Amar Chitra Katha Online offers some information about the series, as well as comic book titles for sale. Lent 1999 includes a very brief overview of the history of comics in Asia, with a concise mention of Indian comics including Amar Chitra Katha. Kasbekar 2006 offers a useful introduction to Amar Chitra Katha, in three short pages.
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Rao 2001 provides an introduction that compares the series with two other popular Indian comic series, Indrajal and Diamond Comics, while focusing both on the different content covered in these various series and the different audiences drawn to these three series. McLain 2009 offers an in-depth introduction to Amar Chitra Katha, based on the author’s extensive time in the production studio: it examines a handful of titles as case studies for exploring the debates over religion and national identity entailed in the selection of heroes and heroines in this series and in the text and image decisions made to tell their stories.
One of the earliest but still most useful and accessible overviews of the series is Pritchett 1995, which provides a taxonomy of the Indian heroes and heroines presented in this comic book series and critically considers religion and gender in the discussion of who is included and who is excluded in this canon. Scholars first began to take note of Amar Chitra Katha in the 1990s. The academic study of comics is a young field, emerging as a serious arena for scholarly inquiry only within the past several decades. It is the realization of this profound significance of these comics in the everyday lives of their millions of readers that has prompted several scholars to undertake serious studies of the Amar Chitra Katha series. For these readers, as for the producers, the comics in this series are not considered primarily an entertainment product instead, they are regarded as foundational texts for the religious and national education of their young readers. Over the past several decades, this English-language comic book series has been wildly popular with the middle classes in India and with the global Indian diaspora. To date, the comic book series entails over 440 titles and has sold more than 100 million issues. In the 1970s, historical Indian figures were added into the mix, including medieval warrior kings such as Shivaji and Akbar and modern freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh and Mahatma Gandhi. Its first heroes were Hindu gods and goddesses including Krishna, Rama, and Durga, whose stories were drawn from classical Hindu mythology. Founded by Anant Pai in 1967, it is also an important cultural institution that has helped to define, for several generations of readers, what it means to be Hindu and Indian. Amar Chitra Katha is India’s first and most beloved comic book series.
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