The hidden politics of 'Asterix'

The comic books promote conviviality, offer laughter as a response to repression; in competitive 1970s Bengaluru, it also provided an alternative to nerdy compulsoriness

By the time I was eight or nine, I had acquired a remarkable callus on the chin. I wondered sometimes if it was the first signs of a beard poking through but in saner moments knew that this rough square of skin was caused by the unusual posture in which I read, regardless of the furniture available. I usually sat coiled like a capital G, with my chin digging tightly into a knee. This was the most comfortable way to prospect a comic-book, without missing out on words, or on details in the picture.

That callus arose almost entirely because the 1970s ensured that I had a childhood awash in comics. This was the era of the fortnightly release, all of Rs 1.50, from Amar Chitra Katha and Indrajal Comics. Plus there was the huge backwash of what had never been thrown away in the neighbourhood — mostly of foreign provenance, ranging from Tarzan, Korak, Superman and Batman to Richie Rich, Wendy and Casper, the Friendly Ghost. There were occasional appearances from Commando comics, and a bunch of British offerings in a similar digest-sized format.

The things that turned up only now and then in this economy of lending and borrowing and occasional buying were Tintin, Asterix, Iznogoud and Lucky Luke. They were much more expensive, and so got taken care of properly. If we may mangle an advertising slogan written for the watchmakers Patek Philippe, you didn’t merely own a Tintin or an Asterix comic, you wrapped it in polythene so as to be able to lend it after due deliberation to those you thought of as good, reliable friends.

This enforced pricey-ness is probably why I came to Tintin and Asterix relatively late. There was a Venkateswara Nursing Home on Narain Pillay Street to which I would be taken when ill. I looked forward to these otherwise unpleasant visits because Dr Narayan, who ran the place, always had a pile of comics which he would lend with a smile that went all the way into his caterpillar moustache. This is how I first clapped eyes on the artistic stylings of Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo.

Simpler Tintin

I blush to say it now, but the first Asterix I read left me rather cold. The comics I had already read ensured that I took to Tintin much faster — due to the easy-on-the-eye ligne claire style that Herge favoured, the neatly plotted stories, and the straightforward funnies that Calculus and Haddock could reliably provide. I was not ready yet for a world where the year is almost always 50 B.C.

The City Central Library on Haynes Road suddenly came into a small number of Tintin and Asterix volumes when I was 10. Getting hold of them required occult manoeuvres such as getting there at opening time, emerging a little before closing time, sweet-talking the librarian to hold something for you, or piling on to the lucky soul who had managed to get one issued to find out when they would return it.

After having read all the available Tintin stories, I borrowed Asterix and the Goths, and fell completely in love. I was now ready for characters who spoke in the Fraktur font because they were German. Likewise, I was ready for the name jokes; Asterix and Unhygienix made sense immediately, while names like Obelix, Getafix and Totorum made sense only much later, after I had learnt a little about the world.

Upparpet finds

The Library, alas, had only a few of the titles. Thus began a hot pursuit that spanned several decades. I began reading The Week regularly in the late 1980s because they would carry a page from one of the unavailable stories. A volume would turn up in one of Upparpet’s pavement stores. And so, I went there week after week. When I began working, I sat down and estimated how much it would cost me to complete my collection, and didn’t get up for some time because I was looking at a princely sum upwards of Rs 10,000.

This sad tale of thwarted desire was upended suddenly in 2003 by two separate developments —the arrival of torrenting, and the creation of the Comic Book Reader software. A friend turned up with the complete Asterix collection burnt onto a CD. Comic Book Reader made it possible to zoom into every page, to dive into a panel whee-ing like a touristy spelunker.

Long-term reading

Can delight ferment and turn to liquor? If the writing and the drawing are designed to play games with the reader’s time. Asterix was built for the long draught, for multiple returns, for top-ups, and for re-reading, because it abounds in visual and textual enigma, in gags that you don’t immediately get, and in gags that make you groan in the here-and-now. I began by wondering who those sad deflated-looking pirates who appeared in every album were, and found that they were characters from another series who insisted on turning up thus. For the other kind of gag, I will point you to Asterix in Spain, which begins with an account of Caesar inspecting his army. The panel that announces this has him pulling their ears. The next one makes a ‘lend me your ears’ joke.

Paradoxically, the element that I found off-putting in my first encounter is the thing I return for today. Uderzo, who passed away last week, unfailingly subjects readers to a visual pummelling. His special talent was the hyperkinetic page, where characters are constantly in motion, their words bouncing up and down the page, where there is simultaneous delight in the denseness of crowds and in detailing the individuals who make up these brawling mobs, where the footnotes set up jokes; where swearing bubbles up in unusual shapes, where the smell of cooking behaves like an escapee stream of something inside a spaceship, where sundry moles, birds and boars also offer commentary.

Gallic sensibility

I’ve heard the word commotion being used for how Calvin & Hobbes and Peanuts open up the American experience for the reader. It is in Uderzo’s truly boisterous pages that readers of several generations met a Europe filtered through a Gallic sensibility. Borges may have said that the original must endeavour to be faithful to its translation, but that claim for translation as authorship is made in a far more straightforward way by the manner in which Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge took the untranslatable verve of the original and matched it with their own. The first argument for a unified Europe, and against Brexit, will abide in how Anthea Bell met Goscinny and Uderzo and became a team. The second argument arises from the fact that David Cameron, Theresa May, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are merely attenuated real-life versions of the disaster-prone centurions and tribunes that Uderzo drew to perfection.

Bro-sociality

The fact that the Gaulish chieftain Vitalstatistix has a wife named Impedimenta must perhaps alert us to the rather strong bro-sociality that perhaps underpins the series. Women have walk-on parts while the men do the bashing, the adventuring and the banqueting. I don’t know how well the series will hold up against such criticism. I will point instead to the much tighter austerity that bound its readers in India to ideas of merit and academic success, and to reading in English as a means of achieving such success. The ideal of conviviality that abides in eating well, and drinking well, and the idea of not taking yourself too seriously may well have been unwitting subversions of the compulsoriness of the Savarna ethic, and this is worth testing. I remember arriving at great curiosity about eating pork and imbibing questionable liquids from close attention to the details of the banquet, to the boar turning on the spit, and the horns that they drank from, and a beautiful drunken conversation featuring Obelix and many reps of the words "zigackly" and "ferpectly".

(The writer heads the department of English Literature at St Joseph’s College, Bengaluru)