Comic Book Karma: Visual Mythologies of the Hindu Modern

Home , India Authentic (comics), Karma (comics), Liquid Comics, Sharad Devarajan

Postscripts 4.2 (2008) 177–197 Postscripts ISSN (print) 1743-887x doi: 10.1558/post.v4i2.177 Postscripts ISSN (online) 1743-8888

J. BARTON SCOTT

MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY

[email protected]

ABSTRACT

Virgin Comics, a transnational corporation with ofﬁces in India and the USA, has tried to put its chosen medium—the comic book— to novel use. In 2006, Virgin (now Liquid Comics) began marketing titles that remobilize Hindu mythology for the global entertainment market. Paying particular attention to the series Devi (2006-), this article situates Virgin’s comics within several discursive and institutional conjunctures. First, I trace how Virgin’s chief “visionaries” sought to “modernize” the Indian comic. By bringing the vocabular- ies of Nehruvian developmentalism to bear on this popular cultural form, Virgin signals that in post-liberalization India the aesthetic has outpaced the industrial as the byword of global modernity. Second, I consider Virgin’s attempt to render the comic book a fully fungible medium, that facilitates the development and exchange of intellectual property across entertainment platforms. Newly dematerialized, Virgin’s ethereally cosmopolitan comics are nonetheless haunted by the material speciﬁcities of the postcolonial nation-state.

Keywords: Hindu comic books; Contemporary India

The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacriﬁce what we are for what we could become. Charles de Bros (epigraph to Devi no. 2, 6)

The comic book Devi tells the tale of Tara Mehta, a woman literally possessed by tradition. Kidnapped by a coterie of priests, drugged, and sub- jected to a secret ritual, Tara wakes up to find herself the vehicle of the goddess Devi. Now her earnest alter ego keeps commandeering their shared body to protect the oppressed urban masses of Sitapur. A deity for a secular age, Tara/Devi fuses the human and the divine and so rein- vests the mundane world with epic significance; but she is none too happy about it. As a self-consciously modern woman whose short skirts flout the disapproval of her gossipy neighbors, Tara defiantly refuses to sacrifice what she is to the goddess that she could become. Nowhere is her refusal of all that Devi represents—duty, tradition, religion—on more gleeful dis- play than in the facing panel (Figure 1). With a policeman collapsed in her arms, Tara declares that, if the priests had wanted her to save the world, “You should have asked me first” (Devi no. 1, 15). Produced by Virgin Comics, Devi reworks the venerable sixth-century Devi-Mahatmya in order to mythologize the cultural conjunctures of twenty-first century India. In doing so, it responds to the demand of Shekhar Kapur, one of its creators, that the Indian comic be “modernized.” The allure of the Indian comic has waned, Kapur claims, since the golden days of his childhood, when popular mythological titles were exchanged throughout India. Times have changed, but the Indian comic has not. “Somehow,” it failed to “develop the new art forms” that emerged in places like Japan in response to television and other media (Kapur 2007). Kapur and Virgin Comics seek to update the genre by adopting visual idioms from other major comics industries and grafting them onto narratives drawn from India’s own rich mythological heritage. “Modernity” and “mythology” thus emerge as the axes around which Virgin creates comics that it insistently presents as distinctively “Indian.” This article contributes to the “‘visual turn’ in modern Indian studies” (Ramaswamy 2003, xiii) by analyzing how Virgin Comics deploys this trio of terms. I argue that Virgin’s comics intervene in the discursive construc- tion of the Indian nation, but in doing so become involved in a series of constitutive contradictions. I trace how, in both corporate publicity and comic book mythology, Virgin negotiates between nationalist and cosmopolitan ideals; immaterial and material production; and the sci-fi future and the mythological past. After describing Virgin Comics and its medium, I analyze each of these three animating tensions, returning periodically to the split figure of Tara/ Devi to consider how the sacrifice that is demanded of her stands in for sacrifices demanded of the Indian nation.1 In conclu- 1. Tara Mehta is, of course, not the first woman to have national tradition thrust upon

Figure 1. “You should have asked me first” (Devi no. 1, 15). By permisison of Liquid Comics, 2009, © Liquid Comics. sion I return to the de Bros epigraph with which I began in order to suggest that Virgin itself ultimately finds it impossible to fully sacrifice what the Indian comic is for what it could become.

her; since at least the late nineteenth century, the regulation of feminine, domestic space has been central to the articulation of cultural nationalism (Sangari and Vaid 1990; Chatterjee 1993).

