The Avatar Trail
Karna
- Stage 1: Amar Chitra Katha’s tale of a good-looking archer’s high birth, low life, unshaken loyalty and unfailing generosity melted hearts.
- Stage 2: In B.R. Chopra’s TV Mahabharata, Pankaj Dheer played him with a double chin, bushy moustache and hairy forearms; but audiences still loved him.
- Stage 3: Reinvented in Vimanika Comics’ recently released Sixth series as a multi-millionaire real estate tycoon who is plagued in his nightmares by injustices done to him centuries ago.
Bheem
- Stage 1: Amar Chitra Katha pit him against Hanuman, telling how he could move mountains but not a monkey’s tail.
- Stage 2: In B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharata, Praveen Kumar turned him into a gorilla-like character who spoke in grunts and emoted through growls.
- Stage 3: Chhota Bheem reinvents him as a nine-year-old do-gooder whose strength is upstaged by his cuteness.
Hanuman
- Stage 1: Calendar image of divine monkey flying away with an entire mountain because he couldn’t find a prescribed herb.
- Stage 2: Dara Singh’s portrayal in Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan. Everyone was taken with his plastered lips, misty eyes, the way he kept repeating “Prabhu”.
- Stage 3: Returns in 21st century avatar to bless the earth as a cherubic mischief-monger, dodging bullets like Keanu Reaves in The Matrix.
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Jai Damani, at 5, has a well-deserved reputation for precocity. But even so, his mother, Suchita, was surprised when, at admission time at a Mumbai school, his answer to the innocuous question “Have you ever been to the beach?” took a sharp mythological turn. The kindergartener described in detail not just the time he had seen idols of Ganesha being immersed in the sea, he also regaled his audience with nuggets of mythological lore, revealing with great assurance, “Ganesha goes inside the water to be reunited with his mother Parvati”.
Even as she worried over what impression her son left on the interviewers, Suchita remembers asking herself, “How does he know this stuff?” Once home, the DVD rack helped untangle the mystery. The 5-year-old had picked up most of his information from My Friend Ganesha, the part-animated, part-live action film that proved so popular that the producers released a third instalment earlier this year. “These films have a moral and children obviously catch on to that,” says Suchita. “There is only that much that can be got out of Tom trying to kill Jerry,”
Chandrika Behl can vouch for that. Her 4-year-old, Samaira, didn’t just devour the Ramayana DVD (produced by Indo-Japanese firm Nippon Ramayana), but deeply enjoys temple visits and wards off nocturnal monsters by insisting on a bedtime story with a god as protagonist. “Gods are everywhere you look,” says Chandrika. “You thank god for the food you eat. You tell your child she is lucky because of what god has given her. The attraction seems only natural.”
It’s rather more than that—divine omnipresence here has a distinctly materialist spin. Not just temple god and a celluloid action hero, Hanuman is also a birthday party theme, his gada given away to tiny tots as return presents. And bookstores are increasingly cluttered with tomes and comics that retell the epics for a contemporary audience. Kiddie TV channels, meanwhile, are forsaking dubbed Japanese samurai thrillers for stories spun around Indian mythological characters. The gods, it seems, have never been so much in vogue.
The task of leading the mythology brigade charge has fallen on the unlikely but broad shoulders of Bheem, rather than the heroic Arjuna or Karna. In earlier TV avatars, he was just a hot-headed, brawny prince, but for the animated show Chhota Bheem, he has been made younger, pulled out of his dusty kingdom Hastinapur and thrown into the fictional village of Dholakpur, where he joins a motley crew of cherubic do-gooders to combat evil in T-20 cricket encounters and other such bravado-inspiring events. Last year, Turner Entertainment’s Pogo Channel, which airs Chhota Bheem, was the most watched Indian kids’ channel whenever the show was on. Vishnu Athreya, Hong Kong-based director of programmes at Turner Entertainments Networks Asia, says, “Chhota Bheem combines moral values with great storytelling. What you get as a consequence is India’s first animated character hero.”
