Can’t wait for Gotham Studios’ western-styled renditions of Indian epics? The classic graphic novels of comic book company Amar Chitra Katha are available for online purchase and reading, as reported earlier on BoingBoing.

Started in 1967 by editor Anant Pai and publisher G.L. Mirchandani, Amar Chitra Katha created 436 titles on Indian history, folklore, mythology and culture. At its peak, the company sold as many as 500,000 copies a week, and had their work translated into 18 languages, ranging from Hindi to Serbo-Croat.

Pai started the company after watching a children’s game show, where contestants “were well-versed with the lore of Tarzan and the exploits of Greek gods, but could not answer simple questions about the Ramayana.” Asia Society’s web site hosts a scanned version of that tale, which was one of Amar Chitra Katha’s first creations.

BoingBoing: Indian epic Ramayana as comic

Continue reading →

Last week the NYTimes Business section went into details about self help guru Deepak Chopra’s effort to bring western style comic books to India.

The newly formed Gotham Studios Asia is a joint venture between the media company Intent, run by Mr. Chopra with Shekhar Kapur, the director of movies like “Bandit Queen” and “Elizabeth,” and Gotham Entertainment Group, South Asia’s biggest licensee for international comic magazines such as Marvel Enterprises, the publisher of “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” as well as DC Comics and Warner Brothers Worldwide Publishing.

Gotham Studios will offer an adaptation of “Spider-Man” [see previous SM post here] in which the hero is a young Indian named Pavitr Prabhakar, who is shown bouncing off rickshaws in a dhoti, a loose Indian garment. There will also be a comic-book version of “Ramayana,” an Indian tale about faith, loyalty and war, to be retold in a sweeping style reminiscent of the “Lord of the Rings.” The titles are to be released in the middle of next year.

Gotham Studios is one of many companies trying to take advantage of an expected boom in the sale of books and music in India, fueled by rising literacy rates and buying power and changing spending habits. India’s population of more than one billion is the youngest in the world. Projections are that, by 2015, India will have 550 million people under the age of 20.

Imagine edgy western style comic book art used to re-tell the Indian classics. Comic books don’t just have to be marketed to kids and teens either, but can be used as a way to reach a larger Indian population with social messages (such as the way Art Spiegalmen did with Maus). Whatever you think of Chopra’s self-help philosophies, this seems like a very profitable venture. I hope there is not to much cross-over with his other books and he can keep his characters from being too preachy.

Mr. Chopra will infuse spirituality and mysticism into the characters. For instance, in the Indian version, Spider-Man gains his powers from a mysterious yogi, not from a radioactive spider. Spider-Man’s enemy, the Green Goblin, is the reincarnation of an ancient Indian demon called a rakshasa. “The superheroes of tomorrow will be cross-cultural and will transcend nationalistic boundaries,” said Mr. Chopra, the chairman of the new company. His son, Gotham Chopra, who is the story editor of the comic book “Bulletproof Monk” and was executive producer of the movie version, will write many of the comics for Gotham Studios.

The NYT reviews Magic Seeds, V.S. Naipaul’s sequel to Half a Life. Naipaul’s protagonist Willie Chandran join a pointless communist group in India, a metaphor for the reign of Marxists in the author’s native Caribbean:

Willie is the latest exemplar of a type familiar to Naipaul’s readers: the fanatical idealist drawn to… “socialist mimicry.” Cheddi B. Jagan, the orthodox Marxist who rose to become prime minister of Guyana; Michael X, the black power leader who ends up a murderer in Trinidad… Naipaul is infuriated by their charade, the fraudulent progressive ideology that masks their will to power.

Chandran is eventually disabused of his fuzzy-minded notions. Naipaul also mocks hopes for a postracial society, and not gently:

Willie attends the wedding of the half-English son of Marcus, a West African diplomat “who lived for interracial sex, and wanted to have a white grandchild.” The groom, Lyndhurst (“very English,” Roger comments dryly), is marrying a white woman, a union that will result in the culmination of Marcus’s dream. The wedding takes place at a grand house fallen into dereliction in the English countryside. A passage from Othello is read, an “Aruba-Curacao” band plays…. just as the mixed-race couple is about to exchange vows, one of the children they’ve had out of wedlock audibly passes gas, no one is certain which: “But the guests lined up [with political correctness] on this matter: the dark people thought the dark child” had done it; “the fair people thought it was the fair child.”

Continue reading →

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s new book, Queen of Dreams is featured in Newsweek magazine:

Newsweek: What else influenced you [to write Queen of Dreams]?

