Adventure Comics and Youth Cultures in India

ADVENTURE COMICS AND YOUTH CULTURES IN INDIA

This pioneering book presents a history and ethnography of adventure comic books for young people in India with a particular focus on vernacular superheroism. It chronicles popular and youth culture in the subcontinent from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary era dominated by creative audio-video-digital outlets. The authors highlight early precedents in adventures set by the avuncular detective Chacha Chaudhary with his ‘faster than a computer brain’, the forays of the film veteran Amitabh Bachchan’s superheroic alter ego called Supremo, the Protectors of Earth and Mankind (P.O.E.M.), along with the exploits of key comic book characters, such as Nagraj, Super Commando Dhruv, Parmanu, Doga, Shakti and Chandika. The book considers how pulp literature, western comics, television programmes, technological developments and major space ventures sparked a thirst for extraterrestrial action and how these laid the grounds for vernacular ventures in the Indian superhero comics genre. It contains descriptions, textual and contextual analyses, excerpts of interviews with comic book creators, producers, retailers and distributers, together with the views, dreams and fantasies of young readers of adventure comics. These narratives touch upon special powers, super-intelligence, phenomenal technologies, justice, vengeance, geopolitics, romance, sex and the amazing potentials of masked identities enabled by navigation of the internet. With its lucid style and rich illustrations, this book will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of popular and visual cultures, comics studies, literature, media and cultural studies, social anthropology and sociology, and South Asian studies.

Raminder Kaur is Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns (2013) and Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism (2003/5). She is also co-author of Diaspora and Hybridity and co-editor of Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World, Mapping Changing Identities: New Directions in Uncertain Times, Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens and Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics. She has also written several scripts for theatre at www.sohayavisions.com.

Saif Eqbal is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He graduated in Political Science from B.R.A. Bihar University, and Politics, and completed his master’s degree (with a specialisation in International Relations) and MPhil from the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is the co-author (with Raminder Kaur) of ‘Gendering graphics in Indian superhero comic books and some notes for provincializing cultural studies’ in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2015). ‘With an irreverent verve wholly befitting their subject matter, Raminder Kaur and Saif Eqbal take us on a magical mystery tour of north Indian superhero comics, a genre which, despite its ubiquity and its tremendous popularity, has until now not been given the dignity of a full-scale analysis. From its humble beginnings to its current multi-mediated Indofuturistic avatars, Kaur and Eqbal offer us a fascinatingly different globalization story. So, get ready: here be superpowers!’ William Mazzarella, Neukom Family Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, USA

‘An enthralling journey into the worlds of the superheroes of north India’s vernacular adventure comics: colourful, larger than life and distinctively desi. Two enthusiasts share their passion, exemplary fieldwork and historical and textual research to make an exciting contribution to our understanding of contemporary popular youth culture in mofussil India, from the golden age of the 1980s action heroes and super- heroines to today’s millennial, Indofuturist fantasies. Insightful and enormous fun.’ Rosie Thomas, Professor of Film, Westminster School of Media, Arts and Design, London, UK

‘This fascinating and rich study of the popular visual culture of Indian adventure comics is a timely and well-researched contribution on how India’s socio-economic and political transformation from the 1980s has shaped young readers’ imaginaries of the nation’s position in a globalising world. It convincingly brings to the fore how these ‘superhero’ graphic media reflect complex turbulences related to diverse forms of knowledge production and circulation, to changes in labour and gender roles, and to the different facets and faces of nationalist dystopia and ‘Indofuturism’.’ Christiane Brosius, Professor of Visual and Media Anthropology, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg, Germany

‘A timely volume in our current age of surging nationalism in different parts of the world. The superhero comics in India are analysed visually and verbally to offer critical insights into its youth culture and its complex landscape of desire, action and political conflict. With its focus on the intersection of the transnational and the vernacular, the book enables us to grasp the slippery terrain of South Asian globalization amidst uneven modernity and the reworking of indigenous philosophies for contemporary times.’ Parul Dave Mukherji, Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India ADVENTURE COMICS AND YOUTH CULTURES IN INDIA

Raminder Kaur and Saif Eqbal First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Raminder Kaur and Saif Eqbal The right of Raminder Kaur and Saif Eqbal to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Disclaimer: Every effort has been made to contact owners of copyright regarding the text and visual material reproduced in this book. Perceived omissions if brought to notice will be rectified in future printing. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-20188-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-35868-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43421-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC For Suraya and Sohana

CONTENTSCONTENTSCONTENTS

List of figures ix List of plates xi Acknowledgements xiii

1 Action India 1

2 The making of modern mythologies 18

3 The golden age of the Indian superhero 46

4 Gendering graphics 63

5 A haven of super creativity 83

6 The fantastic familiar 101

7 The state of the nation 116

8 A forensics of evil 131

9 Readers’ worlds 152 viii Contents

10 In one of my dreams, I defeated America 173

11 Future presents 196

Glossary of key Indian adventure comic book characters 216 Index 221 FIGURESFIGURESFIGURES

2.1 Chacha Chaudhary (n.d.), Diamond Comics Digest, front cover 27 2.2 Bela and Bahadur, Jangal ke Chor (Thieves of the Jungle, circa 1986), Indrajal Comics, front cover, courtesy of bahadurbela.com 31 2.3 Fauladi Singh aur Robot Hunter (Fauladi Singh and Robot Hunter, n.d.), Diamond Comics, front cover 33 2.4 Vinashdoot (1985), Raj Comics, front cover 34 3.1 Nagraj in the foreground with his spiritual guide, Gorakhnath, in the background, Nagraj (The King of Snakes, 1986), Raj Comics, front cover 50 4.1 The superheroine, Chandika, Super Commando Dhruv’s aide (n.d.), Raj Comics, publicity image 64 4.2 Super Commando Dhruv with a schematic silhouette of Dr. Virus behind him, Code Name Comet (2013), Raj Comics, front cover 67 4.3 Nagraj and Visarpi recline on Sheshnag (usually associated wth the Hindu god, Vishnu) with allies, Saudangi, Sheetnag and Nagu, as part of the snake’s many heads (n.d.), Raj Comics, publicity image 69 4.4 The superheroine, Lomri, vanishes from Doga’s view, in Lomri (The Fox, 1996), Raj Comics, p. 19 72 4.5 The alter ego of Shakti, Chanda, encounters the supreme light of Kali after being thrown virtually lifeless into a remote valley, in Doga-Shakti (1998), Raj Comics, p. 12 76 4.6 Chanda as Shakti fighting the superhero, Doga, Doga-Shakti (1998), Raj Comics, front cover 78 5.1 Professor Nagmani inserts a brain-controlling microchip in Nagraj, illustrated by Pratap Mulick, in Nagraj (1986), Raj Comics, p. 28 95 x Figures

