Why The Story Behind Amar Chitra Katha Comics Deserves a Movie Adaptation
Dear Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hotstar producers,
In case you’re running out of original content (after distributing a personal show and/or movie to every A-List Bollywood actor out there), I have a few suggestions for a series that will get people talking, at least for a week.
These ideas all revolve around a ‘Katha’ (story) — an ‘Amar Chitra Katha’: The comic publishing house that served as a launchpad as such rising stars as ‘Krishna’, ‘Buddha’, ‘Suppandi’ and ‘Gopal the Jester’… maybe not the last one.
Their tales might have shaped your childhood or that of your millennial demographic, and have (allegedly) influenced their political viewpoint.
That’s why the story behind the story makers is extremely culturally significant today — and needs to be told, so we can understand more about why we are the way we are.
Since this is a relatively untouched topic, there are more ways to talk about it than there are teenage rom-coms on Netflix.
I’ve shortlisted three different narratives you can explore, each more provocative than the next. Let’s go:
Version 1: ‘Tinkle Comics’: The Indian Disney?
Almost every middle-class* Indian kid growing up in the 90s/early 00s, has either seen, heard, read, bought, borrowed, stolen or extorted a Tinkle comic book.
And why not? It was cheap, available everywhere, and had engaging cartoon stories, facts, and memorable characters like Shikari Shambu, Tantri the Mantri, and Suppandi.
But the origins of Tinkle comics are equally fascinating. Stories from the writer’s room can be adapted into a documentary like ‘The Pixar Story’, or even a live-action series like ‘The Newsroom’.
Here’s the basic outline of it:
In the 1980s, ACK was like: ‘You know what, we’ve already launched dozens of comics about Indian history, we want something new.’ And the founder Anant Pai was like: ‘let’s make this comic book about science, infotainment, and stuff.’
What’s cool about Tinkle was they were one of the first to crowdsource comic stories. The documentary can have testimonials or interviews with the fans, and the team.
If this sounds a bit dull; here’s where the story can pick up the pace. In 1994, the Tinkle office was the scene of a terrible fire.
The entire Tinkle library was burnt to the ground. Hundreds of back issues were lost in just a few hours. In a panic, the Tinkle team asked fans to mail their old issues — so they could rebuild their library.
And the fans agreed, flooding the Tinkle mailboxes and dousing the metaphorical fire of panic. Now, the Tinkle team had to frantically redraw the new upcoming comics from scratch — a race against time.
If this is not a dramatic moment that can be milked — I don’t know what is.
The rest of Tinkle’s history is pretty standard. It rose in popularity, had tons of readers, and dipped in popularity with the rise of the internet. Pretty sure if kids were given a choice they would choose Spiderman over Suppandi any day.
Not this one though:
And that’s it: a perfect title for when you and your partner/friend are on a documentary binge.
Version 2: Uncle Pai the Mythology Guy
After the success of ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor?’, and ‘A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood’, wouldn’t it be great to have an Indian analog to Mr. Rogers?
That’s where Uncle Pai comes in.
Anant Pai was the well-respected founder of ACK, whose publications touched millions of kids. His origin story can make a remarkable biography:
At the age of two, he lost both his parents and was raised by his grandfather.
Later in his life, he studied at the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai. After graduation, he made a career move that’s followed by every true engineer:
He abandoned engineering altogether.
He worked as an executive at Indrajal comics (known for Phantom, Mandrake) in the 60s, and here is the turning point:
One day in 1967, he was watching a quiz contest on Doordarshan, and was sad to see that participants could answer questions related to Greek mythology, but who didn’t know who Rama’s mother was.
(Cue the dramatic music) It was now his sole purpose to make Indian mythology great again…
Sounds too good to be true?
You might be right.
This often-repeated story about Uncle Pai might be a myth much like his comics.
According to an Outlook article, the true founder of Amar Chitra Katha was a Bangalore book salesman: G.K. Ananthram.
It was him, not Anant Pai, who was fed-up with selling imported Western books for his employer India Book House and wanted to be ‘Atmanirbhar’. He launched his comic project which inc to translate fairy tales into Kannada.
That wasn’t enough for him, Anatharam also shared the vision to popularize Indian History.
After his successful project, he proposed an English mythological comic series to the head office. The IBH heads agreed, and assigned this job to Anant Pai (who was handling Indraajal at the time), to build up Amar Chitra Katha and take it to where it is today.
