another instance of parabolic mimesis for there is little reliance on romance, the family and related customary expectations in the comics typically played out through mainstream cultural outputs (see Deshpande, 2005; Dwyer, 2000). However, the superhero comics are not radical in the sense of portraying an alternative vision of India, for while they constitute an alternative public sphere for young people outside the moralizing admonitions represented by the adult consumers of Amar Chitra Katha, they remain within the framework of a civic consciousness which exalts the benefits of science and ideas to do with ‘good citizenship’ demonstrated in patriotic displays and the conduct of superheroes.
Neoliberal fictions of science
Post-1990s market forces and neoliberal economics have led to corporate collaborations in the comics enterprise as epitomized by New York-based Marvels comics teaming up with Gotham Entertainment Group, which holds the licence in India, to launch Spider-Man India in 2004. Peter Parker here appears as Pavitr Prabhakar but, notably, his spider-like powers do not originate with a radioactive spider as in the US version. Instead, while being chased by other kids, Pavitr encounters an ancient yogi who gives him the power of a spider to fight the evil that threatens the world. Local customs, culture and traditions are interwoven with new scenarios, where the Green Goblin villain is replaced by Rakshasa, an Indian mythological demon with morphing abilities. According to Sharad Devarajan:
It is one thing to translate existing U.S. comics, but this project is truly what we call a ‘transcreation,’ where we actually reinvent the origin of a property like Spider-Man so that he is an Indian boy growing up in Mumbai and dealing with local problems and challenges. (cited in Adesnik, 2005: 12)
Effectively the character is ‘transcreated’ – that is, reinvented and repositioned in order to be more relevant for Indian audiences. Whereas with the US version, Spider-Man’s origins are rooted in science, in the Indian version, he is more indebted to magic and mythology, but, as we shall see with the analyses of Parmanu comics below, the latter, rather than serving as a repository of alterity, is a means by which to re-energize modern scientific ideas for new fictional contexts. 6 In comparison, the development of Parmanu is not the result of a multinational collaboration, nor does the character of Parmanu refer to any particular US superhero. Rather, Parmanu owes a debt to a generic type of speculative fiction transposed for the Indian historical and cultural context that circulates around ancient themes and tales reinvented for modern times. The aesthetics and content of the comics have, nevertheless, been invigorated by the increase of media outputs and the liberalization of markets since the 1990s, as we shall see below.
Science fiction conjures up the Janus of modernity, replete with its utopian and dystopian imaginaries. While venturing into a future world, the futurist tales are simultaneously propelled by contemporary issues about social concerns, technical mastery, scientific control, and aspirations to do with national and/or global power. In its Western avatar, science fiction has been described by Darko Suvin as being ‘distinguished by the narrative dominance of a fictional novelty (novum, innovation) validated both by being continuous with a body of already existing cognitions and by being a “mental experiment” based on cognitive logic’ (Suvin, 1978, original emphasis). This relatively limited definition of science fiction, as opposed to the more generic term for futurist tales, speculative fiction, or the more supernatural, science fantasy, prioritizes a rationalist framework based on modernist scientific logic. However, the science that is portrayed even in science fiction may well have a mystical rather than rational character (Reynolds, 1994: 16). Moreover, the definition of science fiction has only partial relevance in India.
Speculative fiction (my preferred term because it is less prescriptive) as it has developed in India could be seen as essentially of two kinds: one that draws upon the amazing potential of modern science and technology (vigyan) for inspiration in the Suvinian tradition. Another strand of fictionalized science draws upon archaic parables and treatises for contemporary application (paravigyan or ancient spiritual science). Although the latter may not represent science in the rational-modernist sense, they are the results of an impulse which Banu Subramaniam has described for contemporary Hindu nationalists as: ‘archaic modernities … strategically employing elements of science and religion, orthodoxy and modernity’ (2000:74). The conflation of modern science and Indic textual precedents has been emergent since the late 19th century (Prakash, 1999). Superhero comics demonstrate a contemporary version of this phenomenon, where scientific ideas – whatever their source – are promiscuously mined to fuel new scenarios for futurist worlds. There is a masculinist rhetoric which underlies this phenomenon (but see below for contradictions to this generalization). The superhero comics in particular inspire the imagination with innovative gadgetry, capabilities and scenarios, and in that sense represent an exalted version of modernity, a hypermodernity that reflects a global orientation while drawing upon a distinct cultural heritage.
