Mad Magazine and Tonto: “Kemo Sabe!” in retrospection
There is one definite instance of how a maddeningly hilarious publication can open up a young cognizant reader’s mind decades before the actual historical narratives are written from all essential angles – histories not as written by the victorious alone but also looked at by the defeated, as well. To be sure:
One mid-1960s issue of Mad Magazine ran a cartoon clip on The Lone Ranger (now known to be the Texas Ranger John Reid) and his “Red Indian” (now rightly addressed as Native American in the US and First Nation in Canada) scout named Tonto, a Comanche warrior. In the scene, the two are surrounded by “Injuns” on all sides, with no escape in sight. In the first frame of the clip depicting this fatal scenario, The Lone Ranger says to his companion, “Tonto, we are surrounded!” The dreadful scene is one of marauding Comanche Braves dabbed in war paint and on warpath, intent on destroying the White settlers encroaching on the Comanche Empire. But to the Lone Ranger’s worrisome Texas Ranger dilemma, Tonto is shown rebutting, “What do you mean by “we”, you White Man?”[break]
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In a briefest gist like this, the great panorama of the American Manifest Destiny of the 18th and 19th centuries is unfurled in a single exclamation, like “we”.
As I write this, I believe the latest Hollywood remake of “The Lone Ranger” does make a most specific departure from a largely stereotypical picture of the past, and thus reverses this very one-sided history and now projects it from the point of view of the vanquished Native American Nations of North America themselves.
Simultaneously, there is also an other instance of how one movie based on vintage Wild West can trace the genesis of the military-industrial complex, and how the nexus further flourishes to satiate the greed of arms and ammunition manufacturers and defense contractors through power lobbyists who connive with corrupt and ambitious politicians in order to create unnecessary wars in order perpetuate profits, and how this mutually profitable collusion continually creates chronic confusion and complications in an already disorderly world of their making.
Finally, in addition, it is only today, some fifty years later, I have at last the occasion to acknowledge my debts to that particular Mad Magazine’s humorously hammering cartoon strip on The Lone Ranger and Tonto. This revelatory visual experience which began germinating in me quite a few years ago has birthed my own needs and urges to find and define my own self-identity as an aboriginal and ethnic tribal of the Himalaya, and to be interested in the world’s internally displaced and marginalized First Peoples as my own kindred souls. Indeed, “We” are of the prehistoric eons and Eden-like lands; and “the others” who arrived, uninvited, and that too much later in history! The fact that such an illuminatingly conscious awareness should come to me, as it did, from a couple of corny-looking cartoon clips of a sadistically funny magazine like Mad is a singular testimony to my own growth as a student of life and its uneven chessboard.
Subsequently and lately, this subconscious also led me to read Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” William Least Heat Moon’s “Blue Highways,” “Empire of the Summer Moon” by SC Gwynne, and the novels of Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie and works by other Native American writers.
In my present understanding – in 2013, some 50 years after first encountering the particular Mad magazine’s aforementioned cartoon frames – of the old Wild West fictional romance, Texas Ranger John Reid’s intrepid and ever-faithful Native American sidekick Tonto’s frequent and widespread exclamation of “Ke-mo sah-bee!” might have meant, as a catchphrase, “trusty scout,” or a term of endearment, like “faithful friend,” in his native Potawatomi tongue. But in the 2013 edition of The Lone Ranger, Tonto (Johnny Depp) ironically explains the term as “wrong brother.” A wrong brother is also a “wronged” brother, hence an enemy in the making, in fact, especially in the context of the American White Man’s “Manifest Destiny” and its drum-rolling and bulldozing drives throughout the rest of the remaining unconquered Wild West, right across to the Pacific; and therefore, Tonto is not a brother but a sworn enemy, perhaps in an avatar of Quanah Parker.
This may also explain the eye mask of The Lone Ranger! In another inference of the present-day speculations on sexual orientation, were John Reid and Tonto gay, too?
Trivial thoughts aside, I must admit, though, and with a note of sadness, that I am yet to read Sherman Alexie’s collection of short stories, entitled “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” And that is bad procrastination. Yet, instead of imagining a possible gunfight to the death on the prairies of Texas to rounds and rounds of Olympian fisticuffs in heaven between the two is an affordable thought. One hopes the bout was a draw, with the two unanimously declared joint winners – one keeping the champ’s belt for six months and the other the next six.
World information dissemination in Nehru’s India
By reading the previous paragraphs, readers may be able to glean into the India in general and Darjeeling in particular of the 1950s and ’60s – those delicate post-Independence decades in South Asia.
Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru literally ruled India for 17 years as its enlightened Prime Minister since 1947, the very year of Independence. For nearly two decades, however, Nehru stymied and stifled and castrated India into an oddball in every which way possible. He sermonized on all things “Swadeshi” and disallowed anything “bideshi” or “phoren” to reach India’s shores and land in airports. He also prevented Indians from visiting overseas to regulate, among other strictures, India’s foreign exchange reserves, and thereby automatically minimizing importation of goods as well while cocooning his fellow Indians within the confines of the subcontinent, hoping perhaps to promote and develop domestic tourism instead. He ruled India as his very own “Permit Raj” and official “Licence Raj” in place of the erstwhile British Raj.
This was fine, except India did not produce and manufacture its own necessary goods and meet requirements to replenish what the British had left and to complement its dire essentials, such as passenger cars, public vehicles, heavy-duty trucks, refrigerators, air-conditioners, audio and visual systems and other fast-growing scientific and technological givens of those days. But the modern rising expectations of the newly aspiring Indians in their proud “Swaraj” were nipped in the bud from the very beginning of their nation state’s renaissance and reformation. Rather, Nehru’s own brand of counter-reformation left no dreams for anything post-modern in Free India when it had no opportunity to taste modernism and reformation in the first place.
However, no such stinginess was evident in matters of information dissemination and knowledge acquisition. How come? Was it because Nehru was a “Pandit,” an educated and enlightened and a learned Kashmiri Brahmin who had a soft and liberal heart for such illuminating things as printed matters and celluloid and vinyl discs?
But these very things which would, unbeknownst to him, begin whetting the appetite for the very things highlighted in such foreign imports which were but rendered out of reach for the very “wanting” and yearning Indian human beings.
Be that as it may, but the young generations of Darjeeling continued availing of the latest imported western comic strips, comic books, magazines, books and novels of all sorts.
India’s cinema houses also continued screening fresh American and British movies while India’s own film industries in Bombay, Calcutta, Bangalore and Madras kept churning out their own commercial and popular feature films in Hindi and other regional languages in spite of the fact that studios had growing difficulties in equipping their studios with up-to-date, later called state-of-the-art, audiovisual and other cinematic systems due to official import embargos and foreign exchange restrictions imposed by Pundit Nehru’s Congress Government. That, however, is another story altogether, and has no contexts whatsoever in this series.
It must be added, nonetheless, that it took 30 years to undo what Pundit Nehru had done to quarantine India as a whole: It took his grandson Rajiv Gandhi to unyoke the nation with his revolutionary liberalization policies in the 1990s, thus opening India to the whole wide world at long last. That it took him to be the Prime Minister of India to reverse what his grandfather and mother, Indira Gandhi, she also in the same position, had stilted in the previous three decades to take India back to the Stone Age is simply stupefying. By which time, sadly, the sweet birds of our youth had flown away, and my generation had already entered our midlife crises.
To be continued next week.
The writer is Copy Chief at The Week/Republica.
pjkarthak@gmail.com
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