IN 2009, while home on holiday in the Meghalayan capital of Shillong, Ban Casper opened his door to a boy delivering groceries. As they chatted, Casper discovered that the teenager, a fellow Khasi—the Khasis are Meghalaya’s largest ethnic group—had just moved to the city from a nearby village. Out of curiosity, Casper asked the delivery boy if he knew of Tirot Sing, an eighteenth-century Khasi chief revered for resisting British colonisers. “He is Punjabi, right?” the boy replied.
Casper, then 23 years old, was in his sixth year with an animation studio in Kolkata. He had worked as a senior animator on Eklavya, a two-film series about a young prince from the Mahabharata for the television channel Cartoon Network, and other projects featuring heroes such as Ghatotkacha and Hanuman. But he had grown tired, he wrote to me this January, of “making the same movie about the same characters”—figures from Hindu myths and fables—“over and over again.” In early 2012, Casper quit his job to co-found Cosmic Clusters, an independent studio, and went in search of novel subjects. After several conversations, such as the one with the delivery boy, he settled on Tirot Sing.
Tirot Sing led an armed resistance in the Anglo-Khasi War, between 1829 and 1833. The British had wanted to build a road through the Khasi Hills, in what is now central Meghalaya, and had agreed on terms with a Khasi council. But, as tensions with the foreigners rose, Tirot Sing attacked a British garrison, setting off a series of brutal retaliations. Facing British guns and fighting with just shields, swords, and bows and arrows, the Khasis were routed. Tirot Sing waged a guerilla campaign until he was captured and exiled, in 1833. He died under house arrest two years later, in Dhaka. Casper’s film, titled U Syiem—The King—largely follows this history, but Casper chooses not to show Tirot Sing’s death, instead symbolising his spirit as a fire that continues to spread over the Khasi Hills even after his capture.
“I grew up without much television,” Casper told me over Skype. Instead, his young imagination thrived on stories, told to him by his grandmother, of heroes such as Tirot Sing. But children get much of their entertainment and learning from television—and increasingly from animation. Chota Bheem, a series for the channel Pogo, based loosely on the Bhima of the Mahabharata, has a viewership of over 40 million people. The first two films of a spin-off trilogy netted Rs 9.5 crore, and through a stable of multi-crore licensing deals, the title character helps sell everything from stationery to burgers. The director of the company behind the series told the Economic Times in 2013 that India’s animation industry was worth about $300 million, and was expanding at over 20 percent every year. Projects such as Eklavya have cashed in on the trend, but, as Casper pointed out, the majority of new animation ignores India’s vast wealth of legends and history in favour of Hindu mythological characters.
Comic Clusters’ attempt to correct the balance verges on the quixotic. According to Casper, the two Eklavya films cost Rs 1 crore. The third film in the Chota Bheem trilogy, due out this year, required Rs 8 crore and the efforts of over 250 people. U Syiem was planned with a budget of just Rs 15 lakh, and Casper and his co-founder at Cosmic Clusters raised the sum doing freelance work from a small flat in Kolkata. The company shifted to Shillong in late 2012 and hired two additional animators, even as costs and challenges mounted. Working their computers to the limit, Casper said, they burned through eight processors over the course of the project. After struggling to find a suitable actor to play Tirot Sing, luck led the team to a singer in a local death-metal band with just the kind of gruffness they were after. The voice-over was done in English, both to reach the widest audience possible and because synchronising lip movements to Khasi would mean additional expense. Casper and his business partner invested personal funds and completed the hour-long feature in December, at about twice the initially projected cost,
U Syiem will be launched in Shillong this month, and Casper has plans for both free and discounted screenings to guarantee accessibility. Casper seemed almost disbelieving at having seen the work through. Early on, he said “our colleagues laughed at us, because it’s a two-person team,” with which it “would be impossible to make an entire animated film.” Even he was convinced they were right. But, like his historical hero, the odds never fazed him.