Red-white-and blue, flying across the sky with his underwear on the outside … it’s hard to think of anything more American than Superman, right? Manish alerts us to an interesting claim made in an article by the “IndiaFM News Bureau” that Superman is nothing more than a Kaavya’ed Hanuman:
Word is that, that the original creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel were inspired from none other than the Indian mythological hero Hanuman and that is how Superman got his flying powers. [Link]
Sure there are some similarities between the two fictional characters: neither is human, they’re both super-strong, they can both fly, and both have names than end in -man. But that’s it, really. Much as I would love to claim Superman as desi, this claim makes as much sense as the claims that Vedic civilization had both airplanes and atomic weapons.
People (scholars even) have written a lot on the origins of Superman.You can find entire articles on this topic in the highly obscure internet source Wikipedia:
Because Siegal and Shuster were both Jewish it is thought that their creation was partly influenced by the Jewish legends of the Golem, a mythical being created to protect and serve the persecuted Jews of 16th century Prague and later revived in popular culture in reference to their suffering at the hands of Nazis in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. Another influence could be Hugo Danner, the main character of the novel Gladiator by Philip Wylie. Danner has the same powers of the early Superman (as do many other pulp characters of the twenties and thirties)… However, the sources sited by Jerry Siegel himself were Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars and Tarzan, Johnston McCulley’s Zorro and E.C. Seegar’s Popeye. He also appears to have been influenced by Jack Williamson’s “The Girl From Mars.” [Link]
See - no reference to Hanuman made, ever. While it’s impossible to prove a negative (I cannot show definitively that they were not influenced by Hanuman), how would two Jewish kids in the 1930s know about Hanuman anyway? [And why would they need to know about Hanuman to come up with the idea of a flying hero? What, nobody in the west had ever thought of flying people before? This is after Peter Pan, for crying out loud.]
So where does this “confusion” come from, besides the sloppiness of Indian journalists? Manish again provides a useful clue. Mukesh Khanna said:
“When I was doing Shaktiman, critics told me it was a bad copy of Superman … I used to tell them that the Superman idea was, in fact, lifted from our own Hanuman so no one can accuse me of plagiarism.” [Link]
Honestly, that’s the only place I’ve ever seen the connection made and that’s by an actor using a more original line than “unconscious internalization” to defend himself against claims of plaigiarism.
The claim that the two are related is bizarre. They look nothing alike, act nothing alike (Hanuman is Ram’s right hand monkey, while Superman plays second banana to nobody), and most importantly Kryptonians act Jewish, not Hindu.
To our friends at the “IndiaFM News Bureau” goes the Times of India award for high quality journalism and a t-shirt of Jason Alexander.
