Angry Eggplants!

Posted on by

tin and snowy.jpg

Fifteen years ago, I fell for an oddly-coiffed Belgian boy named Tintin. I was Anna-Johnny-come-lately; the object of my affection had been loved by people all over the world for 75 years. I met Tintin in India, where his English-language comic books have always been popular. Looks like the cub reporter who has starred in more than 120 million books 200 million books (Thanks, Avi) is about to make a whole new set of friends:

for the first time, DVDs and Video CDs (VCDs) of “Adventures of Tintin” have been launched in Hindi too…
Saibal Chatterjee, a media critic, says the move is driven by pure commercial sense.
“When you do something in English, you’re only reaching out to a certain number of people, a certain percentage of the audience,” he says.

Herge, the nom de plume of Georges Remi, Tintin’s creator, imagined up some charming friends for our boy with the unique hair. They included:

Tintin’s loyal dog and partner-in-adventure, Snowy, and Captain Haddock – famous for his love of whisky and colourful expletives

I guess some words just don’t translate well:

For the curious, Captain Haddock’s “blistering barnacles” translates unexpectedly as “bhadakte hue baingan” (literally, “angry aubergines”). “Thundering typhoons” comes out as “toofani lehren”.

It’s so strange, if Amazon.com were to compile a list of MY statistically improbable phrases, “barnacle” would be one of the anomalous words they’d notice– suddenly, I’m struck by one of those “eureka” moments which occurs when something I’ve always done has a new and logical explanation. 😉The emerging markets of small towns and villages are hot:

Mr Rajesh Shukla, the NCAER’s principal economist, says: “The urban market has more or less reached the saturation level. The new customer is certainly in the smaller towns and villages.
“If you see the larger towns, of the 30% of the total urban areas, metros have hardly 15-16% of the total population. So the next target will be smaller towns which is another 15% and the next ones are the well-connected rural areas.”

So, a massive group of rural people who were once ignored because they lacked money and literacy are now a $30 billion market.

Mr Gurcharan Das, author of “India Unbound”, says India’s economic turnaround began in the early 1990s with the opening up of the economy and in the first instance it largely benefited the English-speaking middle classes.
“But a decade and a half later, the fruits of economic liberalisation are filtering down to smaller towns and villages.”

…and that’s why, judging by the number of VCDs sold, Tintin has 40,000 new friends in six weeks.

39 thoughts on “Angry Eggplants!”

  1. So, a massive group of rural people who were once ignored because they lacked money and literacy are now a $30 billion market

    Does anyone have more information on this stat? or a study it came from? Friedman talks a little bit about this group in his latest book, but not in any real detail.

  2. The urban market has more or less reached the saturation level. The new customer is certainly in the smaller towns and villages.

    Very true. Can be a good thing, so long as they’re not trying to sell baby milk formula. I don’t doubt that stat regarding $30 billion.

  3. I was about 11 when I first came across books by willard price – and what a discovery that was – i ‘learned’ there was a world out there that’s far far different from anything i’d been exposed to – pearl diving in the south seas, herpetology, wildlife conservation in africa, marine life in the deep sea trenches – and all through the adventures of two american boys. Some may argue i got whitewashed. others will sniff that the serious ‘sciences’ were simplified too much to convey any knowledge or information. me – i think it changed me for the better – am still chasing those boyhood fantasies in caves, rocks, forests – bills and taxes aside.

    no doubt there will be resistance from the fringes – the ‘elites’ will mock the corruptions like ‘bhadaktey huei baingan’ – the ‘ultranationalists’ will decry the colonial influence – but tintin in hindi is a winning idea to me – funny, rich tales of strange lands -inspiring kids to travel… tho’ candidly, i dont know of any female role models in tintin . But we’ll just have to wait for pippi I guess.

  6. Hergé was an astute observer of the world around but some of the comics were blatantly racist (Tintin au Congo).

    Nonetheless, Capt. Haddock was my hero until age 10.

