Amar Chitra Kathas and Childhood

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

Like most other children of the early ’70s, my life too was made immensely colourful by the umpteen stories that revolved around invincible gods and goddesses, 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 against the walls of the cool corridor of our small ancestral village house. Siesta time for the elders. Reading time for me.

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 and the rest — became alive in my own special imaginary childhood world. So did freedom fighters, emperors, Saints and other real life characters who inspired me a great deal.

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 to the care of my grandmother. Every time I got a chance to visit our ancestral house, the first thing I would do was 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 inside, turning the pages slowly, and drinking in the damp, musty smell — which could possibly have been a mixture 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 that my cherished Amar Chitra Katha comics had been completely destroyed by termites.

Over the years, my interest in Indian mythology and history deepened, and I got to know more about my favourite subjects through other, more authoritative books.

But surprisingly, even today, when I think of a character from the Puranas, I automatically associate that character with the small but precise illustrations in the Amar Chitra Katha books that had so influenced my childhood.

This morning, as I was cleaning up my bookshelf, I came across an old issue of Amar Chitra Katha that I had bought a long time ago for my son.

And that, of course, was enough to take me on this pleasurable trip down memory lane…