“As far as our content strategy is concerned,” says Athreya, “Indian mythology is right up there.” But the focus, he goes on to elaborate, “is on storytelling and not religion”. This decoupling of the mythological from religiosity marks a significant shift from the 1980s when grandmothers, grandchildren in tow, would take off their slippers and sit in cross-legged devotion before TV sets to watch serialised epics churned out by the Ramanand Sagar factory. Lead actors like Dara Singh, who played Hanuman, would constantly appear misty-eyed, with palms eternally joined in the presence of Rama. The wrestler must find it difficult to relate to the new Hanuman, almost always a cartoon, and on occasion a young mischief-monger, who can, with the help of animation, dodge bullets Matrix-like and fight monsters made of non-biodegradable waste.
P. Jayakumar, CEO of Toonz Animation, which put together a series of Hanuman films, says, “If we drastically changed the core values of mythology, we would lose its purity and purpose. But at the same time, a series or a movie is a commercial venture and market acceptability is a prime criteria. Animation adds a much-needed entertainment element.”
Without that entertainment element, believes Avantika Madan, she would find it hard to get her three-year-old son Arhan to eat—and become, or so goes her daily spiel at mealtimes, “as strong as Chhota Bheem”. Avantika, who at one time conducted mythology-based storytelling classes for children, says, “The earlier lot of epic serials on TV weren’t able to compete with Power Rangers and other such stunt-friendly superheroes. We need these new fast-paced cartoons so that mythology is not left far behind.” Apart from TV and DVDs, Avantika recommends the new breed of strikingly illustrated mythological picture books compared to which, she says, “Amar Chitra Katha definitely loses out”.
A great many of today’s adults who grew up on “ACK” would be disappointed by such a casual dismissal of the comic series. Indeed, so would their creator, Anant Pai, who still vividly recalls what made him put pen to paper and draw almost every known Hindu mythological story. “It was February 1967,” says the octogenarian, “and I was walking down Delhi’s Ajmal Khan Road. In a shop window, I saw a little TV, and there was a quiz contest on. The five students participating all answered a question about Greek mythology, but not one of them knew what Rama’s mother was called. I knew something had to be done.”
Pai did fulfil his mission, modern comic book creators acknowledge, but for many he is yesterday’s mythological storyteller. They yearn to break away from the shackles of linear storytelling, indeed from the shadow of Pai himself. Karan Vir Arora, editor-in-chief of Vimanika Comics, says, “We wouldn’t even exist without ACK. But let’s face it, the artwork lacked imagination, the stories were a retelling of the scriptures. To appeal to the youth, you need a much larger canvas.”
Vaanar grace Toonz Animation labs have churned out a series of Hanuman films
So in a plotline that would seem sacriligeous to Pai, Vimanika Comics’ Sixth series reinvents Mahabharata’s Karna as an nri real estate tycoon who returns to India in search of answers to questions he gets asked in nightmares about a life passed aeons ago. “I don’t feel that this narrative innovation takes away from mythology,” says Arora. “We have only contemporarised Karna as a Super Karna for today.”
Mythologist and author Devdutt Pattanaik is not a fan of such reinventions; he believes they are often naive and even misleading, and too much about “good” pulverising “evil”, while the epics themselves are far more nuanced. “The word ‘evil’ itself cannot be translated into most Indian languages,” he points out.
Indeed, Pattanaik, whose Hanuman’s Ramayan was released earlier this year, warns parents not to make the mistake of regarding mythology as a set of parables that will turn their kids into model children. He says, “Imagine telling your child, ‘Once upon a time there was a king with three wives ...’. How does that create morals and values in the 21st century? Mythology does not create ‘model’ children; mythological stories shape a culture’s understanding of life and define its worldview.”
When author Namita Gokhale visited a school last month, she found that today’s 12-14 year olds have imbibed some of this more adult cultural understanding without being spoonfed any particular version of the myths. The students seemed to have a detailed knowledge of the Mahabharata and they all asked about the injustice done to Eklavya and the moral quandaries facing Karna. “Since its morally open-ended, the epic was training them to reinterpret their world and look at it afresh,” says the writer.
Gokhale, who released her child-friendly The Puffin Mahabharata last year, has her own explanation for the current popularity of the mythological: “I don’t think this is just about market demand. In a world in which story-savvy grandmothers and aunts are becoming rare, readers are looking for an anchor of common sense and folk wisdom, and writers are trying to position mythology in modernity.” And, according to Gokhale, Disney will always look pale and boring compared to “gods that have almost come to life with 4,000 years of worship”. Given that she one day plans to bring out a video game based on the Mahabharata, we can all prepare ourselves for the gods staying alive for a while to come.