The birth of a genre
Raj Comics was founded in 1986 in the outskirts of New Delhi. Describing itself as the ‘The Home of Indian Superhero Comics’, the company produces comics mainly in the Hindi language that are distributed to towns and cities in the north of India. Aside from Parmanu, the pantheon of superheroes in the Raj Comics publishing universe, the brahmand rakshak (protectors of the universe), include the former circus artiste now quick-witted superhero, Super Commando Dhruva; the muscular snake-like psychic, Nagraj; the flag-toting sharp-minded detective, Tiranga; the dog-masked ‘anti-hero’, Doga, conceived as ‘Mumbai’s saviour’; the cyborg supercop, Inspector Steel; and the superheroine, Shakti – a nurse by day but when she hears of a woman in trouble, she turns into the wild-haired and powerful Shakti.
With his double identity as a police officer called Inspector Vinay, and Parmanu, which literally means ‘beyond atom’, the superhero:
fells his enemies with atomic bolts fired from chest and wrist gadgets. He reels out atomic rope from his wrist band gadget. His belt is [a] many splendoured gadgetry marvel which helps him to telemart [sic], atomize and reduce to any desired level.
7
The atomic theme is inextricably woven into the Parmanu series. Not only do the gadgets underline Parmanu’s superpowers, but often there is a discussion about energy woven through the stories. In Blackout, for instance, an evil engineer holds the city to ransom by periodically cutting off its electricity supply to raid its banks. Parmanu overcomes his henchmen, but a supervillain appears in the form of Kirigi Sinha, a villain who has attained supreme powers through yogic, jadui (magical) and vaigyanik shakti (scientific powers). They have an epic battle and in the end Parmanu defeats him. He leaves the robbers at the police station where he resumes his identity as Inspector Vinay in order to interrogate them about the whereabouts of their engineering master, Blackout (BO). But another of BO’s henchmen arrives in the form of Aag-fu who burns everyone to cinders when he opens his mouth: ‘I eat fire. I breathe fire!’ is his retort (see Figure 1). Vinay transforms himself into Parmanu and traps him with atomic rays. Parmanu then descends upon BO’s hideout and vanquishes him. By ridding blackouts, Parmanu is not just expunging selfish villains but also unreliable power grids. The moral of the story is that Parmanu’s atomic power benefits society by providing power in more ways than one – in the form of electricity but also through displays of strength and bravery crucial to the status of the nation-state.
Blackout, circa 1991, Raj Comics
There is a notable change in the Indian superhero comics from those produced in the early 1990s to those of the early 21st century. Principally, stories have become more global, graphics more adventurous and bodies more muscular, aided by newer technologies in three-dimensional rendering and digitization. Compare, for instance, the cover of Blackout (Figure 1) from the mid-1990s with one from the early 2000s (Figure 2). In his earlier rendition, Parmanu stands upright with his trim physique showing off the atomic logo on his inflated chest. His symmetrical positioning prompts comparisons with hieratic icons of Hindu deities. In his later avatar, Parmanu is shown in dynamic action displaying a finely chiselled physique topped off with a pair of bulging biceps in a display of ‘millennial masculinity’, a masculinity that not only refers to itself as a corporeal aesthetic but is also metonymic of a moral economy premised on national-nuclear strength and regional aspirations for supremacy. It would seem that a mascot for atomic power has been emboldened by an atomic or mightily powerful body. It is indicative of the corporeality of contemporary popular culture where bodies do not just contain the super-personality or the ‘soul’; but themselves become the explicit displays of superheroism. 8 The development is also testimony to the soaking up of India’s post-1998 nuclear weapons status where aggrandized ambitions for a nuclear nation in popular culture became commonplace. The nuclear tests were the outcome of, and the trigger for, a series of masculinist and communalist posturings – the former epitomized by right-wing Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray’s proclamation ‘we have proved that we are not eunuchs anymore’ (Visvanathan, 1998); and the latter emphasized by the frequent citation of the ‘Hindu bomb’ by right-wing nationalists (Sharma 1998). Although not directly linked to such political bluster, the iconography of Parmanu prefigured this series of episodic eruptions by almost a decade. After the tests, Parmanu stood not as an aspirant, but a muscle-strapped idolization of nuclear power.