5.2 Nagraj fights an adversary, illustrated by Sanjay Ashtaputre in Nagraj ki Kabra (The Tomb of Nagraj, 1986), Raj Comics, p. 10 96 5.3 Nagraj fights a demonic octopus, Octosnake, sent by the evil tantric, Vishkanya, illustrated by Anupam Sinha, Vishkanya (Poison Maiden, 1996), Raj Comics, front cover 97 6.1 The evolution of the supervillain, Mkahamanav, as narrated by Super Commando Dhruv to his friend, Dhananjay, a scientist from the underwater city, Swarn Nagri, in Mahakaal (A Mammoth Death, 1997), Raj Comics, p. 15 106 6.2 Many avatars of Nagraj in a tilism (labyrinth) along with his assistant, Nagu, in Hadron (2008), Raj Comics, p. 5 109 6.3 Nagraj confronts the supervillain, Black Hole, in Hadron (2008), Raj Comics, p. 55 110 7.1 Conjoined temple-mosque on the India–Pakistan border, in Border (circa 2000), Raj Comics, p. 9 125 7.2 An enemy force running away from the melting ice, in Barf Ki Chita (Funeral by Ice, circa 1988), Raj Comics, p. 30 127 8.1 The story of a legendary brave Roman soldier who could even defeat elephants as discussed by archaeologists, in Roman Hatyara (Roman Assassin, 1987), Raj Comics, p. 2 134 8.2 Grand Master Robo and his henchman, Agnimukh, attack Super Commando Dhruv, in Grand Master Robo (circa 1991), Raj Comics, front cover 136 8.3 The villainous Nagin sucks Nagraj’s superpowers, Nagin (1990), Raj Comics, front cover 137 8.4 Shakti and Parmanu are crushed by the supervillain, Zero G (1999), Raj Comics, front cover 140 8.5 Nagraj fights the supervillain, Samrat Thodanga, who has kidnapped the wife of a forest ranger in Tanzania, Nagraj aur Thodanga (Nagraj and Thodanga, 1990), Raj Comics, front cover 142 8.6 Parmanu attacked by a huge supervillain, Dr. Worm (2003), Raj Comics, front cover 144 8.7 Advertisement for Raj Comics issues on Dracula (n.d.), Raj Comics 146 9.1 Retailer of comic books at a railway station in north India (2012), photograph by Saif Eqbal 154 9.2 The supervillain, Chumba, uses extremely powerful magnets to cut a man in half with the help of his henchmen, North Pole and South Pole. The final panel shows Super Commando Dhruv with his aides, Natasha and Schweta, in Chumba ka Chakravyuh (Chumba’s Trap, 1992), Raj Comics, p. 4 163 11.1 Comic Con, New Delhi (2017), photograph by Raminder Kaur 201 PLATESPLATESPLATES

1 A reincarnated Hitler sits atop a leviathan monster made out of a mass of human beings while directing his viral formula at the superheroine, Chandika. On the bottom left are the superheroes, Nagraj and Super Commando Dhruv. On the right is the guru, Gypto’s spirit reincarnated in the body of a woman, Tanashah (The Dictator, 1998), Raj Comics, front cover 2 Super Commando Dhruv on a motorbike against Globe Circus burning, Pratishodh Ki Jwala (The Fire of Vengeance, 1987), Raj Comics, front cover 3 Super Commando Dhruv and his aide, Blackcat, stand amidst carnage caused by robots on the loose. Commander Natasha stands aloof in a military outfit while Inspector Steel beats up two villains, Hammer and Farsa (Axe), Rajnagar Reloaded (2016), Raj Comics, front and back cover 4 Doga with smoking pistols in each hand, in Doga Poster (circa 2010), Raj Comics, Collector Edition 5 The villainous Miss Killer confronts Nagraj and his aide, Sheetika, in Mrityujivi (The Living Dead, 2011), Raj Comics, p. 11 6 Superheroes attack Haru, a rival of the gods, Kohram (Mayhem, 2000), Raj Comics, front cover. Clockwise from bottom left, they include superheroes, Shakti, Anthony, Parmanu, Nagraj, Inspector Steel, Tiranga, Doga, Kobi and Super Commando Dhruv 7 Doga accused of favouring one community over another during interreligious riots, in Doga Hindu hai (Doga is Hindu, 2008), Raj Comics, front cover xii Plates

8 Superheroes – from left to right, Tiranga, Super Commando Dhruv, Parmanu, Chandika and Doga with Nagraj in centre – gear up to deal with beings from deep inside the Earth who exist in darkness, and when on the surface, prowl in our shadows. They are the Negatives led by the villainous General Andhaman, Negatives (2013), Raj Comics, front cover 9 Supervillains and superhero aides surround Super Commando Dhruv, in Maine Mara Dhruv ko (I Killed Dhruv, 1995), Raj Comics, front cover. Clockwise from bottom left, they include Bauna Waman, Barf Manav (Ice Man) aka Dr. Verghese, Chandika, Grand Master Robo, Vanaputra, Lori, Dr. Virus, Jingalu the Yeti, Natasha, Chumba, Kankaltantra, Dhwaniraj, Cadet Peter, Suprema, Chandkaal, Samri, Blackcat and Dhananjay ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSACKNOWLEDGEMENTSACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book zones in on adventure – specifically superhero – comic books, and how they have carved out new territories, both incredible and wholly believable, in the lives of young people in India from the mid-twentieth century. The authors include Raminder Kaur, a writer and scholar who began reading and researching Indian superhero comics from 2006, and Saif Eqbal, a research assistant and doctoral scholar who has been reading the comics since the age of 6 from the 1980s. We have come together to share our experiential insights and analyses for the book due to the inventive and stimulating appeal of this print media from different yet complementary areas of expertise. We would like to thank all the people who made this project possible – most importantly, to the comic book producers. They include those at Raj Comics who were kind enough to share their time, thoughts and even comics with us in our trips to the outskirts of the state of Delhi. We owe a sincere thanks to Manish Gupta for kind permissions to reproduce the images from Raj Comics in this book, and to Sanjay Gupta and Anupam Sinha amongst others, who talked us through the intricacies of their comic book histories and representations. We would also like to extend our warm gratitude to Gulshan Rai for his advice and permissions to reproduce some of Diamond Comics’ repertoire of superheroism; and to the author and illustrator, Aabid Surti, for his recollections and permissions to reproduce images of the dynamic duo, Bahadur and Bela. Just as significantly, we are enormously grateful to the numerous comic book readers who we encountered, many of whom are now well into their adult years. They expressed several views and opinions that we have tried to incorporate into these pages, keeping their identities and any organisational or institutional affilia- tions anonymous. Where possible, we have allowed their voices to speak and offer insights on the material. It is primarily for this reason that, while this is a scholarly book based on long-term research, we have tried to write the book in an engaging xiv Acknowledgements style so as they too might be tempted to read it, and harbour ambitions to translate it into Hindi in the future. For ease of reading, any vernacular terms cited in the text are transliterated in the Anglicised version rather than presented with diacritics. Our thanks extend also to the manuscript reviewers and editors, Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal for her understanding and patience, and colleagues at the University of Sussex who supported the research. Aside from contributions to travel expenses from the University of Sussex’s Department of Anthropology, this particular research was self-funded, born out of our passion for the project. Earlier fieldwork on nuclear issues by Raminder Kaur was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-000–23–1312, 2006–2008), and a later period by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/HOO/3304/1, 2009–2010) to write her book, Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns. In the book, she discusses the ‘atomic wonderman’, Parmanu, in a chapter that is not reproduced here. A more theoretical version of Chapter 4 was published by the two authors in 2015 as ‘Gendering Graphics in Indian Superhero Comic Books and Some Notes for Provincializing Cultural Studies’ in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 12(4): 367–396. Last, but not least, we would like to thank our dear family and friends who saw us through what seemed like the never-ending task of putting our conversations and thoughts down in black and white, as we tried to capture some of the sparks of energy and enthusiasm that comes from engaging with fabulous worlds of which we are wont to dream. 1

