Anurima Chanda talks nonsense superheroes!

Anurima Chanda is the real superhero in this essay about nonsense superheroes. She looks at the history of superheroes, how they end up in India--and how a few intrepid writers dare to do something different in "a unique margin within the marginal superhero culture of India." That is, they write nonsense superheroes. And the ones she discusses happen to be in This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse, in poems and stories by Samit Basu and Kaushik Viswanath. By making nonsense superheroes, she writes, they are creating a "radically new way of engaging with dominating power structures, neither through concurrence or conflict, but by creating ruptures within these structures to destabilise the circle itself." Bravo!

Click here to read her article!

Here, we see Basu's Pehelwan, of the "mighty, manly muscles" (drawn by Priya Kuriyan)