The life and death of a comics multinational Virgin Comics was founded in 2005 as a transnational enterprise linked to the Virgin Group, the British conglomerate that also includes companies like Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Records. Virgin Comics has established additional ties to Gotham Entertainment, a U.S.-based company designed to distribute American comics in India. The “Chief Visionaries” behind Virgin’s launch were filmmaker Shekhar Kapur (noted for directing Elizabeth, 1998), business mogul Richard Branson (who helms the Virgin Group), and self-help guru Deepak Chopra (the prolific author of titles like The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, 1994). From the outset, Virgin Comics styled itself a nexus between “West” and “East.” It would re-mythologize American characters like Spider-Man for India, export Indian characters to the West, and outsource artistic talent to the major comics multination- als (Rai 2004). The company established offices in New York and Bangalore and in 2006 began plying its house blend of world cultures in three flagship series: Devi, Snake Woman, and The Sadhu. Over the next two years, Virgin would develop a thick portfolio of titles. These include series that riff on Hindu and Buddhist mythology (India Authentic, Deepak Chopra’s Buddha, The Tall Tales of Vishnu Sharma, Ramayana 3392 A.D Reloaded, and Project Kalki; all in the “Shakti” line), as well as series that operate within genres like horror, fantasy, noir, and espionage (Zombie Broadway, Voodoo Child, The Stranded, Shadow Hunter, and Gamekeeper). Virgin quickly began establishing links with the film industry, recruiting celebrities like John Woo, Guy Ritchie, Nicholas Cage, and Jenna Jameson to create comics series, and developing relationships with Warner Brothers, New Regency, Sony Online Entertainment, the Sci Fi Channel, and other companies (“Liquid Comics”). It also sold concepts to be developed as video games, most notably a Sony Ramayana 3392 A.D. Reloaded (Boucher, “Virgin,” 2008). In April 2008, I visited Virgin’s Bangalore facility to learn more about the comic book production process. At Virgin, a comic image begins as a drawing, generally sketched in either pencil or pen, although some- times generated on computer. Hand-drawn outlines, once completed, are scanned and colorized digitally. Depending on the number of panels, coloring a page takes between two and six hours. Once coloration is com- plete, the page is moved upstairs to the text department, where speech bubbles and special effects (e.g. “BAM!”) are added to the panels. Finally, a draft version is sent to the editorial staff, housed partly in Bangalore and partly (at that time) in New Jersey. The Bangalore staff comes to Virgin with a wide range of experience; it includes portrait painters, photogra-

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 J. Barton Scott 181 phers, and muralists formerly employed by the film industry. The latter group had adorned the office stairwell with colorful murals of the major Virgin characters. Some of the staff had been devotees of comics when young; others had little to no exposure to comics prior to joining Virgin. English and Hindi were both spoken in the office. After my visit, in August 2008, the company separated from the Virgin Group and reorganized itself as Liquid Comics. The split seems to have been caused by general financial duress at Virgin; the conglomerate decided to shed a comics company, which, despite its proliferating plans and projects had presumably not yet proved profitable (Boucher, “Virgin,” 2008). The new Liquid Comics relocated its American headquarters from New York to Los Angeles in order to further facilitate links with the film industry.2 Comic book nation: Redefining a genre Although in his call to modernize the Indian comic, Kapur does not name his comic book bogey, his clear reference is to the Amar Chitra Katha (“Immortal Picture Stories”). This beloved series has dominated the Indian comics market since 1967, when it was founded by Anant Pai; it now boasts 440 titles, with over 90 million issues sold. Formally, the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) simulates American comics that were available in India in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Tarzan, The Phantom, and Mandrake. ACK issues hover at around thirty-two pages and divide each page into three to six individual panels, most of which juxtapose text and image. Like those American comics, the ACK relies heavily on text to convey narrative, and it compresses action into relatively few frames. For a variety of reasons, including a loyal and vocal readership resistant to change, the visual style of the ACK has remained fairly uniform since the late 1960s (McLain 2009, 2–3). When Anant Pai launched the ACK in 1967, he positioned it as an intervention into the cultural and class politics of the nascent nation. Pai wor- ried that middle-class children educated in English-medium schools would learn Western history, mythology, and values rather than being steeped in Indian tradition (he consistently mentions a quiz show in which students from an elite Delhi college could name the home of the Greek gods, but not the mother of Ram). Noting his nephews’ enthusiasm for American comics, he hit upon the medium as an appropriate means for the educating these youth in their Indian heritage (McLain 2009, 24–25).3

2. As I conducted signiﬁcant portions of my research while the company was still Virgin Comics, I will accordingly generally refer to it as Virgin. 3. It bears pointing out that, by positioning the Indian comic as a fundamentally ped-ped- agogic medium, the ACK has demarcated a cultural role for itself quite the oppo-

Starting with its first issue (Krishna, 1969), the ACK vigorously promoted Hindu mythological stories. This apparent equation of Indian national culture with Hinduism would, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, open the ACK to accusations of ideological complicity with the Hindu Right. Even the inclusion of comics about major historical figures only seemed to intensify the “slippage” between the categories “Hindu” and “Indian” (McLain 2009, 20). The series has been said to eliminate the multiple vari- ants of Hindu myths and to flatten their ethical ambiguities, simplifying their storylines for consumption by children. The widespread influence of this two-dimensional Hinduism both in India and among the diaspora is thought to have helped consolidate a newly politicized Hindu orthodoxy (Rao 2001; Pritchett 1995; Hawley 1995; Narayan 1992; cf. Rajagopal 2001). As Karline McLain has recently argued, however, the ACK never simply transmitted nationalist ideology to its readership; rather, it served as a site for contestation among editors, authors, artists, and readers (McLain 2009, 24). She suggests that the comic has functioned as an exemplary instance of “public culture,” defined as a “zone of cultural debate” (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988). If the ACK plied politicized mythologies fitted to the cultural crises of the postcolonial nation, the comics that followed it in the 1970s and 1980s typically took up more modest themes. The Bombay industry anchored by the ACK went on to produce other popular children’s titles (e.g., Tinkle) as well as hero-driven adventures serials on the American model (e.g., Indrajal Comics). While these series eschewed the mythological and nationalist themes of the ACK, they continued to target the same English-literate, middle class readership.4 Meanwhile, Delhi emerged as the center of production for a distinctively different style of comic, with North Indian Hindi-speaking teenagers of the “neoliterate” classes as its primary audience. Companies like Diamond Comics and Raj Comics, both with close

