Storytellers to the nation

One example of how Amar Chitra Katha has shaped Indian popular culture is, incongruously, from the world of feminine attire. In the Indian imagination, medieval queens and royal women wore an outfit that consisted of a draped dhoti-like garment from the waist down, and a cloth bustier covering their shapely chests, over which a gauzy dupatta would be draped artistically – the whole held in place by an impressive tonnage of jewellery. This dress-code – for it became almost a dress-code – was replicated in such adaptations of Indian epics as Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana and BR Chopra’s Mahabharata. It even found its way to Bollywood, and in several 1980s films, elaborate item numbers featuring props like giant drums, shiny kitchen vessels and tennis balls would also have the leading lady dancing energetically in just such an outfit.
The outfit was practically invented by artists like Ram Waeerkar at Amar Chitra Katha. Explains Reena Puri, executive editor, Amar Chitra Katha, “They did a lot of research on costumes before settling on this particular one. What they found was, women didn’t really wear an upper garment
[in ancient India]. Naturally, that was not an appropriate way to dress women in our comics. So the artists decided to give them an upper garment that would just cover the chest area – it was called a ‘stan-patta’ [breast- cloth]. And yes, it did become a sort of standard of feminine attire,” says Puri, pointing out that Raja Ravi Varma, whose depictions of goddesses and women from Indian mythology also had a huge impact on the way we imagine women in ancient times to have looked, dressed his women in saris.
However, that Amar Chitra Katha has been a part of every Indian child’s growing up – and consequently, in shaping the way we look at our past - - is indisputable, and not quite the story. The real story is how this brand of comic books – even today, India’s only answer to the Marvels and DCs of America – has kept itself relevant in the digital age, transforming itself into a pop culture behemoth that draws staggering crowds at events like the Comic Con. At the recent Bengaluru Comic Con, the ACK stall was among the biggest and most crowded. Granted, some of it was the allure of nostalgia – the thrill of going through comic books that take you back to summer afternoons spent reading an ACK comic perched on a window-sill – but it also had a lot to do with the brand refusing to let itself remain just a nostalgia thing. At the Comic Con, activities like quizzes, cosplay contests, storytelling competitions and a photo booth (where visitors could pose with life-size cut-outs of famous ACK characters) made sure the 1000 sq feet stall was the most popular one at the event. How did this happen? How did a brand that has changed hands several times not only retain its original ethos, but built upon it to create a multi-media publishing house that is smoothly transitioning into the digital space with a new app available on iOs, Windows 8 and Android that makes hundreds of digitally remastered ACK titles available at a click. Along the way, it has also become a topic of serious study, even PHd theses – Karline McLain, an assistant professor of religion at Bucknell University, USA, published hers in book format. Titled ‘India’s Immortal Comic
Books: Gods, Kings and Other Heroes’, the book published by Indiana University Press won the 2007 Edward Cameron Dimock Jr Prize in Indian Humanities from the American Institute of Indian Studies.
********************* The ACK office in Indiranagar is its creative headquarters. It is not very office-like -- just a two-storey house in a strictly residential lane. This is where one can find Reena Puri and her extremely young team: barring Puri, most of the writers, artists, colourists and designers here are below the age of 20 and come from eclectic backgrounds. Assistant editor Sanjana Kapoor, who has been with the company for six years, had no background in writing comics. She joined right after college and learnt on the job, starting with some ACK Junior titles (illustrated story books for young children) and went on to work on popular titles like Mother Teresa. In the same room is Sahil Rizwan, the well-known webcomic writer whose blog The Vigil Idiot is widely read for its terse stick-figure reviews of (mostly bad) Hindi movies. Rizwan is also a writer for ACK, and has been with the group for a little over a year. “I saw an ad saying they wanted to hire on Twitter, and I applied. It’s not that different from what I do; it’s just storytelling in a different format,” says Rizwan. Puri, however, has been with the group for more than 20 years, and knows it inside out. She has also been with the brand through its transitions between three owners. ACK was born in 1967, when founder Anant Pai, who was then working as a junior executive in The Times of India’s books division, walked into the offices of India Book House in Bombay, owned by
GL Mirchandani. The story of how Pai came to start one of India’s biggest publishing successes (more than 400 comics in 20+ languages that have sold 100+ million copies) is told, appropriately, in the form of an ACK biography published in 2012. It talks about Pai, brought up in a traditional Kannadiga household, stumbling upon a televised quiz contest, in which the contestants were able to answer questions on Greek mythology but failed to correctly name Lord Ram’s mother. The first title was ‘Krishna’, published in February 1970. Although the stories are told simply – some may say simplistically – Pai was quite focused on research and getting facts right, as far as the term ‘facts’ can be applied to myths and folk-tales that have been told for hundreds of years, some only existing in the oral form. Today, Puri’s team too is focused on research, which is why bringing out a biography takes anywhere up to a year (mythological comics take 4-6 months, and historical ones about 8-9 months). “When our writer was working on the Mother Teresa biography, not only did she travel to Kolkata, she spent time with the nuns at Missionaries of Charity and actually volunteered there,” says Puri. “Biographies take more time because there are so many people to meet and interview before we write the script. And we want to be as accurate as possible – down to the colour of the shirt the person was wearing during a conversation.”
