Comics Review
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Meet Pavitr Prabhakar, Marvel Comics latest
spin on Spider-Man.
Can a local hero ?nd his home in modern Mumbai?
By Sukhdev Sandhu
Kipling, who wrote East is East and West is West,
and never the twain shall meet, would doubtless
raise a bushy eyebrow at the news that Marvel Comics
and Gotham Entertainment will soon be launching an Indian
version of Spider-Man. Farewell, Peter Parker; namaste,
Pavitr Prabhakar. His fiefdom is the mean streets of
Mumbai (formerly Bombay) instead of Manhattan. When
crisis calls, he still dons his Spidey bodysuit, but
he also sports a billowing dhoti and a pair of snazzy
curl-toed slippers on his feet. The Green Goblin, his
chief enemy, now takes the form of a rakshasa, a demon
drawn from Indian mythology.
On chat boards and across the blogosphere, comics fans
have been competing with each other to see who is the
most indignant. Its claimed that Spider-Mans
purity will be sullied. That hes a uniquely American
superhero. That the very idea of Indian graphic fiction
is a bit of a joke. Funnypeople used to scoff
at Japanese anime. Aside from the absurdity of being
a purist about one of pop cultures most pleasingly
bastard and vulgar forms, those carpers, if theyre
to be consistent, should bemoan the popularity of Indian
religious iconography and henna motifs among Western
fashionistas. Cultural exchange is a two-way process.
The Indianization of Spider-Man has precedents. Hindi
cinema has a long history of borrowing and adapting
from Western sources, be they Busby Berkeley dance routines
in the thirties, Chaplin-like heroes in the common-man
social epics of the fifties, or Dirty Harry, a major
influence on the wildly popular revenger tragedies of
superstar Amitabh Bachchan. Now, following broadcasting
deregulation, young children are able to watch everything
from Rugrats to Wallace & Gromit on cable TV. Spider-Man
2 is currently breaking box-office records around the
globe, and it is likely to top Titanics record
in India.
Its absurd to be a purist about one of
pop cultures most pleasingly bastard and vulgar
forms.
India has its own comic-book traditions, too. Most bus
shelters and train stations stock Amar Chitra Katha,
a series of historical and mythological strips based
on the stories of Rama. One of the most popular superheroes
of the seventies was a shaggy-haired, bell-bottom-wearing
dude called Bahadur. In April, Penguin Books India published
the countrys first graphic novel, Sarnath Banerjees
Corridor, which is already into a second printing. Hollywood
animation companies have begun to outsource creative
work to the subcontinent, where they can rely on a steady
pool of exstreet painters whose former livelihoods
waned because of crackdowns in illegal advertising and
the rise of photography in film posters.
If the creative talent needed to bring an Indian version
of Spider-Man to life is almost in place, so is the
social context. Metropolis, Gotham City, Opal Citycomics
were both a product of and a commentary on the twentieth-century
American city in all its exhilaration, capitalist energy,
and sprawling loneliness. Until recently, India didnt
have enough urban breeding grounds for would-be superheroes.
Now, though, market forces and neo-liberal economics
have made Mumbai a boom city. Tens of thousands of villagers
migrate there each year; middle-class affluence is in
your face; the skyline is pocked with high-rises, radio
masts, and multinational office blocks. Marvels
suggestion that an Indian Spider-Man would swing from
rickshaws and scooters is a quaint one; the architecture
of metropolitan modernity is already there. Prabhakar
himself should be a call-center worker, a geek scientist,
or an underpaid HTML coder at the bottom of the globalized
knowledge economy to which Mumbai belongs. His inability
to demonstrate his love for his sweetheart would play
very well in a nation where representations of physical
affection are still circumscribed.
But perhaps its the phrase With great power
comes great responsibility that may travel the
best. While it may seem distinctly Americanthe
sentiment speaks to an era in which many people believe
the U.S. is flexing its imperial might a little too
recklessly it also reverberates abroad. It has
considerable resonance in India, where, notwithstanding
the recent election of the left-leaning Congress Party,
the country is still recovering from years of the nationalist
BJP Party, which seemed hell-bent on nuclear war. Even
now, the Delhi and Kolkata equivalents of J. Jonah Jamesons
Daily Bugle are chronicling public disquiet over dubious
hydro projects, governmental corruption, and the ever-widening
gulf between rich and poor. No better swinging ground
could exist for an urban herohowever metaphorical.
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