ACTION INDIAACTION INDIAACTION INDIA

The wandering soul of Adolf Hitler lurks around a portal that connects the world of the dead to the living. It hovers around the body of a boy, Jeevo, who is in an old church in India, the ‘gateway to the paraworld’. The boy is sitting in an ‘invoker machine’ – a contraption designed by his father, an exorcist, to meet with his grand- father’s soul, the late guru Gyoto. Meanwhile, there is a fierce battle going on outside between Indian superheroes and insurgents around a nuclear power plant that violently disturbs the ritual. At a critical point during the invocation, Hitler’s desirous soul overwhelms Gyoto’s. When possessed, the boy euphorically announces: ‘I am no more a human Hitler. I’m a spirit endowed with paraphysical powers’ (Tanashah, The Dictator, 1998, p. 34). He adds:

I’m Herr Hitler! Adolf Hitler! Remember, how I gave hell to this world. But before I could realise my diabolic dreams, allied forces hounded me and I had to commit suicide. My desire to enslave human race remained unfulfilled. My spirit wandered . . . but now I’ll destroy this world. (p. 38)

The powers of the reincarnated dictator are so great that he can even resist the tantric and poisonous snake powers of the superhero, Nagraj, the King of Snakes. Neither are other superheroes any match for his powers – whether it be the highly astute and acrobatic Super Commando Dhruv, or Chandika with her secret alter ego, Schweta – a genius innovator and Dhruv’s foster sister. Declaring that ‘destruction is our common goal’, the dictator makes an alliance with the insurgents who had stolen a ‘mini plutonium bomb’ from the Narora atomic power station. They have designs to explode it on Kashmir Day, a celebra- tion in the border state’s capital in the presence of the country’s political leaders. Hitler/Jeevo takes the extremists to a hidden cache of World War II–era German 2 Action India arms and ammunition in Kashmir, where he also finds a khaki green National Socialist uniform to don with leather accessories to boot. Now looking the part, the dictator takes the rogues to Afghanistan, where they join Taliban guerrillas and seek another ‘depot of arms’. Little do they know that Hitler/Jeevo’s intent is to find a virus formula in an underground hideout in the region that he could use to continue with his ambitions for global domination. During World War II, Hitler’s scientist, Schindler, had been developing an ‘M- and B-virus’ that could help the dictator to control the minds of others. M stands for the Mother and B the Brood. The M- and B-virus establish a similar relationship that ‘a hen has with her brood of chickens. The brood follows her and blindly obeys her every command’ (p. 69). After Schindler learns of the Fuhrer’s suicide, he too kills himself out of a sense of loyalty, even though he was successful in his experiment. His research lay unknown to the world in his hideout for over half a century. The mission of Hitler’s soul is to find the formula, imbibe the M-virus himself, and inject the B-virus into the atmosphere so as it infects all human brains. When the mother and brood are in bondage, he could enslave humanity and subject it to his whims. After having located the virus formula, Hitler/Jeevo moulds individu- als into ‘a monstrous pile-up of people in humanoid shape’ (p. 82, Plate 1). Sitting on top of the mountain of human bodies and surrounded by Nazi tanks, he gloats: ‘As more people join my brood, the stronger I become’ (p. 83). This huge leviathan would make the possessed boy powerful enough to control the planet and even the universe. While in his human form, Hitler would have been able to control only the minds of humans, as a supernatural force his powers are increased manifold to the point that he could give regular form to the irregularity of innumerable souls, dead or alive. As evil reincarnate, his ‘devilish para-powers’ can soak up the energy and power of malevolent spirits. The Hitler monster boasts:

I’m a power grid of the energy of millions of spirits and evil forces. It will go on multiplying. All the energy of the souls of living and dead worlds. . . . Evil forces pooling in me. . . . Then sun, stars and cosmos . . . and god. (p. 87)

Meanwhile, the superheroes ally with Gyoto’s spirit, who incarnates himself in Jeevo’s mother. They gather their wits to overcome this dystopian threat. As the supernatural dictator sucks up bodies and souls for his leviathan, we can well imag- ine his frenzied laughter echoing over the rugged mountains and valleys, and omi- nously expanding into the solar systems to present a challenge to divinity itself.

***

Action comics in India are our remit; young people’s experiences and imaginaries our perspective. We turn to the comic books that have held young minds captive through the genre of adventure, encompassing heroic, superheroic and villainous figures. Although liberally drawing upon historical and religio-mythical narratives, Action India 3 they revel in new exploits for the modern era. While they may encompass action- based escapades and detective stories with heroes demonstrating exceptional intelligence among other talents, the core of this book is focused on superhero comics and what they mean for young India. It is often cited that India now has the world’s largest population aged 10–24, and that since the 1990s in particular, it has had a thriving youth culture.1 But there is an important backstory to youth culture, by no means coherent or unified, that goes back to earlier decades from the mid-twentieth century. We trace it through our focus on adventure comics – an ensemble of material that represents a creative transference between indigenous and foreign, familiar and innovative, ancient and topical. Among the escapades, the stories might envelope contemporary concerns such as political insurgency, assassinations, communalism, corruption, smuggling and include striking events such as the 1998 nuclear tests in Pokhran, the terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008, the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, or further afield with the abominable attacks against the World Trade Centre Towers in New York City in 2001, all for and from the perspective of the young. As we can see with the opening tale in Tanashah by Raj Comics, a counterfactual account of mid-twentieth-century history is telescoped onto the South Asian landscape to give superheroism and villainy another edge. Supernatural, meglamaniac and separatist forces are unleashed to plague humanity. In the attempt to defeat them, Indian superheroes are heralded as a national and international force to be reckoned with and written into the pages of world history. Needless to say, in the end, Hitler fails in his spirited endeavours to conquer the globe again.

A view from the global south With its emphasis on Anglophonic material, studies of vernacular language adventure comic books have been conspicuous by their near absence.2 The available work in the interdisciplinary field of comics studies mainly focuses on adventure comics in the US, Europe and Japan, with occasional chapters or articles on comics in other regions.3 With respect to South Asia, the predominant focus has been on religio-mythological and historical comic books, namely the Amar Chitra Katha (The Immortal Picture Story) series produced mainly in English in India. From the late 1960s until the 1980s, Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) has dominated the Indian comic book market. In their heyday, they proved to be tough contenders for foreign competition. With their sanctioned and illustrative stories, they largely focused on tales from religious texts and ancient epics such as the Mahabharata and Rama- yana, folklore as well as on legendary characters, saints and freedom fighters. The comic books have had much success and support, particularly from elder genera- tions intent on the moral, cultural and national instruction of the young. For some time, the popularity of age-old narratives through the comic book form encour- aged a national-cultural revival in India and amongst its diaspora. Accordingly, the material has become the focus of much scholarship interested in Indian popular 4 Action India culture and the way familiar subcontinental stories are reworked for the comic book format.4 But the significant factor here is that ACK comic book readership was largely among affluent upper-caste Hindu boys and girls from metropole and urban areas.5 Moreover, these comic books were predominantly bought by parents to instruct rather than simply entertain their children, and even schools in India have subscribed to the series as a pictorial form of pedagogy. They form part of an adult-orientated literature boomeranged for young people, rather than a literature that necessarily reflects what the young may be most instantly interested in. What needs to be fully taken on board is the proliferating area of action or adventure tales for youth in the global south. Unless they were involved in the craft of their production, sale or rental, rarely did adults take a look into these comics. As a predominant subgenre of adventure comics, superhero comics have played a remarkable role in forging young readers’ interpretive communities. These superheroes follow in the flight paths of American ones like Superman, Captain America and Spider-Man, but with very distinctive features. An extensive focus on the features of Indian or desi superheroism is well overdue.6

