Mumbai Fables Page 31

  Doga has a single mission: ridding Mumbai of criminals. It is his defining character. His adversaries may be as powerful and lethal as he is, but they do not have his moral compass. Haunted by the anguished cry of the girl he believes he failed to save from the dacoit Halkan, Doga is motivated by a sense of duty to avenge injustice. But Mumbai is so overrun by outlaws that he must deliver street justice, exterminating the immoral and the lawless. This makes for an ambiguous relationship with the authorities. He is deferential toward the police, but their protocols hinder his mission to avenge injustice. For him, matters are clear and the choices are obvious—law versus the lawless, good versus evil, justice versus injustice. He flouts laws in fighting criminals. He shoots and throws hand grenades at the evildoers, rather than handing them over to the police. Never squeamish about killing his adversaries, Doga’s violence is fierce. He does not invoke self-defense to justify his ferocity because the annihilation of criminals, not their reform and rehabilitation, is his aim. His violent vigilantism invites a vicious response from the criminals. They hunt for him, lay traps, and unleash their guns and goons on him. When he is temporarily captured, Doga has to endure unbelievable torture. Violence meets with violence, cruelty with cruelty. The only difference between the two is the morality that motivates Doga’s bloody actions.

  Even as the police recognize Doga’s essential goodness, they cannot condone his vigilantism because that would mean acknowledging their own weakness and accepting an alternative authority. This makes for an ambiguous relationship between the two. The authorities persistently try to apprehend him for taking the law into in his hands, but the superhero successfully ducks their grasp and manages to protect his secret identity. This cat-and-mouse game between the police and the superhero keeps alive Doga’s position as an outsider. As an agent outside the social and legal order, he is able to do what the police cannot—defend society against criminal predators. But even more important, because Doga’s enforcement of justice is extralegal, the legitimacy of the state as the lawful authority is affirmed.

  THE PATHOLOGY OF URBAN VIOLENCE

  Crime never stops in Doga’s Mumbai. It has no beginning and no end, but it endlessly changes its form. No sooner has Doga slain one criminal mastermind than another one emerges. In the city that never sleeps, crime also does not take a break. Lawlessness is a constant feature of the urban landscape; it touches the lives of ordinary people and makes their lives a living hell.

  Genda, for example, is about the havoc wreaked on the lives of poor slum dwellers by the real estate developer Dinanath.37 In public life, he is a respectable businessman, but secretly he is the ruthless gang lord Genda (Hippopotamus). His modus operandi is to get his goons to set fire to shantytowns, clearing the land for his real estate ventures. Then, feigning sympathy, he appears as Dinanath before the displaced residents and gifts them petty amounts of cash. Having lost everything, the poor slum dwellers are happy to get any little crumb. They go away, singing Dinanath’s praises, while he builds luxury hotels and apartment towers on lands cleared by arson. The gangster’s hirelings escape police dragnets by capturing a brave police officer and threatening to kill a hostage. Fortunately, Doga comes to the rescue. He not only frees the officer but also goes after Genda. After finishing off his goons, the superhero ensures poetic justice for the developer-cum-gangster. He ties the crooked hypocrite to a chair in his mansion and sets it on fire. The homeless do not get their homes back, but their oppressor meets with a fiery end.

  The story strikes a chord. It is an experience that is familiar in Mumbai. The poor come to the city from all parts of India, looking for a livelihood. They build shantytowns, often on marshes, and make the land habitable. As the population grows and the slum becomes a thriving neighborhood, the municipal authorities are forced to extend some minimal civic facilities, even if the settlement is illegal. But once the poor have made the land livable, it becomes a valued commodity. The residents are evicted, often by force, or a combination of muscle and political power, and the lands are cleared for the construction of apartments and office buildings. The poor develop the land, but it is the unscrupulous builders who reap the profits. This process reached a fever pitch during the real estate boom of the 1990s. With stakes escalating, the builders hired gangsters to clear lands for construction by evicting slum dwellers. The underworld, crooked builders, and corrupt politicians made hay while the poor suffered.

