The Politics of Cultural Homogenization and Territorialization: Representation of Northeast in Tinkle’s WingStar Series

Abstract

Tinkle, the children’s magazine in English in India has been instrumental in shaping the imagination of the young urban Indian child ever since its inception in 1980. No other magazine has the readership and reach that Tinkle enjoys with a circulation of more than 3 lakh. The fact that Tinkle has survived unlike many other magazines in India for 40 odd years is testimony (marketing strategies aside) of its reach and popularity. Tinkle, ever since the days of its founder-editor Anant Pai, has been instrumental in constructing “imagined communities” of national identities for children in India over the decades since the 1970s ever since the Amar Chitra Kathas. One such attempt in constructing children’s imaginaries is the addition of a series Wing Star in 2015, scripted by Sean D’mello and inked by Vineet Nair that features Mapui Kawlim, a 13-year-old superhero from Aizwal, Mizoram. While it is empowering that a national mainstream popular magazine for children would feature a female superhero from among the less represented Northeastern states, what is problematic, according to this study, is the manner in which there has been a conscious erasure of all markers of her ethnicity by appropriating her into the larger mainstream homogenised pan-Indian identity of a young female superhero with no specific markers to represent the culture she belongs to. This study will attempt to read this ‘sanitised’ representation of a Northeastern superhero in the light of the idea of cultural appropriation and deterritorialization and reterritorialization posited by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that looks at the erasure of specific ethnic and other identities markers. This study will also engage with the implications of how ‘sanitised’ representations like this in popular narratives would construct and homogenise the imaginaries of the children of a country as they would grow up with erroneous notions of cultural ethnicities and diversity within the country adding to the problematics of marginalisation and hegemonic nationalities.