  7. When I was in grade school our French teacher had some Tintin books that she tried reading to us. I think it was a little too complex for our little non-Francophone minds, and she eventually told her own stories. “Nicolas marche dans la foret…”

    Someday, when I’ve got the Hindi alphabet down (damn, doesn’t anyone sell fridge magnet letters?), maybe I’ll start with comic books. 😉

    But we’ll just have to wait for pippi I guess.

    Why, she’s already there!

  8. Tintin and other comics from europe were sometimes blatantly racist. Since many desis themselves are racists, this fact does not deter the popularity of the likes of tintin in India.

  11. I’ve been an TinTin and an Asterix fan all my life. Over the past 30+ years I have read and re-read them all over and have the whole collection.

    Tintin especially was a wonderful way for me as a 8 year old to know the world and the places that existed all over.

    In later years, I could appreciate the deeper meaning of the stories, and the political commentary behind it, as a “telling of the times”

    If Tintin was racist, well that was what the world was at that time. So i dont understand how that can be held against Herge. He was just painting a true picture of the times. What did one expect him to show…..a world where every thing was “peechey-keen” ??

    Come on, lets get real out there.

  13. Was this done with the Asterix comic books? I recall my addiction to them as a highly-suggestible 9-yr old when I came across an issue in a remote village in the motherland.

  15. Anna,

    Hindi, incidentally, is not the first Indian language into which Tintin has been translated. Years, ago, when I was a kid in Kolkata and had already read up most of Tintin in English, I noticed that many of the titles were available in Bengali too.

    Before that, I read Bengali as well as I read Hebrew. But reading Tintin in Bengali got my reading speed in my mother-tongue up from 0 words a minute to roughly 10 words a minute. Yes, I kept getting stuck at translations of Capt. Haddock’s curses and transliterations of names like Syldavia and Kurvi-tasch.

    rI, next time you make two blanket statements in one sentence, spare a thought for the unwashed masses among us and provide some corroboration. Oh yeah, and stop hatin’.

  16. DDiA,

    awesome! i remember reading Tintin in french, myself. 🙂

    considering how many languages his books came in, i can’t believe it took them all this time to make his videos in hindi, too.

  17. Hee hee, I love Tintin, and totally got hooked on the books in India. In Paris I argued with my sister for 15 minutes about the feasibility of bringing a plush Snowy home from the Tintin store on the Left Bank, despite the complete lack of room we had on the train. She won finally. :-p

    I’d love to make a Tintin movie, and I want to caste my friend Corey as Tintin—he’s even actually a globe-trotting journalist, and was voted most likely to take down a presidential administration by our class.

  18. TinTin didn’t just inspire all of you. He inspired a whole generation of hairstyles 🙂

  19. I own a copy of Tintin in “The Blue Lotus” on VCD. Yes, I AM that cool 🙂 And I use the word ‘own’ in a very broad sense of the word. Own as in ‘borrowed from sister with no intention of returning it’ 🙂

  20. ddia, I used to be a fan of tintin when I was a kid but then after I learned the history of belgian terror in what was previously called congo, it’s not funny anymore. What’s more outrageous is that, unlike germans, belgians are in denial about their own holocaust in congo. Many Indians (even liberal types) don’t care for such things. They even love kipling’s gunga din.

  21. rl, Tintin in Congo is probably the only one with broad paternalistic/colonial overtones. And it is true that Herge was at one time a right-winger in Belgium. It is therefore no surprise that Tintin in Congo was not translated into English or Bengali or Hindi.

    Comparison to Gunga Din is perhaps unfair, since unlike Kipling, Herge quickly corrected himself. King Ottokar’s Sceptre is distinctly anti-Nazi and anti-totalitarian.

    Later books have focussed heavily on progressive values, values which otherwise a 10-year-old kid might not have been exposed to.

    AnandM, how do I get my hands on that VCD? I promise to return it to your sis.

  22. Sick! now all i need is the those two elusive issues to finish my Asterix and Obelix collection and im gold.

  23. I don’t think Herge was a racist, although many accused him of advocating gruesome violence against animals. I do remember a few of his comics depicting Africans in terrible stereotypical shapes. He actually had to redo his Tintin goes to America book because many people complained of his portrayel of African-Americans. I know that Asterix and Obelix made some insensitve comments in the past though.

