Godspeed, Uncle Pai!

A comforting word after a silly answer, measuring out school with 12 years of Amar Chitra Katha, and a letter too late

Dear Uncle Pai,

You may not remember me because it has been nearly 30 years since we met. But then, maybe you would too. After all, when I walked away dejected after being eliminated from the Amar Chitra Katha-Tinkle Quiz Contest on my very first question, you asked me, despite being busy with a couple of hundred children around you, “You won last year, no?”

Those words, sadly, will remain the memory of the last exchange we had, for you are now with the stars and legends you brought down for us. There were times before when I thought I should write to you. As a child, I had written to various people I saw in comics, mostly imaginary beings of American nationality. So it was not until I finally saw you in Priyadarshini auditorium in Hyderabad in January 1983 that I knew you were real. You were a dynamic quizmaster, and worked your way through rows of children like a captain of a small ship rather than a headmaster drilling the deadwood out. You showed pleasant recognition as I kept coming back, round after round, and then, as another contestant and I locked the score in a tie-breaker that wouldn’t end, you proposed that we share the prize. But the audience wasn’t ready to give up on their entertainment. And the very next question, about the life-span of a butterfly, I answered. Soon after, my photo came in the papers, receiving a prize from a former governor’s daughter. I still have that clipping. It begins with a citation from your speech about Amar Chitra Katha’s goals—to eliminate “kula, matha, pranthiya abhimanalu” (loyalties of caste, religion and region) and to promote “bhaava-samaikyatha, desa-samikyatha” (unity of feeling and unity of nation). Those words never meant as much as they should have until now. In the past, my inspiration in that photo was just me, thirteen and finally winning at something. But today, I see that my inspiration from that piece of paper is you.

I do not know if you thought of yourself as a visionary, a pioneer, a mediated celebrity, or the architect of a grand cultural universe. But in my estimation, and in the lives of those who were Indian and children at a particular time in its history, you were and you will always be all of these. As a student of media mythology, I cannot help making the comparison: what you did for our generation is perhaps not unlike what Dadasaheb Phalke did for his, and Raja Ravi Varma did before that. And, in a deeper ‘mythic’ mode still, I cannot help asking which divine figure guided your heart and hand (and those of your much-respected team of artists). Was it Ganesha (who glowed red on the ACK cover that stuck out as a representation of my interests in my parents’ leaf-heaped puja stand)? Goddess Saraswati (who did not ever get her own title)?

Or perhaps it was Narada, because he was the messenger of the gods. And since it may appear inconceivable to an age torn between fundamentalism and cynicism that a messenger of the gods could be neither pedantic nor proselytising, and because you spoke often of your mission in the most modern terms, I must offer one more generational pantheon-touchstone. You may have been Uncle Pai to many generations of Indian children, but for those of us who watched the series start and grow along with us, the children of the 1970s, you were the only uncle we had compared to generations before and after. Children before our time had the giants of Independence like Chacha Nehru to look up to for inspiration. The children who came after us had the gifts that their sagacious economist uncle brought them with liberalisation: media, opportunity, and an astounding sense of self-confidence. But for the children of the 1970s, it was just what you, Uncle Pai, brought us.

Amar Chitra Katha meant a lot more to us than merely instruction in culture and heritage, because anxieties about such things only became important and political in the subsequent decades. In an age when there was no television in most parts of India, limited movie watching, sparse advertising, and only a few expensive foreign comic titles around, ACK told us tales in which greatness was not an abstract thing only gods and conquerors were born with. Even though some stories did dwell on campaigns and conquests, it also seemed that ACK was recognising as ‘timeless’ not just the events recited and repeated in history books, but scenes from the mundane as well. It was the elevation of wit, good sense, patience, kindness, trust, friendship, and love in its stories that made it so different from some of the cruder manifestations of mythology that we see in children’s media today. And this is what I believe gave us confidence in ourselves. It is only when we have faith in the decency of the world around us that we can hope to live with faith in the feasibility of our own.

Of course, your work went on to enrich the lives of generations beyond mine too. I suppose that for those who are sometimes called Manmohan’s children, ACK is as scintillating an adventure as it was for us. But ACK’s significance for them will one day have to be assessed in different terms. If you had another lifetime, I wonder what you would have done for them. Would your work have taught them discrimination, how to choose wisely from the sensory clutter of the present media landscape? How would your noble goals of promoting national heritage in a modern, integrationist spirit withstand the barrage of simplistic, violent homilies that the human drama, mythic and historic, has been reduced to in the popular and political imagination these days? We live in an age when everyone seems to want a reality-show sort of celebrity life. We live in an age that seems too facile to be even called an age.

But in the end, there stands a question which I recognised as a teenager in TS Eliot only because I had read the story in an ACK comic as a child. What you have given this world, Uncle Pai, is something magnificent. I cannot presume to speak for everyone but I am sure many would agree that the world is a better place, or at least we are a slightly better people, because of your creation. For now, all I can offer by way of tribute, since I never really did write to you before, is just a few memories of what it meant to be your reader: of walking upstairs into the children’s section of the venerable AA Hussain’s bookstore; of measuring out twelve years of school by the fortnight, waiting for new covers to appear on the roadside stalls besides Sunday and Illustrated Weekly of India and other icons that vanished; of finding your comics on railway platforms and at bus-stands at far ends of the country, literally achieving the national integration you so desired. But what I remember again now is the last time we met, the quiz in 1984 I walked sadly away from because I did not know whether to say Mysore or Srirangapatna when you asked me where Tipu Sultan was from and I confused myself into mumbling something like either Bedar or Bijapur. It was nice of you, though, to have said something when I crashed. Maybe you saw a nascent sense of confidence falling apart, and did what you could to make it better. Maybe you knew that I knew, but had second-guessed myself. I imagine that to be true because there are times I feel it among my students too, when a right answer seems to dance on their faces but they twist themselves into error. I think you really were meant to be a teacher, Uncle Pai, but just as well that you picked mass media instead. You taught more of us than you could have any other way, and what you taught us was something only a few people have done well. It was, after all, not just a lesson in history or mythology that you gave us, but verily in the eternal. 

Vamsee Juluri is a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco and a one-time winner of the ACK-Tinkle Quiz Contest

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