Comic rectitude

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".

No wonder, then, that Anant Pai and the middle class in general tout education as the ultimate corrective, the great enabler of progress – implying that those who obstruct progress are pedagogically and ethically astray. There is in ACK a secret fixation with the obedient and productive schoolboy, one who simultaneously understands the merits of work, competition and reward, as well as the urge for social and economic ascent. Indeed, he continues to be the imaginary ambassador of middle-class expediency and ambition.

Hard work and recompense is to be implanted in all children as an obligatory virtue for survival in the modern world, but more urgently in the moral realm surrounding workers and the lower castes. But leisure, not work, is a sphere perhaps more important to how this middle class makes sense of itself, and how it stays distinct from those 'below'. The rise of ACK must first be placed in the recreational, pleasure-seeking aspect of middle-class aspiration, which partly explains why the reading culture around ACK (and Indian children's literature in general) is so closely tied to the urban middle class. Predisposed to edification and moralisation, the middle class likes it even more when recreation can be combined with education.

An anecdote Sreenivas shares in the beginning about a friend who took every opportunity 'to extract ACK out of our father's pocket' is  charmingly indicative of how in the 1970s and 80s the comic series disciplined children in India to be consumers, dominating their small universe of pecuniary experience. Following the heady economic liberalisation in 1991, the popularity of the series plummeted drastically. The simple world of Anant Pai's well-behaved, compassionate and strong-willed schoolboy gave way to a generation of children attached, as Sreenivas points out, to spectacles like the professional 'wrestling' of the WWF, for whom bad behaviour and unruliness were acceptable. These are ethical shifts outside the ambit of ACK, and it is these shifts which will soon (if not already) influence the ideas and identities of newer middle-class generations, drawn from an unending saga of class conflicts complicated by caste and creed.

Diwas Kc is a scholar and a filmmaker in Kathmandu.