Mumbai Fables Page 30
The violence took a break for a few weeks after December 12 but was unleashed again in full force on January 6, 1993. For nearly two weeks, murder and arson raged across the city. Unlike previous communal clashes, the 1992–93 riots were not confined to particular neighborhoods but engulfed the entire city. Bal Thackeray stoked the fire by publishing inflammatory editorials.20 Armed with voter lists identifying the apartments where Muslims lived, the Sena gangs stalked the high-rise buildings in upscale neighborhoods. Terrified residents removed nameplates from the lobbies of their buildings to avert attacks. The Muslims felt threatened by the Sena-led mobs and did not trust the police to protect them. “I feel like a Jew in Nazi Germany,” said a Muslim.21 Thackeray thought that this was only fitting. In an interview with Time at that time, he said if the Muslims behaved like the Jews, “there is nothing wrong if they are treated as Jews were in Germany.”22
When it was all over, the official estimate was that nine hundred residents had lost their lives and many more were injured in the communal violence and police firings. Unofficial estimates counted many more killed and injured. Everyone agreed that the overwhelming majority of the victims were Muslims. There were many instances of the police’s anti-Muslim bias. A Muslim woman who phoned a police station for help when a Hindu mob attacked her chawl was told: “Landyabai Chup baitho, Abhi kuch nahi hua!” (Shut up, you circumcised pricks’ woman. Nothing has happened yet!). To her horror, when the policemen did show up, they assisted the Hindu rioters.23 In case after case, the police displayed rank indifference to the Muslims under attack, fired excessively at them, and collaborated with the Sainiks.24
The violence-scarred city barely had a chance to recover before it was battered once again. On March 12, 1993, ten bombs—plastic explosives packed in cars—targeted the busy commercial district and other prominent city sites. The aftermath of Black Friday presented gruesome scenes: charred bodies, blood-splattered severed limbs, mounds of shattered glass, and flattened cars. The serial bomb blasts killed over three hundred people, leaving the city engulfed in chaos and fear.
The police investigations subsequently revealed a conspiracy hatched in Dubai, Bombay, and Pakistan that used the underworld to plan and execute the blasts.25 After the 1992–93 riots, Dawood received a package in Dubai from Bombay. It contained red and green glass bangles with a mocking note in Urdu that read: “Jo bhai bahen ki izzat ki hifazat na kar sake use ye tohfa Mubarak” (A brother who cannot protect the chastity of his sisters deserves this gift).26 With this challenge to his manhood, the plot to avenge the attacks on the Muslim community was born. Now even the underworld was communalized.
The chief mastermind of the plot in Bombay was Tiger Memon, who had quickly risen from the ranks as a major smuggler. Tiger had his own motivation. During the riots, his office was burned to cinders. Inflamed by his loss, Tiger joined the conspiracy to hit India’s commercial capital in order to deliver a message to the Hindus—lay off, or else. The plan involved the transport of explosives to a landing spot on the rocky coast that was a smugglers’ haven. Teams of gang members were recruited to assemble and plant bombs. Many of them were sent to Pakistan via Dubai for training. The targets included the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Air India building, luxury hotels, the Bombay Municipal Corporation building, and the Shiv Sena headquarters. Once everything was in place, Tiger fled with his family to Dubai on an early-morning flight on March 12, just hours before the blasts.
That it took the underworld to act on behalf of the Muslim community was a telling commentary on the state of the rule of law. If any further evidence of the liberal order’s breakdown was needed, it was provided by the fate of the judicial commission instituted to inquire into the riots. The Congress-led Maharashtra government appointed the commission only when it came under intense public pressure and in an effort to restore the state’s image as an institution standing above social divisions. Justice B. N. Srikrishna, a retired High Court judge, was named to head the commission of inquiry. But when the Sena–Bharatiya Janata Party alliance rode to power in 1995, it tried to disband the inquiry. Only loud public protests and pressure from the central government forced it to restore the commission. However, the Maharashtra government hindered the process at every turn and, in an effort to blunt the expected findings against the Sena, saddled the commission with investigating both the riots and the bomb blasts.