CBD: The shock of 9/11 and its aftermath. If my novel is about how dreams affect our waking life, this was the other end. What happens in reality is sometimes unbelievable, like a nightmare. Many people felt, “Is this real? This can’t be happening.” When reality takes on that nightmare quality, that shade of the surreal, some people respond with fear and prejudice; they need to blame somebody, to lash out at someone who looks different, who is the “other.” Nationwide, Middle Eastern and South Asian communities became hate-crime victims. Businesses were vandalized, people beaten up—even murdered. Many were afraid to leave their homes. We were advised by mass e-mail, “Don’t wear Indian clothes,” “Don’t go out by yourself,” “Pretend you’re Hispanic,” “Put up an American flag, a GOD BLESS AMERICA sign.”

Of course this will probably be another depressing book by a South Asian author but at least it tackles some new themes.

CBD: …That [9/11] was a tragedy for [Americans of South Asian descent] also—weÂ’d lost people. Then this additional burden—of proving ourselves patriotic—was placed on us because we were “suspicious looking.” It was an injustice to our community at a time when we all needed to come together as Americans. So, the second theme in “Queen of Dreams” is, what does it mean to be American? Does it mean one thing in good times, another in bad? When everythingÂ’s going well, Indians are a model minority—weÂ’re exotic, you take our bindi, our henna, things you like. When things go bad, suddenly, weÂ’re “terrorists”?

A new novel by Goan psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar re-imagines the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Miraben, one of his most committed disciples, a British admiral’s daughter who ‘went native’:

[N]one stood out so vividly as a tall, broad-shouldered and rather imperious-looking Englishwoman named Madeleine Slade… She chopped off her hair, traded her Western clothes for an outfit of homespun cotton and embraced Gandhi’s principles of simplicity and self-denial… He gave Slade the name of Mira, after a mythical Hindu princess, and elevated her to the status of his foremost disciple, sitting with her every evening for an hour of quiet conversation while Slade massaged his feet with oil. Over the next two decades, he would write her nearly 500 letters…

[H]e does suggest that Slade fell passionately in love with Gandhi, who had taken a vow of celibacy… [Gandhi wrote,] “May God remove what I consider is your moha,” a Hindi word for infatuation.

The book’s approach echoes the Freudian analyses of Indian mythology, such as that of Mirabai’s devotion to Krishna, by non-South Asians. These analyses’ obsession with sexuality almost always provokes controversy. In this case, Kakar is adopting a classically Western approach to explore the obvious implications of a retroactively sainted man’s personal relationships. Of course, Gandhi admirers are up in arms:

Kakar’s implication that the deep emotional connection between Gandhi and Slade had something other than a purely spiritual basis has raised eyebrows in a country accustomed to hagiographic portrayals in school textbooks and movies such as “Gandhi”…

Here’s Ennis’ previous post on canonizing Gandhi.

A new collection of South Asian diasporic short stories has been put together by editor Shyam Selvadurai under the title Story-Wallah as reported by The Globe and Mail. This might be a great way to get your diasporic writing fix if you are like me and find a full novel much too depressing to read through.

Indo-American writer Bharati Mukherjee, one of the contributors in this collection, believes that the diasporic posture is fraudulent and self-serving. “In literary terms,” she writes, “being an immigrant is very déclassé. There is a low grade ashcan realism implied in its very material.” In Karima, one of the stories in the collection, Pakistan’s Aameer Hussein writes of a character who is alienated both from Bangladesh and Pakistan: “With pride we assume the mantle of the dispossessed.”

The contrary view, held by writers such as Salman Rushdie, asserts that the immigrant is a cultural nomad, an Everyman in a world of shifting values and cultures — an interpreter of maladies (to quote the London-born, U.S.-raised Jhumpa Lahiri). Selvadurai, closer to this latter group, mentions the importance of this cultural clash to his own plots. And this is the theme running throughout the stories in this anthology.

Salman Rushdie has adapted Haroun and the Sea of Stories into an opera playing at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center from Oct. 31 to Nov. 11. Haroun is a fabulist children’s tale, more accessible than his usual work, but still layered with allegory:

Haroun narrates the fate of the story-teller, who loses his ability to tell tales. His son then sets out on a journey to save his father’s skills. Rushdie had intended the book as a gift to his son Zafar… to make the son understand his father’s plight… [T]he book reached out to audiences uncomfortable with the complexities of Rushdie’s other novels…

Rushdie found the process of adaptation taxing:

S.R. ItÂ’s a strange book, Haroun. This was the one that came with the greatest fluency—it took me less than a year, and itÂ’s now taken ten times that long to adapt, so you know this is a much larger achievement… C.W. ThereÂ’s a practical reason for that. Its brevity makes it a little bit more manageable. I mean, I have my eye on The MoorÂ’s Last Sigh… S.R. Yes, that would be a very long opera.

Rushdie’s last stage adaptation was the excellent, albeit rushed, Midnight’s Children in London and at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He’s also working on a film version of his short story The Firebird’s Nest, in which he’s cast his inamorata Padma Lakshmi.

Update: Amardeep Singh has more.