How does orthodoxy maintain its power over culture? Deepa Sreenivas explores how the Amar Chitra Katha, a widely read comic series started in 1967 in India, influenced the historical and national consciousness of young readers in a conservative direction. Tacitly blaming Nehruvian welfarism of the time for the moral decline of the nation, the Amar Chitra Katha emerged as a literary articulation of the Indian right's Hindu-nationalist ideology in a modern, bourgeois guise. To renew Hindutva hegemony, the comic series gave orthodox ideas a new sheen, both in its form and content, merging Western comic styles with Indian visual story-telling traditions on the one hand, and combining mythological characters with political figureheads into harmonious narratives on the other-making it difficult to sift history from myths and legends. Sreenivas deftly argues that these mythological-political tales emphasized the instructive rather than the informative potential of history.
encouraging neoliberal values such as merit and hard work while ignoring caste or class as systemic issues.
DEEPA SREENIVAS is a professor at the Centre for Women's Studies, University of Hyderabad. Her research interests include visual culture, childhood studies and feminist pedagogy. She is the author of Sculpting a Middle Class: History, Masculinity and the Amar Chitra Katha in India (2010) and a contributor to Towards a World of Equals: A Bilingual Textbook on Gender (2015) and A World of Equals: A Textbook on Gender (2022). Her research articles have appeared in the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Tasveer Ghar and Childhood.
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