Busting the myth of Indian cartoons

Soumik Bannerjee was ten years old in 1989. He remembers vividly the summer morning when his whole family gathered in front of their TV set to watch BR Chopra’s Mahabharat.

The mighty Bheem was engaged in mortal combat with Dushyasan, the second Kaurav. He flung his enemy onto the ground, put his foot on his neck, and ripped his arm out clean with a bloodthirsty roar. Not satisfied, he then proceeded to tear open Dushyasan’s chest, put his mouth to the gaping wound, and drank his blood. Soumik recalls all of this in graphic detail with almost child-like glee.

Now that he’s the father of an eight-year-old, how he would feel if he were to catch his daughter watching the same gruesome scene on television? Soumik replies that if he were around to put it in the proper context for her, he wouldn’t mind. In fact, it’s the ‘kid-friendly’, watered-down versions on offer today that irk him.

“I asked my grandmother how Bheem, a good guy, could do something so awful? And in the process I learnt about the consequences of violence. I also realised that demi-gods can have dark sides. That is why the Mahabharat is brilliant. It makes us recognise our complexity — as individuals, and as a society,” he says. “Mythology is important for kids. But the kind of fare that is served up in the name of mythology to kids today, well, the less said about it the better.”

Mythology P/G-rated
The ‘fare’ Soumik is referring to, is the slew of Indian mythology-based films and cartoon shows released in recent years. Hanuman (2005) was the initiator of this particular trend. The success of the film led to production houses and television channels jumping on the mythology bandwagon.

Titles like Krishna - The Birth, Krishna Balram Bal Hanuman 1 & 2, My Friend Ganesha, and Bal Ganesh1 & 2 started flooding the Indian market. Aimed at kids, they showed off the cuteness of their eponymous protagonists while dealing in plots that were essentially simplistic parables.

Says Krishna Desai, the Director of Programming at Turner International Pvt., the parent company of Cartoon Network and Pogo, “Mythology was the lowest hanging fruit in the early days of indigenous content-development; it was familiar, family-friendly, and had a built-in base.”

He is quick to point out though that their current programming has moved away from mythology and deals with issues that are relevant to kids today.

A quick search of indigenous cartoon shows throw up names like Chhota Bheem, Kumbh-Karan and Roll no. 21 (where a modern-day avatar of Krishna gets up to mischief in a boarding school), which indicate otherwise.

Desai counters that Chhota Bheem and Kumbh-Karan, even though they’re named after mythological characters, are completely disconnected from mythology. This is true to a certain extent. It’s highly doubtful that the proud and furious Bheem ever wielded a cricket bat or snow-boarded down snowy slopes as his pint-sized counterpart does in Chhota Bheem. Yet, in these shows, the conception of the lead characters borrows heavily from mythology. 

This sort of gentrification of much grittier characters does not sit well with Ashok Banker, author of the Ramayana series of books. “These shows extract individual elements from mythology under the mistaken impression that they’re picking the ‘cool’ elements — superpowers, battles, romances, adventures — not realising that it’s like ripping off pieces of fabric from a brilliant design, or stealing stones and carvings from a timeless monument. The parts are not the whole.”

While adults, like Banker, might look down their noses at such shows, kids seem delighted with them. Ten-year-old Keshav Rai waxes lyrical about Little Krishna, “He’s (Krishna) so mischievous and fun. He also cares about people,” he says. When asked how feels about the more violent aspects of mythology, he crinkles his face, “It can be a little sickening. But I’m ten now, I think I can handle it.”

Bad guys are ugly
The white-washed, clean-cut, nature of these shows is precisely what appeals to some. Nandita Shah, mother of seven-year-old Vaidehi appreciates the simple moral values held up by shows like Chhota Bheem and Rollno.21, “It shows my daughter what the right thing to do is, and it carries a strong moral message. I prefer her watching such shows, which have good Indian values, over Japanese cartoons like Shinchan, which are often obnoxious,” she says.

Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has a very different view of the values that these shows project. According to him, the morality espoused by these shows is simplistic and far-removed from the complex values of the Indian epics. “Most of these ‘heroes’ seem to be only bashing up ‘bad’ guys. No one’s actually saying what makes a person ‘bad’. Ugliness is being equated with evil. These seem to be values given out by cartoons,” he counters. This does ring true when you watch some of these shows.

In Chhota Bheem, for example, Bheem’s main foe is Kaalia, the village bully. Not only is his complexion darker than Bheem and most of the ‘good guys’, he’s also a gross caricature of an overweight person.

Pattanaik rues the fact that parents and grandparents are no longer the primary imparters of the ancient wisdom stored in our epics. “How many parents and grandparents actually tell stories anymore? They let movies and television do their jobs for them. And the stories that these mediums churn out lack the intellectual investment necessary to make an honest appraisal of our cultural values. We have become cultural beggars,” he says, with evident disappointment.

Our mythology, Pattanaik seems to indicate, is more complex than the simple binary of good versus evil. The subtleties and moral nuances of these epic stories are overlooked by the TV shows, and therefore children fed on a fodder of these simplistic re-tellings lose out on the cultural learning our mythology imparts. 

There seem to be contradictory opinions about whether the current bunch of TV shows is actually an effective representation of our mythology. The question arises therefore, what is the function of mythology in society? Banker explains, “Mythology is the foundation of culture, memory, self-awareness, and identity. It’s like the original Facebook of cultural identity connecting us all, directly and indirectly. These are our shared memories — sometimes hazy, perhaps unreliable but still powerful and alive.”

If the function of mythology, as Banker puts it, is to connect us all culturally, one wonders whether the children today are getting cross-connected.