Desi superheroism Drawing from the jurist, Learned Hand, who presided over a court case on superhero copyright infringement in the US in 1940, Peter Coogan outlines four features of a superhero.7 Even though Coogan only foreground male paragons, we widen our reference points and analyses on superheroes to encompass female crusaders, but revert to gender-specific terms when there is a need to identify differences between them. The generic traits of superheroes are comparable to those in India. First, the superhero should be a selfless individual with a social mission to eradicate evil and to protect the oppressed. Second, this individual has special powers – mythical, magical and/or technological. Third, the superhero’s nomenclature and the presence of an iconic costume distinguishes his/her identity from the heroes of detective comics or other genres. Fourth, s/he might also have a dual identity, an alter ego. Basing her work on ACK, Karline McLain expands the list to six characteristics for the new-age superheroes, maintaining that they hold true for the Indian case with minor additions or substitutions as the case might be.8 The six features are extraordinary powers, enemies, a strong moral code, a secret identity, a costume and an origin story that sets the stage for further adventures. With this template, McLain takes recourse to the example of the semi-divine Ram, whose main exploits in the Ramayana are reproduced in some of the ACK comic books. She adds that these comics are a combination of ‘sacred and secular, myth and history to produce a national canon of superheroes’.9 However, as McLain herself acknowledges, Ram is not the be-all and end-all of Indian superheroism:

Rama is a god in human form, and the Rama comic book is therefore not a fictitious tale of the victory of good over evil but a Hindu devotional story told through the comic book medium.10 Action India 5

Heroic as they may be, the characters in ACK do not necessarily qualify as superheroes as goes the convention in comics studies. Ram is a human deity, whereas Indian superheroes are not divinity or worshipped in the same sense, but bond with the reader through their fantasies of the superhuman. Tales from the scriptures and epics in comic format are not so much the making of modern mythologies, but mythologies adapted for the modern era.11 Vernacular language superhero or adventure comics, in contrast, do present the making of modern mythologies for the Indian context. The stories in these Indian vernacular adventure comics may follow a mythic template of heroes pitched in a battle of good against evil. They may invoke customary ideas to do with ethical conduct as they might also do in ACK. But 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.12 As we explore in later chapters, we note the specific features of five main types of modern-day Indian superheroes. In their own ways, they register another pulse on young people’s imaginaries by marvellously addressing historical, religious, mythical, social and ethical discourses along with commentary on new developments in science, technology and politics. They are, as James Lovegrove puts it for science fiction in general, ‘a bellwether of the zeitgeist’.13

Adventures through ‘imagewords’ In its sequence of images interlaced with textual strips, panels or speech and thought balloons, theorists have pointed out the mutual dependence between word and picture. In one of the seminal studies on comics, Coolton Waugh defines them as having a central character who recurs in various issues and through his/her antics becomes cherished by the reader. They are complemented by a sequence of images that might be complete in themselves or a part of a larger narrative, accompanied with text in the illustrations.14 Will Eisner highlights how the repetition of images becomes a style of story telling that creates a ‘grammar of sequential art’, where words become part of the picture that the reader has to analyse in a simultaneous visual-verbal manner.15 Going further, Scott McCloud points out that comic books are not just an object but a medium of communication.16 He settles down to a definition of comics as ‘juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence seeking to evoke an aesthetic response in the reader’.17 While the focus on the ‘aesthetic response in the reader’ is a welcome one, McCloud’s definition of comics is ahistorical, and the elasticity of his definition might even be extended to cave paintings, as Aaron Meskin suggests.18 On another point of validity, Robert C. Harvey submits that McCloud does not place enough emphasis on words and texts as an integral part of the comics, but words are what distinguish comic books from simply illustrative panels.19 David Carrier prefers to call this simultaneity as ‘verbal-visual interdependence’ and an essential part of post-1930s comics, while Kristie S. Fleckenstein sees them conjoined as ‘imageword’.20 Similarly, on the subject of graphic narratives, Pramod K. Nayar describes them as part of a ‘dual narrative strategy of sequential dynamism and iconostasis’.21 6 Action India

This image-text, sequence-stasis interdependency is not, however, straightforward. Thierry Groensteen prefers to see the relationship in terms of metaphors of multiplicity: one where the story does not read continuously as one might find in a book, but space and time become discontinuous and irreducible to a linear reading.22 This, he argues, is the ‘foundation of the medium’, a foundation that is steeped in diversity rather than grounded in coherence.23 We take these points on board as well as explore the specificities of the ‘aesthetic response’ of vernacular adventure comics among their readers, but we do not limit our focus to a formal analysis of conjoined images, words, balloons, strips, panels and/or pages. Rather, our focus is on the graphic stories, and how these imageword adventures are socially, culturally and politically framed, as much as they frame the social, cultural and political worlds of those who produce and read the comics. The illustrious comic book series provided by Raj Comics has a prominent place in the psyche of north Indian Hindi-speaking children. This is especially the case amongst boys aged between 6 and 16 in the 1980s and 1990s, some of whom have continued to read the comics into their adult years. Based in Burari on the outskirts of the state of Delhi, Raj Comics has played a major role in introducing and energising stories about scientific innovations, philosophies, histories, social issues, current affairs as well as attributes of superheroism and villainy to young people in the Hindi-speaking belt of India. Not only have they been transfixed with the characters and stories in these comics, but the comics’ easy availability at virtually all train and bus stations, large or small, has made them an integral part of the myriad journeys that young people have taken, both physically and emotion- ally. These journeys range from the ordinary to the fantastic, the stupendous to the ridiculous. They feature adventures with alluring characterisations, heroic and villainous, and those that lie somewhere in between.

Modernities in the backyard Vernacular adventure comics lie at the intersection of metropolitan and mofussil imaginaries – they are not so much about how metropolitan imaginings and outputs such as cinema have represented the rural or mofussil, but how the latter represent modern life in cities across the country and globe through the panels of vernacular comics. These intersections are cross-cut by young people’s more local circuits of engagement, those who grew up in mofussil and semi-urban areas of India that also extend to the outskirts of city centres. As a medium for non-elite or lower middle class youth, they have been sidelined in narratives about globalising India.24 While comic books are a definitively modern form of communication reflect- ing global trends in graphics, aspects of modular modernity exist only as hints and hybrid transformations within their pages and among their creators and readers. Building upon what Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar calls the ‘ “multiple modernities” thesis’, the production, content and reception of vernacular adventure comics are marked by instances of what we call ‘modernities in the backyard’.25 Multiple Action India 7 modernities are not just on a scale of differentials between nations – the axes of the formerly colonising and colonised, the global north and south, and so forth – but also within and across the region and nation. To seek these other ‘modernities in the backyard’ requires going beyond Anglophone literature and the dominant hubs of capital and global cosmopolis in order to allow marginalised material and those that engage with it to speak in their own terms. In this endeavour, we foreground historical, textual and ethnographic material, hoping not to asphyxiate it with too much heavy theorisation. When we do so, we notice how vernacular adventure comics look outward to other times and spaces as much as they turn inward to embrace the lifeworlds of the young reader. They indicate an osmotic seepage of regional, national and global currents and cross-currents that, while having an earlier history that could be traced back to colonial times, for the purposes of our focus on vernacular adventure comics, emerges mainly in the 1970s with earlier precedents in the form of comic strips and illustrated magazines. With the availability of syndicated comic books from the west in India, the relaxing of government control on paper quotas for publishers, and the influence of vernacular pulp literature and Doordarshan state television entertainment programming, desi superheroes such as Nagraj materialised to take on international terrorism in mid-1980s comic books. In their manifold adventures, they are shown navigating fantastic as well as actual territories such as Britain, China, Japan, Myanmar, the US and countries in the Middle East, making foreign lands more imaginable to a young reader who cannot travel abroad. The 1990s saw the marked influence of neoliberal policies and market deregulation with the establishment of new entertainment options in audio-visual and digital formats. These changes led to trans/multinational collaborations, creative start-ups, along with a proliferation of new media, stylistic developments, as well as experimental ways of sharing graphic outputs online for wider audiences. But the competitive drive and availability of new outlets also meant that the struggle for survival became much more ferocious. A handful of vernacular comic book publishers endured, but most were delivered a deadly blow as their erstwhile readers began to turn to other media. By the start of this millennium, Indian comic book houses that survived the lean patch tried to strengthen their national status and export standing. More and more upwardly mobile Indians travelled to the cities and overseas for education and work opportunities, taking with them a storehouse of memories embedded in their favourite comic books. In the process, the vernacular comic books became pricier and less affordable to mofussil audiences who are not able to move on. They became geared towards metropolitan and transnational audiences keen to have a desi riposte to the language of global superheroism. This digest of Indian vernacular adventure comic books, therefore, is not quite a story of globalisation from below, and certainly not from above, but one from a meandering muddled middle that preceded the formal beginnings of neoliberalisation under Finance Minister Man- mohan Singh’s policies in 1991.26 8 Action India

