Back to the Future with Tintin

1930-31, even though Tintin is without a mouth and Snowy 8212; scared as he is at the thought of contracting 8220;psittacosis8221; from an African parrot bite 8212; is not quite the plebian 8220;mongrel8221; of the later works!

World events thankfully forced Herge to correct his 8220;attitude8221; in the later 1954 re-edited version and in the later adventures. Did Tintin and Captain Haddock not take on the might of Rastapopoulos and Allen to bust their slave-trading racket in 8220;Red Sea Sharks8221;?

This helped redeem his stature somewhat, and did his claim on universality no harm too. For, countless child minds have grown up on this initiation into a proxy-European worldview by virtue of his brilliantly lively comics 8212; so lively and full of incident that, compared to his detailed artwork, the animated and the film versions seem pale and static.

But in Congo, he is far from redemption. It is heartbreaking to see Tintin reduced to an agent-envoy of the pre-war colonial Beligian King who created havoc in Congo. It is said that Herge was hostage to his publisher Wallez8217;s influence. That it was Wallez who got Herge to do this thick-lipped, body-bent-forward, 8220;Master-this-is-your-cabin8221; sort of primitivised Congolese for the 8217;30s Belgian youth who needed lessons on the virtues and values of colonialism: and on how the natives were introduced to civilisation.

How, indeed! Our good ol8217; Tintin on a holiday in Congo via Antwerp. Through the good offices of a lost car, he reaches the pristine territory of the King of Babaoro8217;m to become the chief of a Congolese tribe. On the way, he hires a boy called Coco as guide, goes hunting big game, killing wild rhino 8212; in the first B-W edition, Tintin drills a hole in the back of the rhino, fills it with gunpowder and blows it up, later Herge altered it to a rhino accidentally triggering Tintin8217;s rifle 8212; crocs, boas and whatever wildlife came his way. The condescending air, the colonial perspective, the details of the safari, all was pieced together by Herge from tales of African explorers.

There was an outcry even then. The black-and-white version was redrawn and made more palatable in 1946 and further changed in 1975. This 2005, first English edition in colour comes with a foreword setting out a historical contextualisation by way of an advance apology. However, those of us who have been weaned on Tintin8217;s friendship with the Maharaja of Gaipajama and the Great Indian Rope Trick of the evil fakir, do not protest that easily.

But then, the figures and characters that peopled our childhood attics, streaming images from distant lands, haven8217;t they all been pulled down from their pedestals? How many of their inherent complications have survived the pure rage of academics who got bored with great literature and turned their analytical lens to pulp? Holmes was on opium, Agatha Christie was not the crafty creator of Poirot that we imagined but a clinical employer of textbook Freud, and all the golliwogs have been excised out of those blighted Enid Blytons. The romances of Emma and Elizabeth Bennett have long been lost in the hands of classroom fascists who read narrative structures into Jane Austen8217;s cloistered, matrimonial tales of tiny English counties. We8217;ve torn all our blonde dolls to shreds. Now we read Lolita in Tehran.