  There are plenty of accounts of the builder-criminal nexus in Mumbai. In the comic book’s show and tell, however, the story acquires other layers of meaning. Drawings and words attract attention to their surface, resisting realist mystifications and inviting the reader to imagine the scene, to explore the interaction between the text and the images. Consider, for example, the first scene of a crime depicted in the opening pages of Genda (plate 3). Three gasoline tankers appear, each in a separate panel. It is night, and no one is around. The meaning of the tankers’ images is made clear by the accompanying text, which tells us that they are converging on a shantytown under the cover of darkness. The text and the pictures together suggest that something ominous is afoot. The following two panels enhance this suggestion. The woman jumping out of her tanker notes with satisfaction that everyone is asleep, making the job easy. The nature of the job is made plain by the picture of a man reeling out a hose from his tanker. The balloon expressing the man’s hope that his accomplices are also doing the same thing establishes that it is a coordinated plan. This would not be apparent from the drawing itself. In this sense, the pictures are not self-sufficient. But neither is the text, for the words would not make sense without the drawings of the tankers. Words also function graphically. Thus, in the second row of panels, each thought balloon spills beyond the gutters and occupies a space in an adjacent box. These indicate that the woman and the man are working in coordination and that a third person is also part of the conspiracy. This meaning is produced as much by the words as by their placement in balloons that violate the panel borders. In the bottom two panels, we see the further execution of the diabolical plan—the third conspirator and the woman are dousing the hutments with gasoline. While the man marvels at the ease with which gasoline gushes forth, the woman revels in its intoxicating smell.

  Words and visuals together depict a heinous crime in operation. While the innocent slum dwellers sleep in their hutments, the goons engage in an evil conspiracy against them. They feel no sympathy for their intended victims while executing their inhuman plan. Their criminal pathology can be understood as a grotesque manifestation of the indifference to strangers, or what Georg Simmel called the “blasé outlook,” characteristic of the cold and calculating modern capitalist metropolis. Tracing the psychic effects of money, Simmel argued that commodity exchange erases the qualitative distinction between things, hollows out their specific values and meanings by reducing them to their monetary equivalents, breeding an attitude of indifference.38 Fleeting and anonymous social relations produce the bystander who looks away from the suffering of others. The criminal is only a perverted expression of this indifference in the modern city. Thus, the gangsters plotting to burn down the shantytown do not look away but take a cruel pleasure in their violence on strangers. The comic book’s show-and-tell description throws a spotlight on the social psychology that underpins criminal violence.

  Doga himself is no shrinking violet. He also takes pleasure in pulverizing and killing his enemies. In close-ups showing him bashing gangsters’ heads together, accompanied by exclamatory sounds, we see not only the display of his extraordinary strength but also his murderous desire. The images of faces twisted in pain and words expressing the sounds of Doga’s fist smashing into the gangster’s head enlist the reader in imagining the deadly intent and the terrible intensity of violence. If capitalist excess produces greedy criminals who run riot in the city, taking pleasure in arson and murder, then Doga must respond with a greater burst of bloodshed. Justice is served not by locking up the evildoers but by countering their
twisted cruelty with more intense and decisive violence. It requires a response that is commensurate with the deep psychic alienation that underpins the criminals’ brutality in the modern capitalist city.

  Thus, Doga not only slays the crooked developer but also delights in the deed (see plate 4). In the first panel, he towers over the cowering Dinanath seated on a couch, while a battered goon lies prostrate on the floor. The text characterizes the scene as a verbal confrontation between a triumphant Doga and a defeated adversary who issues empty threats. Without showing the intervening actions, which the reader has to imagine, the next panel shows Dinanath tied up and the masked superhero determinedly walking away. While his captive pleads for mercy, Doga gleefully announces that a fiery death awaits him. In the following panel, Doga holds a flame and is about to set fire to Dinanath’s mansion. The picture of his bloodthirsty vengeance is modified by his utterance that his action is in response to the thousands burned to death by Dinanath. With the morality of his action established, Doga swaggers off triumphantly. His steps do not falter, and he does not look back. The vigilante superhero does not feel any qualms about leaving the gangster to his fiery fate.