Young spheres of action So how have adventure comics helped forge youth cultures in India, ahead of and in conversation with film, televisual and other media? What characterises these comic- centred cultures of (re)creation, representation and consumption? How were they influenced by, and simultaneously distinct from adult-centric cultures? What do the alluring and almost magical qualities of superhero comics conjure up amongst their readers, past and present? And what light does a focus on fabulous fiction bring to young people’s dreams and fantasies? By tending to these questions in this book, our research adds substantial depth and dimension to the available literature on post-1990s youth in South Asia. There is now a well-established literature on the sociology and anthropology of childhood and youth, as is indicated in the numerous books and journals available on this theme.27 In their particular ways, they concur that these are historically and socially constructed categories. In India, childhood has received the most attention in terms of psychoanalytical, historical and sociological analyses.28 It has been distinguished from the lives of teenagers and those older. Acknowledging that adventure comics may be targeted at a more narrow age bracket, when it comes to superhero comics, people from across the above age ranges read them. Our adoption of the terms, youth or young people, is therefore amoeboid. As goes a common Hindi idiom – thora adjust hua – it is ‘a little adjusted’ to accom- modate the consumers of comics throughout the decades. They range from those aged between 6 and 16 when Indian superhero comics proliferated, but they also extend to those who recall, treasure and continue to read comic books into their late teen and adult years – kidults, for want of a better term. This is necessarily a lens on the horizon of then as much as it is on the filters of now, as we try to ascertain young people’s worldviews from former decades. Such a then-and-now lens defies the stiff parameters of age-specific youth cultures as it does legislative calibres that stipulate children or minors become adults at the age of 18.29 Our focus on young people is therefore elastic, filtered and fractured, embracing children, teenagers and young adults, and affected by cleavages to do with class-caste, region, religion and/ or ethnicity to a greater or lesser extent. When we need to emphasise the younger end of this continuum or to differentiate them with regards to parents and guardians, we will use the term, children. Otherwise, we will use generic terms such as young people or youth to include older readers who construe superhero comics as both history and nostalgia, archive and alive. Through their varied optics, we will be able to glimpse the Golden Age of Indian superhero comics in the 1980s and 1990s, and their part in making the cultures of young people when comic book circulation and readership was at its zenith, as well as reflect on more recent trends. When it comes to studies of youth cultures, a debt needs to be paid to their emergence in mid-twentieth-century Britain with the rise of cultural studies. There was a concerted effort to move beyond economic production as the historical dynamic of capital to the role of consumption in forging new identities. Along- side was a drive away from the Frankfurt School’s legacy of high and low/mass Action India 9 culture binaries towards a Gramscian focus on the contradictions and contestations of marginalised and subaltern cultures. By the 1970s, several perspicuous studies emerged that foregrounded working-class and lower-middle-class youth cultures.30 Progressively, the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality with respect to class formations became an integral part of such works on popular culture in the global north. While a focus on youth had powered research on popular culture, when it comes to considering South Asia, it is studies of public culture that have ignited specific studies on youth cultures – less so subaltern or popular culture studies.31 Public culture – conceived as a contested ‘zone of cultural debate’ following Arjun Appa- durai and Carol A. Breckenridge – was taken up to explore the mediated inflections of postcolonial cultures.32 But the fallout has been that young people seemed to have slipped away as a specific point of reference. Directed at mainly adults or families, young people in early public culture studies have been seen more as appendage than as agents. They were either subsidiaries to be orchestrated or a part of the silent and suppressed. When they appear with respect to public culture, it is as post-1990s children of liberalisation largely located in the throes of metropolitan and urban heartlands.33 Accordingly, youth culture is seen to be ‘invented’ or only emergent in 1990s India, particularly through young people’s engagement with politics and the consumption of mass media such as music, television and films in a refracted mirror of the west.34 This invention of ‘new youth cultures’ is premised on the commodifica- tion and (inter)national visibility of the urban middle classes. But what were ‘old youth cultures’ about? What did young people do before or in areas away from the metropole heartlands, where there is little electricity or entertainment outlets, when television sets were sparse and going to the cinema difficult? How can we conceive of young people before the era of neoliberalisation – as subjects to be socialised, consumer adults-in-waiting, or as budding agents who enacted their own wills on their environment and created their own spheres of action, real and imagined? Did youth even exist before the 1990s in the sense that we understand the term today?35 A focus on vernacular adventure comics enables us to address these questions. In doing so, we emphasise the more fluid cultures of young people as opposed to youth cultures in an invented sense. The task is to deconstruct the commodified notion of youth cultures, and to revisit culture as constituting the lifeworlds of young people in all their acquiescent and antagonistic multiplicity akin to the emphasis in early studies of youth culture. This is not to say that there was an entirely alternative subculture or resistive representational field for young people, only that there were different circuits and agonistic relations with respect to mainstream culture.36 While by no means the sum total of their lives, adventure comics are an important fragment of what young people could call their own cultural circuits.37 Even though they might have sourced money from their family members to buy or rent the comic books, the cultural circuits remain peripheral to the world of adults. Fol- lowing Roseann Liu et al., we see youth as ‘creative cultural agents in their own right’.38 Through considering the available material, we can begin to appreciate 10 Action India what the cultures of young people might have looked like since the mid-twentieth century. Through analyses and interpretations of the vivid tales in these comic books, we can begin to develop an intimate analysis as well as a broader overview of their expressive articulation along class-culture dynamics. On a related note, the Indian middle class is often distinguished between its ‘old’ and ‘new’ avatar, the former with its emphasis on the salariat civil servant; the latter with its more entrepreneurial spirit enabled by state deregulation particularly from the 1990s.39 As we cross historical eras, youth too might be given their old and new inflections. Those that bought vernacular adventure comics would be largely from mofussil middle classes – those who live in small towns and semi-urban areas where the vernacular is preferred over English. While they range from the lower middle to relatively more comfortable classes, they are distinct from the jet-setting cosmo- politan lives of social elites or metropolitan middle classes who, as Leela Fernandes states, play the most ‘national visible role as the agents of globalization in India’.40 These visible agents might well dismiss the mofussil middle classes as provincial and immature – in a word, ‘backwards’ in not just a socio-economic sense. This indeed has been the rap for their literature, vernacular adventure comics cast off as dispos- able and derivative: ‘a slavish imitation of foreign comics’, as one Indian commenta- tor put it.41 Aspersions about the ‘copy-cat’ qualities of subcontinental superheroes are likewise apparent among those placed in other regions of the world, vernacular comics having been viewed through a very myopic and partial lens.42 Without prejudice, we concentrate on young people from mofussil middle classes as the most pervasive readers of these vernacular comics. They are mainly from low- to mid-level income backgrounds whose families have enough to invest in their education rather than have to put them to labour. Some children might even have a small amount of pocket money. They read vernacular comics while ‘waiting’ or doing ‘timepass’ as Craig Jeffrey describes lower-middle-class young people who aspire to get a salaried post.43 But the waiting trope need extend to their younger years during their period of schooling – the vestibular play area next to the waiting room presided by their anxious guardians. Readers might include the children of small shop and business owners and managers, petty agricultural landlords and people employed in the public sector and private-public enterprises such as Indian Railways and Coal India Limited. On the subject of caste, readers are generally from middle-order castes such as Other Backward Castes (OBC), but lower castes and Dalits too are present. Indeed vernacular comic books have found favour across a broader range of readership rendering caste of minimal use to our study.44 The readers might also extend to children from lower-working-class and rural families when considering rental outlets for adventure comics that end up being recycled for another entertaining lease of life, thus implanting rhizomatic roots and shoots to our enquiry.

