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.