  DEMOCRACY DESECRATED

  Genda is finished, but Doga’s work is not over. In issue after issue, he encounters yet another evil villain. Being a superhero series, the comic book naturally treats each encounter from Doga’s point of view. We are offered his appraisals of the contemporary city and his perceptions of what is wrong with its legal and political order. The villains are not only underworld dons and crooked builders but also corrupt policemen and politicians. This theme recurs in the series, but Khaki Aur Khaddar offers a particularly withering critique of the hypocrisy and treachery of public servants.39

  Khaki Aur Khaddar opens with a picture that covers most of the page (see plate 5). A portly man in the Indian politician’s traditional uniform—khaddar (homespun cloth) kurta pajama, Nehru jacket, and Gandhi cap—stands with his back to a police officer in khaki. The accompanying text intones that peace and order in the country require law, that protection of the law needs the police, and to control the police a politician is needed. The statuelike images and the declarative sentences portray a solemn and universal ideal. But on the very next page, all hell breaks loose. The police are raining bullets at a car on a crowded Mumbai street. The shots crack the windshield and the windows. The Opel Astra sedan careens out of control, banging into a roadside fence before coming to a halt, blood spilling out of the doors. The policemen converge on the car, whose occupants lie felled by bullets. Prem Singh, a constable, turns over a dead passenger to identify him. His face contorted with shock, the constable exclaims that the slain man is not Lion, the dreaded gangster. Other constables add with shocked realization that the remaining dead passengers are not Lion’s henchmen either. The enormity of the blunder registers on Inspector Arjun Singh, the supervising officer. The tip that Lion and his hirelings would be traveling in the car has turned out to be false; they have killed innocent people.

  This killing scene reprises the infamous “encounter” that the Mumbai police have used routinely since the 1990s to kill underworld gangsters. The police force has several specialists who triumphantly proclaim the number of criminals they have “encountered.” Charges swirl that “encounter” is another name for the cold-blooded killings of alleged gangsters by a police force under pressure. Civil libertarians have charged that the police—frustrated by gang wars, contract killings, and the underworld’s ability to manipulate the judicial system—resorted to encounters as a way to combat crime. A culture of killing took hold, and officers were decorated and promoted on the basis of the number of alleged criminals they had encountered. There were also rumors that the underworld bosses had used friendly police officers to “encounter” their rivals.

  Using the thread of these charges and rumors surrounding the encounter, Khaki Aur Khaddar weaves a story about the criminalization of politics. As the story progresses, it turns out that the false tip was planted by Constable Prem Singh at Lion’s behest. Inspector Arjun Singh, an honest police officer, was a thorn in Lion’s hide, raiding the gangster’s warehouse and seizing his smuggled goods. Through Prem Singh, Lion plants false information about the car, confident that the officer will take the bait to promote his career through the encounter. Instead, when innocent people are killed, Arjun Singh will lose his uniform. Lion’s plot is successful. Arjun Singh is dismissed from the police force. When another honest police officer figures out the plot and arrests Prem Singh and Lion, the ever-resourceful criminals remain undaunted. The now-jailed Prem Singh stands for election and wins with the help of Lion’s thugs, who silence the opposition. The rule of law becomes a mockery as Prem Singh becomes a minister in the government and has the police at his command. Democracy and political citizenship stand grossly perverted.