Now this story adds a twist to the straightforward fable of ‘Uncle Pai: a man who wanted to change the world out of the goodness of his heart,’ doesn’t it?
The documentary can paint the realistic portrait of Uncle Pai- a publishing executive who was just doing his job.
Yes, it demystifies his legacy, but the biography can tell the truth of who he really was: a brilliant salesman.
In fact, there’s like tons of anecdotes of him being a master marketer, that the biography can address:
Like how he went to bookshops and asked the sellers to stock his new Amar Chitra Katha comics. When the booksellers were like ‘Dude, we have no space’. Uncle Pai took out wood, nails, and hammer and was like ‘Yea, that’s why I will make my own rack in your store’.
And another time, when he entered a train with a briefcase full of comics and noticed that the compartment was full of children. When he was stowing away his briefcase, it ‘slipped’ and fell on the floor revealing tons of comics.
Now that he had their attention, he told them about the stories and spread the word of his brand.
Ad agencies take note: this is how you do an ‘organic’ awareness campaign.
The rest of the biography can focus on how he formed the Amar Chitra Katha team, and launched Tinkle Comics.
And there you have it: A multi-layered story of the man who popularized many folktales.
Version 3: The Dark Side of Amar Chitra Katha
Now here’s the most outrageous and ‘woke’ narrative of them all. Even Vice India can have a field day with this.
This material is great for ‘thought-provoking’ documentaries.
Amar Chitra Katha’s main mission was to paint the glory days of Indian history and Hindu mythology. If any publisher tried to do this today, they would definitely be greeted with outrage, memes, and a 10-minute set by Kunal Kamra.
However, ACK was launched in the late 60s. Religious sensitivity wasn’t mainstream yet. As a result, most of the comics were painted with the broad brush of cultural and religious stereotypes.
Let’s start with the depictions of the gods. Only deities and high-caste individuals used ‘Fair and Lovely’ and were noticeably lighter-skinned.
Meanwhile, demons and those individuals belonging to lower castes, were ‘Dark and Ugly’.
Non-Hindu religions were underrepresented in these ‘tales of India’, with roughly 5–6 out of 500 comics featuring famous Muslims.
And when they were represented in other ACK comics, they were usually drawn to be ‘aggressive’ and sinister looking.
Their designs were so skewed that even their illustrators realized it. Yusuf Lien, one of ACK’s artists, admitted that these depictions were crude.
So we’ve covered casteism, racism in these comics, and now we need to talk about sexism to complete this twisted hat trick.
Heroines were almost always drawn to be weak and dainty and their outlines were curvier than a boomerang.
Additionally, women were shown choosing to commit ‘Sati’ (jumping into their dead husband’s funeral fire) in kids comic books.
I understand ACK wanted to portray all traditions, good or bad.
But these comics should have prefaced some problematic traditions with a warning, like those anti-smoking ads before every movie.
But we can give ACK the benefit of the doubt here because they came out at a time when sexism and racism were least of their concerns, there were much bigger problems like hunger, poverty, and Shatrughan Sinha movies.
However, they still might have done some damage by fueling Hindu nationalist sentiments, but that narrative is up to you to decide.
At best these comics were naive in their approach, or at worst they were destructive propaganda.
It might be the former, as both ACK and Tinkle comics are now actively trying to break the stereotypes they’ve created all these years.
On the anti-sexism front:
They recently released comics celebrating women path-breakers and focused on telling heroic tales of women.
To show they don’t stand for racism anymore:
New comics have handsome villains, and characters that are equally diverse in colour
To prevent portraying household staff as uneducated dimwits:
Suppandi is no longer a ‘servant’. Instead, he’s taken up occupations like being a photography assistant.
And they plan to be more inclusive in the future in order to transform with the changing times.
So here you go: A documentary about a publisher with dangerously Hindu-Nationalist undertones that realized they needed to change their ways (unlike most politicians).
Bonus outrage:
ACK decided that it was appropriate to have a child’s comic book to have the story about:
A jackal tricking a lion to de-skin a dead elephant, so he could eat its meat.
You know, typical kids stuff.
So as you can see ACK played a huge role in digging up rich tales of our past, and it’s only right that we do the same for them by sharing their untold story.
If you liked any of these treatments and want to adapt it for an online series, don’t hesitate to send me a royalty cheque, thanks.
Regards,
Ankit
PS: I also accept Gpay
*The more privileged ‘cool’ kids had access to Asterix, Archie, and TinTin
