Three months after a warehouse fire destroyed all the stock of Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle titles, their editors discuss how a resilient team and reader support helped them restore the Indian household favourite’s legacy
Dev Nadkarni, former associate editor, feels that ACK — as also to a certain extent, Tinkle — artworks sit at a rare intersection of scholarship and popular art. The artists work from rigorous historical and cultural references, yet produce imagery that is instantly readable and emotionally resonant for children. The visual language is disciplined, the language formal, respectful rather than sensational, and rooted in Indian aesthetics. Pics Courtesy/Amar Chitra Katha Pvt Ltd
Ever since the massive fire at Amar Chitra Katha’s Bhiwandi warehouse on October 1, 2025 destroyed the publishing house’s massive stock and archive, the team has been in rebuild mode. Reena Puri, executive editor, Amar Chitra Katha, and Gayathri Chandrasekaran, editor-in-chief, Tinkle, reveal how they regrouped, and stayed positive throughout this challenging phase.
Excerpts from the interview
Could you dial back to when you and the team heard the news?
Reena Puri (RP): It was a big shock. Since most of the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) team works from different cities, we felt helpless as we awaited updates from our colleagues in Mumbai. It was a huge setback for the company. For me, it was deja vu! We had experienced a similar fire in 1994 at our office in Eruchshaw Building on DN Road, Fort. Our research library of 3000 books was burnt along with all our comics, and six months of Tinkle scripts and artworks, which we always prepared and stored. It makes me wonder, why do fires mostly occur at night?
Gayathri Chandrasekaran (GC): We were in shock. The Mumbai team rushed to the site. We did our best to douse it, ensure everyone’s safety, and salvage what we could. After the initial blow, we immediately moved into crisis mode. Our first steps were assessing the stock loss and activating a business continuity plan for retail, quick commerce, e-commerce, and D2C so readers and partners faced minimal disruption.
An ACK colourist works on a comic about Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj
What long-term practices have you adopted since then?
GC: We’ve moved to a 3PL [third-party logistics] multi-warehouse model, strengthened fire safety protocols, segregated high-value stock, and shifted to digital-first inventory planning.
We’ve also accelerated cloud-based back-ups and archival systems to avoid single-point failures.
Support would have poured in from all quarters...
RP: I got numerous phone calls from former team members for over a month. They all wanted to know if we were okay. I would tell them that we were fine, and would recover just as we did after the Eruchshaw site fire. Accidents can happen; what matters is how we move forward, and continue with our work. Our readers have been extremely supportive. We’ve tried to reassure everyone that despite feeling the pinch for a few months, hard work can overcome every challenge.
GC: The response was incredibly emotional. Readers, parents, teachers and former team members immediately reached out to check on us and offer assistance. Many extended help with sourcing or restoring older materials. Their warmth kept the team going. Most of our retail partners and distributors stood firmly by us, extending their support by clearing outstanding dues. They also facilitated the return of stocks, enabling us to participate in key events such as Comic Cons and book fairs. We are equally grateful to our printing partners, who responded promptly, and helped us accelerate the printing of our titles, ensuring timely availability.
Reena Puri and Gayathri Chandrasekaran
And how did the team react to it?
RP: They railed around each other at the site, as the fire raged on for three days. Everyone realised that it’s the time to get together for a huddle; all of us put in efforts to win the situation.
GC: Teams across cities came together instantly — from rerouting orders to salvaging what they could. It didn’t matter which department or role; everyone stepped up. We worked hard to restart our warehousing and sales operations.
Going ahead, what measures have been adopted that can also be followed by other publishers?
GC: A complete digital archive of all comics and art, multi-region cloud backups and secure, fire-safe storage for original art. Nothing should ever be at risk again. Physical archives are precious but vulnerable — preserving them must be treated as a core responsibility, not a side task. Digitise everything and build redundancy.
RP: Digitise and save! Original art should be kept in a safe.
1967
Year in which Anant Pai (below) established Amar Chitra Katha
‘Appeal to fans to help’
The warehouse has been our one place where we have the latest titles meant for dispatch, and where we had stocked years of physical copies, which included old and rare issues. There were also our carefully preserved positives of artworks that dated back to the 1980s and 90s. For me, this has been a huge loss since it’s a treasure that we can never recover. The first time we experienced a fire in 1994, at our office on DN Road, our fans had sent us extra copies from their collections. We scanned them and digitised our books.
Once again, I appeal to our readers and fans to do the same. Though most of our content is digitised, we still have missing issues of Tinkle and ACK. You can reach out to us through our social media handles to help us.
This fire caused a hitch in our inventory, but we were strongly supported by our management. Despite the monetary losses we saw wisdom in not lamenting. We had to bounce back to printing as we had orders to fulfil; events and book fairs to attend. This was possible only because of the efforts of our production team, who put in nights at the press to recover our stocks for deliveries. Our retail and online partners patiently waited for their orders to be fulfilled.
A brand like Amar Chitra Katha is immortal. We will emerge from this crisis more powerful, like the phoenix.
— Savio Mascarenhas, group art director, ACK Pvt Ltd
‘This is our cultural heritage’
When ACK was launched in the 1960s, India was in the midst of rapid social change. Urbanisation was accelerating, multi-generational and joint families were giving way to nuclear households, and the informal, grandparent-led tradition of storytelling was disappearing. ACK stepped seamlessly into that cultural vacuum. It became a surrogate storyteller, transmitting epics, legends, historical narratives and moral frameworks accurately to children who no longer heard these stories at bedtime. Its archive preserves the continuity between oral tradition and modern print culture across generational readers. It’s kept India’s civilisational stories alive, familiar and accessible.
The artistic, historical and archival value of these original artworks would have appreciated over time. In that sense, a genuine cultural treasure has been lost. Going forward, heritage publishers must treat original art with the same seriousness as manuscripts or rare books, with decentralised fire and termite-proof physical storage, good conservation practices and custodianship to ensure such losses aren’t repeated.
— Dev Nadkarni, former associate editor, ACK
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