More Comics and Comic Books Consumerism Continues
In the then Darjeeling of the late 1950s, a brand-new comic book in mint condition cost four anna-s (16 annas made one Rupee in the old monetary system before the Naya Paisa regime was introduced in India). Special annual hardcover editions of Dell and Marvel Comics cost a whopping eight Rupees each. Being expensive, as it was, some of us likeminded addicts pooled our copies for our own lending library and circulated the precious issues among us. When the copies developed wear and tear and dog ears, we sold them to junior kids and replenished our library with new editions. We also looked for secondhand comic books occasionally flooding the bazaars from the Cambridge schools of Darjeeling, such as North Point, Mount Hermon, and St. Paul’s. The Convent girls’ schools were hopeless no-go places for comics – complete dead runs – where only Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew and Barbara Cartland reigned supreme. We did not need such girly stuffs.[break]
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It was when my family moved into our own house at Chandmari, I struck a nest of good bargain comic books. On the next lane, near the Lloyd’s Botanical Gardens, there lived a fellow Lepcha gentleman who was one of the chefs at St Joseph’s School’s hostel where the sons of the rich and famous, including the royal and aristocrat scions of Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, Lhasa, Burdwan, Coochbehar were housed in security, comfort and with VIP care.
I once happened to be at this Lepcha cook’s place as a junior volunteer for one traditional tribal celebration held at his house. It was then I discovered stacks of comic books in excellent condition in one corner of his flat. He said this particular lot came from “Nepal’s king’s three sons’ monthly stock” at the school (also called North Point).
It soon transpired that Crown Prince Birendra and his two younger brothers, Princes Gyanendra and Dhirendra, were extreme consumers of comics of all sorts. My Lepcha neighbor reportedly made nice packets every month when the Nepali royals and other hostel residents dumped their comic books and magazines in the dustbins during cleanups, and the dormitory staff divvied up the glossy loot, took them home and sold the copies like hot sel roti in their neighborhoods. I soon started buying six choice comic books for one Rupee total from the Lepcha neighbor and he also sold Photoplay, Life, Look, and The Reader’s Digest magazines to me at throwaway prices.
The annual winter housecleaning of the six or so elite Jesuit and Cambridge schools and colleges and their hostels and dormitories in Darjeelingtown yielded comic books and popular magazines as well as raunchy novels (I discovered one called “Lady Chatterley’s Daughter” while “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” remained banned in India) which flooded the hidden markets of the town. We knew many of the staffs who worked at such posh institutions and visited their houses for the choice harvest at the end of every year.
There was one rich town boy called Reggie Haim who was of our age. His family lived in one grand villa in the exclusive Mahatma Gandhi (MG) Road suburbs. He returned from Goethal’s School in Kharsang (Kurseong) in mid-December and came with Mussalman-made tin trunks filled with comics. I remember reading Tarzan, Phantom, The Three Musketeers and Ben Turpin series, among other titillating sagas, from his varied collection. By the way, Reggie Haim became Raju Hem Gurung in Kathmandu and passed a few years ago.
Comics and Comic Books: Pros and Cons
This was how I started brushing up and polished my fledgling English during my nascent school years in Darjeeling.
In retrospection, those comics or comic books were not all comical in nature; many carried heroics, adventures and sagas and others dramatized classic literary works in graphic pictures, with dialogues, explanatory sidebars and boxes; some were funny and good for belly laughs. Many such publications were printed in pocket-size and black-and-white editions while other series were Flex Technicolor print jobs. The detailed drawings of characters, animals and landscapes in these graphic tales and stories were lifelike and natural.
Even then, many refined and sophisticated denizens of Darjeelingtown, including some of our senior schoolteachers, did not approve of our voracity for comics, cartoons and comic books. They insisted that we read excellent magazines and serious books, and recommended The Reader’s Digest, Current Events and such much. We read them, too, but comics, comic books and cartoon clips were more readily available and affordable.
One personal incident, I feel, is worth mentioning here. It was pre-winter 1958 and schools were preparing to close for the forthcoming long winter vacation. I took to class the latest annual glossy edition of The Lone Ranger and Tonto, purchased at the princely sum of nine Rupees. Our teacher of English at Turnbull High School, Mr. Nirmal Chandra Pradhan, saw the volume poking out of my schoolbag. He confiscated it, slapped me once very hard, and tore the fat volume in four pieces and threw them out of the window. From three stories above, I watched the scattered pieces being picked up by an eager young schoolboy playing among the shrubberies below and run away joyously to obviously paste them together later at home and enjoy it!
Little, however, did the likes of Mr. Pradhan – those “propah” people acculturated to the hallowed traditions of the bygone British Raj in India, by then already eclipsed for 12 years – realize how new means of learning were being wrought by searching students in the new era when India was resurrecting herself on classical “Bande Mataram!” and “Jai Hind!” mantras and eschewed everything western, mistaking them for British, colonialism and imperialism. The delivering boons of modernism were considered un-Indian banes in re-Sanskritized Bharat.
It was only in 1978, twenty years later, Mr. Pradhan – one of the most venerated teachers of Darjeeling in his time, and a distant maternal uncle of mine– acknowledged my long efforts in language learning and literary persuasions when we met at Sek Kong on one of my visits to Hong Kong. He was by then a veteran headmaster of the British Brigade of Gurkhas high school on the island, and he readily reckoned with our past bitter experience and made amends to redress the “misunderstanding.” He had finally realized how reading comics and comic books in my early teens had contributed to my overall aspirations for the English language.
He at last appreciated the hillbilly background of my childhood, and also recognized how a village urchin had scant recourses to language learning, information gathering and knowledge production resources even in a cosmopolitan town like Darjeeling, except through whatever means were available to me in my immediate surroundings, for my language skills improvements.
To be continued next week
The writer is Copy Chief at The Week/Republica.
pjkarthak@gmail.com
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