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Author: Times News Network
Publication: The Times of India
Date: June 7, 2007
Delhi's St Stephen's College has many boasts including its old boys occupying the upper echelons of the IAS but few know that the college is responsible for one of the country's most enduring vehicles of popular culture: the Amar Chitra Katha.
The creator of the comic series, Anant Pai, fondly known as Uncle Pai, was at a Delhi junction in 1967 when his attention was caught by a television shop whose bank of TVs was tuned to a quiz show, with Stephen's as one of the teams. In what has now become part of ACK legend, Pai was aghast when the team rattled off the names of the gods on Mount Olympus but was unable to name the mother of Ram.
It was to reclaim the deracinated urban Indian mind that the comic series, which completes 40 years this month, was born. Pai says he does not wish to gild the past or valorise it; he just wants to educate and entertain. "I don't even say you should be proud of the past but you should be aware of it,'' he said.
From the very first edition of Krishna, the success of the venture was unprecedented, and apart from a decade-long lull in the 1980s when television colonised the mind of the Indian tot, the comic's sales have been unrivalled, touching 86 million.
Uncle Pai-even Gulzar calls him 'uncle'-is its pole star and it was a nice touch that his 40th anniversary with ACK tied in with another milestone-the first Ph.D on Amar Chitra Katha. Karline Mclain, an assistant professor of religion at Bucknell University, has earned her doctorate from the University of Texas on the 440-plus series of comics for a thesis titled 'Immortal Picture Stories-Comic Books, Religion and Identity in Modern India'. She is the first among a number of academics from India, the US, Germany and France to do so.
Mclain, whose work won both the best thesis award from among 4,000 others submitted to the university that year and the American Institute of Indian Studies award, says she chose the subject because she wanted to learn about modern Hinduism.
As a student of Sanskrit and Hindi in Texas, Mclain found that the Indian students in her class treated the comic books as the gospel of Hindu mythology, fiercely insisting that the Ramayana ended with Ram and Sita happily ensconced in Ayodhya, rather than accepting the ending as written in the Valmiki original.
Mclain's interest was piqued and before she knew it she was at the Amar Chitra Katha offices in Mumbai, behind a desk assigned her. She spent a year watching comics being conceptualised, scripted and laid out, learning how the visual aesthetic was selected and how Indian mythology was translated to the modern idiom and compressed into 32 pages. Travelling through the country and interviewing readers, Mclain got a sense of how "incredibly loyal'' they were to this fixture that had enlivened a childhood otherwise weighted by the dreariness of the history textbook in school.
Krishna, the first title, was a hit, but the rationalist Uncle Pai had scrupulously eliminated the Krishna miracles. The readers would have none of it-what was the Krishna story without him lifting the mountain Govardhan on his little finger? "The revised edition included the miracle, and in subsequent editions the miracles became more prominent and the mountain bigger,'' she said to general laughter. Krishna has sold more than 11 lakh copies and been translated into, among 38 other languages, Swahili and Serbo Croat.
One broad question which Mclain interrogates in her thesis is how the editors decide who should be part of this canon that claims to represent all of Indian history. For instance, the women on board were keen that Draupadi should be included along with Sita and Parvati. Others felt that the revolutionaries of the freedom struggle like Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh should be given full play to correct the overwhelming Congress-domination in history books.
Asked how warts-and-all the series is in dealing with modern political figures, Mclain said that in fact the biographies consciously stop with Independence. The Mahatma Gandhi comic was published only years after the series started, Nehru as late as 1986, and there has been no edition on Indira Gandhi. In fact, after the medieval heroines like the Rani of Jhansi the next woman to be featured is the late NASA scientist Kalpana Chawla. The most contemporary figures featured are Chawla, Jayaprakash Narayan (the Emergency is glossed over) and JRD Tata and J N Tata.
Uncle Pai explained the air-brushed approach by quoting a Sanskrit shloka which said that one should "tell the truth, tell what is pleasant but do not tell an unpleasant truth''.
toireporter@timesgroup.com
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