Any hope that the government would uphold the rule of law went up in smoke when the Srikrishna Commission issued its two-volume report in 1998. The state government, first under the Sena-BJP alliance and later under the Congress, ignored the commission’s recommendations for prosecuting the guilty political leaders and police officials involved in the communal riots. Meanwhile, the investigation and prosecution of the perpetrators of the bomb blasts proceeded expeditiously, leading critics to charge that the government was quick to act against Muslims while letting Hindu activists and police officials with blood on their hands go scot-free.
The Srikrishna Commission concluded that the bloody spectacle of a sustained pogrom against the Muslims was carried out with the police looking the other way or assisting the rioters. “The police,” the commission concluded, “by their own conduct, appeared to have lost moral authority over the citizens and appeared to evoke no fears even in the minds of criminal elements.”27 The state had buckled under the pressure of Hindu majoritarianism. If the Srikrishna Commission stood out as a courageous assertion of liberal norms, its findings, disregarded by the government, demonstrated the abject failure of the rule of law.
The image of Bombay as a liberal city ruled by law and reason turned out to be a chimera. It is for this reason that the Sena-BJP government’s official renaming of Bombay as Mumbai in 1995 was not a simple matter of reclaiming the city from its colonial heritage. It was also an act of populist insurgency, a forcible takeover of state power to deliver the city to the people. Behind this story of the populist and communalist mobilization of the street lies the broader narrative of the crisis of the liberal order. The state’s authority, in spite of Justice Srikrishna’s valiant attempt, stood hollow. The combination of the Shiv Sena’s populism, the Congress’s resort to political expediency, the collapse of the mills, and the rise of the underworld and Hindu nationalism had taken its toll. Choking in a polluted atmosphere of bitterness and distrust, the city faced seemingly intractable political, social, and economic problems that had rendered it lawless and disorderly. The rhetoric of liberal democracy that filled the official realm of politics increasingly appeared unreal. The reality seemed to be corruption and violence, riots and murders. Conspiracies, hatched by politicians, builders, criminals, Hindu militants, and Muslim dons, appeared to be the underlying dynamic of the city. Anger and violence ruled the street. It was into this tortured city that Doga arrived to deliver street justice.
THE LAWLESS CITY AND THE COMIC-BOOK SUPERHERO
Crime offers a perceptive optic for viewing the state of law. Thus, imaginative practices return again and again to the scene of lawlessness. Novels, detective fiction, pulp, cinema, and comic books turn to the disorder produced by crime to represent the functioning of order. What is at issue in their depictions of murder, robbery, intrigue, kidnapping, blackmail, and extortion is the state of law. In courtroom dramas, what is on trial is not the criminal order but the legal one. When the detective carefully pieces together clues in crime fiction, he or she identifies and assembles the system’s dysfunctions. Typically, such dysfunctions are located in the city, for it is in the urban space that modernity finds its most concentrated expression. It is there that society is fabricated, pieced together, rather than formed organically. The modern city is forged by the operations of the capitalist economy and the practices of everyday life. Its built environment—the grid of transportation, streets, neighborhoods, tenements, shops, and businesses—is produced by modernity. The social spaces of the city express and are formed by modern political, cultural, and psychological forces. Above all, it is in the modern ci
ty that law functions to constitute and regulate society.