  25. You know what have you guys done………tonight I am going to go spend a lot of money on buying new Tintin and Asterix comics at the local bookstore.

    Sepia Mutiny will lead to my financial doom.

  26. That link is from Nov, 2002. I think Spielberg forgot all about this !!!

    I think the project has been moving very slowly through Dreamworks’ schedule of films. Spielberg is tied up doing “Miunich ” and possibly the next Indiana Jones film after that. here is an interesting bit of trivia about the connection between the last Indiana Jones film and Tintin (from the wikipedia entry):

    Steven Spielberg has owned the rights to a trilogy of live-action Tintin films for several years. The project has been dormant since the 1980s, but Spielberg has confirmed in recent years that the project is indeed moving forward. A first script draft has been approved by Hergé’s estate. He will produce it as a joint venture between DreamWorks and Universal Studios. Portions of a previous script Spielberg commissioned and rejected for his Tintin project were incorporated into the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

    More interesting information about Tintin and the racist undertones the stories used to have:

    The earliest stories in The Adventures of Tintin have been criticised for racist and colonialist leanings, including caricatured portrayals of non-Europeans. However, Hergé changed his views sometime between these early works and The Blue Lotus, published in 1936. This story, set in China during the then-current Sino-Japanese War, was the first for which he did extensive background research. It criticised Japanese and Western colonial meddling in China and helped to dispel popular myths about the Chinese people (though it does contain flagrant stereotyping of Japanese people). From then on, meticulous research would be one of Hergé’s trademarks.

    Wikipedia entry for Tintin

  27. I have been crazy about Tintin since I was 8. I think The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko were pretty cool too. Incidentally the most recent Tintin book that I read was Tintin and Alph-Art – a book Hergé was working on at the time of his death.

    Of course I have been a great fan of Asterix as well(I have even read up Oumpah-pah – a character by Goscinny and Uderzo that precedes Asterix). Incidentally just days ago a brand new Asterix book was unveiled – can’t wait to get my hands on it.

    Looks like I have just outed myself – comic book nerd that I am. Damn! (Oh and btw, does anyone know of any other comic books like these that Tintin/Asterix maniacs like me can consume?)

  29. “(Oh and btw, does anyone know of any other comic books like these that Tintin/Asterix maniacs like me can consume?)”

    Mangas. That is a whole different world.

    Art Spiegelman’s stuff is more serious.

  31. “(Oh and btw, does anyone know of any other comic books like these that Tintin/Asterix maniacs like me can consume?)”

    You should try Osamu Tezuka’s manga work on Buddha. I have volume 1, but need to buy other volumes soon.

    Some people think that he has given an entirely different meaning to Siddhartha’s life, very different from Herman Hesse using manga.

  32. This is awesome! I used to go home to Goa every year and in my childhood picked up all of the Tintin and Asterix comics. I saw the prices of these comics raise from somewhere around 40 rupees to over 400 now.

    Amazing that it took this long for the translation, long overdue and yet welcome indeed. VIVA TITIN!

    There is also a TINTIN movie in the works too:

    http://www.thezreview.co.uk/comingsoon/t/tintin.htm

  33. He inspired a whole generation of hairstyles 🙂
    There’s Something About Snowy.

    Leaving seminal discussions with Freudian overtones aside, Manish, I think the original poster was talking about the fauxhawk.

  36. Librarie De France tends to be a little expensive; I’ve tried to buy Tintin-related stuff from there and found it overpriced. The French-language Tintin stuff we have at home – Archives Hegre 1: Au Pays des Soviets, Au Congo, En Amerique – was purchased from a store-front window at a hole-in-the-wall bookstore in the West Village. So, if you are looking for Tintin in French, I’d scour random used bookstores. Always found stuff in those.

  38. I just read that Jacques Cousteau’s grandson Fabien was inspired by Tintin to create a submarine that looks and moves like a great white shark. The submarine shark is named Troy.