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I know many parents who covet and collect copies of Amar Chitra Katha for
their children. Then they bind them. Ad promotions project Amar Chitra Katha
as a series "acquainting children with India’s cultural heritage,
developing the habit of good reading and supplementing school
education". With some 80 million copies sold of over 400 original
titles published in over 30 languages in about 30 years and still batting,
it is a marketing phenomenon. But although they use the comic book format,
ACK lack the subtlety and sophistication of the genre because here the
medium is simply the message.
The series is powered by the perception that
Indian children know little or nothing of their own history and culture and
steps in to fill what it believes is the breach. In a
newspaper article
about Indian comics, journalist Sadanand Menon comments: "Buddha and
Chanakya, Mirabai and Vasantasena, Sai Baba and Ambedkar, Sadhu Vaswani and
Bagha Jatin, tales from the Jataka and Kathasaritasagar are all fed into the
mill, dessiccated, sterilised, mixed up, tossed around, boiled, strained,
capsuled and popped out sweetened and perfumed and confected in glossy
kitsch for local and foreign consumption of this candy-floss
world-view."
1.
Despite its success, the series invites serious
criticism. For the most part, the text comprises banal writing, poor and
often wrong use of language. 2, Unedited use of age-inappropriate vocabulary
and ideas, plainly chauvinistic or downright insensitive dialogue, blandly
rendered narrative, de-contextualised perspective . . . How will children
understand words like ‘moksha’, ‘preceptor’ or even ‘emancipation’
or statements such as ‘His young son, Baji Rao, was imbued with the
martial spirit’ or ‘Chaitanya not only stemmed the tide of conversion to
Islam, but also provided a new life force to Hindu religion’? Jasma of
Jasma of the Odes says of her husband, "Oh god! My husband is a
cripple! He’s ugly too! Alas! What have I done to deserve this?" How
does a child react to this, or to "You dunce of a hunchback. Are you
thick-lipped too?"? Draupadi is described as "the total woman;
complex and yet feminine" . . . unintelligible to a child but loaded we
know!
The drawings are downright crude and in poor taste; even diehard ACK
fans will have to admit this. To give just one example: in an Akbar-Birbal
classic teaching that mothers think their own babies are the most beautiful,
there is a picture of a big-made, dark, thick-lipped, naked baby to show
that the child is from a lower caste, is poor, is ugly and not desirable.
With seemingly little effort towards historical / social / political detail
much less mood, the implications are all too obvious; such examples abound. Stereotypical,
gender biased and full of preconceived notions: these would well describe
this series that reveals a definite upper class attitude that cannot be
condoned. The light and shade, the multilayered philosophical and other
connotations of India’s rich classical heritage, the magic and the variety
are all honed down to a series of flat retellings devoid of nuances. As for
humour, they haven’t heard the word!
In the world of the Amar Chitra Kathas, physical beauty
is paramount, anything else is ugly therefore wicked. Ideas of revenge,
killing the enemy, waging war, acquiring one’s desires by fair means or
foul . . . all these surely merit more careful contextualising so that
children will at least begin to approximate their real meaning. And what can
you say about the retelling of the famous Sanskrit plays, delighting in
poetry and sensuality? Can they be retold? Are they for children at all?
The worst blow, however, is that Amar Chitra Kathas make
the readers, young and old, feel they know it all, they ‘have’ culture.
But without going to original texts or at least more worthy sources, all we
are left with are narrow domestic walls. Culture comes from
substance not
shadow.
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