site of the role usually allocated to the comic in France, the United States, and elsewhere—that of corrupting the young (Wertham 1954; Lent 1999). 4. Tinkle was a biweekly series launched by India Book House, the publisher of the ACK, in 1980. Among its distinctive characteristics was its solicitation of stories from readers: children submitted ideas that Tinkle’s staff illustrated and distrib- uted in future issues of the comic. Indrajal Comics was published by Bombay’s Times of India starting in 1976. The Times had made its ﬁrst foray into publishing comics at the instigation of none other than Anant Pai, who in 1961 convinced the paper to print the America series The Phantom. The success of that series led the Times to sponsor an Indian series in the same mould. Its hero, Bahadur (“The Brave One”) fought nefarious bandits while sporting a saffron kurta and blue jeans, sartorial signiﬁer of his suave fusion of tradition and modernity (Rao 2001, 42–54).

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 J. Barton Scott 183 links to the Hindi pulp fiction industry, became famous for characters like Chacha (“Uncle”) Chaudhary, with his turban and bushy white mustache (Rao, 54–60). As media historian Aruna Rao has demonstrated, this second wave of Indian comics emphasized much smaller stories than had the ACK; while their narratives featured fantastic elements, they left the mythological genre proper behind. Virgin, representative of a third wave of Indian comics, returns the medium to the genre that marked its inception. In doing so, it reclaims the mythological not only from the ACK, but, just as importantly, from its politicized deployment in other mass media. Although the mythological slowly disappeared from India’s cinema during the middle decades of the twentieth century, it made a dramatic return on television sets in the 1980s (Dwyer 2006). The tremendous success of the 1987–1988 serial Ramayan, broadcast by the national network Doordarshan, coincided with the political rise of the Hindu Right; this coincidence sparked a great deal of debate about the political impact of mass mediated religious spectacle. For many, the devotional fervor inspired by the TV mythological became indelibly associated with the highly politicized 1992 demolition of the Babri Mosque (built on the alleged site of Ram’s birth) and the subsequent Hindu-Muslim riots (Van der Veer 1994; Mankekar 1999; Rajagopal 2001). However, even as the genre’s dangerously violent potential came into view, so too did its remark- able resonance. The mythological has an unusual, if not unique, ability to span different media, its effects ricocheting unpredictably through a series of sites of cultural production. Whether through local performance traditions or mass-produced poster art, the mythological continues to structure desire, spark debate, and mediate between contending worlds: tradition and modernity, country and city, the bazaar and the world market (Lutgendorf 1991; Pinney 2004; Jain 2007). Virgin’s mythological comics stake a claim in this complex field of cultural production, recuperating it from its benighted nationalist past and remaking it for the liberalized global future. If the company seeks to unmoor the mythological from the Indian nation, it does so with the recent history of the genre in full view. Moreover, in its turn from the nation toward the global economy, Virgin is not alone. A new breed of “Indian” comic has arisen in several world cities. Entrants to the field include Illustrated Orchid, an Indian company with operations in Delhi and Mumbai, which sells its wares primarily in Malaysia and Singapore (Shah 2007); Hong Kong’s Fluid Comics, which has reworked the Mahabharata for its series DevaShard, sold in China and elsewhere (Wong 2007) 5; Delhi’s 5. For sample images and biographical information about the firm’s staff, whom it

Vivalok Comics, which emphasizes the ethical ambiguities of myths pre- viously simplified by the ACK; and New York artist Chitra Ganesh’s Tales of Amnesia (2002), which queers ACK images to mount a feminist critique of national identity (McLain 2009, 209–210). Meanwhile, even the old guard comics companies are taking advantage of international markets, the internet, film, and television, as well as repositioning their products within an Indian comics market that has expanded to include graphic novels (Rao 2001, 62; Bajaj 2009; Banerjee 2004).6 If, as some scholars have argued, increasing penetration by global markets destabilized Indian identity in the 1980s and 1990s and so accelerated the rise of Hindu nationalism, this crop of comics from the 2000s gestures toward a new resolution of the same cultural contradictions (Appadurai 2006). It is in this context that Shekhar Kapur’s call to “modernize” the Indian comic needs to be understood. Kapur has to negotiate between nationalist and globalist imperatives, and he does this by differentiating comics’ visual and narrative dimensions. Visually, he suggests, the Indian comic should emulate reigning international standards. Unlike American comics of the 1960s, this more “sophisticated” style relies less heavily on what Scott McCloud has termed “action-to-action” transitions between panels; instead, in the style of Japanese artists like Osamu Tezuka, such comics extend a single moment across several panels or temporarily suspend the narrative flow to dwell on the discrete details of a setting (McCloud 1994, 170–182). Accordingly, Virgin’s comics include panels and sequences that, rather than directly advancing the action, create a mood, set a scene, or develop a character. Action sequences are more likely to prolong events in order to generate suspense. Additionally, the flat compositions and bright monochromes of the ACK are gone. Instead, we find more realistic modeling of figures, extensive use of perspective, heavy shadow, and a darker color palette. The cinema has also clearly had a significant influence on Virgin’s style, both in the composition and the sequencing of panels. For instance, in the opening pages of the first issue of Devi, demon general Iyam meets with Bala, the Dark Lord. A nine-panel sequence uses an establishing shot of Iyam and Bala to situate both in the latter’s lair, and then follows it with a series of panels that adhere to a cinematic shot-reverse-shot grammar in order to indicate that the two men are in conversation (Devi no. 1, 4–6). Finally, Virgin’s content is considerably

