Where do our ideas about what is beautiful, particularly what is beautiful in people, come from?  I grew up in an Indian family in Connecticut in the 70’s, with The Preppy Handbook and Seventeen as my primary aesthetic barometers.  I knew that the rules therein applied in general and also, somehow, that they didn’t really apply to me.  Like a lot of desi kids my age I was mesmerized by the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comic books relatives brought for me from India, with stories from myth and history.  I loved the dense, candy-colored graphics and the way that the Indian characters (that is, all of them) were drawn, with melodramatic poses and extravagant costumes.  Shakuntala is the volume I remember best.  Its heroine (a beauty who marries a prince who forgets her and then, finally, remembers her) has a body like Kim Kardashian’s, with reality-defying curves that fill her sari brilliantly.  And her eyes, nose and lips are so big there’s barely room for them on her face.

At a recent event to remember the ACK founder Anant Pye, who died last year, a group of desi writers and artists gathered to reminisce.  All four speakers said that they were attracted to the (latent, mostly) sexual and violent themes in the comics, and that they found imaginative freedom in the worlds depicted.  There was some criticism.  Heems of Das Racist said that the comics focused on Hindu subjects to the exclusion of other groups.  And Chitra Ganesh, a painter who’s appropriated imagery from the comics into her own fabulist work, observed how much sex and violence the narratives actually repressed.  More than anything that anyone said, though, it was the presence of Heems and Chitra on stage that inspired.  They were outspoken, unorthodox, wickedly smart, and fantastically dressed.  As long as they’re around desi kids won’t need to scour comic books looking for heroes.