  Where is Doga? Why does he not put an end to the oppression of the criminal-turned-politician and the law-turned-lawless? Tragically, Doga is dead. Suraj has killed his secret superhero identity because his girlfriend, Monica, hates the violent Doga.40 This twist in the story permits the full portrayal of the reign of terror let loose by Prem Singh and Lion. Suraj watches helplessly as shantytowns are burned to make way for the politician’s luxury hotel. He seethes with anger as the police are turned into Lion’s agents. As a law-abiding citizen, he can do nothing but watch the dance of lawlessness. The injustice also disturbs Monica, but she still has faith in the law and nonviolence. As if to mock her naïveté, Suraj invites her to a fashion show. When she expresses her surprise that he would invite her to something so frivolous, he responds that domestic life means going to clubs, shopping, fashion shows, and wandering aimlessly. On the way to the fashion show, they run into Lion’s goons, who, with police assistance, beat up people and set fire to their shantytown. Monica is horrified at the sight and says that she cannot see such injustice. Suraj insists that she must watch the tyranny that runs riot on the street (see plate 6). In the panel, he directs her to observe the smoldering slums, a blood-spattered body, and the anguished face of a fleeing resident. Suraj says: “Just watch, but see it like a fashion show. Not through the eyes of the law, not from the viewpoint of violence that Doga unleashes after seeing such oppression. See it through the eyes of a terrorized citizen.”

  Monica remains unmoved by Suraj’s anguished plea. She refuses to abandon her faith in law and democracy even as the sight of a vast gap between the ideal and the experience of the liberal-democratic state stares her in face. It is only when repression and tyranny break all bounds that Monica cries out for Doga’s return. Suraj once again dons the dog mask and tight bodysuit and reappears as Doga. He goes after Lion, tearing through the gangster’s protective armor of law. The coup de grace is getting Prem Singh to sign his death warrant by unknowingly ordering the police to shoot at his own official car. The criminal career that began with an encounter also ends with one.

  The criminalization of politics is a familiar story in Indian politics, and the encounter killings of Mumbai gangsters became a routine news item in the 1980s and the 1990s. In their comic-book rendering, these well-known stories are given a twist. Law and politics have not just been turned upside down but have been desecrated. What we see are not violations but the complete perversion of norms and ideals. This point is driven home when a character, a former police officer, is locked up illegally and tortured. He implores an officer who is reluctant to participate in Prem Singh’s illegal activities not to stain khaki and khaddar. “These two are holy like the Ramayan [the ancient Sanskrit epic], Bible, and the Quran.”41 His appeal to the sacred image of the democratic state is in vain. The police have no recourse but to follow the elected representative’s orders. The ordinary citizens are also helpless. Protests against official conduct are brutally suppressed. The twist in the plot, involving Doga’s absence, allows the display of a completely defiled legal and political system.

  By the time Suraj becomes Doga again, the idealized image of k
haki and khaddar lies in total ruins. Corrupted to the core, the democratic state is thoroughly distorted; it has become an agent of despotism and oppression. Gloom and despair prevail among the citizenry. Only the superhero can rescue the city from its misery and hopelessness. But Doga does not lead the citizens to a popular revolution. He is a vigilante, but no rebel. He accepts the democratic state’s ideal as an abstract institution, standing above concrete private interests. In his eyes, the state’s aura appears intact; only its agents look rotten and ineffective. Faced with the gap between this ideal and its actual experience, he seeks to close the breach by performing functions that the state cannot, due to either corruption or legal constraints. By embracing the extralegality of his actions to secure justice, Doga provides supplementary support to the legitimacy of the liberal-democratic state.

  BLOOD AND COMMUNITY

  The relief, however, is ephemeral. Yet another criminal, and then another, appears and terrorizes the city. In recounting the superhero’s exploits from issue to issue, the Doga comic books show a remarkable attention to Mumbai’s political landscape. The corruption of politics and the police, which figures prominently in the public discourse, remains an enduring theme in the series. So is the question of Hindu-Muslim relations. An anticommunal thrust is a constant presence in the series, expressed through Doga’s relations with Adrakh Chacha, who frequently invokes Allah’s blessings for the superhero. But in a recent set of issues, the comic book also tackles the question of communal conflict head on.42