evil bird dies; humble fish avenged
indian comics, narrative structure, myths v fables
When I was 21, someone asked me about the artworks that had first opened my heart at a young age. And, because I was also young at the time, I rattled off a rather obvious list, books that I believed had taught me how to think, in terms of ideology; or which had reached emotional heights that I found memorable; or had a certain scene or dialogue that I would find myself mapping onto the real world.
Only more recently have I been thinking about what has influenced how I think about structure, or how a story is shaped. These influences are less obvious to me, but nonetheless persistent. A few weeks ago, I was cleaning out my basement and came across these dusty boxes of hundreds of Amar Chitra Katha books, Indian comic books so popular that countless writers, artists, and myriad individuals with connections to India have cited them as influences, recounting stories similar to mine, that they were gifted these books from watchful adults of all stripes.
Years before, when I had again encountered the question of what to do with these books, my father had recommended that I give them away to another child. I didn’t, because I was unsure of their merit.
The late Anant Pai, who had acted as publisher, writer, editor, even illustrator, has been on the receiving end of much useful criticism. The books, meant to be instructive, were among the first to dramatize and narrate the dry facts of Indian history, and to depict various Hindu gods and epics in breakneck comic pacing. But they were considered overly simplistic, preferring narrative arcs that spotlighted single protagonists over other, more collective storytelling methods. Real-world caste, class, religious complexities were often flattened, and complex, sprawling myths would become thin enough to veer in the direction of propaganda.
Then again, a child reading these comics away from India might be more like me. I was interested in the stories that depicted the animal kingdom, which were horribly cruel and openly gory. The stakes of these stories were high. Every animal was just a hair away from death—and unlike Bugs Bunny or SpongeBob, they often did die! Boulders would crush skulls, bodies would float down rivers. These gory deaths would often be the conclusion of the tales, like in the one to follow.
Here’s the beat-by-beat plot for a story called The Heron and The Crab.
An old heron lives near a lake full of fish, crab, eel. He’s too old to catch any of them, so he starts to starve.
He spins up a plan to sit by the edge of the lake crying. A young crab sees him and asks what’s wrong. He tells this crab that he’s fasting as a precaution—the lakes are going to dry up soon.
The crab freaks out and tells all the other water creatures. They mimetically also freak out and ask him to get advice from the wizened heron.
The heron suggests to the crab that he can be their savior. That he’ll carry them, one-by-one, to a close-by lake, where there’s unlimited water.
All the fish and crab and eel are excited and shout out “me first!” “uncle!” “brother!”
The heron takes one fish after the next in his mouth, dashes them to death on a rock a few meters away, and then eats them whole. He’s satisfied and healthy.
Weeks pass. The first crab approaches him and asks when it’s his turn be saved. The heron decides that it’s the crab’s turn to become a meal.
The crab is flying on the heron’s neck when he spots fish bones on the ground. He grows suspicious.
The heron is feeling evil. He decides to tell the crab everything, ending with the fact that he’s going to kill and eat him.
The crab squeezes the heron by the neck and strangles him. The heron crashes into a rock.
Then, the crab drags this dying bird to the lake by his thin neck, laughing the whole way.
The remaining lake animals are shocked that the heron is dead, but the crab reveals all.
The story ends with a little caption that says
MORAL: ONE MAY SMILE AND SMILE AND YET BE A VILLAIN.
The moral is really off-the-mark and unsatisfying. As a fable, the comic fails. Here’s a successful fable. A tortoise and a rabbit decide to race. The rabbit is so fast he decides to rest and take a nap, and the slow-and-steady turtle wins the race. Clean and neat narrative arc, obvious moral about persistence.
In reality, the stories are closer to myths, as in Peter Brooks’ definition in Reading for the Plot. Brooks explains that myths used “narrative as a form of thinking, a way of reasoning about a situation.” In fact, myth is “the ordering of the inexplicable and impossible situation as narrative that somehow mediates and forcefully connects its discrete elements, so that we accept the necessity of what cannot logically be discoursed of.”
In plain terms: Myths use narratives to lay out situations that can’t really be analyzed through normal logical discourse. They deal with something that escapes logical explanation altogether. We could never encounter an evil heron preying on a group of innocent fish, and likely, it doesn’t exist in our real world. But Pai believes this story is useful because it reveals something in its telling.
Let’s say we looked at the heron story as a moral myth.
The heron starves, for what seems to be a long time. He is bent on survival and plots. He decides to go cry by the lake, and this is when the story starts to move swiftly.
He tells the naive crab, who is alone and away from his group, that the lake is drying up, and that they must save themselves. The crab believes him, even though he can see the lake himself!
MORAL NUMBER ONE: Don’t believe anyone coming with big, end-of-world messages, especially not someone who can harm you. It doesn’t even matter if they cite an astrologer.
The crab quickly becomes the messenger, bringing this apocalypse story to the crowd of mostly fish in the lake. They’re terrified—save us. The crab doesn’t think for himself here, either; he returns with their message to the heron.
MORAL NUMBER TWO: Use your own two eyes.
Suddenly, we see that the heron is eating the fish he is pretending to save. There is no sense of how much time has passed. The stupid fish in the lake line up like lemmings to go next. It is only when it is the crab’s turn that he sees the fish bones.
MORAL NUMBER THREE: When you go off alone, you will face horrors greater than you would have ever imagined. But you will also get to be brave and heroic.
The heron is a typical sort of villain. He shares his plans too early. This moral is rather obvious, yada yada.
MORAL NUMBER FOUR: Never underestimate anyone, no matter their size.
The heron’s hubris kills him. The crab has won, and he’s so happy he continues to laugh, off-panel, until he gets back to the lake. Even then, the fish, with their partial information, don’t recognize him as a hero, but that’s a story for another time.
The story had to be laid out in this order to work. The heron had to win over trust, first. The crab needed to see reality fray and the heron’s lies appear. And, eventually, the crab needed to lead the fish away from this issue. The moral was not at the end, but in its little turns.
I’m going to put aside the usefulness of some these morals and look at this story solely as structure. Pai invented a structure—most likely, he understood fable loosely enough to manage to make something original—that I think is part of what makes these stories so influential, to others, and to me.
Straight logic isn’t always sufficient to solve a problem if its bits don’t have good correlates in the real world. Myth is useful here, because it’s not about the moral it’s driving towards, but more about the way it moves through narrative itself. The various twists and turns are where meaning is derived.
Here and there, I see myself drawn to this structure when I’m working through a problem, like what I wrote last week. I think this comic structure has been incredibly generative for me to find solutions that may not be very linear.
So, thank you for that, Anant Pai. And also for of all the depictions of animals waging mindless and cruel wars on each other.
