There has been some disagreement amongst my friends about the resemblance (or lack thereof) of this Sarojini-toon to Sushma Swaraj, but I’m convinced it’s a full-on soul transference thing. Funnily enough, this Sarojini-Sushma cross-dimensional freaky friday switch is not the most awful thing about this Amar Chitra Katha on M.S. Subbulakshmi’s life.
The amnesia about caste is. We are supposed to believe that the only obstacle that M.S. Subbulakshmi faced was being a woman. I wishfully presumed that they would at least mention she wasn’t Brahmin so as to give their comic a narrative arc — she defied the odds, etc.
By the way, want to know ACK’s version of how she overcome being a woman in a man’s world? Her benevolent husband fixes her problems, of course. And I won’t even come to all the MS = Mother India stuff.
Obviously, the expectations of an Amar Chitra biography have to be muted, but they have rather implausibly managed to make her life utterly boring. So I leave you with this picture of a youthful Subbulakshmi with her bestie Balasaraswati. It was responsible for much internet-exclaiming last year.
