Economies of Longing: The Superhero as National Leader in India

Abstract

My dissertation explains how Hindu right-wing political factions have drawn upon a mythologically mediated superhero iconography to conjure images — and promise the return — of a Hindu golden past. Examining the comic book Nagraj (1986-), the popular television series Shaktimaan (1990-2005), and the electoral campaign of three contemporary Indian politicians (Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal, and Mamata Banerjee), I show how superhero narratives are no longer an imposition from without, but instead have transformed the very fabric of Indian culture from within. Drawing on theorists like Bishnupriya Ghosh, Susan Stewart, Benjamin Moffit, and Gilles Deleuze, I critically examine the idea of ‘screens’ and ‘icons’ as singular or monolithic institutions and evaluate them instead as rhizomatic structures both indebted to and continuously reproducing the biases, approaches, and methodologies of their colonial past. To this unique combination of western philosophical approaches, I also add a critical evaluation of South Asian philosophical traditions like the Hindu Brahmanical thought systems of Mimamsa and Vedanta. Within this theoretical framework, I study the superhero archetype as an icon and a tool for globalization and neo-colonialism. I argue that the globally recognizable icon of the superhero is circulated through highly localized markets of India once they have been adopted and adapted to Indian socio-cultural contexts. These globalized icons are then re-deployed by populist political leaders as markers of the promise that their respective economic policies hold, i.e. prosperity, economic equality, and the rise of India as a global superpower. This process is still furthered when these repackaged icons are re-sold in the international market, now as global paragons of populist leadership. Thus, the production, circulation, consumption, and re-calibration of popular icons – first superheroes, and now the superheroic-seeming political leaders – across media boundaries, create an ‘economy of desire’. My project opens up a much larger cultural canvas and seeks to highlight how the democratic electoral processes are influenced by the successful colonization and manipulation of popular visual narratives, from iconographies both external and internal to national cultural fabrics. Ultimately, instead of examining immediate factors like market trends, inflation, and currency fluctuations, political scandals, etc., my project traces a genealogical line through decades of Indian pop-cultural history, to argue for a layered causality of recent political and economic events.