I didn’t understand how ideals of obedience to authority-something the comics taught-can feed systemic inequality. I was unaware of the broader, ongoing effort by Hindu nationalists to define a doctrine devaluing lower castes, women, tribal populations, and religious minorities. I didn’t care that the protagonists I was reading about were drawn with white skin. They also became my first window into a culture I barely knew. The heroes of ACK became my superheroes long before I discovered Spider-Man or the Flash. We only spoke in English and ate burritos more often than dal bhat. When I was a boy growing up in upstate New York, my parents had no Indian friends or nearby relatives. My family had built a library of some 90 issues by the time I began to read them, tattered from decades of swapping between cousins. Like many other Indian diaspora kids, my mother brought her own collection when she immigrated to the United States as a 9-year-old in 1973. Yet millions of children-myself included-revered “Uncle Pai” for creating a popular avenue to an Indian heritage, however limited.
Consequently, ACK reinforced many of the most problematic tenets of Hindu nationalism-tenets that partially drive the platform of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, currently under fire domestically and internationally for policies and rhetoric targeting religious minorities and lower castes. On top of that, his comics often erased non-Hindu subjects from India’s historic and religious fabric. ACK’s writing and illustrative team ( led by Pai as the primary “storyteller”) constructed a legendary past for India by tying masculinity, Hinduism, fair skin, and high caste to authority, excellence, and virtue. Even within this crowded field, ACK remained beloved and novel for both its edutainment value and its role as the grandfather of an industry.Īnd yet, since its debut in 1967, ACK has also helped supply impressionable generations of middle-class children a vision of “immortal” Indian identity wedded to prejudiced norms. ACK’s first successors were primarily Western-inspired action and adventure series, but by the 1990s Indian institutions like Diamond Comics and Raj Comics were publishing mysteries, funnies, and science-fiction works.
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ACK was the first major indigenous comic-book series to sell within India, and its success also heralded the development of a broader domestic comics industry. Pai revolutionized children’s entertainment as much as he did religious education. Today, the series has sold 100 million-plus copies of more than 400 comics in upwards of 20 languages, primarily English and Hindi. While schools and shopkeepers initially hesitated to stock the issues, ACK was a household name in India by the late 1970s. The comics, titled Amar Chitra Katha (also known as ACK, or Immortal Illustrated Stories), slowly became a massive hit.
He eventually teamed up with the publisher India Book House to launch an educational comic series that presented kid-friendly Indian religious and historical stories. Concerned that young people in his country had lost touch with their cultural heritage, Pai acted.
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Fifty years ago, a junior executive at the Times of India named Anant Pai watched Indian children on a TV quiz show fail to answer a basic question about the Hindu epic Ramayana.
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