Dunya Khatre Me (The World in Danger), circa 2001, Raj Comics
Homo bestia
With the proliferating sphere of superheroes and the challenges they must face to demonstrate their prowess and ethical conduct, comes a proliferating sphere of villains and supervillains (villains who have acquired formidable powers). The villains share the characteristics of a motley melange of monsters, dictators, terrorists, mobsters and megalomaniac scientists, all of them with aspirations for national and/or world dominance. Basing his observations on US superhero comics, Pramod Nayar comments that they are:
an exercise in teratology (the science of monsters). The monster is also – etymologically speaking the term comes from ‘monstrare’ meaning ‘to show’ or ‘reveal’ – about revelation, portents and omens. What the monster reveals in the superhero comic book is an imminent future – of chaos, lawlessness, a different social order. What the superhero fights is a villain who is almost always a mutant monster, a freak, or one who has developed extraordinary powers which s/he uses to overrun society. (2006: 96)
The hyper-masculine hero is placed against the freak that has to be expunged in order to preserve a precarious present. Through the monster or the villain in monstrous guises the reader enters the limits of civil society. As a form of ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998), villains can never be included as part of an ideal social world but, nevertheless, are required for its contours to be defined and in order to underline the status and prowess of Parmanu’s powers. The villain here is so outside the pale of political society that his killing is not conceived as murder, nor is it a sacrifice as it is not worthy of a divine offering. S/he is effectively ‘life that does not deserve to live’ (Agamben, 1998: 136), ‘an inclusive exclusion’ (1998: 7). The reprehensible body is effectively a non-citizen who has to be expelled if the heroic body, an aggrandized version of the citizen, encapsulating notions of a strong and healthy nation, is to be preserved. But this figure of debasement also has incredible powers which can overrun society. Significantly, rather than being a figure subjected to state powers who can be killed with impunity, villains have formidable powers of their own, acquired by various means. In this sense, they are not homo sacer but homo bestia – humanoids or beast–human hybrids that stand at the limits of society but with stupendous powers to overturn it. They are sub-human in that they too can be killed with impunity and they are also super-powerful, but not in the sense of a sacrificial victim who is both accursed and sacred. Rather, this observation alludes to a psychosocial theme which Agamben barely touches upon – that is, according to a racist episteme, oppressors have paranoiac anxieties about the powers of the debased as manifested in the phobia of being ‘swamped by immigrants’, the ‘dangerous and oversexed black man’ (see Butler, 1993; Fanon 2008 [1968]) and, particularly since 9/11, the threats posed by the global network of ‘fundamentalist Muslim terrorists’ (see Appadurai, 2006).
An apotheosis of the sublime
If the state remains the determinant of ‘inclusive exclusions’, including the right to kill, what happens when that state and the system it is part of is perceived of as corrupt and ineffectual? What if state representatives are deemed partial and opportunist? This observation only serves to underline the importance of vigilantes, messianic individuals who catalyse the ideals of the state, and energize its sublime as against its more profane aspects (Hansen, 2001: 226). The ordinary insider, ensconced in procedural machinations (Vinay, a police officer), becomes the extraordinary ‘outsider’ (Parmanu, an atomic superhero) representing idealized values in the form of the arbitration of social justice which the quotidian practices and representatives of the profane state aspire towards but cannot always deliver.
