Karline McLain’s interdisciplinary study of the premier comic book series in India, Amar Chitra Katha (ACK, founded 1967), masterfully engages in three related projects of import for art history and for South Asian studies. First, her book investigates the reception of popular visual culture, the global transmission of images and visual literacy, the tension between canonized religious texts and the production of images, the appropriation of (high) art for nationalist causes and for popular audiences, and the struggle to put text and image together on a page in the service of an entertaining narrative. Second, she courageously takes on issues of communal conflict in India, addressing the presentation of Hindu and Islamic topics and historical figures in ACK with nuance and clarity, and offers a model for those addressing similar examples of religious conflict, iconoclasm, and culture wars in South Asia and elsewhere. Third, she highlights the representation of women and goddesses in ACK’s repertoire such that readers come to understand the problematic gendering embedded within the production of India’s national identity; the book is therefore a welcome addition to the growing literature on women, gender, and nationalism.

McLain begins with the people who read the comics. Rather than focusing on the comics as objects for study, or entering the project from the point of view of ACK’s artists or writers, and rather than situating the comics in the last four decades of Indian history or art history, she instead draws her readers into the book via the people who grew up on ACK comics. As a result, McLain convincingly demonstrates the significance of ACK for the production of India’s national identity through its depiction and canonization of key religious and historical figures. The introduction also provides important insights into her fieldwork, as she describes how she worked through mountains of ACK’s fan mail, interviewed writers, artists, and Anand Pai, the founder of ACK, on multiple occasions, and chatted at bookstalls in Mumbai with vendors and buyers of ACK comics. Any other opening would signal a particular discipline; McLain’s innovative introduction sets the stage for her strong interdisciplinary approach.

Subsequent chapters draw out the themes she highlights in the introduction: ACK’s role in raising awareness of India’s diverse history and cultures while articulating a unified set of national heroes, heroines, and historical figures; ACK’s active participation in the production of an Indian middle-class identity; and ACK’s interweaving of religion into the formation of national and class identity against a backdrop of tension between secular education and a rising Hindu fundamentalism (5–8). Truly the hidden gem of McLain’s book is its engagement with gender and the role and representation of women and goddesses within ACK comics, something not signaled in the title but permeating the entire book.

The first chapter narrates the history of ACK’s founding through an analysis of Krishna, one of its first comics. McLain continues the introduction’s focus on audience, detailing the series’ embrace by the public education system in India and its competition with television’s popularity in the 1980s. Through a nuanced presentation of founder Pai’s vision for the comics, McLain traces the company’s move away from a secularism focused on scientifically grounded knowledge toward an acknowledgment of the superhuman, miraculous feats of India’s religious and historical figures. In doing so, she subtly narrates the early stages of ACK’s production of a Hindu India, to the dismay of many observers.

The second and third chapters move more fully into the visual and textual aspects of the comics themselves. In chapter 2, McLain draws on women’s studies scholarship to describe the two types of heroines in ACK: the pativrata or tapasvini—a self-sacrificing, devoted wife and mother—and the virangana—a martial leader. Some of the earliest ACK comics focusing on women include figures such as Padmini, a Hindu Rajput queen who committed sati, or self-immolation, to enable her husband to go into battle without fear that she would fall into the hands of the enemy. Interviews with women and men on the staff of ACK enhance McLain’s exploration of the changing motivations for depicting and in part glorifying the extremely problematic—and illegal—practice of sati. McLain then clearly shows that in ACK even the martial, virangana ideal is reworked into a self-sacrificial one by choosing figures who go out into the world, take on male roles, but in the end sacrifice themselves, usually by dying on the battlefield.

The goddess Durga centers the third chapter, and here McLain carefully and deftly analyzes the relation between the stated textual source, the Devi Mahatmya, and the resultant comic. She draws out the tension between the company’s guiding principle that ACK achieve a level of “accuracy” in its retellings of Hindu narratives and the problems with identifying which of many regional and historical versions embody that accuracy. In addition, McLain shows how Durga’s gender undermines the comic book author’s ability to treat her as a superhero. This chapter provides a wonderful example of the negotiations among source text and contemporary cultural practice in the production of an ostensibly definitive narrative of Durga, an argument of interest broadly to art historians interested in text-image relations.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the other major theme in the book: communal religious conflict and ACK’s representation of Hindu and Muslim historical figures. The fourth chapter analyzes the culture wars in India as they manifest themselves in representations of the Hindu Maratha king Shivaji. The chapter masterfully traces the contested appropriations of Shivaji for colonial, nationalist, non-Brahmin, and Hindu fundamentalist causes over the past century and a half. Scholars writing on Shivaji are well aware of the potential for a violent backlash against their work, as evidenced by the attacks on the archive in Pune, where historian James Laine did research on the historical ruler, and the subsequent banning of his book (Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Thus McLain’s central discussion of ACK’s treatment of Shivaji, and the high standard at which she executes her analysis, deserves praise for its detailed attention to the contested appropriations of this historical figure.

