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| Vol. 4, Issue 2 February 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
Superhumans and Standard Gods
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| What do two recent popular novels say about our vision of the transcendental? |
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| S |
AMIT BASU'S Turbulence is that customer-friendly
thing—a racy read. Several hundred passengers on a
flight from London to Delhi are suddenly endowed
with superpowers—they miraculously become what they’ve
always wanted to be. Basu leaves out the backstory—not just
the previous lives of these once-ordinary people, but also
their transformation |
into airborne gods. He cuts straight to the action.
When the novel opens, some weeks after that magic
flight, superhero and gravity-defying Vir Singh is soaring
above a Pakistani nuclear research centre, seconds away
from striking it. Just then, he gets an anonymous call from
a man who tries to restrain him.
“You want to…make the world a safer place for one and
all? Well, going down there and re-enacting King Kong isn’t
going to achieve that…it’s not possible. Not in this world,
not even with your powers,” says the mysterious caller. A
little later he asks Vir, “Who’s the greatest Indian leader
ever?” Gandhi, says Vir. “Ask yourself this. If Gandhi had
your powers, would he be flying around above a Pakistani
nuclear site, wiping his foggy glasses and trying to start
World War III, or would he be doing something slightly
more productive?”
This exchange touches on one of the novel’s key ideas.
How to be a convincing superhuman without being, in
comic book terms, predictable? For if there’s one thing Basu
knows well, it’s the saturated nature of the superhero genre. So how will he ensure that a new set of superheroes does
not remind us of the old ones, even if this time the worldsavers
are not Caucasian cape-wearers but tall, dark and
beautiful Indian ones?
Basu deals with possible superhuman fatigue by making
his creations ironic about themselves. “We’ve got very
functional powers, very sidekicky powers, very mass-media
powers,” says lead player Aman Sen, the man on the
phone to Vir. Basu’s players aren’t meant to be giants. So
King Kong, as in the above exchange, cannot be emulated.
To those who grow megalomaniacal, our hero Aman (who’s trying to build a superhero team from his base in Mumbai)
says things like “Don’t go Darth Vader on me.” And when
the time comes for Vir to go out into the world and proclaim
his powers, Aman dissuades him from taking on a grandiloquent
superhero name. “All the good ones are taken. Trust
me, I’ve looked,” he says.
These touches of irony add to the charm of Turbulence.
They enhance the realism of the fantasy which is exactly
how fantasy works—by leading us to believe in a small corner
of our hearts that, despite the hyperbole, none of what
we’re seeing is, strictly speaking, impossible.
| COURTESY OF HACHETTE INDIA |
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Samit Basu deals with possible superhuman fatigue by making
his creations ironic about themselves. |
But despite the frequent allusions to his forerunners in
the genre, this is not a novel only for the initiated. Basu
talks to the genre by writing in all kinds of pop culture references from manga comics to Star Wars, but he also talks
to those who might miss the in-jokes. Our proxy layperson
is the British-Pakistani beauty and aspiring Bollywood actress
Uzma Abidi, who wishes, once she throws in her lot
with her fellow superhumans, that she had read more science
fiction. Another proxy is flying wonder Vir Singh.
“We’ll be hunted down, imprisoned, either way—by you
people or by someone else,” says Aman. “It’s like the
X-Men.”
“Who?” asks Vir.
“Have you been living under a rock? You don’t know the
X-Men? Not even the movies?”
“Aman I don’t have time for movies. I spend my time
defending India.”
“Good for you…”
The references don’t come just out of a sense of humour
or affection, however. They are also there to illustrate another
key idea. Which is that superheroes matter—they are
potentially more than just the colourful constructions of
writers who want to publish entertaining novels. “Heroic
myths and legends through the course of human history
are all true,” says Basu through his Mad Scientist character
Sundar Narayan. “And these heroes…appeared because of
these legends; the legends were not records of their actions, but prophetic texts derived from collective human aspirations
that paved the way for their arrival.”