The scope of the research Fieldwork for the book was conducted from 2010 until the present day in annual bouts of month-long fieldwork with producers, distributors and readers, with an Action India 11 earlier period of research that goes back to a year in 2006. This was pursued through participant-observation, focus groups and semi-structured interviews in mainly Hindi with a degree of English code-switching, as is colloquially common. Most of those consulted were young males in the age range of 15–37, but we also talked to some female comic readers. With an array of comics in hand as flicking points of reference – ‘comic book elicitation’ – we conducted about 30 interviews with under-18-year-olds, and 70 interviews with students and professionals in three north Indian districts.45 Most were conducted together in south Delhi, with a few conducted individually in Muzaffarpur district in Bihar and Dhanbad district in Jharkhand. Some of our interlocutors we returned to on subsequent occasions with more extended conversations on superhero comics. Many of the young people living in south Delhi were recent migrants from other north Indian states, from whom we attained further insights. Virtually all had grown up reading superhero comics in states otherwise designated by the acro- nym, BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh), or ‘sick states’ playing on the Hindi term for sick, bimar.46 In 2000, Bihar was split into two with Jharkhand as a new state. These states including their capitals were particularly run-down in the 1980s and 1990s. These were the decades when many of the youth grew up – a period when the regions were undeniably ‘underdeveloped’, and where superhero comics had a pertinent role in providing outward-bound flights of fancy and fantasy. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with about 20 senior people for their historical recollections and abiding interests in comics, plus about 30 people who made, sold or rented out comics, some of whom were avid young readers themselves. These more structured occasions were supplemented by participant- observation and chats over chai around tea stalls, retailers, college and university campuses, residences, comic book fairs and events, and train stations and journeys. These transport hubs were in fact the site of thousands of migrants who travelled to Delhi for work and education every day, particularly from the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. Since the late 1990s in particular, owing to a lack of higher education and work opportunities, and considering the rise of violence and yet decline of policing in mofussil regions, families in these north Indian states began to encourage their older male children to migrate to the cities with an anticipative ticket to upward mobility. As the first authored volume on vernacular adventure comics in India, we admit that there is a lot to cover and not enough space to do so. The book is only a study on the changing facets of mofussil middle-class youth cultures in so far as they relate to adventure comics – how this media reflects, refracts and (re)produces their social worlds. Vernacular adventure comics are windows on much larger historical and socio-political contexts, some of which is necessarily the subject of further research, and some for which there exists plentiful other work signposted in the endnotes. Even though we begin with a national overview of adventure comics as they relate to young people’s cultures throughout the last century and end with a focus on their orientation today, the main address is superhero comics that circulate in the Hindi-speaking belt of north India. There are other more specific histories 12 Action India to be done, particularly to do with comics in Bengali and south Indian languages, a detailed study of which is outside the scope of this book.47 The next three chapters cover the lay of the land, concentrating on the main figures and narratives of adventure comics in India. By outlining the Nascent, Golden, Dark and Platinum Ages, we provide a necessary postcolonial corrective to assumptions about their singular development in the global north. In Chapter 2, we introduce and situate the rise of adventure comics in India in a context of incipient trends in colonial and post-independent contexts from the mid-twentieth century. A history of the rise of comic books is drawn out with a focus on indigenously produced comic strips and ‘pocket books’ such as those published by Diamond, Indra- jal, Tulsi and Manoj Comics. This is supplemented by a focus on early adventurous crime-fighters such as the masked Phantom (later Indianised as Vetal), the avuncular Chacha Chaudhary with the ‘brain faster than a computer’, the dacoit-fighting Bahadur with his kung fu aficionado and cohabiting girlfriend, Bela, and the emergence of fantastic India-grown superheroes such as the robot with feelings, Falaudi Singh, and the friendly blonde alien, Vinashdoot. Along the way, we highlight how artists such as Pran Kumar Sharma carried over skills acquired in calendar arts, developed in ACK magazines, and then deployed in early adventure comic books, bringing several traditions of artistry together. We consider film veteran Amitabh Bachchan’s foray as his superheroic alter ego, Supremo, along with his pet falcon and talking dolphin in comic books devised specifically for children. We also learn about television programmes and how they sparked a thirst for Indian extraterrestrial action. They included Indian-produced and syndicated programmes such as the US series Star Trek, along with the broadcasting of major events such as Rakesh Sharma’s journey into space as part of a 1984 joint programme between the Indian Space Research Organisation and Soviet Intercosmos. We concentrate on these earlier episodes of heroism before they firmly shape-shifted into desi superheroism in the 1980s. Chapter 3 plunges into what we have called the Golden Age of the Indian superhero at a time of increasing political and economic turbulence. Light will be shone on the brahmand rakshak, or protectors of the universe, so we can begin to appreciate characteristics of the foremost superheroes. They include ‘mytho- modern’ protagonists such as the muscular snake-like psychic, Nagraj; (extra)ordinary superheroes such as the former circus artiste and now quick-witted superhero, Super Commando Dhruv; transhuman superheroes such as the automated police officer, Inspector Steel; forest guardians such as the synergetic Kobi and Bheriya; and enraged avengers such as the dog-masked ‘angry superhero’, Doga. Chapter 4 highlights the need to gender graphic narratives. We consider how women such as Chandika and Schweta are portrayed in superhero comics, before focusing on attributes of masculinity or, more to the point, hypermasculinity and their symbiotic relations with representations of femininity in their more mun- dane, superheroine or villainous forms. With a focus on Raj Comics’ unique series dedicated to the superheroine Shakti, who owes her spiritual-physical powers to the omnipotent Hindu goddess, Kali, we end by looking at how indigenous Action India 13 philosophies are reworked for contemporary times in the struggle against gender inequality and violence. Chapter 5 takes us to Burari, a fairly ordinary place on the outskirts of the state of Delhi that has the unique and perhaps surprising claim to be north India’s his- toric heart of supercomics creativity. We reflect upon some of our conversations and observations with an eye to considering the recent history and creative energies behind Raj Comics. Honing in on early superhero comics and characters, we out- line the key creators’ contributions in this ‘mofussil hub’ as a distinctive expression of ‘modernities in the backyard’. From Chapters 6 to 8, we analyse the main themes of superhero comics, begin- ning with cultures of fabulous science. These provide the spine to Indian superhero comics that include a debt to developments in modern science along with inventive or miraculous ideas that have their provenance in Indic religion, mythology and folklore. With such resources, all kinds of creative possibilities are imagined, phe- nomena that one of our interlocutors described as ‘scientific magics’. The scientific magics may manifest themselves in the origin stories of protagonists, good or bad, in the struggles and battles between such characters, and as part of gadgets, events and the environment that they inhabit and seek to alter. In the process, we revisit science fiction as it is widely understood in the west with some significant modifi- cations that we elaborate in terms of the ‘fantastic familiar’. Chapter 7 examines conceptions of the nation and state as manifest in superhero comics. The ‘truth-seeking’ superhero executes various tasks to protect the nation, and in the process, engages with (and sometimes even disengages from) the state apparatus such as the police and the army. This range of ‘in/exclusion’ extends from, first, the superhero who personifies both the nation and the state together. Second, the superhero might disengage from the state in a mission to provide a corrective to corruption that festers in policing and bureaucratic institutions, but s/he may continue to form an alliance to valorised aspects of the state apparatus, as with the army fighting for the country. Third, there are times where the superhero might disengage altogether, even from the holy grail of the army, and be foisted into the spotlight as a vigilante or outlier, yet one who has a popular sovereignty as the apex of a divorced yet pure patriotism. Chapter 8 moves our focus to the darker terrain of dystopia and horror, and how like a double helix, current and imminent threats to cherished social values and national security rotate around each other in the superhero universe. As an ‘essential evil’, criminals and dictators, aliens and mutants, mythological and folkloric demons, even Dracula and ancient Egyptian mummies, are liberally scattered across the comic books. Without such dark forces, there would in fact be no superhero. Chapters 9 and 10 take us to young readers’ interpretive communities with a focus on the reception of superhero comics when they were growing up, mainly in the 1980s and 1990s.48 We begin by considering in more detail consumption patterns and alternative youth cultural circuits of superhero comics that have generated a diversity of meanings and conceptual mappings. The subsequent sister chapter takes us deeper into the subterranean worlds of comic book readers’ dreams as 14 Action India conjured up by the title sourced from one of our interlocutors: ‘In one of my dreams, I defeated America’. The ‘dreams spectrum’ – whether they be as aspira- tional ambition or as somnolent journey – manifests itself in the way comic books catalyse young people’s fantasies about personal powers, super-intelligence, out- standing technologies, vengeance, justice, geopolitics, romance, sex and the incredible potential of masked identities enabled by the internet where and when it became accessible from the mid-1990s. We end with Chapter 11 that charts what we have described as the current Plati- num Age. This is a fiercely intensive neoliberal period accompanied by the development and maturation of new superhero ventures, production technologies, television, film and transmedia projects, trans/multinational collaborations, and the consolidation of comic book creative talent in diverse fields in a contested zone where other forms of media – audio-visual-digital – vie for monopoly in transnational spheres. Describ- ing the phenomenon as Indofuturism, we address some of the new characters and themes that have crystalised as part of narratives of millennial desi superheroism when Hindu nationalism is on the resurgence, adding saffron hues to graphic ventures. With our multifaceted approach entailing histories, textual and contextual analyses, and excerpts of interviews with the creators, retailers and readers along with their views, reviews and reveries, we hope to provide an exciting and incisive documentation of a hugely neglected modern history of Indian young people’s lives. The adventures play a potent part in stimulating imaginaries of all kinds while combating modern fears and anxieties through super/heroes ready to defend their principles, beliefs, nation and planet. As such, they are an essential avenue to the psychosocial worlds of youngsters. If not always the case in the present era due to the onslaught of multiple entertainment channels, there is no denying that adventure comic books form an integral, diverse and vibrant part of the history of youth cultures in the subcontinent.

