Bringing unknown Indian folk stories to the fore

This thought led two history buffs from the city, Santhosh Kumar Subramanian and Prathik Murali to bring the spotlight on Indian folklores from the 1900s as a comic series. They have published the first book in the series titled Veerasena’s Four Ministers. Santhosh tells us, “Prathik loves to travel and during his journeys, he discovered rare folktales that are particular to that region. I met Prathik and we discussed the possibilities of bringing such folk stories to the fore. Many folk stories are connected to various religions and myths. But we didn’t want to explore stories that have religious connotations or stories that are regressive and propagate patriarchy, etc. Instead, we wanted to retell stories that are progressive and secular. We thought of presenting the stories in the form of illustrated comics so that even children can easily understand it. Recently, we published the first comic series titled Veerasena’s Four Ministers.”

 Prathik did the story curation, illustration was done by a Coimbatore-based artist Jeevanathan and design suggestion was provided by Santhosh’s design agency The BS Labz. “People are undergoing a lot of stress and anxiety now. We thought it would be nice if we can come up with something interesting. The book is out on Kindle. Currently, we are working on translating the comic to different languages including Tamil, Hindi and Marathi.”