Not surprisingly, literature and cinema locate their crime fictions in the modern city. Consider Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective novels, which register the breakdown of class and racial orders in Los Angeles. Or take Hollywood film noir, with its characteristic shadows and highlights, which reveal urban wastelands of gangsters, tainted judges, femme fatales, brothels, and shysters. Crime has also served as a lens to represent urban society in India. There is an established tradition of detective pulp fiction in Hindi. In addition, Hindi cinema of the 1950s produced a spate of “crime melodramas,” such as Baazi (1951), Aar Paar (1954), Taxi Driver (1954), and CID (1956).28 Using noir style, these films depict Bombay as an ambiguous and crime-ridden space for the confrontation between law and crime, family and money. Bombay turns darker in the “angry young man” films of Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s and the 1980s. The city appears racked by the breakdown of citizenship and the legal order. Bachchan’s underclass vigilante emerges from the depths of urban crisis to singlehandedly avenge injustice.29
Like the 1950s crime melodramas and the Bachchan films, Doga views Bombay through the lens of lawlessness. But the comic book is a different medium.30 Like cinema, as a graphic form, it produces representations in images. But its boxed panels, combining text with images, constitute a specific form. Unlike cinema, there is no synchronicity between words and pictures. We view the visual and read the text sequentially. The reader makes the connections, determining their meanings and that of the narrative as it progresses from panel to panel. This makes the comic book an interactive medium, as does its handcrafted appearance. Its preindustrial look requires us to suspend disbelief much more radically than the realist illusion of the photograph and the cinema screen. We are invited to participate in the comic book’s fantastic storytelling and enlisted to establish the meanings of its words and pictures. Inexpensive and published as a series, like pulp detective and romantic fiction, comic books are published month after month, extending the narrative with new episodes. Readers buy, borrow, trade, and collect these graphic narratives, forming long-lasting relationships with them. Like pulp fiction, comic books circulate widely in popular culture, perhaps the reason why they are viewed as lowbrow commodities.
When Doga appeared in 1993, the comic-book market in India was already developed. Superman and Batman were familiar superheroes in the big cities. But the first series to be published in India was the Indrajal comics. Published between 1964 and 1989, these, in the main, were adaptations of Phantom stories. Eventually, Phantom acquired an Indian name, Veytal, but the exploits of this comic-book superhero in distant Africa did not find an enduring readership in India. Far more successful has been Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), which began publication in 1967. Its stories are drawn from epics and historical myths. Cast in a Hindu nationalist mould, the ACK series has become an iconic artifact of popular culture. Even as its location in contemporary cultural politics is clear, ACK is dressed heavily in classical and historical garb and views itself as teaching children their cultural heritage.31 Those who do not have a taste for ACK’s Hindu nationalist history can turn to another wildly popular comic book, Chacha Chaudhary. Published in several languages, Chacha Chaudhary recounts the adventures of a superhero with no special powers. He is an old man, armed only with a stick and his incredible wit, which he uses to foil thieves and robbers.
While all of these graphic narratives express the vital place of visuality in modern life, the Doga series is strikingly different. Its focus is decidedly on the modern city. This is evident not just in its narratives and their setting in Bombay but also in its close attention to visual surfaces. Of course, this is understandable, since it is a visual medium. But what is significant is the attention it pays to the city as a visual spectacle. Streets, buildings, apartments, shop windows, and bodies—all are drawn with an eye to their aesthetics. Buildings are not just buildings but shiny towers of glass and concrete. The apartments of the rich exude luxury and are filled with expensive-looking furniture and decorative goods, whereas the dens of criminals appear menacing. Advertising signs and shop-window displays present visual spectacles. Even the bodies of the comic characters—underworld dons in stylized clothing and police officials in crisp uniforms—point to the comic book’s attention to the city’s visual surfaces.
Writing about Berlin in the 1920s, Siegfried Kracauer identified urban modernity in its “surface-level expressions.”32 He argued that the emergence of mass society in the modern city under capitalism rendered aesthetic forms and spectacles vital to urban life. Commodity exchanges take place by packaging goods with an alluring exterior so that similar products can be distinguished. Advertising, shop signs, and architectural forms turn the city into a space of manufactured spectacles.
It is seeing Mumbai as just such a city of spectacle that inspired Doga’s creators to locate the comic-book series there. According to Sanjay Gupta, the studio head of Raj Comics, who conceived and developed the concept in collaboration with Vivek Mohan and Tarun Kumar Wahi, the idea was to create a comic-book series aimed at big cities.33 Mumbai seemed an obvious choice because of its “khaas chamak” (special shine).34 It is a place of high finance, big deals, and a fast life. The city also sparkles with glamorous film stars. The “chamak,” adds Gupta, extends to its underworld. Though crime is not Mumbai’s exclusive preserve, in the city the scale appears immense. The complexity and vast organization of Mumbai’s crime syndicates are scaled to match the high stakes. The creators decided that the superhero would not only fight Mumbai’s criminal world but must also be brushed by it; Doga had to partake of the environment even as he acts on the side of the angels.
