Tintin a hunter?

If you are a Tintin fan, you?re surely dying to get your hands on Tintin in the Congo, which just hit bookstores in the city. But if you are an animal lover, you?d better stay away from it.

If you are a Tintin fan, you’re surely dying to get your hands on Tintin in the Congo, which just hit bookstores in the city. But if you are an animal lover, you’d better stay away from it.

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Because this latest offering has the world’s most famous cub reporter shooting monkeys and giraffes and killing 15 antelopes while taking on tribal chiefs and an unscrupulous diamond baron in Africa. No wonder then that animal rights activists aren’t exactly amused.

Says Anuradha Sawhney, chief functionary, Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), India: “The manner in which hunting has been shown is appalling. It sends out the wrong message. I possess and have read all the Tintin books but Tintin in the Congo takes away from the magic. My interest in Tintin will never be the same again.”

Sawhney isn’t the only one to be outraged. The controversy surrounding this comic book goes back to when it was first published in French in 1930 and is one of the reasons why it took many decades for an English translation to come out. And it isn’t just the cruelty issue that has been criticised. The book has also faced flak for calling Congo a Belgian colony and for racist overtones (creator Herge has bestowed simian features on the Africans).

The criticism paid to a certain extent. Over the decades, Herge — who has also been called a misogynist — eliminated several elements, among them a sequence in which Tintin blows up a rhinoceros with a stick of dynamite.

The current edition comes with an apologetic foreword from the publishers: “In his portrayal of the Belgian Congo, the young Herge reflects the colonial attitudes, that he depicted the African people according to the bourgeois paternalistic stereotypes of the period — an interpretation that some of today’s readers may find offensive. The same could be said of his treatment of big-game hunting.”

Some fans are crushed. Ayesha Singh, a corporate lawyer, says: “For Herge to present atrocities against animals in such a light-hearted manner is dreadful.”

But the controversial content isn’t stopping people from buying the book. Crossword CEO R. Sriram says the hardback, with a price tag of Rs 595, is doing well.

Perhaps many of the young buyers, like Sriram himself, are unaware of what lies between the covers.