Notes 1 See below and Monica Das Gupta, Robert Engelman, Jessica Levy, Gretchen Luchsinger, Tom Merrick, James E. Rosen (2014) The Power of 18 Billion, Youth, Adolescents and the Transformation of the Future, New York: United Nations Population Fund. www.unfpa. org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/EN-SWOP14-Report_FINAL-web.pdf. Accessed: September 9, 2017. 2 A parallel argument has been made for literature in general when English-language books have received more transnational attention in the west. See Pamela Lothspeich (2009) ‘The Mahabharata’s Imprint on Contemporary Literature and Film’, in Popular Culture in a Glo- balised India, eds. K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, Abingdon: Routledge. When we invoke west/ern in this book, we rely upon Stuart Hall’s notion of it being both a geographical and powerful discursive space that connotes power and privilege as well as, in this case, hedonism and excessive materialism. (1992) ‘The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power’, in Formations of Modernity, eds. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben, Cambridge: Polity Press in association with the Open University. 3 As Charles Hatfield reminds us: ‘the heterogeneous nature of comics means that, in practice, comics study has to be at the intersection of various disciplines’ (2010) ‘Indiscipline, or, the Condition of Comics Studies’, Transatlantica: American Studies Journal, 1(1–18): 1–2, http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/4933. Action India 15

Comics in other regions are foregrounded in John A. Lent, ed. (2015) Asian Comics, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi; and Islamic perspectives in A. David Lewis and Martin Lund (2017) Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam and Representation, New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press. Analyses of international or transnational comic books are provided by Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn, eds. (2010) Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives, Jefferson, NC: McFarland; Daniel Stein, Shane Denson and Christina Meyer, eds. (2013) Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, London: Blooms- bury; and Rayna Denison and Rachel Mizsei-Ward, eds. (2015) Superheroes on World Screens, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Otherwise, comics studies scholarship has highlighted issues to do with cultural diversity in the west, as with Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague, eds. (2014) Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels, New York: Routledge. 4 See Karline McLain (2009) India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings and Other Heroes, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; and Nandini Chandra (2008) The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Kathas, 1967–2007, New Delhi: Yoda Press. Other accounts include Frances W. Pritchett (1996) ‘The World of Amar Chitra Katha’ and John Stratton Hawley (1996) ‘The Saints Subdued: Domestic Virtue and National Integration in Amar Chitra Katha’, both in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, eds. Lawrence A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley, Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press; Sanjay Sircar (2000) ‘Amar Chitra Katha: Western Forms, Indian Contents’, Bookbird, 38(4): 35–36; and Gaurav Puri (2009) ‘Reading History in Comics: A Case Study of Amar Chitra Katha Visionaries’, dissertation, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. 5 McLain, India’s Immortal Comic Books, p. 22. 6 There are occasional articles and chapters on Indian superhero comics as exemplified by Aruna Rao (2001) ‘From Self-Knowledge to Superheroes: The Story of Indian Comics’, in Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines, and Picture Books, ed. John A. Lent, Hono- lulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press; Sandya Rao (2007) ‘The Globalization of Bol- lywood: An Ethnography of Non-Elite Audiences in India’, The Communication Review, 10: 57–76; and Nandini Chandra (2012) ‘The Prehistory of the Superhero Comics in India (1976–1986)’, Thesis Eleven, 113(1): 57–77. There are also transnational perspectives provided by Shilpa Dave (2012) ‘Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translating/ Transcreating of American Cultural Narratives’, in Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives, eds. Denson, Meyer and Stein. There are brief mentions on the Raj Comics superhero, Nagraj, in Suchitra Mathur (2010) ‘From Capes to Snakes: The Indianiza- tion of the American Superhero’, in Comics as a Nexus of Cultures, eds. Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn. There is also a chapter on the superhero, Doga, in Gyan Prakash (2010) Mumbai Fables, New Delhi: HarperCollins; and a chapter on the ‘atomic wonderman’, Parmanu, in Raminder Kaur (2013) Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns, New Delhi: Routledge. 7 Peter Coogan (2009) ‘The Definition of the Superhero’, in A Comics Studies Reader, eds. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press, p. 77. See an important corrective by J. L. Bell (2009) ‘Judge Hand in the Land of Superheroes’, April 29, http://ozandends.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/judge-hand-in-land-of-superheroes. html. Accessed: November 20, 2017. 8 McLain, India’s Immortal Comic Books, p. 1. 9 Ibid., p. 3. 10 Ibid., p. 2. 11 See Richard Reynolds (1994) Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 12 See Umberto Eco (1972) ‘The Myth of Superman’, transl. Natalie Chilton. Diacritics, 2(1): 14–22, p. 15. 13 James Lovegrove (2012) ‘The World of the End of the World’, in Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: The Sub-Genres of Science Fiction, ed. Keith Brooke, London: Palgrave MacMillan, p. 102. 16 Action India

