In 1967, the story goes, Anant Pai was watching a quiz show on television in Delhi. The contestants were bright, well-schooled Indian children, and they could name the gods of Greek mythology without hesitation. Then someone asked who Rama's mother was, and nobody knew.

Pai was a publisher, and the moment bothered him enough that he went on to start Amar Chitra Katha, the illustrated story series that taught generations of Indian children their own epics. It is told as a funny anecdote. But sit with the scene for a second. Those children were not careless. Nobody had put the stories where they could reach them.

If you are raising a child far from India, you may recognize the quiz-show problem in your own living room. Your kid knows Zeus and Thor from school and movies. Ask about Hanuman and you get a shrug, or a vague "the monkey guy?" That's not a failure of love. It's a failure of format.

The story was never the problem. The delivery was.

Most of us inherited Indian stories through voices: a grandmother at bedtime, an uncle at a festival, a long drive with a parent who narrated half the Mahabharata from memory. That is a wonderful way to learn. It is also a way that depends entirely on who happens to be in the room.

In a diaspora home, that person may be on another continent. The alternatives on offer are usually a dense retelling written for adults or a glossy cartoon that flattens everything into a brisk plot. A picture story sits in between, and it works for reasons that have little to do with nostalgia.

What pictures do for a young mind

The most useful idea here is dual coding theory, proposed by the psychologist Allan Paivio. In short: we process verbal information and visual information in two partly separate channels, and when a concept reaches the mind through both, it tends to be remembered better than through one alone. A word and an image give the memory two hooks instead of one.

Think about what that means for a name like Ravana, or a concept like exile. For a child with no background, "Ravana had ten heads" is an abstraction. A panel showing a towering figure, ten faces each with its own expression, and a small, calm Sita in a garden below him gives the child something to hold. The picture carries the setting, the mood and the scale, so the words are free to carry the story.

Comics add something else. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud describes closure: the way a reader's mind fills the gap between two panels. Panel one, an arrow leaves a bow. Panel two, a deer is falling. The child supplies the moment in between, and that moment is the child's own contribution. Active participation tends to make stories stick, and a gutter between panels is a small invitation to think.

A gentler door for reluctant readers

There is a quieter benefit, and it matters for families where Hindi or another heritage language is shaky. Educators and librarians have long reported that graphic formats help reluctant readers stay with a text, because the images support the words they cannot yet decode. A child who would abandon a page of unfamiliar names often keeps going when a face and a gesture explain who is speaking.

This doesn't mean comics replace reading. It means they lower the cost of entry. A child who gets through one story feels capable, and a child who feels capable asks for the next one. That small loop of success is worth more than any lecture about why heritage matters.

Let the images say the uncomfortable parts

Parents sometimes worry that Indian myths are too intense: demons, battles, a king who banishes his wife. A good illustrated story handles this the way the best picture books do. It shows enough to be honest and leaves the rest to the child's imagination. A single panel of a shadowed forest can hold more dread, and more safety, than a paragraph of description.

It also lets you read the child's reaction in real time. When a face on the page makes your daughter go quiet, you can stop and ask, "What do you think she is feeling?" You are no longer delivering a lesson. You are looking at the same page together, which is a much better position for a parent to be in.

Why the comic often wins over the screen

A video moves at its own pace. A comic moves at the child's. They can linger on a page, flip back, or stare at the corner of a panel where the artist hid a tiny detail. That control matters. Children return to the pages they love again and again, and repeated, self-chosen exposure is how a name like Arjuna or Draupadi moves from "something Mom mentioned" to "someone I know."

A stack of comics on a low shelf also does quiet work. It tells your child, without a word, that these stories belong in the house the way any other books do.

Your next moves

  • Pick one story, not a collection. Choose a short, vivid tale such as Krishna and the butter pot, a Panchatantra fable, or Hanuman leaping to the sun. Finish it this week before buying anything else.
  • Read it together, then ask a gutter question. Pick two panels and ask, "What happened between these?" Let your child narrate the missing moment, and don't correct it.
  • Put it where small hands can reach it. Keep one illustrated book in the car, on the bedside shelf or in the bathroom. Visibility does more than good intentions.
  • Ask your child to redraw one panel. Three minutes with a pencil turns a passive reader into a storyteller, and drawing is another way of encoding the story.
  • Message a grandparent with one question. Send a photo of the page and ask, "Did you read this one as a child?" You get a family memory, and your child gets a link between the page and a real person.

Where this leaves us

Anant Pai's quiz show was not really about trivia. It was about what happens when a culture's stories stop being easy to find. Picture stories are one way of making them easy to find again, and they work because they respect how children actually learn: through the eye, at their own speed, with room to wonder.

That is the thought behind KathaKids, which brings Indian festivals, mythology, language and food to your child in formats that suit them, whether they like to read, listen or look. If your child's shelf is missing its Rama and Hanuman, you can have a look at https://baalkatha.lumenlabs.works and see if it fits your family. Either way, start with one story and one page, and let your child turn it.