Vigilantes too are inclusive exclusions but from another vantage point – not to be reviled but revered. They are sovereign in the sense that they have the authority to kill and/or incarcerate but could also be accused of treason and so forth: in Agamben’s terms, they are ‘at the same time outside and inside the juridical system’ (1998: 15, original emphasis). This position of being both inside and outside the system is highlighted in a later special edition, Vote for Parmanu (circa 2000). Here, Parmanu captures the villains but does not kill them, leaving them instead for his alter ego, Inspector Vinay, to take to jail. Vinay later gets a call from a minister saying that ‘release papers’ have been arranged for the man he had just incarcerated. Vinay despairs at the ‘system’, repeating despondently: ‘Shame, shame, shame! Charge sheets are just like paper weights. They mean nothing!’ (circa 2000: 6). When Parmanu is on his surveillance flights over the city, he hears what seems like a fighter jet in the clouds. He goes towards it and sees Mahatma Gandhi spinning at his wheel (charka), who explains that he made the sounds to draw Parmanu’s attention (Figure 3). Gandhi recalls:
First we fought against the British, gave our lives for freedom. Now people are fighting for political power. Before, people aspired to serve the nation. Now they worship money.… Political parties have become like mafia gangs. Police have become useless.… Parmanu, it is superheroes like you that do good for the nation by taking care of its fiends. But your thoughts are a joke. Because the real fiends are running the country who even you have to obey.… Ultimately, you too are like a big gangster whose main motive is power and money…. Go Parmanu! And ask yourself are you a gangster or not? (circa 2000: 37–9)
Parmanu meets M.K. Gandhi in Vote for Parmanu, circa 2000, Raj Comics
Gandhi disappears leaving a bewildered Parmanu uncertain as to whether or not he dreamt the encounter.
Later, Parmanu is led to wrongfully pursue an ex-convict for extortion when the man was in fact collecting for people affected by a cyclone. Flying away from the scene, Parmanu sees an angel, and thinking that it could be another message from Gandhi, pursues it. Again he meets Gandhi who instructs him to look behind. Parmanu sees India’s premier, Jawaharlal Nehru, who admonishes:
I had thought that my India would become such a place that people would die to be reborn here again and again. Why are we telling you this Parmanu? Because we hope that the nation will get one more gift – which will hate villainy, which will instil people with peace. Political parties keep everything for themselves so that the common man cannot prosper at all…. Parmanu, you are a true worshipper of the nation. Why can you not take these problems into your hands? … You are like Ram’s devotee, Hanuman, who had to recollect his full strengths…. It’s not your mission to fight small fry gangsters, but tackle the real problems. The fate of India’s millions of people is in your hands. Either ruin it or make something out of it. (circa 2000: 37–9)
Back on terra firma, Parmanu resolves to nominate himself for the upcoming elections against corrupt and profligate individuals such as the crook, Bhajwani, for which he solicits the help of his female friends. Bhajwani becomes concerned about Parmanu’s growing popularity. He calls his henchmen to obstruct Parmanu, who report to the media that Parmanu has enlisted the help of gangsters to win the elections, after which the police make an appeal for his arrest.
Meanwhile, Probot explains to Parmanu that ‘Ayodaid tablets’ had created the smoke and clouds in the sky and that Parmanu was victim of a scam (by 2000, the Professor had been replaced by a cyborg aide, Probot). A villain had hidden an airship in the clouds, dispersed the tablets, and then projected holographic images of the freedom fighters onto the clouds. With this very convincing sound and light extravaganza, he encouraged Parmanu to enter politics where, as the villain laughs delightedly, ‘even the strongest people are screwed’ (2000: 56). This would then keep Parmanu out of the way of his designs on the nation, as he celebrated with his men with a bottle of champagne.
Parmanu is furious that he was taken in by the charade, but still despairs at political opportunism in the nation. Probot advises that even if he were to become prime minister, he would not be able to change the situation in India. Two women outside the laboratory overhear and remind Parmanu that if he becomes a minister, who will be left to protect the people from gangsterism? Parmanu then decides to pull himself out of electoral politics.
