Amar Chitra Kathas and Childhood

 

My love affair with the Amar Chitra Katha series started from a very early age.

 Like most other children of the early 70’s, my life too was made immensely colorful by the umpteen stories that revolved around invincible Gods and Godesses, devas, asuras, rishis, national heroes, and brave warriors. Thanks to my parents, I had steadily built up a solid collection of these treasured books and I would eagerly lap them up on hot summer afternoons, reclining on the walls of the cool corridor of our small ancestral village house. Siesta time for the elders, It was reading time for me since there seldom were other children to play with. So the various characters in the books, especially the mythological ones like Krishna, Rama, Draupadi, Sudama, Sita, Parashurama, Drona, Karna, etc became alive in my own special imaginary childhood world.

My subsequent journey through life took me away from that simple old house overlooking a big pond, where I had entrusted the small leather trunk filled with my precious books in the care of my grandmother. Every time I got a chance to visit my grandmother, the first thing I would do was to rush to the trunk which was kept on top of a stone ledge in a room upstairs. The whole ritual of opening the box with a rapidly beating heart, taking a quick inventory of the books stacked neatly, turning the pages slowly, and drinking in the damp, musty smell which could possibly have been a mix of evaporated naphthalene balls and old paper, gave me a sense of pure bliss and I would revel in it for as long as possible. But during one of my periodic visits, I was heartbroken and inconsolable to discover my cherished Amar Chitra Katha comics totally destroyed by termites.

Over the years, my interest in Indian mythology and history deepened and I got to know more about my favorite topics and more through other authoritative books. But surprisingly, even today, when I think of a character in the Puranas, I automatically associate it with the small but precise illustrations in the Amar Chitra Katha which had so influenced my childhood days.

This morning as I was cleaning up my bookshelf, I came across an old issue of Amar Chitra Katha which I had brought a long time back for my son, that being the reason for this pleasurable trip through memory lane…