Lately, the Indian middle class has come under widespread scrutiny, with some of its own in the vanguard of the critical brigade. This self-analysis is not unwarranted, given that the ideas and identities of this class are key to understanding the triumphant and confident face of the 'new' India. The Indian middle class is convinced of its own superiority as the inheritor of modernity and democracy, of its obvious knack for progress, and of its entitlement to replicate its beliefs and preferences as ideal for the entire nation. It claims moral, cultural and intellectual authority by asserting its practical knowhow about getting ahead, but equally through its self-proclaimed sympathy for the poor and the downtrodden. The mantras of compromise and flexibility – or the fusion of motivation and morality, venture and virtue – are at the heart of this Janus-headed identity of the middle class, turned at one and the same time to the ambitions of status and property on the one side, and to their critiques on the other.
In this new work, Deepa Sreenivas, a fellow at the Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies in Hyderabad, India, turns to a formative period of modern India, examining the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comics to pin down the contents of the contemporary Indian middle-class identity. Enormously popular among urban, English-speaking children, the series first made patriotic, egalitarian heroes out of Hindu mythological figures, and then mythologised Indian national heroes. Sreenivas aims, through these comics, to discover the ethical and pedagogical underpinnings of the 'IT generation' that grew up reading them.
Anant Pai, the creator of ACK, imagined the series as a way for tradition and the religious past to provide guidance for the modern and secular Indian present. In 1967, the year Pai launched the comics, India was gearing up for major readjustments as, Sreenivas contends, the 'welfarist' Nehruvian vision of self-dependence was abruptly crumbling. That year Prime Minister Indira Gandhi devalued the rupee on coercion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), marking the arrival of globalisation in the Indian economy. That same year also saw the emergence of the Naxalite movement, which has since grown to become the lurid disrupter of the 'Indian dream'.
Schoolboy's nation
The leftist rebellions of the period strengthened the perception of the urban middle class that the lower classes and castes were immersed in a domain of anarchy, crime and violence. Sceptical not only of Maoism but of all ideologies in general, the middle class preferred instead to appraise society in terms of morality and even religious uprightness. Accordingly, ACK's answer to the political crises of the period is a 'code of conduct' that is at the heart of Sreenivas's study. Pai's recasting of characters ranging from the Mahabharata's Arjuna to Mauryan guru Chanakya, warrior king Shivaji, industrialist J R D Tata and Dalit leader B R Ambedkar and NASA astronaut Kalpana Chawla is that of individual enterprise, struggle and diligence leading to the breaking of boundaries (caste, gender, lineage, and so on) and eventual greatness. Pai's heroes are purposefully of, as Sreenivas quotes Pai, "humble beginnings".