14 Coulton Waugh (1947) The Comics, New York: The MacMillan Company, p. 14. 15 Will Eisner (1984, 1985) Comics and Sequential Art, Fort Lauderdale, FL: Poorhouse Press, p. 8. 16 Scott McCloud (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: HarperCollins and Kitchen Sink Press, pp. 2–23. 17 Ibid., p. 199. 18 Aron Meskin (2007) ‘Defining Comics?’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65(4): 369-379, p. 370. 19 Robert C. Harvey (2009) ‘How Comics Came to be: Through the Juncture of Word and Image from Magazine Gag Cartoons to Newspaper Strips, Tools for Critical Apprecia- tion plus Rare Seldom Witnessed Historical Facts’, in A Comics Studies Reader, eds. Heer and Worcester, p. 25. 20 David Carrier (2000) The Aesthetics of Comics, Pennsylvania, PA: Penn State University Press, p. 26; Kristie S. Fleckenstein (2003) Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. 21 Pramod K. Nayar (2016) The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique, New Delhi: Routledge, p. 21. See also Chapter 11. 22 Thierry Groensteen (2007) The System of Comics, transl. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press. 23 Ibid., p. 9. 24 On a useful summary of globalisation and consumerism and its relevance for ‘non-elites’ in India – those who stand between the affluent and the poor - see Steve D. Derne (2008) Globalization on the Ground: New Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India, New Delhi: Sage. 25 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (2002) ‘Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction’, in special issue, ‘New Imaginaries’, Public Culture, 14(1): 1–19. See also Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds. (1993) Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 26 As such, the book adds to studies of globalisation, notable among which are Arjun Appa- durai (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press; William Mazzarella (2003) Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Christiane Brosius (2010) India’s Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Pros- perity, New Delhi: Routledge; and the edited decennial volumes by the Association of Social Anthropologists published by Routledge in 1995. 27 See, for instance, Philippe Ariès (1996 [1962]) Centuries of Childhood, New York: Knopf; Allison James and Alan Prout, eds. (1990) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, Lon- don: Falmer Press; and Robert Levine and Rebecca S. New, eds. (2008) Anthropology and Child Development: A Cross-Cultural Reader, London: Blackwell. 28 See Sudhir Kakar (1978) The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press; Ashis Nandy (1984–1985) ‘Reconstruct- ing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood’, Alternatives, X: 359–375; Sat- adru Sen (2005) Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India 1850–1945, London: Anthem Press; and Sarada Balagopalan (2014) Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India, London: Palgrave MacMillan. 29 This is another colonial hangover from the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890. 30 See Simon During, ed. (2007) The Cultural Studies Reader, London: Routledge. 31 On the relevance of this material for wider debates in comics studies, cultural studies, anthropology and postcolonial studies, see Raminder Kaur and Saif Eqbal (2015) ‘Gen- dering Graphics in Indian Superhero Comic Books and Some Notes for Provincial- izing Cultural Studies’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 12(4): 367–396. On another view on the debate between public and popular culture, see Christopher Pinney (2003) ‘Introduction: Public, Popular, and Other Cultures’, in Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, eds. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Action India 17

32 Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge (1989) ‘Why Public Culture’, Public Culture, 2(1): 5–9, p. 6. 33 See Ritty A. Lukose (2009) Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizen- ship in Globalizing India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; and Mark Liechty (2003) Suitably Modern: Making Middle Class Culture in a New Consumer Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. On an overview of diverse youth cultures, see Mary Bucholtz (2002) ‘Youth and Cultural Practice’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31: 525–552. 34 Vamsee Juluri (2002) ‘Music Television and the Invention of Youth Culture in India’, Television and New Media, 3(4): 367–386. 35 See Liechty, Suitably Modern, p. 209. 36 See Pinney, ‘Public, Popular, and Other Cultures’, p. 7. 37 Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus propose that ‘cultural circuits’ be envisaged with regards to five elements of any cultural text or arte- fact: its representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation. These elements all play a part in comic books circuits, but are not a structuring device for this book. (1997) Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, London: Sage and The Open University. 38 Roseann Liu, Amanda Snellinger and Elizabeth Lewis, ‘Youth’, https://culanth.org/ curated_collections/7-youth. Accessed: December 20, 2017. 39 There is a vast literature on the highly plural and complex dimensions of the Indian middle classes. See, for instance, Pavan Varma (1998) The Great Indian Middle Class, New Delhi: Viking Publishers; William Mazzarella (2005) ‘Indian Middle Class’, in South Asia Keywords, ed. Rachel Dwyer, www.soas.ac.uk/south-asia-institute/keywords/file24808. pdf; Leela Fernandes (2006) India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Eco- nomic Reform, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press; and Brosius, India’s Mid- dle Class. Most concur that the neoliberal era has led to the emergence of a professional, consumer-orientated ‘new’ middle class quite distinct from earlier models associated with Nehruvian India before neoliberalisation in the 1990s. 40 Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class, p. xiv. 41 Cited in Rao, ‘From Self-Knowledge to Superheroes’, p. 59. 42 See Raminder Kaur (2011) ‘Atomic Comics: Parabolic Mimesis and the Graphic Fic- tions of Science’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(4): 329–347. 43 Craig Jeffrey (2010) Timepass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 2. 44 See Liechty, Suitably Modern, Chapters 8 and 9. 45 On the comparable method of photo elicitation as used in interviews and ethnography, see Heidi Larson (1988) ‘Photography That Listens’, Visual Anthropology, 1(4): 415–432; and Daniel Harper (2002) ‘Talking About Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation’, Visual Studies, 17(1), www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/methods/harper.pdf. 46 See Ashish Bose (2000) ‘North-South Divide in India’s Demographic Scene’, Economic and Political Weekly, May 13–19, 35(20): 1698–1700. 47 On other regional comics, see Jeremy Stoll (2017) ‘Comics in India’, in The Routledge Companion to Comics, eds. Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook and Aaron Meskin, New York: Routledge, p. 90. 48 On the emergence of reception studies of comic book readers in the west, see, for instance, Matthew J. Pustz (1999) Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi; Benjamin Woo (2011) ‘The Android’s Dungeon: Comic-Bookstores, Cultural Spaces, and the Social Practices of Audiences’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2(2): 125–136; Mel Gibson (2012) ‘Cultural Studies: Brit- ish Girls’ Comics, Readers, and Memories’, in Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, eds. Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, New York: Routledge; and Ofer Berenstein (2012) ‘Comic Book Fans’ Recommendations Ceremony: A Look at the Inter-personal Communication Patterns of a Unique Readers/Speakers Community’, Participations: A Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 9(2): 74–96. There are, hitherto, no such studies on readers in South Asia.