Thus, Doga was born as an urban warrior who fights violent criminals with violence. Like many superheroes, he is estranged from society, an angst-ridden loner, and an orphan with no siblings or other family.35 Halkan Singh, a notorious and ruthless dacoit of the Chambal Valley, found him abandoned as an infant in a garbage heap. The dacoit brings up the orphan but treats him no better than a stray dog. He is even called a dog and forced to accompany the dacoit on his criminal forays. The boy simmers with revulsion as he witnesses Halkan’s bloody actions. His disgust with the criminal’s brutality reaches a breaking point when the dacoit kidnaps a young girl named Sonu. The young Doga frees the girl and escapes with her. A grateful Sonu names him Suraj (Sun) before drowning in a river while escaping from the gangsters who are in hot pursuit. (Actually, she survives and appears later in the series as Suraj’s love interest.) Haunted by Sonu’s anguished cries before she apparently perishes, the boy goes to the police and spills out the dacoit’s secrets. The police attack the gang, but Halkan gets away and flees to Bombay, where he establishes himself as a gang lord. Meanwhile, the boy also arrives in the city, looking for Halkan. He gets a job at the Lion Gym, growing into adulthood as Suraj, a young man with a fabulous muscular body.
As Suraj, he has an adopted family of four uncles.36 Under the supervision of Adrakh Chacha (Uncle Ginger), the head of the Lion Gym, Suraj turns his muscles into steel. Dhaniya Chacha (Uncle Coriander) teaches him boxing, Haldi Chacha (Uncle Turmeric) is his karate instructor, and he becomes an expert in firearms under the tutelage of Kaali Mirch Chacha (Uncle Black Pepper). They not only train him but also save his life when he is shot and bleeding profusely, in urgent need of a massive blood transfusion. Since his blood group is different from that of the uncles, all four troop into a blood bank, where they open their veins in exchange for a supply of Suraj’s blood type.
With this rebirth, the orphan acquires a fictive family. But religion does not mark this family. We do not know Doga’s religion, but his adopted name, Suraj, is Hindu. The person closest to him, the only one who knows his secret identity, is Adrakh Chacha, a Muslim. But he is named after a spice, as are his brothers. According to Gupta, the creators named the uncles after spices as much to give them catchy and memorable monikers as to avoid the “baas” (stench) of communal ide
ntity. As a consequence, while the comic book identifies the religion of Doga’s adopted uncles, it also places his fictive family beyond the most identifiable social identity.
As an orphan, Doga is already on the margins of society. But even when he acquires an adopted family, Suraj remains an outsider. Because of this outcast status, he adopts the secret identity of Doga to deal with the searing memory of Halkan’s horrific cruelties. Social alienation is not uncommon with superheroes, as in the case of Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent. But the rejection of a religious identity to signify an anomalous relationship with society is significant in the Mumbai context of Hindu-Muslim conflicts. In this respect, it is noteworthy that this comic-book series appeared in 1993, that is, in the wake of the riots and the bomb blasts. It is as if the burst of communal violence gave birth to a superhero altogether beyond communities.
Being an outsider, Doga is free of society’s prejudices. His close relationship with his spice uncles, signifying a bond with nature, magnifies his estrangement from culture. So do the dog mask and his unique relationship with the canine world. Doga is assisted by an army of stray dogs, a dependable pack who arrive when they hear his ultrasonic whistle, a sound that is inaudible to others. When summoned, the dogs attack his adversaries. When he is injured in fights, they drag Doga to the safety of underground sewers, where they nurse him back to health. He does not have supernatural powers but does possess keenly developed senses that bestow on him an uncanny ability to become one with the instinctual animal world. His muscular physicality and his extraordinary strength and indestructibility enhance his power as a force of nature. He is essentially human but elemental. Simplicity, directness, and honesty define him.