proudly bills as hailing from both “East” and “West,” see Fluid’s homepage: http:// www.ﬂuid-comics.com. 6. For older comics series online, see http://www.diamondcomics.com and http:// www.amarchitrakatha.com.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 J. Barton Scott 185 more “adult” than that of the ACK. As journalist Riddhi Shah quipped, “the large-bosomed ladies are out to seduce the hormonal adolescent in you” (Shah 2007). If Kapur’s modernized Indian comic must borrow its visual idioms from abroad, courting hormones usually reserved for the audiences of Hollywood films, its narratives are supposed to remain native to the sub- continent. Indian mythology, Kapur assures us, is what will lend India its competitive advantage in the global narrative marketplace. Even a cursory look at Virgin’s comics, however, reveals that their storylines’ geographic, cultural, and national affiliations are far more diverse than Kapur’s appeal to tradition would imply. Virgin’s comic book mythology remains poised between the global and the national. Indeed, as we will see, these comics’ global mobility is predicated on their ability to demon- strate their links to the nation, just as their hope for the nation is that it might claim greater global cachet. Global mythologies When I met with Virgin Comics’ president, Suresh Seetharaman, he told me that the global marketplace requires its own methods of storytelling (Seetharaman 2008). While “you might get inspiration from the mythology of one particular area,” that mythology will be always have to be altered to transcend merely local tastes before it can be marketed elsewhere in the world mosaic of cultures (cf. Mazzarella 2003, 30). The trick is to navigate between “global language” and “local language.” This process is not, Seetharaman said, one of translation, but rather one of “transcreation.” The point is to retain the gist of a story without overstressing detail; a horse can and should be rendered a car. The transcreation of world mythologies is, however, constrained by what Seetharaman referred to as local “sensitivities.” In his view, even sacred texts should be open to transcreation: “Nothing is sacrosanct. Everything is fluid, and everything is beautiful.” But the sacred is not always as pliable as Seetharaman would wish it. For instance, while their Ramayana 3392 A.D. Reloaded builds on a quintessentially Indian narrative, Virgin sells the comic only in the USA, lest their sci-fi Ram run afoul of the Hindu Right. “We are the land of the Kama Sutra, but today,” Seetharaman said with a shrug, even nudity is taboo. Seetharaman invokes a cosmopolitan India of urbane sexuality as the counterpoint to the presumed intol- erance of the hypersensitive “local”; but in doing so, he reinscribes his vaunted cosmopolitanism within the cultural imaginary of the nation. A constitutive tension structures Virgin’s effort to negotiate between global

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 186 Comic Book Karma and local. The nation emerges as that which must be transgressed by the cosmopolitan, but it also serves as the ground on which cosmopolitanism is to be articulated. Here, as elsewhere, the global and the local function as “mutually constitutive imaginary moments,” and it is from within the space of their mutual determination that cosmopolitanism is articulated (Mazzarella 2003, 17). A core sequence in Devi, the comic described at the beginning of this article, expresses the tension between the global and the national in visual and narrative terms. In the sequence, the mortal woman Tara Mehta is transformed into the goddess Devi. A priest injects her with soma, the divine elixir, and she enters a mystical coma, wherein a pantheon of gods bestows gifts upon her. The sequence reworks the episode from the sixth- century Devi-Mahatmya in which the gods combine their several divine fires to form a fierce female warrior, the Devi (Goddess) (Coburn 1996, 36). Presumably in deference to “local sensitivites,” however, the comic excises the major Hindu deities (Vishnu, Shiva) from the episode and replaces them with an eclectic ensemble of world divinities that includes only a single Hindu god (Kama, the little-worshiped love god). In the episode, comatose Tara’s spirit is first greeted by the Primal Devi, who ushers her into a blued-tinted gallery of women who hosted the Devi energy before her. A multiethnic, multireligious bunch, they tell her that their kind has protected the world throughout history: When the Titans returned, we were there. When the Mother Dragon awoke, emptying the seas, we were there. When the tentacled ones slith- ered across the ruins of Ilium, we were there. We slew the great were-lion from the Savannah of eternal flame… (Devi no. 4, 23) And so on. This chain of demon-slayers yokes together much of the world—Greece, China, East Africa— in a global sisterhood. But no matter where these goddess-women hail from, their animus is decidedly Indian: the Hindu goddess subsumes all global eruptions of the divine feminine into her Sanskritic self. Next, Tara meets the full pantheon of gods. They include Bodha, the all-father and sky-emperor; Mars, the war god; Kama, the love god; Ra, the sun god; Kapital, the wealth god (his Ben Franklin features adorn an American bill); Interface, the Max-Headroom style messenger of the gods; and Death, who looks suspiciously similar to John Everett Millais’ Ophelia. This list is emphatically transcultural, featuring Indian, Roman, and Egyptian deities, plus American currency and apparent nods to a British painter (Millais) and a British genre writer (Douglas Adams, source