This is a pertinent tale, illustrating the powers that Parmanu’s liminal position as a vigilante provides in society. Even as the superhero tries to work within the system, he is ineffectual and is almost chewed up and pursued by the police. People too began to lose faith in him once he began to deliberate as an aspiring politician, preferring the direct no-nonsense action of Parmanu. The story reveals Parmanu’s intense hatred of corruption and lies. The lessons he learns convinces him of his need to overcome individual gangsters rather than transform the political arena, which, like a vine, has grown out of control and suffocates or limits the good intentions of whoever is caught in it. In this sense, Parmanu promotes a civic consciousness for good conduct as opposed to a political consciousness that could effect change in Indian realpolitik. The inadequacy of the profane state is conjured up by themes of corruption; even if characters like Vinay stand up against it, they are stymied by powers above them and the procedural framework in which they are ensconced. The battles between good and evil, superhero and villain, and the sublime and profane aspects of the state are played out in idealized fantastic forms where the real-life inadequacies of the political infrastructure are compensated for by the superpowers attributed to Parmanu, but these powers could in fact be debilitated if he meddles too deeply in the profane. Parmanu, in short, stands for an ideal, an anthropomorphized sublime state – just, effective and non-corrupt, that is able to rein in the powers of the villains as well as compensate for the venality of political culture, but only if he remains on its outer limits.
Gendered universes
Representations of gender demonstrate some unique and sometimes contradictory developments in the superhero comics which are in striking contrast to those characters represented in the more conventional Amar Chitra Katha (Pritchett, 1996). Vinay/Parmanu may have become a muscular he-man by the 2000s, but his ‘millennial masculinity’ does not simply equate with hypermasculinity along with its associations of exaggerated ideals of aggressive physicality, patriarchy and male potency. 9 His image of muscle-bound virility is intricately tied in with notions of celibacy or ‘contained sexuality’, where his formidable physique is put to the use of serving the nation (Alter, 1999: 144). A lack of family implies a lack of customary gender roles. The superhero’s characteristics are such that he liaises with female aides and heroines as equals, and he is just as comfortable in the arena of domesticity as he is fighting off dangerous villains. In one story (Last Flight, circa 1997), for instance, Vinay is shown talking to a man who is boasting about everything he has ever done at a dinner party, and Vinay slips off into the kitchen, preferring to help his female friends with preparing the food, an activity which he is accustomed to, being an orphaned bachelor living on his own. While portraying a martialized masculinity, the superhero’s character is also one that equates with the ‘modern man’, recognizing gender equality and mutually transferable roles.
Parmanu’s female aides, Mamta, Shipra and Sheena, have vocations in journalism. Even though representing the curvaceous and slim ideals of male fantasy, these career women are not subservient, docile or objects to be protected by men. They are able to fight off villains to a certain extent, but may well succumb to the shastrik powers of supervillains. However, there are also superheroines who liaise with Parmanu and take on the might of the supervillains on their own terms. In Ek Aur Parmanu (One More Parmanu, from the mid 1990s), Parmanu is cloned by a villain known as Fefra. The winged superheroine, Pralayanka, also an alias of Mamta, helps Parmanu out when he is in dire straits against the powers of the fake Parmanu, known as Anu, and his villainous supporters (Figure 4). Without her help, Parmanu would almost certainly have perished.
Shakti, circa 2002, Raj Comics
Most notable are the special editions of Parmanu meeting the superheroine Shakti (Figure 5) in what Raj Comics describes in Hindi film terminology as a ‘multistarrer’. Shakti could be described as a parabolic mimesis of the powerful Hindu goddess Kali and DC Comics’ Wonder Woman, although it is the former that is mentioned in the comics. Shakti emerged when her alter ego, Chanda, realized that her husband had been killing their female offspring. Her resultant anger triggered Kali to attribute her with superpowers in order to help women everywhere and, with this boon, Chanda killed her husband in her Shakti form (Parmanu-Shakti, 28–31).
