Karline McLain, Asian Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
AIIS Dissertation Proposal 2000
Whose Immortal Picture Stories?: Amar Chitra Katha and the
Construction of Indian Identities
Karline McLain
Abstract: Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories), the leading Indian comic
book series, enjoys a ubiquitous presence among the urban middle-class in India and the South
Asian diaspora. These comic books provide a unique opportunity for the study of the definition
and negotiation of a modern middle-class Indian identity, as the multiplicity of intended and
received messages of the comics can be examined by studying both their creation and consumption
in conjunction with a careful reading of the content. My project will challenge traditional
approaches to public culture which typically focus on either creation or consumption, one at the
expense of the other, by viewing both as active and contested processes which together act with text
and image to continually recreate and transform identities. Furthermore, my project will engage
identity formation particularly the formation of religious identities on both the national and
transnational levels and examine the tensions between them.
Background: Amar Chitra Katha has dominated the flourishing comic book market since
its inception in 1967, selling over 436 titles and more than 78 million issues. Anant Pai, founder of
the comics, conceived of them as a means of teaching Indian themes and values to westerneducated Indian children who knew western history at the purported expense of Indian history and
mythology. Hence the comics, which are first produced in English and then translated into Hindi
and other languages according to demand, can be loosely grouped into two categories:
mythologicals and historicals. The mythologicals were conceived of first and retell, in a childfriendly way, the classical epics and various Puranic stories. The historicals, added several years
later, feature regional personalities in order to promote national integration, according to Pai, by
teaching people in one region about the culture and history of another (Gangadhar, 1988). The
comics are advertised as the only comics welcomed in schools and the route to your roots,
promoting their scholarly accuracy and Indianness, qualities meant to appeal to specifically
Hindu middle-class communities both within India and abroad.
Methodologies and Issues: I envision this project as an investigation of three primary
Karline McLain, Asian Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
AIIS Dissertation Proposal 2000
issues: content, production, and consumption. The first part of my study will consist in careful
textual and visual analyses of Amar Chitra Katha, wherein I will explore relationships between text
and image, noting when imagery supports or subverts the text. I will also approach this medium of
public culture as a site in which global and transnational processes intersect and at times conflict
with national processes. One such intersection is the use of the western comic book medium to
depict Indian images and retell Indian themes. When Amar Chitra Katha was founded in 1967,
Anant Pai recognized that western comics such as Superman, Phantom, and Captain Marvel were
popular in India and designed his comics in the western artistic style. Furthermore, these comics
utilize western scholarship on India to promote their historical and textual accuracy, thereby
conveying some western biases. One example is the Shah Jahan issue (no. 642, 1979) which
focuses more on the romance between Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal than on Shah Jahans reign
and military victories. This focus reflects the uncomplicated romantic image of Shah Jahan that was
prevalent in the west prior to the 1980s, an image now superceded by newer scholarship that
promotes a more imperial emphasis. The usage of a western artistic style along with content
derived from previous western scholarship to teach authentic Indian values is a space wherein
the tension between national and transnational politics of identity formation can be witnessed and
problematized. By examining such contested spaces, I will be able to explore multiple intentions on
the production side and multiple interpretations on the consumption side.
The second aspect of the project is an analysis of the production processes and the authorial
function. I approach these comics as a consumer-oriented (as opposed to an author- or artistfocused) industry which makes use of marketing techniques to facilitate commodity exchange. The
comics are semiprogrammed literature/art in that they are highly formulaic and repetitive, and are
designed for an explicit, already-constituted audience. By observing and interviewing members of
the company I will begin to discern the contours of the theoretical audience, the sort of market
research conducted, the advertising principles employed, and other factors guiding the publication
process. This will allow me to explore the multiple intentions behind the product, as authors and
artists are encouraged to work within the comic book template, yet at times may contest editorial
Karline McLain, Asian Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
AIIS Dissertation Proposal 2000
decisions. J.S. Hawley and F. Pritchett note that the comics are created amidst competing tensions
between sales versus educational values, scholarly accuracy versus appeasing particular interest
groups, and truthfully depicting past conflict versus promoting national integration. The Draupadi
issue (no. 542, 1974) exemplifies the kind of conflict that can occur during the creation of a comic
book. Associate editor Kamala Chandrakant wanted to portray Draupadi as a woman of sharp
intellect, questioning the actions of her husbands (Gangadhar 1988). This challenged the typical
portrayal of Hindu wives as meek and traditional in the series and thus jeopardized a financially
proven formula. Ms. Chandrakant informed me in a telephone interview that she left the company
due to concerns over its representation of women and Muslims. In my view, a multiplicity of
intended messages can result from such tensions between multiple authors over the constitution of
Indianness and between the creative and economic processes.
