AN AMAR BOND

Amar Chitra Katha got Amin Jaffer, international director of Asian art at Christie’s, hooked to Indian art and history

Amar Chitra Katha got Amin Jaffer, international director of Asian art at Christie’s, hooked to Indian art and history
As a young boy growing up in Rwanda, my only connect with India were the tales my family would narrate from time to time, mostly incidents from Indian history and art. I heard about the Taj Mahal and the mighty Mughals and formed images in my mind, but since my parents too were not first-generation Indians in Rwanda, it was difficult for me to relate to it completely.

Then one summer, when I was about 14, I visited my aunt in Brussels. I was deeply into reading by then, but at her place, most of the books were in French, a language I did not know. My aunt, who has always been a favourite with me, and has influenced my life greatly, introduced me to the Amar Chitra Katha series in English that she had collected over the years for my cousins, and for the first time, the stories of Indian history and mythology came alive in front of my eyes. Somehow it had so much more meaning and resonance than the imaginary exploits of Batman and Superman, which I had contented myself with for so long.

The first thing that captured my imagination was the vivid visuals, and then there were the stories themselves. I was particularly fond of the Ramayana and of course, my old friends, the Mughals. The stories of the former concretised for me all the core human values that my parents would always emphasize upon—lessons in loyalty, brotherhood, morality, only it was so much more exciting to find them as part of a larger scheme of things than was apparent to me at that age. As for the Mughals, their heroism captured my imagination as much as their love for beauty and I would keep staring at the rough drawings of forts and monuments that I was only vaguely familiar with earlier. In fact, I was extremely frustrated when I ran out of the books that she had in store and when I returned home after the vacation, I begged my parents to order more for me.

In retrospect, it does become apparent now how simplistic it was and how it reinforces stereotypes, but for me it was also what accentuated my desire to study Indian history, a passion which I followed up later in life. Later, in the course of my work at Christie’s, I came across the works of Chitra Ganesh, another expat Indian in the US, who uses the Amar Chitra Katha as a leitmotif, assembling the homogenic elements and distilling the artworks with sexual and gender tension and racial issues. It makes you realise how, for my generation of people who grew up in the Seventies outside the country, it acted as a tie between the world that we inhabited and the world we had left behind, teasing out the idiosyncrasies of our own lives.