Phantom turns 90: A masked hero’s Indian odyssey haunted by colonial baggage

My first ever crush has just turned 90! When I was all of four, I had declared, with all the solemnity of a pre-schooler, that I would marry Aranyadev when I grew up. If you’re wondering who that is, it’s the masked crusader who has just turned nonagenarian — Lee Falk’s Phantom.

My earliest introduction to this strange character was in Bengali. In those translated strips, Phantom became Aranyadev or Betal, his wolf/dog was called Bagha, not Devil, and his white stallion was called Toofan, not Hero. This was the early 1970s when access to imported books was restricted to Soviet publications and the occasional Tintin title. For the child in me, Phantom’s world — exotic, dangerous and fantastical — was like an alternative history and geography lesson. His shenanigans took me to magical realms where, ever so often, actual historical characters popped up, offering a fiction-fantasy blend perfect for a young mind.

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This month, this masked crusader turns 90. Which means the first Phantom stories made their debut in the pre-war mid-1930s. Of course, the stories that I binge-read in the 1970s were — to the displeasure of teachers and parents who disapproved of comic books in general — very different from those first outings of the Ghost Who Walks. For one, the premise had shifted continents and, for another, the Phantom universe had undergone some post-war tweaking too. Phantom himself continued to do what he always did — fight pirates, gun-runners, drug cartels, bloodthirsty bandits and evil regime changers.

It seems Lee Falk originally intended the Phantom-verse to be situated somewhere in the subcontinent and its surrounding regions. He was looking for an exotic, colourful and dangerous locale and India of the Thuggees and Maharajas fitted the bill. Inspired by The Jungle Book and the colourful Thuggee stories that were the staple of British civil servants from William Sleeman onwards, he pictured his arch villain with broad Indian strokes. The Singh Brotherhood, a global pirate organisation, is to Phantom what Moriarty is to Sherlock Holmes. The rivalry between the two evolves over nearly 500 years and each successive Phantom has his own Singh Brotherhood captain to tackle. The Singh Brotherhood names are mangled Indian — Rama, Ashar, Kabai etc — and reflect the way the West looked at India in the 1940s and 1950s.

From Tintin’s holidays in the palace of the Maharajah of Gaipajama in The Blue Lotus to Nancy Drew’s brush with Kenyan Indian Shastri Tagore in The Spider Sapphire Mystery, the Indian connection was always part exotica, part danger — something that the Western detective, crime crusader or journalist has trouble both understanding and controlling. Of course, the Singh Brotherhood’s racial antecedents are confused, to say the least. Take Kabai Singh — though he is broad-spectrum Asian, in film versions he is more Fu Manchu than anything definitively Indian, but the age-appropriate racist undertone of an exotic villain still stands.

If the villain is exotic, can the love interest be far behind? A casual look at Phantom’s various love interests brings up the Indian angle in a few of them. For a man who wears underwear over a body suit and an empty-socket eye mask, the Phantom manages to snag a long line of beautiful and feisty women, many of them of historical lineage.

There’s a fair bit of history embedded in the Phantom mythology, with the origin story going back to 1536 when the first Phantom is shipwrecked as a boy. His father is connected to Christopher Columbus and Phantom himself grows up to marry Marabella Columbus, the explorer’s granddaughter. More exciting historically is the third Phantom, who first travels to Elizabethan England, takes part in a Shakespearean play and then manages to sweep the bard’s niece Rosamunda off her feet. They marry but presumably his wife dies because we see this 16th-century character then travel to India and find himself a royal bride.

In The Third Phantom’s Bride, he meets Princess Pura, the daughter of a Maharajah, who proceeds to, predictably enough, fall in love with him. The story ends with them getting married and living happily ever after. Not all romantic overtures end happily, though. When Kabai Singh’s close associate Sala falls in love with Phantom, he spurns her, triggering bloody vengeance on her part.

Phantom’s involvement with all things Indian undergoes a definite change in the half-century that separates his first appearance from The Third Phantom’s Bride, which came in the mid-1980s. In fact, early Phantom strips show him in action in Calcutta (Kolkata), Madras (Chennai) and Bombay (Mumbai), helping track down pirates, bandits or kidnappers. One of the earliest adventures set entirely in India was The Maharajah’s Daughter, in which the 21st (current) Phantom rescues Lakshmi/Lakani, the princess of Nimpore, from the clutches of the evil Rajah of Simbal (which sounds suspiciously like Chambal). Shortly afterwards, we find the Phantom dressed like Lawrence of Arabia fighting the Thuggees in a story called The Thuggees, which appeared in 1949-50.

While the Thuggee reference pops up several times — thanks to the colonial obsession with that cult, as mentioned earlier — Phantom does travel to India to fight the Singh Brotherhood as well as other bloodthirsty villains. In two Team Fantomen stories from Scandinavia — The Coffin from Bombay and The Curse of the Rakshasa — the 17th Phantom swoops in to tackle some exotic Indian attacks. Written in the mid-1980s through to the mid-1990s, these stories continue to project India as a colourful, exotic puzzle that forms the backdrop for a Western crime-fighter’s daredevilry. In that sense, they are similar in sensibility to Octopussy (1983), which shows 007 swanning around palaces and markets in India in search of a villain.

The Indian references aside, most of the Phantom stories talk of fictional places and people, often with a definitive African arc. The Phantom himself literally lives in a man-cave called the Bangalla Skull Cave (the Bengali version turned it into Denkali to avoid confusion) with his wife Diana Palmer, children Kit and Heloise, and his ward Rex. He is protected by the fiercely protective Bandar tribe (shades of The Jungle Book’s Bandar-log, perhaps?), often gambolling in the Golden Sands of Keela Wee, listening to the Whispering Mountains or relaxing at the Isle of Eden where even lions eat grass.

Not bad for a 90-year-old with no super weapons, no superpowers (beyond the skull ring biff) and not even a cape. No wonder the four-year-old me wanted to marry him — can you blame me?

(Nandini Sengupta is a freelance writer and author of several books. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)