Looking East: Tinkle’s Depiction of its New Superhero from the Northeast has a Long Way to Go
The opening panel of the comic magazine Tinkle’s newest comic series, ‘Wingstar,’ is a television screen. The scene: a media van is parked in the background, next to which are three silhouettes pointing their cameras and microphones towards the sky. Two police officers shuffle hurriedly out of a building. A moustachioed man in a pale-yellow sweater vest stands in the foreground, holding a microphone as he says, “In other news, Wingstar, the city’s youngest vigilante, just brought down a corrupt minister and his henchmen. The identity of this vigilante is still unknown…” The minister and the henchmen are dejectedly hanging mid-air in the firm grasp of a figure in white—presumably Wingstar. The vigilante is dressed in a white and green suit, a flaming jetpack on her back. The next panel cuts to the inside of a home. Tashi Kawlim—a slightly balding, bespectacled man—is comfortably plumped on a pink couch with a remote in hand and the news running on a television. “Good evening, Wingstar,” he says to his daughter as she enters, “Long day on the job?”
That is how readers meet Mapui Kawlim or Wingstar, a 13-year-old superhero, who spends her after-school time fighting crime, albeit with some reluctance. Mapui’s day doesn’t end with her escapades as a superhero. In the first chapter, titled ‘Even Superheroes Have Homework,’ she is shown struggling to finish her maths homework so that she can go for a sleepover with her friends, even as her new wristwatch that serves as a police scanner buzzes with notifications of a bank robbery happening in the city. This wristwatch is one of the many gadgets Mapui’s father has made. She tests these before they hit the market, and they give Mapui her powers. The gadgets include a robotic arm that can lift up to 1000 kilograms, and “iron fists” that can break anything with a punch.
Mapui’s “powers” are a function of these devices. While she wallows in the luxury of being able to carry out mundane tasks more efficiently, she is also forced to choose between spending time with her friends and battling the latest danger to the city. ‘Wingstar’ is set in the fictional town of Aizwa in Mizoram, based on the Northeastern state’s capital city, Aizawl. It “could be Mumbai, Delhi or any place for that matter,” said Sean D’mello, the comic’s creator, who developed its story and script. “It’s just a city.”
Tinkle, which was first published in 1980, is a popular monthly magazine targeted primarily at school-going children. The magazine was created by Anant Pai, a pioneer in Indian comics, known to his young readers as Uncle Pai. Since its launch 35 years ago, Tinkle has been translated into several Indian languages and boasts of a readership of over 3 lakh. It has produced some of the most widely recognised comic characters across India. Many of these, such as the beloved simpleton Suppandi, the cowardly and lazy hunter Shikari Shambu and the scheming Tantri the Mantri continue to be produced in newer issues today.
Mapui’s character was launched in Tinkle’s thirty-fifth anniversary edition in November 2015.
Although she is neither Tinkle’s first character from the Northeast nor its first female superhero, Mapui does profile a minority in both regards. The announcement of the character was met with an enthusiastic response. Many celebrated the fact that a comic as popular as Tinkle was “breaking stereotypes” about people from the Northeast and diversifying the representation of Indians in popular culture. The British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, pronounced Wingstar “the Indian superheroine fighting discrimination.”
Once the comic came out, many who read it expectantly were disappointed. Even though the comic’s characters and its story are based in Mizoram, it did not appear to weave Mizo culture into the narrative or the visual language. Opportunities to include such elements were many, but Mapui’s world did not contain any recognisable traces of her ethnicity. In my conversations with the editor and author of the comic, they emphasised that Tinkle’s primary purpose was entertainment, and disavowed any intent to engage with the politics of the Northeast. According to them, addressing the issues that children face, such as homework and bullying was key. The creators stressed that they had deliberately fictionalised aspects of the character and the comic to avoid “offending people.” These caveats have meant that the depiction of diversity in the comic essentially amounts to tokenism. While D’mello’s goal to “create awareness about the Northeast” is noble, in terms of achieving it, Wingstar, and Tinkle, have a long a way to go.
