From Supremo to Shaktimaan, the quest to establish a definitive desi superhero

In 1982, writer-director-lyricist Gulzar agreed to consult for the script of an odd little ‘comic’. Comic books or folk storytelling in this context had predated any form of superheroes envisioned in Indian cinema or pop culture at that time, but in that particular year an absurd little experiment came to life. Amitabh Bachchan was dressed in pink tights, supplied with questionable allies, and sent to fight adversaries, with no real superpowers to speak of. His character was called Supremo.

In a decade where Bachchan’s bankability was on the wane, Supremo seems — in retrospect — an attempt to re-seed the landscape with a yearning for modern India’s biggest superstar (and not the only one, if Shahenshah and Ajooba were anything to go by). The fact that Bachchan’s Supremo costume wasn’t a disguise is indicative perhaps of the way we thought about (super)heroes. His brief tryst with crime-fighting was unremarkable but the comic remains a highly sought after piece of pop culture memorabilia — a copy today can cost lakhs — in a country that really doesn’t have, or hold on to, much.

All of which brings us to the recent news that Doordarshan’s ‘90s sci-fi adventure featuring Milind Soman in and as super soldier ‘Captain Vyom’, would be remade as a web series. Coupled with the reboot of another ‘90s throwback in Shaktimaan, the moment seems rife for examining what really makes an Indian superhero.

Let’s zoom back once again into the past, to the late 1980s when Manoj Gupta, a resident of Delhi’s Burari, found inspiration in Lee Falk’s Phantom, and created a superhero of his own. Religious symbolism doesn’t exactly run under the surface in India, and what might have started as Gupta’s quest to create a modern concept — intentionally or otherwise, also culminated in something traditional. Thus was born Nagraj, a man/serpent whose superpower was the ability to summon venomous snakes.

The Guptas — apart from Manoj, there were his brothers Sanjay and Manish, and patriarch Rajkumar — had founded Raj Comics in the 1980s. By the early ‘90s, their titles were everywhere: on newsstands, at grocery stores, selling like soap. Nagraj was followed by superheroes like Doga and Commando Dhruv, making the Guptas more than just inspired creators. They now possessed a significant portion of India’s cult heritage — the kind that is unlikely to be preserved in any museum other than that of memory and nostalgia.

Meanwhile, 1987 saw the release of Mr India, a superhero story that in reality, championed the earnestness of India’s middle-classes as the real star. Power, in this film, was simply a tool to say that anyone could be a superhero — as long as they chose to do the right thing.

The space for Indian superheroes contracted over the following years, as the baton for inspiring shock, awe and resilient moralities was passed on to the genre of mythology. Along with BR Chopra’s Mahabharat, the Ramanand Sagar era took over and it wasn’t until after liberalisation and the consequently easy access to pop culture from the West, that another Indian superhero was conceived — Shaktimaan. Mukesh Khanna played a red-suited superhero who meditates his way to yogic powers, and bore more than a passing resemblance to Superman (Shaktimaan’s alter-ego Gangadhar is also, like Clark Kent, a journalist).

The popularity of Shaktimaan can be gauged from the fact that amid increasing absenteeism (students were staying home to watch the show), schools had to distribute circulars and contact parents. Consequently, Shaktimaan episodes were retelecast on holidays. In 2001, after the Gujarat earthquake, Khanna was requested by the government to distribute relief material to children, dressed as the character. (This was reminiscent of the worshipful reception actors like Ram Govil and Nitish Bharadwaj inspired for their turns as Ram and Krishna, respectively.) The overwhelming belief people had in a make-believe character qualified the hypothesis that Indians invest their faith in stories far more wholeheartedly than in laws, rules and regulations.

India’s economic growth and growing cultural influence had begun to inspire people far removed from the country. In 1999, Alan Moore reconceptualised Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo as Prince Dakkar — a turbaned superhero who adventures with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In 2000, Batgirl Annual #1 by Scott Peterson featured shape-shifter Aruna Shende, who is born in a Chennai slum and helps solve the murder of a Dalit actor.

Shende’s emergence in an American publication points to the complicated socio-political structures Indian superheroes must navigate — if not confront. Is the Indian superhero then caste-blind or will they endeavour to inquire into the many historical wrongs that still victimise people here?

In 1998, Doordarshan launched Captain Vyom, a space adventure about a handsome, young super-soldier tasked with capturing galaxy-hopping criminals. Vyom’s popularity didn’t quite match Shaktimaan’s and there were clear reasons why. Shaktimaan was the middle-class’ darling, a conservative man of staunch moral predispositions. He sermonised everywhere he went, lecturing mischief makers into submission. Vyom on the other hand represented a more youthful brand of superhero — a bit reckless, and (courtesy Soman) impossible not to sensualise.

Fast forward to today and we’ve really had a variety of superhero characters emerge from the Indian firmament. From the days of Krrish and the (ill-advised) Flying Jatt, we’ve come to Minnal Murali and the (not strictly Indian, but related) Ms Marvel, a teen superhero whose origins can be traced to Partition’s damning consequences.

What sense do we then make of the Indian superhero’s chequered past? Will one emerge from within the freedom struggle? (If you don’t consider RRR a superhero film, that is.) Or does India even need superheroes, going by the Western construction of the figure?

In 2015, a short Pixar film created by Sanjay Patel, Sanjay’s Super Team, envisioned India’s many deities as superheroes in a form of cultural translation that really does put a lot of things into perspective. Maybe we’ve had superheroes all along — long before the world began conceiving theirs — in our folk tales, oral stories and many, many histories wrapped in the supernatural and the audacious. Which one is it, really, is a question of where you derive your sense of wonder from. For now, it’s exciting to just think of how Shaktimaan and Vyom will adapt to the complicated milieu of the present.