To imagine something vividly can sometimes be enough
to realise it. This is the premise of Turbulence, too. Each
of the passengers on Flight BA 142 acquires powers that
matches her or his dreams. But having got what they wanted,
having fulfilled the first requirement of extraordinariness,
they must now fulfil the second. They must put their
superpowers to meaningful use. What would this be?
Basu’s superhumans are, in their moral confusion over
power, recognisably human. It’s all very well to be able
to save the world, but how does one go about it? True to
the genre, the first thing superhumans must save is themselves.
For, inevitably, pitted against the good guys is the
arch-nemesis, the one whose greatest failing is hubris—the
Icarus who is going to fly too close to the sun.
Jai Mathur’s dream is military conquest of the world. He
would have liked the armed forces to back him so that this
could have been an Indian military conquest of the world,
but the armed forces prove too slow to understand. So Jai is
going it alone with his own band of super-soldiers.
Even though Jai is the enemy, Basu doesn’t downplay
any thrills one might get from having a hero with an Indian
name say things like “London’s such a lovely city, and
I would hate to have to destroy it.” He also clearly hugely
enjoyed setting his denouement in the British capital, with
all its reinforcements thrown helter-skelter, although this
final battle goes on for far too long (the one drawback of superhumans
is that, given their enhanced abilities, no fight
between them can ever be efficient.) Nor can one miss the
elation of the thousands watching Vir Singh fly in a perfect
arc over Delhi’s India Gate or fail to feel a frisson of excitement
at Aman’s intuition of what the world’s thinking when
it learns of Jai’s exploits—“Superman exists, and he’s not
American.”
In the end though, the novel’s apotheosis consists not in
the triumph of good over evil or of India over the rest of
the world but in restating, in a way that is both serious and
funny, the question about what is the good. Even if Aman
Sen can and does erase Third World debt in an afternoon,
to save the world, it turns out, is both harder and much simpler
than that.
| T |
HE DIFFICULTY OF BEING GOOD, the politics of power,
and the doings of superhumans are also the subjects
of Slayer of Kamsa, the first book in Ashok Banker’s
proposed Krishna series. The book ends with the birth of
Krishna. What we have here, therefore, is almost entirely backstory. Centring on the doings of Kamsa, wicked prince of Mathura, and the
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attempts of Vasudeva (king of the Suras and eventually father to Krishna) to thwart Kamsa, the tale unfolds leisurely, detailing the political organisation of the kingdoms of Arya Varta and their feuds.
There are, of course, numerous ways of entering into the
mythology of Krishna. The Krishna of Meerabai’s bhajans
is different from the Krishna of the Bhagavad Gita, for
instance. And that Krishna is, in turn, different from the
Krishna of Gita Govinda.
Banker’s Krishna, at least in this first volume, belongs to
a world of kings, warriors and battles; his aesthetic is Ramanand
Sagar, complete with ornate palaces, giant armies,
archetypal lovers and stock dialogues. While viewers of TV
mythologicals might be the primary audience for Banker’s
series, he also seems to want to pull in consumers of fantasy
and science fiction; Krishna is described on the blurb
as a superhero and “super-being in human form”. Amidst
the pomp and warfare—and the parampara and sanskriti—of Aryan society, there are some distinctly nerdy moments
such as when Narada, the messenger between gods and men,
explains how he uses a “vortal” to move about, something
which is, tautologically, defined as “a kind of portal that enables
one to travel between worlds”. And King Kong may be
too comic for Samit Basu’s 21st-century heroes but Banker’s
colossus, Kamsa, definitely owes something to him.
| COURTESY OF HARPERCOLLINS |
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Ashok Banker’s Krishna belongs to a world of kings, warriors
and battles. |
The title of the series too—Krishna Coriolis—is telling.
According to my dictionary, the Coriolis force is “an apparent
force that as a result of the earth’s rotation deflects
moving objects (as projectiles or air currents) to the right
in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern
hemisphere.” I’m not sure what this has to do with Krishna
but it’s got a nice sci-fi ring to it. Meanwhile, the birth of the
god himself could be something out of a low-grade science
fiction film.
