Anant Pai obituary

The editor and publisher Anant Pai, who has died of a heart attack aged 81, was the creator of the educational Indian comic-book series Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Tales).

In 1967, while watching a television quizshow in Delhi, Pai was scandalised that Indian children could reel off the names of the gods of Olympus but could not name the mother of the Hindu god Rama. He was inspired to start a comic-book series recreating stories from Indian epics as colourfully illustrated, child-friendly narratives. Every two weeks, Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) arrived in the households of schoolchildren like me, bridging the distance between the Enid Blytons and Nancy Drews we found in our school libraries and the multisyllabic Sanskrit names and convoluted tales of Indian mythology.

Eight years after the founding of ACK, Pai happened to overhear an argument between two senior government officials in Delhi. They were arguing about something in the Ramayana. Finally, in order to settle the argument, they referred to their copies of ACK.

Pai was born in Karkala in south-west India. He moved to Mumbai as a child, studied engineering at university and, after working briefly as an engineer, moved to the Times of India, where he managed Indrajal Comics, which published American strips such as Mandrake and Phantom. He left his job in 1967 and persuaded India Book House to take a chance on ACK, after other publishing houses had rejected it. The series lost money in the early years, but went on to become a great success. The 400 titles have now sold more than 90m copies.

Committed to combining learning and entertainment, Pai started a children's magazine, Tinkle, in 1980. Tinkle also contained comic strips but unlike ACK – which rebranded existing fables and folk-tales from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Panchatantra and Jataka and later forayed into illustrated biographies of national heroes and heroines – the characters in the Tinkle comics were Pai's creations, such as Shikari Shambu, a cowardly hunter who never managed to catch any animals.

Tinkle also carried quizzes, non-fiction articles on history, science and geography, and a column in which children were invited to ask "Uncle Pai" questions. The name stuck, and after that, he was Uncle Pai, the man who knew everything. It was a role that delighted Pai, who was childless.

ACK occasionally ran into controversy. In 1976, a caste group called the Valmiki Sabha took offence at Pai's portrayal of Valmiki, the storyteller of Ramayana, as a thief. Elsewhere, Pai was accused of a Brahmanical bias in his choice of stories, and for not portraying enough minority traditions. Later issues of ACK and Tinkle addressed these concerns.

As the southern Asia scholar Frances Pritchett put it: "Whenever an issue involving Sikh characters is drafted, an expert consultant on beards is employed." ACK was bought in 2007 by ACK Media, which last year launched animated shows based on the comic books for the Cartoon Network, bringing the world of Indian epics to a new generation.

Six days before he died, Pai was honoured with the lifetime achievement award at India's first comic convention. He is survived by his wife, Lalita.

Anant Pai, publisher and editor, born 17 September 1929; died 24 February 2011

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaK%2Bfp7mle5FpaGpnkaW%2FcHyWaJinmZ6perGtyGamm6Gkqq6zxQ%3D%3D