The Secularisation of the Indian Epic

This paper draws the passage by which the spiritual Indian epic becomes popular, westernised and secular, according to the Nehruvian agenda. The Amar Chitra Kathas talk of the lives of gods, goddesses and saints as though they were not distanced, spiritual and elevated, but human. The epic machinery is replaced by a visual mechanic that reveals bedroom details about them instead. The colorful lines and features of these characters trivialize the spiritual message by incorporating essentially human conditions of hierarchy and exploitation, not to mention, an insidious male Hinduism.

Dasha Avatar or the story of the ten incarnations of Vishnu, witnessed various tensions that the editors and illustrators had with the depiction of Vishnu  and his antagonists. In these tales, Vaishnav Hinduism was projected as a humane religion perpetually in need of an avatara or reformer who would sweep it clean of orthodoxy. At the same time, it presented the dominant class in contemporary India with a model of assimilation which was very effective in reconciling different class factions. According to Chandra, “The all-inclusive Vaishnav morality would at times merge with the scientific temperament of a rationalist-empiricist model based on universal truth or the Vedantic principle of ekam sat” This begins from the first page itself , where Pratap Mulick sketches Vishnu as larger-than-life, blue in colour to symbolize royalty, elaborately adorned with mace, conch shell and chakra. He has to protect the Vedas from being stolen by the asura Hayagriva, whose depiction leaves no doubt that he is the enemy- dark, hairy, heavy limbed and bulky with the face of a horse. This racist tendency is a result of the appropriation of the Oriental gaze through the western comic book medium. There were no masked crime-fighters in purple skin-suits, but each issue had a superhero who attempted to wage war against foreign oppression, whether the “foreigner” was the Asura, Muslim or British. 

In their paper on ‘epidermal politics’, Radhika Parmeswaran and Kavitha Cardoza note that the coloured moral hierarchy extends to women as well. Draupadi  and Kali are shown in various colours- blue for royalty, blackish-brown for the sanwla complexion. They are visually attractive. Asura women are shown with protruding fangs, thick eyebrows, uncombed and wild hair, large breasts, and vicious facial expressions to be coded as sub-human and bestial. In the case of Shoorpanakha, to win Ram over, she transforms herself from a dark-skinned and animalistic woman into a young, Caucasian woman with sharp features, slim body and graceful posture. As a contrast to her, the cover page of Rama shows Sita standing one step behind her husband with white flowers in her hair and around her neck, with a serene expression. The important image of Sita as the ideal wife/mother/woman in a dharmic world is extended to the 21^st century Indian mores of gender. Indrajit Hazra comments- “In the Amar Chitra Katha's Hinduised version of the Madonna-Whore binary, the Sati-Shakti principle works like neurotic clockwork”. To conclude, the comics with their “stories” may claim to be as “immortal” as the canon, but popular and contemporary sentiments of race, communalism, nationalism and femininity proliferate the pages. Thus, there’s more to the Chitras, than meets the eye.

~ Anhiti Patnaik