ACK and its sister publication Tinkle had a golden run up to the late 1980s, with at least 10 new titles a year. Then, a lull set in, and there were very few new ACK comics after 1991 – only a few ‘specials’ such as biographies of personalities like JRD Tata and Kalpana Chawla. The slowing down was partly due to the group’s increasing focus on Tinkle, the fortnightly comic anthology, and partly due to a creative lull stemming from a seeming lack of material (historical, mythological and folks stories) that could be converted into comics. Some say there was dissent in India Book House as well, and Mr Pai’s editorial autocracy was being questioned. Between 1991 and 2011, just about 10 comics were published. The group clearly needed new direction, and it came in the form of an acquisition. In 2007, entrepreneurs Samir Patil and Shripal Morakhia acquired and incorporated Amar Chitra Katha and its sister brands like Tinkle and Karadi Tales from the Mirchandanis, besides bringing together the publication and the distribution business (India Book House) under a single corporate entity called ACK Media in 2010. The storytelling picked up pace again, with many new titles such as Surjya Sen, Tales of Indra, Tenzing Norgay and Stories of Creation. Morakhia and Patil were also responsible for moving the creative base of ACK to Bangalore. Eventually, the two entrepreneurs sold a majority stake (65.84%) in the company to Kishore Biyani’s Future Ventures in tranches over two years (26% for a reported Rs 37 crore in 2011, followed by an acquisition of another 30%, and finally buying around 9% more in April 2012, as per medianama.com in September 2013). The rest (26%) is owned by private equity business Elephant Capital, and the group is headed by CEO Vijay Sampat. Despite rumours of Future Ventures looking to sell its stake in the business, the digitization of the content has proved to be a success. “We are not concerned about the surface from which the comics are read,” says Manas Mohan, CEO-Publishing of ACK Media, naming this as one of the factors that have helped the brand stay relevant. The ACK app was released on iOS and Android platforms in May 2014, and within a week, it was the top book app for the platform in India, and the no. 4 app overall. It also crossed 100,000 downloads within the next two months. “It has been adopted readily by people who are parents today, who have a great emotional connect with the brand from the time they were children. They want their kids to grow up reading ACK as well, but they are not bothered about whether this is in print or in the digital format,” says Mohan. The brand also moved quickly into different retail environments. “While bookstores and sellers will always remain very important to us, we are very active in the online retail space. Frankly, as a publisher if my books sell online I’m not going to complain. The comics sell very well on Flipkart,” he adds. The packaging and formatting of the comic-books has also changed keeping in mind changes in middle-class aspirations and disposable incomes. “There was a time when our singles did really well, because Mr Pai’s rationale was that parents could buy a two-rupee book that would make their children happy. But now, the larger packs do better because parents can afford more. So our packs have evolved to keep in mind Indian economic realities,” says Mohan. Incidentally, during the recent Big Billion Day sale on Flipkart, ACK Media created exclusive packs of all ACK titles, each mega-pack weighing 32 kg and priced at a whopping Rs 19,000. “They got sold out in four hours,” says Mohan.
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Yet, it’s not just the business that has to evolve; the content must keep pace with changing realities as well. While the average reader may skim through the comics with delight, critics and more politically aware readers have found fault with many aspects of the comics’ content, for instance the fact that they are written extremely simplistically, with linear narratives that often sound forced and result in phlegmatic pacing. Critics have come down on aspects like portrayal of women in the patriarchal, passive sati-savitri mode, and on the depiction of positive characters as light-skinned individuals and the negative ones as dark. In her essay ‘From Self-Knowledge to Super-Heroes: The Story of Indian Comics’ author Aruna Rao wrote that the criticism of the comics largely revolved around these two issues, as well as the portrayal of minorities. The depiction of practices like sati and jauhar was seen as problematic, with comics like Ranak Devi and Padmini showing women walking into pyres without adequate contextualisation or comment. However, Rao conceded in her essay that India Book House -- especially its editorial team -- responded to some of the criticism positively, and made efforts to be more inclusive. Often, this was done in a ham-handed fashion, making the comic dry and academic rather than fun and informative. Achieving this tricky balance is a challenge for Puri as well. “The asuras are becoming fairer!” she says with a laugh, adding that the creative team is not tone-deaf and has consciously made efforts to reflect 21st century sensibilities in the writing and artwork. It’s not uncommon to hear cries of ‘Oh! Gross!’ in the writers’ bay when someone is working on a story that is particularly jarring to modern ears for its sexist or racist undertones. Despite several clones that have tried to copy its style, Amar Chitra Katha is still, frankly, all we have. Compared to some of these clones, which are mostly badly written, badly drawn and terribly researched, ACK’s work still stands out for authenticity, rigour and a deep-rooted love of storytelling. While remembering that they tell ‘a’ story, and not always ‘the’ story, or even the incontrovertible version of a story, it would not be too much to hope that somewhere, even today, a child is curling up on a window seat with an Amar Chitra Katha comic in her hands.