Chapter 5 continues the investigation into the production of communal division in India by reading a variety of ACK comics for their imaging of Muslims. McLain situates the comics that focus on Mughal rulers—specifically Akbar (r. 1556–1605), Shah Jahan (r. 1627–58), and Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707)—in a larger art-historical and nation-building context in order to draw out and complicate Pai’s understanding of secular as “a form of political authority that allows for religious pluralism” (164). The chapter demonstrates that the ACK portrayal of Muslims locates the roots of secularism not with the British or the Mughals but with a cohort of Hindu and Sikh heroes such as the Sikh king Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) and the Hindu Maratha queen Ahilyabai (r. 1766–95). Muslims appear as villains throughout ACK comics, a pattern McLain links to rising fundamentalist politics during ACK’s main run, a fundamentalism that exploited and enhanced the fear that secular India meant the demise of Hinduism.

Chapter 6 focuses on a historical figure, Gandhi, although its primary focus is the relation of text and image within ACK comic books and the way in which narrative operates when the story does not involve a major battle. To overcome this perceived lack, ACK authors used dramatic scenes of both the 1919 British massacre of Indians at Jallianwala Bagh and Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 as pivotal points in comics profiling nationalist figures. McLain demonstrates how ACK implicitly linked Gandhi’s noncooperation movement directly to the massacre, and shows how the drama of Gandhi’s assassination often overshadowed the events of his life. The final chapter returns to the readers of ACK, this time students in McLain’s North American classroom, who provide insight into the global, diasporic flow of these comics and the resultant production of a Hindu-inflected Indianness across the globe.

McLain gracefully weaves together a variety of methodologies. An anthropological approach emerges across the book; she lets her interlocutors at ACK and in the public speak for themselves, and thereby takes care to represent them responsibly while enabling her readers to see the depth and the intended (and unintended) implications of the comments they make. Pai develops almost as a character in a novel: a multifaceted, respected leader who hones his own understanding of what ACK must do to support its educative and nation-building mission. She addresses art-historical precedents for many of the visuals in the comics, looking to Raja Ravi Varma’s painting (and subsequent prints based on his work) as well as early twentieth-century paintings of Shah Jahan by both Abanindranath Tagore and Abdur Rahman Chughtai. She turns to scholarship on narrative and global comic book literature to articulate the text-image relationship within the comics, while drawing on a wide range of scholars in South Asian studies for her discussion of the heroine figure in the comic books. As with most multidisciplinary scholarship, the balance sometimes shifts too much toward one discipline at the expense of others. McLain’s visual analyses do solid art-historical work, but for a reader from that discipline they occasionally appear too late in the argument, situated somewhat uncomfortably in relation to the overarching flow of ethnographic and textual methodologies. That said, McLain’s work should be commended for taking this difficult multidisciplinary route, and she does it well. As she moves among disciplines, she grounds her argument in the comics as objects, the image-text relationship, and the people who produce and read these works, never losing her rigor in analyzing these various sources.

The book includes a center section of good quality but not astounding color plates; the black-and-white reproductions in the rest of the book make one wish for more color and more reproductions overall. Juxtapositions of working sketches and prototypes with the final panels underscore key arguments in several chapters while elsewhere some scenes are left without illustrations. As the book earned the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize from the American Institute of Indian Studies—a prize that included funds to support the publication of the book—it is frustrating that there are not more color and more visual coverage of the comics discussed.

The book’s clear prose will appeal to those teaching popular visual culture at the undergraduate level, as well as fans of ACK in India and around the world, many of whom participated in McLain’s study. She should be commended for writing text with which her interlocutors can and will engage. This approach does have the unfortunate side effect of underselling the import of McLain’s research to the scholarly community. At only a few points does she gesture to broader theoretical frameworks for her approach, and one must look to the footnotes to find some of her central scholarly resources. Pivotal concepts such as secularism or modernity do not receive the sort of attention they need here in order to demonstrate connections to the broad literatures associated with both terms. As a result the text does not fulfill its potential to engage fully with literature in nationalism, secularism, modernity, and postcoloniality. The book shines at moments when McLain relies on and shows her scholarly apparatus while maintaining an eye on her broader audience: her discussion of the machinations related to artist, popular religion, and text in the production of the Tales of Durga; or her clear narration of complex caste disputes over the representation of Shivaji starting in the nineteenth century (121–31).

India’s Immortal Comic Books is a welcome addition to the growing interdisciplinary analyses of India’s popular culture. While the most developed literature in this field focuses on India’s many regional film industries, studies like McLain’s dig more deeply into other media. God posters and poster prints have seen a great deal of attention in recent years (Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, London: Reaktion, 2004; Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and especially since the serialization of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in India, television studies too has seen an expansion. McLain’s book joins recent curatorial efforts to highlight the Indian comic book (“Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India’s Comics,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 17, 2009–February 7, 2010), and it adds India’s twentieth-century comic Amar Chitra Katha to the vast literature on comics in North America and East Asia.