Sometimes books create wrinkles in space-time. (I take that to mean that for some reason involving bodies with massive gravity, space-time bends so that a “now” and a “then” or a “here” and a “there” rub up unexpectedly against each other. It’s the stuff of basic science fiction.) That happened recently when news broke of the death of Anant Pai, the “Uncle Pai” whose name adorned the hundreds of Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) titles of the average English-speaking 1980s Indian childhood.
I had been reading a book by the late travel writer Norman Lewis, the beautiful but chilling The Missionaries (Macmillan 1988). It describes the terminal damage done to the world’s isolated tribes by Christian missionaries — chiefly those from the well-funded and aggressive Protestant missions who fanned out across the globe in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Suddenly there were roads bulldozed through the jungle. There were ex-military airstrips in clearings, and light aeroplanes that could use them. Access, money and the ebb of colonialism allowed Christianisation to be carried out on a once-unthinkable scale.
There was a cold logic to the process. In Guatemala, where Lewis lived in the 1950s, upper-class Catholic whites from Guatemala City often drove to the hill town of Chichicastenango to have health problems sorted out by the brujo, or Indian witch doctor. But the local evangelist missionary Mr Fernley was, unlike the local Catholic Church, keen to end all tribal practices. By cutting the Indians off from their past he expected them to make better believers.
“He had no power to put an end to the pagan ceremonies that set so many shutters clicking,” Lewis writes. “Nevertheless he set out to disrupt such entertainments in every way he could... Mr Fernley’s scouts kept him informed of fiestas when these things occurred, and he would hurry to the spot carrying a movie camera on a stand, and start close-up filming. This was often enough to frighten the performers into taking to their heels.” The souls of the Indians would not be saved, Fernley said, “until every vestige of the customs linking them to a hopeless pre-Christian past had been abolished.”
This is mild compared to what Lewis saw in French Indo-China. There, the authorities liked the missionaries because once they had done their work among the tribes, what was left was a deracinated mass of men who could be put cheaply to work on the plantations.
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What do ruined tribes have to do with ACK? Someone should write a book on the 1980s in popular culture and their impact on the formation of an urban middle-class worldview. Every obituary of Uncle Pai, a gentle man by all accounts, repeats the story that he decided to do over the old stories in comic form because, he was sad to see, Indian children could identify figures from Greek mythology but not name the mother of Ram.
He was certainly right about the hunger for lightweight historical storytelling. But because ACK was so successful, his vision alone has peopled the memory and imagination of two generations of urban Indians. Absorbing ACK’s holy texts we have converted ourselves to a shared orthodoxy.
What’s more, just as missionary Christianity was right for colonialism, the pleasing, nostalgic vision of the past and of imagined national identity that ACK offers is suited for an aspiring modern middle class. It belongs in the 1980s with TV’s Mahabharata and Ramayana, with “Mile sur mera tumhara” and the hunger for a clean, rooted, truly Indian hero. It’s all very religious, in fact — not Hindu or Christian, just religious — and still unsettlingly relevant.