The third aspect is ethnographic and focuses on the audience. I perceive Amar Chitra
Katha comic books as public culture in Appadurais and Breckenridges sense of the term as
describing not a type of cultural phenomenon but a zone of cultural debate; they are contestatory in
character due to the contradictions between the national and transnational cultural processes they
embody (Breckenridge 1995). In viewing comics as public culture, this project builds upon
previous scholarship which has demonstrated that gender, race, sexuality, and class can imply
radically different practices of pleasurable reading and viewing (Mulvey 1989, Radway 1984), and
that the practices of marginalized groups can involve strategies of alternative readings, resistance,
and co-optation (Staiger 1992, hooks 1994, Mankekar 1999). My focus is on the subjective
experience of reading/viewing comics and the different sorts of pleasure, desire, and agency it
entails. For instance, one reader might read Rabindranath Tagore (no. 548, 1977) as an example
of Hindu-Muslim solidarity, for in one panel Hindus and Muslims are shown together protesting
the British partitioning of Bengal along communal lines. However, another reader might instead see
it as a token nod to political correctness that does not compensate for the general absence of
modern Indo-Muslim figures or the widespread depiction of Muslims as the invading, conquering
other. Similarly, a female reader might engage traditional, self-sacrificing heroines such as Sita
Karline McLain, Asian Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
AIIS Dissertation Proposal 2000
and Savitri as female role models, or might instead favor independent women who forged roles for
themselves in the male-dominated public realm such as the Rani of Jhansi or Sultana Razia.
I will incorporate audience reception theory and utilize ethnographic interviews of comic
book consumers within India and the American diaspora to discern how the ideology of these
comics is negotiated and thus expose the many layers of influence in an individuals or interpretive
communitys construction of identities. Specifically, I will interview urban middle-class consumers
in northern and southern India, both Hindu and Muslim, male and female, in order to explore the
intersections of religion, gender, ethnicity, class, and nationalism in the zone of public culture.
Additionally, I will interview middle-class members of the South Asian diaspora in America to
examine how these comics are reinterpreted in the process of negotiating hybrid identities and the
extent to which the knowledge of the topics in Amar Chitra Katha derives from these comics rather
than from more traditional sources not often available to the diaspora. I hope to demonstrate
that comics provide insight not only into the ways in which colonial and nationalist discourses are
engendered, but also into how competing transnational ideologies are intertwined in this medium,
thereby leaving open the possibility of multiple and even subversive readings.
Significance of Project: This project is a unique study of a genre of Indian public culture
which will be of interest to scholars in several fields. First, it will be an important contribution to
the study of public culture in India, long dominated by studies of the film industry. As Appadurai
and Breckenridge have argued, the contours of the media boom in India are barely understood, and
studies of various media technologies are necessary as each has distinctive capabilities and interacts
differently with older modes of organizing and disseminating information. Hawley and Pritchett
are the only scholars who have studied Indian comics, and that only in brief. In their textual and
production-oriented studies, Hawley and Pritchett agree that these comics present India as a
multicultural nation and are sensitive to marginalized communities. Although these comics do
insert didactic lessons on the goodness of religious minorities and outcastes, I believe that there
is an overarching nationalist ideology that is not necessarily counterbalanced by such imposed
themes, and that such themes may not be passively accepted by consumers. My study will provide
Karline McLain, Asian Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
AIIS Dissertation Proposal 2000
a good base for further consideration of the roles of print culture, allowing the uniqueness of Indian
comics as a medium for identity formation to be explored so that they may then be located in the
wider, intertextual context of public culture, both in India and transnationally.