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 J. Barton Scott 187 of some of Interface’s techno-argot, e.g., “hoopiest frood”). The densely allusive texture of the comic places it firmly in the stratosphere of global Anglophone cultures, and it makes its cosmopolitan commitments clear; but the comic also ensures that its global heaven is ruled over by a man with a Sanskritic name (Bodha). India rules supreme in the ethereal, immaterial realm of global exchange, and thus cosmopolitanism never quite escapes the constraints of national identity—indeed the return to national identity is precisely the point (Devi no.5, 1–25). If this episode suggests an Indian modernity that can playfully assim- ilate world cultures into its own mythological framework, it also—and quite significantly—declines to mythologize the Indian nation beyond the fold of Hinduism. There are no Muslims in the pantheon (or anywhere in Devi, for that matter) nor does this heaven seem open to Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Jews, or Parsis. While it is understandable that Virgin’s executives would hesitate to experiment with Islamic icons, the unavoidable effect of their reticence is to reinforce the common conflation of “India” with its Hindu majority. Devi reclaims Hinduism from the Hindu Right (and the vernacular middle classes that its affiliate organizations tend to target), asserting instead Hindu mythology’s affinity for benevolent, Anglophone cosmopolitanism. In its effort to undermine national chauvinism and “local sensitivity,” however, the comic ultimately reinforces that chauvinism’s central project: the exclusion of Muslims from the imaginary of the nation. The main difference is that in Devi’s transmuted mythology, a Sanskritic sky-god rules not only India, but also the world. My point here is not, of course, to denounce the comic, but only to point out that Devi enters into discursive structures that constrain the narrative possibilities open to it and that overdetermine the futures that it can forecast. Dematerialized comics and the production of mythology In narrating its multinational heaven, the sequence described above not only mythologizes the fraught relation between the national and the global. It also implies that the realm of global exchange is an ethereal, immaterial one. To take her spiritual voyage, Tara must leave her body behind. Her newfound ghostly mobility allows her to thrill with the gods to the intercultural flows that define this comic book heaven and to collect the series of abstract gifts (strength, beauty) that will propel her narrative forward. The affinity between the “spiritual” and the “global” that this episode implies is, I will argue, more than coincidental. Rather, “mythological production” becomes for Virgin a premiere form of economic activity that eclipses the material specificities of the comic book medium.

When Kapur suggests that Indian mythology will secure Indian dominance on the global comics market, he makes two closely related hyperbolic claims: (a) India is “totally driven by Myth and mythic stories,” and (b) there is “no other culture as rich and diverse in Mythology as India” (Kapur 2007). Kapur here recycles a colonial stereotype with a hoary lineage. Compare, for instance, James Mill’s condemnation of the “wild and ungoverned imagination” that had fabricated Hindu myths for “a rude and credulous people, whom the mar- velous delights” (Mill 1840, 166). Colonial ideologues like Mill counted India’s narrative fecundity against it; a people ruled by an ungoverned imagination, the argument went, were not fit to govern themselves. Kapur reclaims this discourse, although his reclamation may seem belated or, at best, cliché. He is not, after all, the first person to invert colonial hierarchies by promoting “spiritual India” over the “material West.” Kapur’s claim about India’s narrative fecundity, however, signals a novel configuration of global discourses, wherein India’s presumed dominance in the immaterial realm assumes a renewed urgency. In the new global economy, where intangible production often garners greater pres- tige than material production, India’s “ungoverned imagination” stands to become its greatest asset. In the 1960s, when the ACK emerged, Nehruvian modernization projects sought to build the nation’s physical infrastruc- ture and technical expertise, while relegating culture and religion to a relatively unorganized “leisure” sphere (McLain 2009, 8–9). Unidirectional and hierarchical, development would flow from “top to bottom;” that is, from the state, to the economy, to society (Rajagopal 2001, 2). Since the 1980s, however, the directionality of development has changed substan- tially. Kapur’s interview, true to its moment, remobilizes the older idioms of Third World developmentalism to hail cultural production as the economic sphere most in need of organized intervention. It upends the old hierarchy to hail the “aesthetic” as the bridge to the Indian future. And Kapur is not alone. Gotham Chopra, another Virgin executive, has further explained Virgin’s dedication to the “mining” of “creative potential” in India. 7 In doing so, he too implies that only “creative” production can launch India into the ranks of the First World nations: Any time a studio chief at Disney, Fox, Universal Studies, or Warner Bros. admires some of the artwork in our books, I am reminded of the real transformation that we are already seeing and will be seeing more of in the coming years…. It’s cool to know that the world is increasingly realizing

7. Gotham Chopra, Deepak Chopra’s son, has been involved with Virgin Comics since its inception. He changed his name from the traditional “Gautam” in order to pay homage to the comic book metropolis Gotham City.