Lalnunsanga Ralte is a Shillong-based professor and PhD student at the North Eastern Hill University, who studies science-fiction literature. Ralte is from Aizawl in Mizoram, and was initially thrilled to hear about the introduction of a Mizo character in Tinkle. He is also a part of a group called the Mizo Bloggers on the chat application Whatsapp. This group discusses various issues related to Mizo identity and its representation. The members of the group, Ralte told me, were disappointed by the lack of attention to detail. D’mello said while drawing Mapui’s features, the artists studied the features of young girls of the same age from the region—but to Ralte and the group, the features were not specific enough to Mizoram. The characters “didn’t look anything like us,” he told me. Other comments online suggested that the names were inauthentic too. Mapui’s name, commenters noted, would be spelt “Mapuii.” They added that “Tashi, ” her father’s name is not even a Mizo name, and neither is “Kawlim,” her last name. In fact, the comments stated, Mizo culture does not employ last names at all, but second names, which are indicative of a clan. The choice to obscure these associations, D’mello told me, was deliberate. “We did not want to directly represent or misrepresent a particular clan,” he said, adding that they looked for a name that “belonged to that area” instead. Rajini Thindiath, the editor of the magazine, echoed D’mello’s sentiments. Since neither Thindiath nor D’mello belong to the Northeast, I asked her about the research that had gone into crafting the character. She admitted that the lack of primary sources of information was a challenge for the comic’s creators. They attempted to overcome this problem by reaching out to people online. Thindiath said, “We did ask people around, particularly on Facebook, because you have friends and they connect you and so on.” “You do not want to alienate one or the other. We tried to stay as authentic as possible without getting into too many nitty-gritties,” she told me.
Thindiath’s comments point to the principal problem with Mapui’s depiction. D’mello told me that one of the objectives behind creating Mapui’s character was “to showcase Northeastern culture, backgrounds, people—how they talk, how they look, they behave.” But decisions such as these—choosing a name that is not specific to a clan, setting the story in a generic city and a lack of focus on field research—serve instead to further generalise the people belonging to the Northeast. Tara Douglas, the secretary of the Adivasi Arts Trust—a charity registered in the United Kingom—whose doctoral research dealt with the representation of indigenous communities in animation agreed. Douglas believed that the politics of representation tended to skew the depiction of people from the Northeast. In his introduction to the No Stereotypes Plz: A Comics Campaign On Northeast, a compilation of comics made by students of Northeastern origin in an effort to dispel the stereotypes that surround them, Sharad Sharma, the founder of World Comics India, writes that one of the issues is that “not much information about the NE region is available in public domain [sic].” Through four-panel comics, the narratives collected in the book shed light on the stereotypes and discrimination the authors have faced. This allows them to present their problems, writes Sharma, “through his or her own brush.” These stories of discrimination are individual—no one experience is the same as the next. “The region is very ethnically diverse,” said Douglas, as she explained why a homogenised representation “will not work.”
Both D’mello and Thindiath said that the decisions that were taken regarding Mapui’s character were governed by the fact that Tinkle is not a political publication. D’mello told me, “It’s not a magazine that starts pushing a political agenda.” This reluctance to taking a political stance does not have to be at odds with an honest representation of a character’s ethnicity. For instance, the US comics giant Marvel’s Kamala Khan or Ms Marvel, is a 16-year-old Pakistani American polymorphing superhero. She is clad in a red, white and blue costume that is inspired by the kurti. Sooraya Qadir, or Dust, a Marvel mutant of Afghanstani origin who has the power to transform into a sand-like substance, is a young Sunni Muslim girl who wears a black burqa. Contrastingly, Mapui’s costume contains no influences from Mizoram . It is an apple-green fitted suit with a facemask.
Comics, as a combination of the visual and textual medium, allow for a layered depiction of character. The text and dialogue take the story forward, and the images continually set the background with visual clues that can root it in a time, a place and a culture. In her book How Texts Teach What Readers Learn, the British scholar Margaret Meek writes that the combination of pictures and text, the “balloon dialogue, inset sketches, drawing ‘asides,’ together with the reader’s impulse to keep the story going while taking all this in,” transform the reader to “both the teller and the told.” In an essay titled ‘Comics as a Vehicle of Education and Culture,’ Tinkle’s Anant Pai, too, espouses the use of comics as a unique educational tool which has a “spell-binding effect on children.” This thinking reflects in the comic’s motto, “Where Learning Meets Fun.” The nature of comics, then, make them especially suited to depicting a character that is can reflect the culture of the region she belongs to while being a 13-year-old who hates maths homework and loves fighting crime. The emphasis on a contemporary, generalised depiction, over any idea of tradition, Douglas said, is “a loss, because the traditions are what is unique to these communities.”
Corrections: A previous version of this article misidentified Lalnunsanga Ralte as Sanga Muanga, and the group Mizo Bloggers as the Mizo Global Society. The Caravan regrets the errors.