One of her theories is regarding the skin coloring in ACK (Amar Chitra Katha), which she says is trying to make dark color as analogous to Evil. The reader may or may not agree with Nandini Chandra's analysis, however it has to be said that her arguments are cleverly designed, most of the times. I would surely be biased while writing about this book since I grew up with Amar Chitra Katha, but even after trying hard to make myself think as rationally as possible, I still find this book reminding me of GP Ramachandran's film reviews of 1990s. The book tries to prove that these popular comic books were having a hidden agenda to propagate Hindu Communalism, Vaishnavism to be specific, and also that the comics were anti-Muslim, anti-feminist, anti-Communist, pro-Brahministic and what not. This innovatingly designed book with several nostalgic images from various Amar Chitra Katha comics, published by Yoda Press, is a result of the author's several-years-long research, and provides a Communist-Marxist sort of analysis of the Amar Chitra Katha comic book series. Last few weeks, I have been reading the book The Classic Popular - Amar Chitra Katha, 1967-2007 written by Nandini Chandra. I feel that these convoluted reviews, if they were more widely read, would have poured more poison into people's minds than the targeted films which the reviewers accused to be propagating "communal agenda".
CHITHRA KATHA MALAYALAM MOVIE
There were similar reviews published by a few other critics as well, and some of them even considered the caste and creed of the makers of the movie also into consideration while writing reviews. All the main characters in a movie have to be feminists. As a logical continuation of the above rules, all upper caste Hindu characters in a movie should be negative. For example, if a character is shown as praying inside a Hindu temple in one scene, he should automatically be moved to the villain category. Care needs to be taken to avoid even indirect references to Hinduism. Any scene containing Hindu religious signs, customs or festivals in a cinema would be treated as a method of propagation of Hindu communal agenda. Feudal landlord characters should not be shown as having any good qualities, under any circumstances. Capitalist and bourgeoisie characters should always come as villains in films. Such characters have to be shown as ideal human beings, by all means. No character in a film should be portrayed in a bad light if he is shown as a follower of Communist-Marxist ideology.
A film as a whole should promote Communist-Marxist ideology GP Ramachandran's reviews focused more on the ideological standing of the movie rather than its art, and they were based on a few rigid rules: After reading a few reviews, I was able to see the pattern in his analysis and the reviews started looking more predictable to me but still, I continued reading them just for fun (there were gems like " Buddha was the first Marxist in the World" in one of the articles that got published in Deshabhimani those days, if I remember correctly). I liked to read these reviews, because they provided quite a different perspective of the films, which I would never have perceived while watching them.
GP Ramachandran used to write reviews of Malayalam films those days in the weekly. During the 1990s, I used to be a regular reader of Deshabhimani weekly.
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