that India is a source for creativity and great ideas, not just a back office to execute them more cheaply. (Thrill 2008) The looming specter here is the “back office,” symbol of India’s service economy. If services are more highly valued than industrial production, then wholly intangible “creative” labor is to be more highly valued still. Chopra expresses a desire to alter global hierarchies, to render India as a “source” of ideas rather than merely the site of “outsourcing,” and he identifies immaterial creative production as the field where this “real transformation” of India will be effected. (Of course, in doing so, he also reaffirms existing hierarchies, specifically the preeminence of Hollywood studio chiefs as global tastemakers). Virgin’s chief product, it seems, is not so much comics as it is Indian “culture,” or even, perhaps, the idea of “India” itself. National affiliation not only guarantees Virgin’s comics their global mobility as icons of the exotic East; the comics, in a sense, come to stand in for the nation, serving as a symbol and as a material index of its economic output. As the national commodity enters world markets, these markets assume a political valence, becoming an agonistic field wherein nations contest for world supremacy by comic book proxy. Far from being post-national or even transnational, the domain of global cultural flows here serves as the scene for the enactment an international competition, which owes its basic shape to the statist legacies of imperialism and neo-imperialism. Virgin steps up to champion India, just as South Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese comics have for years contested the (neo) imperialist influence of Japan and America (Lent 2001, 3–5). But despite Virgin’s quasi-nationalist rhetoric, its intervention on behalf of India remains a fraught one. Virgin is part of a multinational media conglomerate, and while its valorization of creative production does respond to discursive pressures put on postcolonial, liberalized India, it also does much more than this. Virgin’s emphasis on creative production participates in a dispersed array of global discourses, practices, and preferences privileging knowledge economies over physical ones. The comic book in particular has, in recent years, entered a new institutional constellation that has tended, in a sense, to dematerialize the form. While commercially successful films have increased the profile of the comic, they have also led some industry insiders to view comics as relevant only insofar as they can aid in the production of intellectual property (I.P.). The medium’s material specificities recede from view as it is remobilized to facilitate the transfer of characters, stories, and ideas beyond the bounded pages and panels of the paper codex. Virgin’s new name, “Liquid” Comics, succinctly expresses the intention to render the comic book a mobile and

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 190 Comic Book Karma fully fungible medium uniquely suited to the rapid flows of global culture and global capital. I became aware of this aspect of the industry during my meeting with Suresh Seetharaman. In our interview, he explained how Virgin conceives of the comics business. The Virgin team members are, at bottom, “I.P. Creators.” Here at Virgin, “we don’t just make comics.” Rather, comics serve an important role as an “incubator” of “big seed ideas” that can be developed in “every platform of entertainment,” including video games, television shows, commercial films, and the internet. He mentioned Lara Croft as a paradigmatic product for this business model. Seetharaman further explained why he values ideas over technical ability: conceptual work will always rank higher than artistic execution because conceptual work is the only work that will never be done by machine. As he speculated, if someone were to invent a computer that could visualize brilliant ideas through some sort of cerebral interface, human technical virtuosity would be rendered obsolete. In this fable of a virtual future, intellectual property emerges as the premier form of property. Indeed, in a world where material production is relegated to the margins, intellectual property becomes, in an important sense, the only kind of property that matters. Although Virgin is not alone in its effort to dematerialize comics, it has been identified as a leader of the trend. Alan Moore, for instance, in a prickly defense of comics’ aesthetic specificity, denounces the corporate abstraction of the medium into intellectual property. Moore, the author of high-profile titles like Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, does not conceal his contempt for the “three or four companies” that have reduced comics to a “pumpkin patch” meant to incubate franchises for the movie industry (Boucher, “Alan Moore,” 2008).8 While the aesthetic synergy between comics and cinema has been celebrated since the pioneering work of Will Eisner (if not longer), the intensified connection between the two threatens to undermine the aesthetic specificities that Eisner and others have worked so hard to define (Eisner 1995). Meanwhile, the internet undermines the comic from yet a different direction, disassembling pages and sequences in order to repackage them as “widescreen digital comics.”9 This abstract circulation of ideas and images beyond the physical pages of the comic, however, continues to rely on very concrete networks of

8. In “Virgin Comics Gives It Up,” Boucher clariﬁes that this comment is a “thinly disguised swipe” at Virgin. 9. Since its corporate reorganization, Liquid Virgin has done even more to transfer its images out of comic books and onto its website. See http://www.liquidcomics.com.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 J. Barton Scott 191 comic book production, distribution, and consumption. Indeed, it is the material specificities of the medium—its relatively low cost, its porta- bility—that make it an appropriate vehicle for the development of “big seed ideas.” Comics, printed in slim serial issues, can be easily collected, traded, or disposed of by consumers, and their circulation among enthu- siasts fosters the growth of medium-based social networks and communities. In recent years, with the rise of the graphic novel, comics have also taken on a less ephemeral form; Virgin, like other companies, now publishes bound multi-issue volumes (with five issues per 140-page book) that suture serial cliffhangers together in a glossier, higher-quality, more expensive product. While such volumes may have a slightly wider distribution than disposable comic book issues, the quintessential outlet for both forms remains (in the USA, at least) the specialty comic book shop, with its distinctive sub-cultural clientele. While comics fans might fancy themselves citizens of a renegade coun- terpublic, they also, of course, function as the niche market that sustains a global industry. Corporate executives have recently realized that these communities can serve an additional function by acting as focus groups for market research. As Seetharaman explained, comics lend themselves to Virgin’s expansive use of the medium because the comics audience is a “highly motivated” audience: comics readers provide “free research,” in that often without solicitation they volunteer their opinions about whether a story is good or bad (Seetharaman 2008). The comics industry, with its new position at the interstices of multiple media, thus aspires to bring the active consumption of its primary product back into the production process. The entire life cycle of the physical comic becomes one phase in the creation of abstract intellectual property. Most of Virgin’s readers, it seems, reside in North America, and this reflects the primacy of the American market in appraising intellectual property. The American market is the premier market, and the best indi- cator of whether comics are good or bad; from the USA, Virgin moves its titles on to Europe (Germany, Holland, Spain, France), then Latin America, and then finally the “East,” currently the smallest market (Seetharaman 2008).10 In fact, in 2008 distribution of the comics in India seemed decidedly poor; even in major cites like Mumbai and Bangalore, the titles were scarce.11 When physically available, the comics, sold at thirty rupees per