Parmanu and Pralayanka in Ek Aur Parmanu (One More Parmanu), mid-1990s, Raj Comics
In several editions from 1998, Parmanu and Shakti come together to fight the mammoth powers of supervillains. In these stories, the reader is witness to the more powerful attributes of Shakti, based as they are on the utilization of divine feminine energies derived from Kali, in comparison to Parmanu’s powers driven from more modern innovations. Whereas Parmanu was the ‘face of energy’ (urja ka roop), Shakti was energy through and through (Parmanu-Shakti, 45) able to fend for herself with supreme physical and spiritual strengths.
When deadly ‘live cells’ are injected into Parmanu’s blood stream by the villain, Jukam, in Death Dot Com (circa 2001), Parmanu would have succumbed had it not been for the intervention of medics and the use of radiotherapy. But when Shakti is injected with the same dose, she is able to use her internal energies to burn the cells to smithereens without harming herself. Still, it is Parmanu who, when spotting himself in a mirror, realizes that they are under the influence of the supervillain’s ‘mind confusion bombs’ which had both of them lashing out at inanimate objects that they thought were attacking them. By the end of the story, Shakti is able to open her third eye and burn the otherwise invincible Jukam, a supervillain that even Superman in the US could not annihilate, but only freeze and bury so as to stop him in his tracks (Figure 6). In Aa Shakti, Aa Parmanu (Come Shakti, Come Parmanu, circa 2000), the two superheroes come to face the spiritual powers accumulated by the supervillain, Nashketu, who can use them to deathly ends by unleashing enzymes which destroy human DNA. Shakti uses her nirman shakti (inner foundational energies) to fend off the villain’s nash shakti (destructive energies), eventually blowing him up but not without nearly losing her superpowers herself, at which point Parmanu comes to her aid. When a megalomaniac renegade scientist, Vidrohi, utilizes the powers embodied in the ancient battlefield, Kurukshetra from the epic Mahabharata, to rule the universe in the story Bachao! Bachao! (Help! Help, circa 2001; see Figure 7), it is Shakti who eventually knocks him out with her powers. But this could not have been done without the support of Parmanu, who ‘transmits’ himself, reduces in size so as to be able to enter Vidrohi’s mouth and stop his tongue from reciting powerful mantras. This narrative, which conflates ancient science (paravigyan) and modern science (vigyan), illustrates the attributes of Shakti and Parmanu respectively, the former excelling in physical and spiritual strengths, the latter formidable in his physical and scientific or atomic powers.
Jukam, Superman and Parmanu in Death Dot Com, circa 2001, Raj Comics
Parmanu and Shakti overcome Vidrohi in Bachao! Bachao! (Help! Help!), circa 2001, Raj Comics
Conclusion
Indian superhero comics lie at the convoluted intersections of local, national and global dynamics to do with state, civility, science and popular culture. In analysing them, I have shifted theories of mimesis away from planar mirrors of reflection and adaptation to coeval vectors of parabolic intersections where the ontological status of Western or ‘original’ and postcolonial ‘copy’ is undermined. The Hindi-language superhero comics are not copies of Euro-Anglian adventure comics, nor do they signal a space of alterity, as with conventional mytho-religious representations in Amar Chitra Katha. Rather these superhero comics are firmly located in a futurist present, and constitute a parabolic mimesis on several fronts with reference to Western superhero comics, indigenous epics and archaic treatises on science, modernist science, Indian popular cinema, nuclear politics and the contemporaneous political economy. Through temporal vectors of ancient resources filtered through a multifaceted contemporary lens, the imagined worlds of youth comic books chart future lines of flight for not a ‘developing country’ – an idea believed to be only relevant for India’s past – but an aggrandizing, future-oriented nation looking towards regional, global and even cosmic superpower, with Parmanu electing to be its nuclear national super-icon.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Raj Comics and in particular to Manish Gupta for permissions to reproduce the photographs of comics, Anupam Sinha, P.K. Sundaram, Saif Eqbal, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Amitabh Kumar and other SARAI staff for their help in the research and the anonymous reviewers.
Funding
The research was initially enabled by a Small Grant from the British Academy (SG-35512); an Economic and Social Research Council Award (RES-000-23-1312); and an Art and Humanities Research Council Award (AH/HOO3304/1).