It never quite took off as it might have, but for readers brought up on the sedate visions of Ramanand Sagar (known for television series Ramayana) and BR Chopra, this version of the Mahabharata— which initially found expression through comic books—was a mind-shattering thrill. It was as if the wheel of samay (time) had suddenly sped up, to collide with the future in furious revolutions.
This ‘India of science-fiction dreams’ was dreamt up by two creators a while ago. Their influence still lingers like the background radiation left over from the Big Bang. With the teaser for upcoming movie Ramayana amassing millions of views on Youtube and creating a buzz over its humongous budget running into thousands of crores, it is time to revisit India’s long search for a more futuristic, sci-fi inspired storytelling.
The big question—can sci-fi for the world, created in India, come from time-travelling to our past?
BACK TO THE FUTURE
The last few years have seen a tsunami of epics reimagined as well as adjacent to mythology—there is Disney + Hotstar’s animated Ramayana, Kalki 2898, Brahmastra and the unmade Immortal Ashwatthama.
Long before the movies, there were the comics. Comic book fans of a certain vintage will recall the excitement in India in the late nineties. A new wave of comics and graphic novels was upon us. These were not your father’s Indrajal or Chacha Chaudhary. In this febrile environment came a thunderbolt of an announcement. A reinvention of the Mahabharata backed by top-notch talent and deep wallets. The press releases from that era are borderline messianic, with Chopra stating that “we will forge new mythologies bringing together East and West” while Kapur said “comic book characters—traditional and digital—are the new cult, the new religion. India’s 600 million teenagers are now at the forefront of the creation of these new gods, derived directly from the vast ocean of mythology”. Their goal was to replicate what anime/manga had done for Japan in the American market by getting the Yanks to develop a taste for this fusion Indian sensibility.
18 Days was to be the opener of the new way. The writer who would breathe life into this new universe was industry legend Grant Morrison, known for edgy works such as Doom Patrol and Arkham Asylum. He now wanted to work on a “huge scale, a cosmic scale”.
And the artist was a then little-known Mumbaikar Mukesh Singh. He had won a contest by depicting Superman paying homage to Hanuman, which, back then, spread around the Indian internet at the speed of Orkut. After working with Shekhar Kapur on a series, Singh said he wanted to next work on a “psychedelic Lord of the Rings with Star Wars technology”.
Singh’s concept art for Morrison’s script is filled with colossal war machines, atomic dreadnoughts, high-energy superweapons and mechanoid dinosaurs, among other wonders.
They were so striking that Singh says, “After Grant received the images, he went back and changed (the script). Morrison would say “all technology should consider embracing some of this retro-Indian-steam punk aesthetic” and coined the term “Vedicpunk” to describe Singh’s approach.
This was the beginning of the rise of this highly influential imaginary that can also be called “techno-Vedic”.
A RADICAL LOOK
Morrison wanted a clean break with the past, for making this “mythic poetic realm”, and would say “we should use familiar historical styles and fashions that we associate with traditional depictions of the Mahabharata and then mutate those traditional influences into a much more shiny, reflective, decorative look”.
Singh’s art marks a sharp departure from Raja Ravi Varma style, whose blending of European and Tanjore art would become so definitive, for both devotional art as well as Indian comics.
Indeed the venerable Amar Chitra Katha, with artists like Ram Waeerkar or Dilip Kadam with their deft brushstrokes and poster-like compositions, had already reached a kind of pinnacle of this style.
Singh agrees that Varma brought “realism into mythology” but there was an “unspoken dissatisfaction” with the portrayal of these characters. He says this grew out of a milieu of an “aspirational Indian middle-class” as “I always felt our gods were too distant, they were kept too distant from us”.
This was the India of those yeh dil mange more years, wanting to push boundaries, do what hadn’t been done before. Singh wanted to bring the energy of a Neal Adams or Frank Frazetta into what was staid and chaste calendar art.
SCIENCE FICTION’S TIME LAG
While 18 Days was envisaged as the beginning of a cinematic universe with comics, animation and films, it never quite took off. The concept art however went on to live, right-clicked and saved into eternity. And now scraped for AI to train on, it lives forever like a ghost in a cyberpunk machine.