10. He did not specify which countries are included in the “East.” 11. I am not the only person to have had difﬁculty in ﬁnding copies of Virgin’s comics in India. In a 2007 article in the Hindustan Times, Riddhi Shah complained that in India “the comics were nowhere to be found. As I write this story, the comics are

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 192 Comic Book Karma serial issue, remain financially accessible only to relatively well-off deni- zens of the middle class—who are, after all, the consumers most likely to read English.12 Remembering the future One final tension marks Kapur’s call to modernize the Indian comic. In calling for a comic book modernity, Kapur deploys a rhetoric of radical rupture: “I see the future…. Comic book characters—traditional and digital—are the new cult, the new religion” (Kapur 2007). As Kapur quickly asserts, however, this “new religion” can succeed only by appropriating a very old set of religious discourses—Hindu mythology. Kapur’s confident proclamation of the Indian future is thus immediately entangled in an ambivalent retention of the Hindu past.13 In The Sadhu, one of Virgin’s flagship series, the fictional narrator turns a provocative phrase: it is his fate to “remember the future” (Sadhu no. 3, 25). While in its diegetic context the phrase denotes clairvoyance, I would suggest that it also signals a broader process at work in these comics. To remember the future implies a strange temporal paradox: the past ends up where it should not be, haunting hopeful visions of the yet-to-come. These visual tales “re-member” the future, in that they cobble it together from pieces of the past. This is science fiction as historical bricolage. Resurgences of the past structure all three of Virgin’s flagship series, in which self-consciously modern characters find themselves possessed by forgotten histories. The Sadhu stages its conflict in colonial London and Bengal. Snake Woman brings colonial Bengal to twenty-first century Los

on their ninth series in the US, yet both Oxford and Crosswords in Mumbai have not so much as heard of Virgin.” (The same bookstores still did not have the comics when I visited in spring 2008, despite their keeping Amar Chitra Katha titles in stock). Sharad Devarajan told Shah that Virgin was having “distribution problems in India”; but Shah claims that these are “hollow words in a country that now hosts three major bookstore chains” (Shah 2007). 12. John Lent has noted that, throughout Asia, comics are generally an urban, middle class phenomenon. In some locations, rental shops provide access to readers with more limited buying power (Lent 2001, 7). 13. This sort of temporal contradiction has a long history within Indian nationalist discourse, which has frequently ﬁgured the modern nation through appeals to a lost classical past. Compare, for instance, Gyan Prakash’s formulation: “As the contemporary national self emerges in the differential sign of the return, as its time is expressed in the repetition of another time, an alienating otherness becomes the medium of expressing the fullness of the nation” (Prakash 1999, 119). The split- ting of the present by an ancient and alienating otherness is especially resonant in Devi.

Angeles, where Jessica Peterson is consumed by the spirit of a vengeful snake deity. Her soul is hitched to the East India Company soldiers who massacred her village two centuries earlier and, reborn alongside her in every generation, are cursed to seduce and slaughter her in each of their eternal returns. Particularly in the latter series, the karmic weight of the past overdetermines the present with all that forward-looking folk would rather disavow: colonial violence, atavistic religion, voracious sexuality. On the face of it, Devi operates in a very different mode, seeming to celebrate the continuities of the past in the present—Hindu heritage helps sanctify the sci-fi Indian future. Indeed, both past and future become more stylish, more distinctive, more eminently marketable, due to the visual confusions between them. I would term this aesthetic the “future antique.” Particularly in the sleek city of Sitapur, futuristic and classical elements combine to project a future that refigures (and re-members) the past. Half-decayed statuary peers out over orderly four-lane high- ways, while dense apartment blocks mimic Rajput havelis; ancient icons simulate cyborgs, and primordial foot-soldiers don gas masks and metal- lic body army. Streetside fruit vendors, nightclub dance fiends, board- room executives, saffron-clad sadhus, and stray dogs all jostle for space in Sitapur. This fictional landscape heightens the much vaunted temporal and class disjunctures of contemporary urban India by rendering them in a mythological idiom. But Devi’s visual celebration of India’s heritage is undermined at the level of plot. The comic’s grandest narrative arcs seek to put a resur- gent past in its place. The Goddess Devi herself is brought back to life to vanquish Bala, the fallen god whom she was created to kill millennia before. He has escaped from his hell-prison and is out again to conquer the world—Devi has to conquer him, repressing the eruption of this supernatural atavism. Unbeknownst to her, she will be aided by the secret agents of the mysterious Cabinet of Shadows, an alliance of humans determined to rid the world of all supernatural beings. Their mission: “to live in a world governed by humans, free of control either divine or diabolical” (Devi no. 6, 4). Each of these grand plot arcs is echoed in Tara’s own initial refusal of the Devi energy [Figure 1], which distills the series’ many ambivalences into a single iconic assertion of will: although Tara would deny mythology’s claim on her, it is precisely her mythological trappings that make her refusal an iconic one. Perhaps this double imperative is Devi’s most significant interpolation into the imaginative world of the Amar Chitra Katha. This comic book’s mythology carries within it the wish that mythology could be brought

