Cartoon, Culture and Conflict
It all began, as many profound sociological inquiries do, with a toddler, a cartoon, and an unintended insult. I overheard an Indian mother scolding her three-year-old son for calling his father "Papa Pig." The horror in her voice was matched only by the child's innocent grin. Now, calling someone a pig in India isn’t just cheeky, it’s bordering on blasphemous. Yet here was a child, clearly influenced by Peppa Pig, nonchalantly dropping farm-animal epithets. Intrigued, and slightly amused, I began to dig deeper. After all, cartoons aren’t just moving pictures. They’re miniature empires of soft power.
Me, who grew up with Mowgli’s jungle wisdom, Uncle Scrooge’s capitalist acumen, Dexter’s lab-coat logic, and the Powerpuff Girls’ sugar-spice-chemical-X formula for justice, I hold a certain reverence for cartoons. But today, as a father and a sociologist, I find myself questioning: what are these cartoons really teaching our children? And who, exactly, is doing the teaching?
Cartoons as Cultural Trojan Horses
Cartoons operate as cultural Trojan horses, colourful, giggly, and deceptively innocent. But behind the slapstick lies ideology, value systems, language norms, and subtle cues about how the world works (or should). Joseph Nye called it "soft power": influencing others through attraction rather than coercion. Cartoons, in their own peculiar way, are the velvet glove over cultural influence’s iron fist.
Foreign cartoons, like Russia’s Masha and the Bear, Britain’s Peppa Pig, Japan’s Shin Chan, and America’s DuckTales, have become ubiquitous in Indian households. They arrive in high-definition, dubbed in Hindi or Tamil, with merchandising tentacles reaching from lunchboxes to bedsheets. Children adore them. Parents tolerate them. Sociologists study them.
From Puppetry to Peppa
Let’s roll the historical reel. Before independence, Indian storytelling was analogue and organic, think tholu bommalata, shadow puppets dancing on oil-lamp-lit walls. Dadasaheb Phalke tried his hand at animation in 1912 with The Growth of a Pea Plant. Noble. Niche. Negligible impact.
Fast forward to 1967. Disney’s Jungle Book, a British-American interpretation of Rudyard Kipling’s colonial nostalgia, aired on Doordarshan, India’s then-only channel. It was our first taste of foreign animation’s flavour. By the 1980s, Doordarshan captured 90% of TV viewership. Cultural infiltration was underway.
There came Masa the Bear from the USSR in the 1980s, carrying collectivist values in cute bear-shaped bundles. Then came the American tsunami: Tom and Jerry, DuckTales, and eventually, Cartoon Network (1995). By 2000, it had 70% of the kids’ TV market in India.
Japan entered the fray with Doraemon and Shin Chan, creating bilingual Indian children who spoke fluent Hindi and Japanese catchphrases. Doraemon has had 29 films released in India by 2022. A 2010 Turner International survey reported 80% of Indian kids aged 6–14 recognised Doraemon. Let that sink in.
Behavioural Borrowing: Monkey See, Monkey Mimic
Cartoons don’t just entertain; they rewire. A 2016 ASSOCHAM study found 40% of Indian parents noticed behavioural changes in their children after cartoon consumption. The British Council reported in 2019 that 68% of teachers observed kids mimicking accents and phrases from shows like Peppa Pig. Baby sharks do more than dance, they shape speech patterns.
And it’s not always cute. Shin Chan was temporarily banned for encouraging impudent behaviour. Motu Patlu was criticised for cartoon violence. Yet Chhota Bheem found a way to merge indigenous narratives with superhero tropes, winning 15 million weekly viewers by 2015 and raking in ₹500 crore in merchandise by 2020.
Streaming Tsunamis and the Great Local Lull
Now, we face a flood. Netflix Kids grew by 200% in Indian viewership from 2020 to 2022. YouTube Kids is the new babysitter. 70% of Indian children consume global cartoons daily (Ormax Media, 2023). Meanwhile, the Indian animation industry, though valued at ₹23.2 billion, outsources 55% of its production.
Only 15% of content on Indian OTTs is local. In a 2021 CBSC survey, 62% of Indian kids said they preferred foreign cartoons for their “better storytelling.” Japanese anime fandom has grown 300% in India between 2015 and 2023. Who’s telling our children’s bedtime stories?
Peppa Meets Parvati
This isn’t xenophobia. Cultural exchange is healthy. I love Peppa Pig. But when “Papa Pig” becomes part of domestic parlance, and gods give way to superheroes, we must pause. It’s not about banning. It’s about balancing. It’s about ensuring that when our kids binge cartoons, they also binge context.
Remember Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama (1992)? It earned $12 million in Japan. Why haven’t we followed it up? Adult animation in India constitutes barely 2% of output. We’re leaving narrative terrain untapped.
What Now?
Cartoons are mirrors. Sometimes, funhouse mirrors. They reflect, distort, entertain, and educate. As a father, I want my child to laugh, imagine, and dream. As a sociologist, I want him to do so in a way that is culturally rooted yet globally literate.
Perhaps the time has come to raise not just the bar, but the bamboo, the kind used in tholu bommalata and weave stories that are uniquely ours, delightfully odd, and unapologetically Indian.
Let Peppa Pig visit the house. But don’t let her redecorate.
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