The Curious Indian Life of Archie

From an outsider's perspective, it is odd to observe what appears to be a national obsession with Archie comics in India. This summer, when he proposed to brunette vixen Veronica over wholesome blonde Betty, newspapers ran story after story of analysis. The Times of India conducted a poll asking its readers, "Should Archie Marry Veronica?" 78% said No and emphatically argued the point on the comments page. Another earnest headline in DNA proclaimed, "Betty fans protest as Archie proposes to Veronica." What makes Archie so popular in India that mainstream culture so actively concerns itself with its fictional universe?

A few years ago, there were plans to "Indianise" Archie, perhaps even going to extent of clothing Veronica and Betty in saris. It was noted that the books had been selling well in India for over forty years, and had the largest circulation of any comic in English. In the Indian context, Archie takes on a range of meanings and references, which tenuously reconcile the all-American world of Riverdale High with a very different cultural milieu.

On one level, there is a certain colonial genealogy to Archie. In Aparna Sen's 36 Chowringhee Lane, elderly Anglo-Indian teacher Violet Stoneham visits her brother Eddie in a Calcutta nursing home to bring him tins of biscuits and Archie comics. Here the book itself becomes a symbol of a colonial past, pleasantly quaint yet fundamentally anachronistic. It is also a marginal relic, separated from the surrounding post-colonial cultural world of Calcutta and circulated in an intimate ceremony that memorialises the shared past of Violet and Eddie.

However, despite this highly specific use of the Archie book to suggest a vanishing past, its story is actually deeply implicated in India's post-colonial modernity. In Amit Chaudhuri's essay on America in Granta, which appeared in 2002, he recalls from his childhood "the much thumbed and perused copy, in the 'circulating library', of the Archie Comics Digest; the thin line that separated us from Riverdale." This remarkable statement asserts a connection to America in a non-official space, nurtured by the English language and a particular imagination. Chaudhuri writes that American comic books taught him how to read and "somehow entered our lives in Bombay and became indistinguishable from them." In other words, the universe of the comic book becomes a constituent part of the Indian cultural milieu into which it has been transported.The "thin line" that separates Bombay and Riverdale is finally crossed in Karan Johar's now-classic 1998 melodrama Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. This film has been acknowledged as a sort of turning point in recent Hindi cinema, marking the full bloom of the romantic comedy aimed at young, cosmopolitan audiences. The first half of the film takes place in St. Xavier's College, an ambiguously Americanised space that is part India, part Riverdale. The love triangle between Shah Rukh, Rani and Kajol has even been described as an outright Archie adaptation. What is important here is that Karan Johar deliberately chooses to reference Archie and its universe as a way to express a new modernity for India. His characters live on a stage that is only partly constructed by observing how young Indians actually behave with each other; it also uses comforting allusions and symbols of a "foreign" world that has, for the better part of the last half-century, in fact been India's own.