Uncle Pai had his prejudices

The death of Anant Pai, popularly known as Uncle Pai, marks the end of an epoch. He has rightly been hailed for popularising Indian history, legend, and mythology, packaging them into readable comics that were literally staple reading in the era before TV exploded in our living rooms. For millions of children, particularly those in urban India and who could therefore not sit at their grandparents’ feet to learn about our traditions, ACK became the substitute.

The apocryphal story goes Pai once overheard some children in south Mumbai discussing Greek gods but they were unaware of stories about Hindu gods. Worried that Hindu culture would be lost as India modernised, he began writing and drawing ACK comic books.

There is no doubt that Anant Pai deserves much credit for his pioneering work. As children, my brother and I grew up reading ACK comic books, particularly on lazy summer vacation afternoons. Few of us in our 30s and 40s today will deny that much, if not all, of our knowledge about Hindu mythology comes from ACK.

And for that, we all owe a debt of gratitude to Anant Pai.
Unfortunately, there is a more sinister side to ACK comics that has, alas, often been ignored. To put it bluntly, ACK should rank among the most politically incorrect comic books available today.

ACK comic books are casteist, racist, and not very subtly propagate Hindu superiority over other religions (particularly Islam) and Brahmin superiority over other castes.

For instance, in every comic book, the hero is always drawn as being fair (even if in actual life the person may not have been so fair), muscular, slim, and good-looking in a classical way (square jaw, clean smile, thin lips, etc). In contrast, the villains are invariably dark, pot-bellied, buck toothed, with a permanent grimace. In comics that depict battles between Hindu and Muslim kings, the latter are often depicted as rapacious villains. So when a Muslim army raids a city, the panels depict women and children fleeing in horror as men with beards wield swords. Yet if there is a case where the Hindu leader wiped out a Muslim settlement, all that is shown is someone writing in a huge book about how ‘no one was spared’, and thereby avoiding any gory visuals. An example: Banda Bahadur.

Even worse is the racism. The Mahabharata records that Draupadi was a dark-skinned person; she is shown to be pale blue (why can’t she be shown dark-skinned like most of us Indians are anyway?). Krishna, a name that literally means black, is shown as dark blue, never dark brown or savla (the colour of most Indians).

The dark skin tones are reserved exclusively for all the Asuras. Nowhere does this prejudice come out stronger than in the comic book on Prahalad; the good boy that he is, Prahalad is shown fair-skinned; not his father who is killed by Narasimha.

The comic of Adi Shankaracharya, who was a Namboodiripad Brahmin, shows Adi Shankaracharya as fair-skinned even as fellow Namboodiripads are shown as dark skinned. Adi Shankaracharya hailed from Kerala. How could he have had the skin tone of a Kashmiri? Similarly, Dr Ambedkar is always shown fairer compared to his followers.

Such bipolar depictions only feed existing prejudices of the so-called upper caste as fair versus the so-called lower castes as dark; of fair north Indians versus darker south Indians (the irony is that Pai is a south Indian).

This is not to berate the otherwise good work done by Pai, who was, after all a product of his times. In the 1960s and 1970s, few were aware of such political correctness. Other comic strips too have been accused of fostering prejudices. The extremely popular Tintin comics were quite racist in their depictions of Africans, Arabs, and even Indians (see Tintin In Tibet, Cigars Of The Pharaoh), though always humourous. In the UK, Enid Blyton’s books are no longer recommended reading for children due to her subtle racism.

Moreover, comics remain a tool for disseminating knowledge, and even for spreading goodwill. If used rightly, they can bring about positive change simply because they influence children to a large degree. It is believed that the Ku Klux Klan was laid low not by police action but by Superman comics that poked fun at Ku Klux Klan members, and which children soon began mimicking, thereby mocking Klan members.

The comics of Pai, may his soul rest in peace, are worthy of not just being preserved, but of being reprinted for future generations. But there is no doubt that future editors have their work cut out in terms of doing away with the comics’ prejudices. Perhaps they could start with the first ACK comic, titled Krishna. Let’s just draw him black!