The immediate fallout was a host of derivative mythological comics “inspired” by this techno-cosmic blend hitting the market in that mini-boom of the 2010s.
Though Singh and Morrison didn’t set out to do so, it perhaps set in motion a process, which would be described by critic Philip Lutgendorf as the “colonisation of Indian imagination by a new aesthetic hegemon…(that) …glorifies hyperbolic musculature, militaristic machismo, techno-weaponry capable of unleashing apocalyptic violence, and the angst-ridden, usually male characters who wield it”.
But science fiction always asks the what if question. Why hasn’t (yet), Indian science fiction taken off as a genre of the masses?
The golden age of the pulps in the US that catapulted writers like Asimov and Heinlein was born on the tide of rapid industrialisation, scientific progress, and a side-helping of world war.
The heroes were usually jut-jawed engineers or pilots, almost always male, who punched the universe till it all made sense. Similarly, the 90s liberalisation that enabled large disposable incomes, the rise of IT and a huge clade of engineers ought to have done the same, with our own unique twist.
One only must look at China, where there is no dearth of spectacular imagery or outsized spectacle. What they have is mega-science fiction, but bearing the imprint of the culture which birthed it. In Cixin Liu’s Wandering Earth, for instance, giant machines the size of mountains must push earth out of orbit, out of the blast radius of a sun that is about to explode. It is not a lone hero but a high-powered committee armed with the appropriate powers which problem-solves at a solar level.
Perhaps India’s reluctance to embrace sci-fi lock, stock and barrel stems from India’s complicated relationship with it in the first place.
Mind you, it had a promising start. Scientist JC Bose’s foray into science fiction in 1896 was sparked by a short-story competition sponsored by a hair oil company; his winning entry Runaway Cyclone involved a nifty plan to save Calcutta from the titular weather phenomenon, with an early rendition of the Butterfly effect.
Despite this, in general there is a tendency in India to draw upon images of the past for making meaning in the present. Sociologist S Viswanathan puts it more bluntly, “One of the strange absences in the Indian imagination is sci-fi. Maybe the fecundity of our myths made the sci-fi imagination unnecessary”. But the mutability of epics such as the Ramayana or Mahabharata, which can be recast in any form, is a killer app. This is echoed by Lutgendorf, who says the ‘adhbuta rasa’, or sense of wonder, is already evoked through the Puranas.
On the other hand, according to literary critic Joan Gordon: “India’s very rich tradition begins not with Mary Shelley or Jules Verne… but perhaps with the Ramayana… It has different definitions and aesthetic principles, a different relationship to fantasy…Its science may be Ayurvedic as well as Newtonian..”
A FERTILE CLIMATE
What next? Climate change could be the next big thing, insinuating itself overtly or covertly into our fiction. Our linear progress, to become the next Shanghai, the next Dubai will also contain the fear of a chaotic unravelling, of a future filled with tensions.
This new age–filled with wars, tsunamis and pandemics—is not going to be for beginners. Perhaps the default reflex to make meaning out of all this will not draw from sci-fi or contemporary literature, but once again retreat to the primal legends—an eternal, inexhaustible well from which India has always drawn upon.
It also helps that the Puranas and the epics catalogue descriptions of extreme weather events, and the mechanics of the great dissolution or pralaya is quite entertaining, as it involves mega droughts followed by planet-spanning forest fires, refugee movements between the worlds, and colossal flooding.
It ideally lends itself to become integrated into climate-change themed fictions in India, replete with striking and memorable imagery.
The Puranas mention how the “world will look famished” after droughts that last for centuries, and then “rains will start pouring down in streams as thick as the trunk of an elephant”, after mass drownings, the “seven rays of the Sun which had grown fat by drinking this water would become seven separate Suns…these Suns would burn all the three worlds …Then the earth would look like the back of a tortoise”.
The shape of the climate crisis also means that India will be subject to these conditions well before the West. In essence, India will turn into a sub-continent sized laboratory of ideas, of survival strategies as well as cautionary tales. Perhaps it can lead to another fusion, of titanic legends from the beginning of time to mega-science at the end of it.
(The author is a Hyderabad-based writer)
