Anant Pai: The many sides of the ACK founder

 Anant Pai was a story-teller. In his childhood days in Karkala, coastal Karnataka, he came under the spell of enchanting Yakshagana performances which helped him imbibe a sense of drama in his story-telling. Pai owed his thorough knowledge of Indian mythology to the harikatha, a traditional form of story-telling accompanied by Kannada devotional songs, that was performed in the village temple he used to visit.

By the time he finished his schooling and graduation in Mumbai, Pai had read Buddha in Pali, Kalidas in Sanskrit, Tagore in Bengali, Kabir, Tulsi, and Rahim in Hindi, abhangas in Marathi, and was fast catching up with Urdu.

Soon after graduation, when he took up a marketing job with Indrajal Comics which was doing nothing more than  repackaging and selling American comic book heroes — Phantom, Tarzan  Mandrake. One day, Pai saw ‘light’ — he saw himself telling the stories of Krishna, Hanuman, Akbar and Rani of Jhansi in the comic book format. GL Mirchandani of India Book House asked him to go ahead with his ‘mad’ idea. Thus was born Amar Chitra Katha (ACK).

Pai started off with his own comics scripts and those by Pradeep Pau and Yagya Sharma. He collected a band of young illustrators — Pratap Mullick,  Ram Waeerkar, PB Kavadi, Souren Roy, Yusuf Lien and Jeffrey Fowler. He was quite particular about architectural and costume details, and would hurry to Moti Chandra, the then curator of Prince of Wales Museum, to plead with him to tell his artists how to dress up the various mythological and historical characters and the kind of pillars  to be drawn in the palaces and other buildings.

He had a young assistant, Govind Kotwani, to help him. As the workload increased, and he started looking for writers, a young woman, Indian in appearance but quite westernised in her outlook, walked in. This was Kamala Chandrakant, a living legend in the ACK circle.

Having grown up in Breach Candy,  and done her schooling in Villa Teresa and Sophia, Kamala knew her Shakespeare but had hardly heard of Vyasa until Pai asked her to write the story of ‘Devayani.’ When she caught hold  of an English translation of the Mahabharata, a whole new world opened before  her. As she dug into the epic looking for more stories, Kamala found everything she thought was missing in her ‘education’.

Thus were the lines drawn for the great editorial battles in ACK. While Pai wanted to keep things simple and just tell a story, Kamala wanted to capture the mood and milieu of the epics. Between these two turks were thrown the tribe of ACK script writers — Yagya Sharma, Gayatri Madan Dutt, Toni Patel, Rajendra Sanjay, Bharati Vyas, Debrani Mitra and Luis Fernandes — who groaned, grunted and growled.

The battle was joined by illustrators who now included younger artists, Vasant Halbe, Harischandra Chavan, MN Nangare, GR Naik, Dilip Kadam, Ashok Dongre, CM Vitankar and Pradeep Sathe. The artists would get irritated each time Pai asked them to ‘cover up’ the damsels they had drawn. They would protest, saying that’s how they are depicted in the sculptures of Belur and Konark.

The artist Dilp Kadam had his revenge when we produced ‘Bahubali’. In his artworks, Bahubali Swami stood tall and unclad, and this made Pai very uncomfortable. He looked for ways to cover up the great digambara swami without sacrificing authenticity. For once I had no solution. Then Pai’s face lit up. “Subbu, put a speech balloon there to cover that,” he said pointing to the spot. “Mr Pai,” I said, keeping a straight face, “For ages philosophers and grammarians have wondered what’s there behind the words and now you’ve solved the riddle.” The whole office exploded in laughter.

The ACK scripts would go through several rounds of editing before landing at his desk for his OK. He was all concentration when reading the final draft. He wouldn’t look up even if someone walked into his cabin. He would spot bloomers that had somehow eluded the scrutiny of everyone else and point them out to us with a meaningful glance.

One day he walked into the office all charged up. A child had told him that, of late, ACK was getting ‘unsimple.’ The Oracle had spoken. And the new order was out. We cannot sacrifice authenticity and character build-up, said Mr Pai, but we had to make sure the comics would not be ‘unsimple’. So, we got down to the business of scaling down our great works so that the little brat would find it simple enough for her to shut up!

Now you know why kids loved him. Pai loved story-telling. He loved kids still more. Espousing Indian culture, encapsulated in the slogan, the ‘route to your roots’ was dear to him, but so were the sentiments of his young readers. That’s why, for children across the country, he remained for ever their dear Uncle Pai.

Subba Rao worked as a senior editor with ACK and Tinkle for over 10 years