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 194 Comic Book Karma to an end and gods gotten out of the world. If Virgin Comics must resus- citate Hindu mythology in order to promote India’s creative powers on the global entertainment market, it is simultaneously hampered by the suspicion that a cultural influence gotten through the gods will inevita- bly mark India as provincially religious. The late modern mystic East, as instantiated by Virgin, plies narratives that unfold from a contradictory double imperative to remember and to forget, to promote the gods and to promise to banish them forever. The “we” that we could become This double imperative is expressed quite succinctly by the Charles de Bros epigraph that prefaces this essay. The grammatical structure of de Bros’ maxim implies a “we” that remains continuous throughout the process of becoming; the self remains the self despite the rupture of the sacrifice. This grammatical continuity, however, obscures the risk involved in self-sacrifice: the self that emerges after the sacrifice may be (and perhaps must be) other than the self that entered, the self that was sacrificed. Thus, despite the maxim’s repetition of the pronoun “we,” its second “we” cannot be identical to the first. Rather, if the sacrifice is to warrant the name, if it is to be a proper self-sacrifice, then the second “we” must, even while preserving a structure of subjective continuity, introduce an alien presence into the self. The process of becoming is a process of becoming other, of becoming not-self. De Bros’ maxim promises both rupture and continuity, and in this it is of a piece with Virgin’s corporate publicity and its comic book mythologies. Virgin dreams of sacrificing what the Indian comic is for what the Indian comic could become, but, for all the reasons detailed above, it needs the future’s Indian comic to be just as Indian as the present’s. If Virgin’s comics cease to be Indian, they cannot fulfill the company’s quasi-nationalist ambitions, nor can they circulate successfully on world markets where their Indian association is what marks them as desirable commodities. Virgin thus finds itself bound by a double imperative, or, perhaps more precisely, by several intersecting double imperatives: to remember the past and to forget it; to be cosmopolitan and to be nationalist; and, finally, to celebrate the immaterial and the spiritual, while rec- ognizing that mythological production relies on concrete networks of material exchange. I close this essay where I began it, with the split figure of Tara/ Devi. This character enacts and embodies the contradiction implied by de Bros’ maxim. If a person is to sacrifice herself for the future, the person who

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 J. Barton Scott 195 she becomes will be a different person—a goddess, perhaps, or a super- heroine, but not the same person who did the sacrificing. Tara, however, refuses to be sacrificed; and so, in effect, she insists on her ability to be both woman and goddess, self and other. Her story unfolds from this split subjective position, its heroine always alien unto herself. The cosmopolitan and the national, the spiritual and the material, the past and the present all struggle for space in a single body, and it is their irresolvable struggle that propels the comic’s plotline into the promised future. Acknowledgment I would like to thank Suresh Seetharaman and the staff of Virgin Comics for their hospitality during and after my visit to Bangalore; Leo Mirani, Dann Naseemullah, Daniel Elam, and Lynn Schofield-Clark for feedback during the early phases of research and writing; and Jeremy Stolow and Lisa Gitelman for their support through the editing process. References Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Appadurai, Arjun and Carol Breckenridge. 1988. “Why Public Culture?” Public Culture 1: 5–11. doi:10.1215/08992363-1-1-5 Bajaj, Vikas. 2009. “In India, New Life for Comic Books as TV Cartoons.” New York Times. July 19. Banerjee, Sarnath. 2004. Corridor: A Graphic Novel. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Boucher, Geoff. 2008a. “Alan Moore on ‘Watchmen’ Movie: ‘I will be spitting venom all over it,’” “Hero Complex,” L.A. Times Blogs, 18 September. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2008/09/alan-moore-on- w.html. Accessed 12 May 2009. ———. 2008b. “Virgin Comics Gives It Up, Liquid Comics Hopes for a Splash,” “Hero Complex,” L.A. Times Blogs, 24 September. http://latimesblogs. latimes.com/herocomplex/2008/09/virgin-comics-g.html. Accessed 12 May 2009. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Coburn, Thomas B. 1996. “Devi: The Great Goddess.” In Devi: Goddesses of India, edited by John S. Hawley and Donna M. Wulff, 31–48. Berkeley: University of California Press. Devi. 2007-. Holmdel, NJ: Gotham Entertainment Group. Dwyer, Rachel. 2006. Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema. London: Routledge. Eisner, Will. 1995. Comics and Sequential Art, 2nd ed. Paramus, NJ: Poorhouse Press. Hawley, John Stratton. 1995. “The Saints Subdued: Domestic Virtue and National

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