According to you, why is the ACK archive precious for Indian literature?
When Amar Chitra Katha was launched in the 1960s, India was in the midst of rapid social change. Urbanisation was accelerating, multi-generational and joint families were giving way to nuclear households, and the informal, grandparent-led tradition of storytelling was steadily disappearing from everyday life. ACK stepped seamlessly into that cultural vacuum. It became a surrogate storyteller, transmitting epics, legends, historical narratives and moral frameworks accurately and authoritatively to children who no longer heard these stories at bedtime. Its archive, therefore, represents more than comics or children’s literature; it documents a pivotal moment in India’s cultural transition, preserving continuity between oral tradition and modern print culture. For generations of readers, ACK ensured that India’s civilisational stories remained alive, familiar and accessible.
What makes the artworks in these storybooks different from any other visual literary works?
ACK (as also to a certain extent Tinkle) artwork sat at a rare intersection of scholarship and popular art. The artists worked from rigorous historical and cultural references, yet produced imagery that was instantly readable and emotionally resonant for children. The visual language was disciplined, the language formal (as against other comics, which tended to use more informal, even slang expressions), respectful rather than sensational, and rooted in Indian aesthetics.
What should be the way forward to safeguard these treasures, in light of the recent fire?
I would expect much of the artwork would already been digitised (since the titles are downloadable digitally), which ensures that the stories and images will continue to be available to readers in some form. However, the loss of the original artworks is irreplaceable. These were not merely production assets but unique cultural artefacts, carrying the marks of their time, their creators and the material processes of illustration. Their artistic, historical and archival value would only have appreciated with the passage of time. In that sense, a genuine cultural treasure has been lost. Going forward, heritage publishers must treat original art with the same seriousness as manuscripts or rare books, with decentralised fire and termite-proof physical storage, good conservation practices and custodianship to ensure such losses aren’t repeated.
I have an extract of a similar incident many years ago from my personal tribute to Uncle Pai upon his passing a few years ago. I have also added a link to the original article:
Over the years, I kept in touch with Uncle Pai, meeting him whenever possible. He shared his wedding anniversary with that of my parents, so that was always a day we would speak to each other every year for many years.
One day in the 1990s I decided to bind my entire collection of Amar Chitra Kathas – some 375 of them – for posterity and carried them to my office. For some reason they remained there long enough for one of the cleaners to think of them as being of no consequence and selling them off as junk for Rs 22.
Unfortunately, I discovered it a couple of weeks later and a round of the junk shops around Mumbai yielded nothing. Many of the titles were never reprinted and were lost forever. I thought of calling Uncle Pai and asking him to help me out to compile a new set.
Eerily, it was Uncle Pai who called me. Just the week before, his offices had been consumed by fire and all his record copies had been lost. I had read about the fire in the papers but did not know Indian Book House too was gutted. “You are my last hope. I am sure you have a whole set intact,” he said. When I narrated what happened to my collection, we were both beside ourselves with frustration and disbelief. There was nothing we could do.
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