Good always defeats evil, while wit and wisdom consistently win the day.
The comics possess a robust moral compass too. Overall, the comics accurately depict the rich and confident ancient Indian ecosystem. Women have been shown as free, expressive, emancipated and having hourglass figures.
In short, everyone except villains are eye-candies.
Both the men and women have finely-sculpted Greek physiques as opposed to the Indian ones in the comics. The brave heroes and strong heroines from these stunning images opened the country’s colossal repository of ancient anecdotes to the public. He based his stories on ancient texts and tried to bring out their gist in 32-odd colour pages. While the latter was hell-bent on producing brown sahibs with a slavish mentality, embarrassed of their culture and religion, Pai made all efforts to nullify the ill effects of colonial education. In a sense, Pai was a complete antithesis of Macaulay. The comics even had a pledge:Īmar Chitra Katha are brought out by people who care for children who screen each word and each picture as they have a lasting impact on impressionable minds for whom Chitra Katha is more a vehicle of education than a business. He immediately hooked the children to his Dharmic comics by incorporating these appealing elements. The colours are deep and rich with the language short, crisp and engaging enough to hold their attention. Pai set out to alter all this by launching a comic-book series in which he would narrate stories from Indian epics and Puranas via kid-friendly storylines and eye-catching illustrations, designs and graphics. There was no middle of the road solution. At the other end of the spectrum, there are heavy-duty scholarly treatises on Indian texts, unfit for common people and children. Indian stories have traditionally been passed down orally. Often reeking of colonialism and racism, these were the characters with which Indian kids could not identify. Till then, Indian children were growing up on the likes of Indrajal comics which had imported American protagonists like Mandrake, Flash Gordon and Phantom. The entire generation grew up to be secular, utterly ashamed of its own identity and roots. The Indian role models were either not projected adequately or made to vanish from the books. The history books were full of praise for Arab, Turk and Mughal invaders. This was a time when the Indian ecosystem was sterile and secular. He found that many were not even taught about the scriptures at home. Upset, he pondered about the deep malaise inflicting the Indian children. In 1967, a young journalist Anant Pai noticed while watching a TV quiz show on Doordarshan that the Indian children on the show could quickly answer questions about Greek mythology, but they could not answer a simple question about the name of Ram’s mother.
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