Shaktimaan is back! How the Indian superman came of age!

When I was a boy, at the cusp of the new millennium, superheroes were still very much a subculture. There was no internet yet, and the only place to buy comics in Bombay was to go lurking about the roadside book-wallahs near Flora Fountain, searching for tattered volumes of old Golden Age titles. Occasionally, lending libraries like Metsons and Shemaroo managed to get their hands on disjointed issues of the X-Men and the Justice League and the Legion of Super-Heroes which you could borrow briefly if you were a member, for three bucks a pop.

It was here that I first encountered Superman and Batman, Spider-Man and the Hulk. This was the Post-Crisis Era, the age of the Brave and the Bold, before reboots and cross-overs became the fashion. Batman had only just begun to retreat into darkness, and Superman was still the eternal boy scout, fighting for truth and justice against Luthor and Braniac and the very silly Mister Mxyzptlk. Guy Gardner was the Green Lantern of Earth, and Keith Giffen was doing very odd things with the JLI. Characters like Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, Lobo and Ambush Bug, were changing the very notion of what superheroes were meant to be, not merely one-dimensional, omnipotent beings, but rather bumbling, argumentative individuals who were in the end, altogether human.

My one lament, I remember, was that we had no Indian superheroes as such. Perhaps it was the fact that India was a relatively young country, and the shadow of our national heroes stretched long and far, Gandhi and Nehru and Patel, standing monumental in the public consciousness, seemingly as insurmountable as titans. Perhaps it was the preponderant popularity of Bollywood that had crippled our collective imagination, the personality cults of the Bachchans and the Khans that made superheroes seem somewhat demode. Or maybe it was the enduring presence of history and religion, those two bastions on which the Indian way of life is built, that made paper heroes seem utterly flimsy.

Sure, there were characters like Nagraj and Doga but they seemed amateurish at best when compared to what the Americans were churning out, month after month. Mandrake and Tarzan and the Phantom were part of our lives, but they weren't quintessentially Indian. Neither was Tintin or Asterix, or Rip Kirby or Modesty Blaise. No, what was missing was a truly sub-continental protagonist, a 'brown' hero who epitomised the very essence of India, who made each of us believe that we could be more than ordinary, even if we were dark skinned, even if we were not American.

That changed on 27 September 1997. That Sunday, at 12 pm sharp, the first episode ofShaktimaan was broadcast on Doordarshan. It chronicled the adventures of Pandit Gangadhar Vidyadhar Mayadhar Omkaar Naath Shastri, a bespectacled, buck-toothed nerd who masters his yogic shakti and is infused by the five elements after a Kundalini ritual, thus becoming able to transform into a very Vedic Ubermensch, blessed with super-speed, super-strength, invulnerability, telepathy and telekinesis, not to mention whatever other powers the writers of the show decided to give him that week.

Shaktimaan To RETURN On TV by lehren

It was obviously a copy of Superman, right down to his susceptibility to kryptonite, which in this case was a celestial crystal called 'papmani'. The end result was rather tacky, from the lame costume which made Mukesh Khanna look like an extra from an Ed Wood film, to the truly dreadful special effects. Nevertheless, in spite of the plot holes and the inane acting, we found ourselves drawn back week after week, quite simply because it let us, as children, escape for a few minutes, retreat into the realm of pure imagination. Also, it had Kitu Gidwani starring as a very comely reporter, and for a teenager trapped in the throes of puberty, that was reason enough to tune in.

A year later, in 2008, Ketan Mehta, always original, reinvented Flash Gordon as Captain Vyom. Much as I hate to admit it, I was about as ardent a Vyom-ite as you can imagine. This was Ketan Mehta's frizzy haired madness at its finest. You had Milind Soman running about channelling William Shatner, hamming it up with a devil-may-care grin while waving an over-sized NERF gun about shamelessly. But it was the villains that made Vyom so much fun, stellar actors like Rahul Bose who played an interstellar super-sociopath with almost Websterian blood-thirstiness, not to mention Madhu Sapre and Nethra Raghuraman strutting about clad in extremely tight cosplay outfits. True, just like Shaktimaan, the storyline was shaky and the SFX amateurish, but Vyom had an addictive campiness to it, a Harryhausen quality not unlike the Sinbad films or Adam West's Batman, which kept viewers glued to the screen. It was rather terrible, but in a marvelously unabashed way, like Shakespeare in Punjabi, strange and outlandish but still undeniably entertaining.

Fast forward some 20 years later, and superheroes are now very much en vogue. What was once dismissed as a primarily American preoccupation by our parents have become part of the global zeitgeist, and a massively profitable one at that. Marvel and DC blockbusters gross billions each summer. On television, shows like Arrow, Gotham and The Flash are watched by hordes of eager fans each week, and Disney's merchandise earns more than the GDP of most third world nations.