A shape very much like a large oblong had appeared on
the wall, at eye level. It seemed to be formed entirely of
some kind of brilliant bluish light. He had never seen
the likes of it before. It glowed rhythmically, pulsing
and throbbing slowly, like…like…a heartbeat? Yes.
Slayer of Kamsa illustrates the challenges in retelling
mythological tales. Should one render them as modern
fantasy and make full use of contemporary technology and
cinematic special effects? Should one go the exotic, gentle,
timeless Amar Chitra Katha way? Should one try to historicise
them—locate the lives of gods and demons in a temporal
world?
Ashok Banker attempts to do all three and the result, naturally,
is a bit of a mishmash. For instance, Vasudeva, the
good king of the Sura nation who strives to practice a king’s
dharma, is an engaging character except that he is very
conveniently aided in his pursuit of justice and duty by his
supernatural powers. So, he can prevent a gigantic shower
of arrows from hurting him by simply raising his staff. His
explanation is that he is no god himself but that the gods,
possibly pleased with his pursuit of dharma, have stepped
in to lend him a helping hand.
Vasudeva’s blasé attitude to his superpowers makes his
pursuit of dharma a little glib. While Basu’s characters find
that their newfound superpowers complicate their relation
with themselves and the world, Banker’s Vasudeva does not
pause to reflect on what his powers mean in an otherwise
supposedly rational world where “the use of maya was forbidden.”
The explanation that the powers are the intervention
of Lord Vishnu only renders the god a deus ex machina
and does nothing for the story.
That leaves the historical bits—the Vedic North Indian
world of warring republics. It’s interesting to read about the
mores of the wealthy herder Yadava community into which
Krishna is born, till one encounters the following sentence
in the mouth of Jarasandha, king of Magadha, which unlike
the Yadava nations is a not a republic but a kingdom created
as a refuge for “out-castes”. Talking about what happens to
the children born of marriages between people of different
castes, Jarasandha says, “They become non-varnas. Or, to
use an inaccurate but more familiar term, out-castes. Although,
of course, varnas are not castes at all, not in the
sense that our Western brothers across the oceans use the
term.” Huh? This seems to be a contemporary Ashok Banker
talking in English, certainly not an ancient Indian king.
A little later, Jarasandha’s historical authenticity grows
even wobblier when he says that he is building the new
capital of his empire “at the site of the ancient hermitage of
Gautama”. Krishna, who will be born soon after Jarasandha
says this, is reckoned to have lived at least as far back as 900
BCE, while Gautama Buddha dates from about 500 BCE.
Despite all these shortcomings and the often clichéd
prose style, one follows Slayer of Kamsa to the end simply
for the consolation of seeing the god set the mortal world
aright. For that is a primordial idea which continues to
compel—the idea that simply because we so badly want
it, either a superhuman or just a regular god will one day
come down to influence the affairs of men.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Namit Khurana
1 March 2011
10:52 AM
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Interesting but somewhat uninformed review. There's clearly much misreading done by the reviewer with regard to both books. Basu's book is childish in its attempts at humour and seems to appeal to the new trend of adults reading YA books. Why? Have literacy standards dropped suddenly? Also, the reviewer seems to overlook the numerous "lifts" from various comic series by Basu - some quite blatant. This kind of derivatism is better left to Bollywood than to Indian authors, surely?
Haven't read the Banker book so can't comment. But must point out that despite the reviewer's naive assumptions, there's no hard evidence to prove that these characters were historic. At best they're part of itihasa or assumed oral history. So why the repeated efforts to prove historicity - is that the author or the reviewer's attempt? Can't tell for sure.
Oh, and 'Gautama' was a renowned ancient sage, clearly not Gautama Buddha (who was in any case named Siddhartha, the 'Gautama' in his case merely being a title, not his name). I hardly think Banker or any author would make such a gaffe but for a reviewer not to know even such a basic fact is deplorable.
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