My project will also contribute significantly to the field of religious studies by exploring
how public culture alters the circulation of religious symbols in Indian communities, by examining
the place of religion in identity formation, and by investigating how the legacy of the past is recast
to explain the present. This project will also be of value to scholars of visual history and literature,
as my work will consider the boundaries of literary and visual theory by simultaneously engaging
both audience response and the authorial function, viewing art and literature as spaces in which
identity, difference, and cultural value are produced and contested. Furthermore, I will contribute to
the study of print culture in these two fields, as my project will involve an analysis of the ways in
which western products and forms shaped Indian print culture as a result of the colonial project.
Finally, this project will be valuable to scholars interested in gender studies, as I will employ
feminist scholarship and engage feminist concerns throughout each phase. Increasingly, comic
books are receiving a serious place of study in the west (cf. Napier 1996, Schodt 1983). My
project will allow India to occupy a place in these discussions, establishing foundations for further
research which will bring India's comics into the discourse about the global community.
Qualifications and Timetable: To complete this study I seek funding for an eight month
stay in India. The majority of this time will be spent in Mumbai at the Amar Chitra Katha office
where I will observe the creative processes, from the first conceptualizations of issues to the final
printings. I will also examine the Amar Chitra Katha archives, studying the comics and placing all
of the titles in their original chronological order (new copyrights are given each time they are
periodically reissued), tracing their evolution over time. Anant Pai has welcomed me to observe
these processes and interview the writers and editors at the studio, including Subba Rao (editor) and
Shri Ram Waeerkar (artist). However, as much of the writing and drawing is done on a freelance
basis, I will also need to spend several months traveling to Calcutta to meet with Souren Roy (artist),
to Hyderabad to meet with Chandu Mirge (artist), to Kerala to meet with Mohandas Menon (artist),
Karline McLain, Asian Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
AIIS Dissertation Proposal 2000
and finally to Chennai to meet with Kamala Chandrakant (former associate editor). While
conducting open-ended interviews with these individuals, I will also take the opportunity to establish
contact with consumers of the comics in these cities to conduct initial interviews. I plan to seek out
a core group of approximately 25 individual consumers in Mumbai (of different gender, age, and
religion) with whom I can conduct more extensive interviews. I would like to affiliate myself with
the University of Delhi, as this association will allow me to contact feminist scholars such as Uma
Chakravarti and Kumkum Roy, who would provide valuable input into my project.
I am qualified to conduct this project for several reasons. First, for my masters thesis I
analyzed the literary and visual content of Amar Chitra Katha in order to argue that the modern
Indian identity constructed by these comics parallels Hindu nationalist discourse in several ways: in
the makeup of the Indian (male) citizen and the impact of religion on citizenship; in the use of
mythology in the construction of ideal gender role models and oppositional others; and in the
visual employment of ritual fetish objects (such as the saffron flag). My dissertation will extend
beyond the issue of Hindu nationalism, exploring the larger question of identity formation within
public culture as a transnational, intertextual process. Second, I have studied Hindi and Urdu, as
well as Sanskrit, throughout my graduate career. By the time of the award period I will have
completed eleven semesters of Hindi and Urdu. Additionally, I attended the AIIS Summer Hindi
Program in Udaipur, Rajasthan. This language training will allow me to conduct interviews in
Hindi with those people who are more comfortable conversing in Hindi than in English. Third, as
my transcripts demonstrate, my coursework covers the range of South Asian civilization, religion,
and disciplinary approaches that I will employ, including several courses in gender studies. Finally,
I have been in communication for the past year with Anant Pai and Kamala Chandrakant, and both
have agreed to interviews and offered to help me in my research.
After spending eight months in India carrying out this research, I will return to the U.S. to
conduct additional research within the diaspora community (two to three months), and plan to
complete my dissertation by summer 2003. I intend to share the results of this research with my
colleagues in India, and will seek publication for my dissertation in the U.S. as well as in India.
