Tilak Raj Shetty

Tilak Raj Shetty — “Tilak Shetty” in the animation trade press and “Tilakraj Shetty” in the Information & Broadcasting Ministry’s own account — is the co-founder and chief executive of Mumbai animation studio Graphiti Multimedia, and the co-creator, with Munjal Shroff, of the animated folk-tales series Krish, Trish and Baltiboy (BusinessToday; The Hindu). The series’ second season, “Bharat Hain Hum,” was co-produced with the Central Bureau of Communication of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, launched by Union Minister Anurag Thakur, and named by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 117th episode of Mann Ki Baat (The Hindu; Prime Minister’s Office).

The Graphiti Multimedia co-founder

Shetty’s career is inseparable from Graphiti Multimedia, the Mumbai studio he began building with Munjal Shroff in 2002 — a pivot from advertising films to creating original animated intellectual property at a time when the Indian industry was dominated by outsourced work. BusinessToday identifies both men as former protégés of Ram Mohan, described as “the guru of animation in India,” and credits Shetty as co-founder and CEO (BusinessToday). His studio strategy was contrarian: rather than competing as a low-cost vendor, Graphiti would invent, script, storyboard and animate its own characters — “outsourcing is a cheap-labour game,” Shetty told the magazine (BusinessToday). That bet extended beyond animation series: in 2007, as “Graphiti CEO and animation director of Cash,” Shetty led the team that inserted roughly ten minutes of animation — about 200 shots, finished in some sixty days — into Anubhav Sinha’s Hindi feature Cash, with character development by Ram Mohan and his team (Business of Cinema). He also founded the Graphiti School of Animation in Mahim, whose students made the first Krish Trish And Baltiboy films under his direction (Hindustan Times).

Krish, Trish and Baltiboy: co-creator and director

The Hindustan Times reported in 2010 that the first Krish Trish And Baltiboy films — six folktales adapted into two one-hour films — had taken four years to make, were produced by the Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI), and were directed by Tilak Shetty, who also wrote the screenplay (Hindustan Times). The films’ storytelling device was distinctly Indian: a cat, a monkey and a donkey acting as sutradhars — traditional narrator-figures — to carry tales from Rajasthan, Kerala, Punjab, Karnataka, Bihar and West Bengal, each rendered in the visual language of that region’s folk art (Hindustan Times). Shetty’s stated mission was archival: India’s dying folk art forms needed to be revived and preserved through storytelling children would actually watch. His fidelity rule was strict — “we didn’t take any freedom as far as the art form is concerned” — and he cited Madhubani’s flat, perspectiveless style as the kind of constraint the animators refused to soften (Hindustan Times). The series went on to air on Cartoon Network, and Shetty and Shroff were quoted as the studio’s directors when its second film drew international festival attention (AnimationXpress).

Cairo nomination and the folk-art feature slate

In March 2012, “Krish, Trish and Baltiboy 2” was nominated in the children’s animation category at the 21st Cairo International Film Festival for Children, held from 23 to 30 March. Speaking to AnimationXpress, Munjal Shroff — identified as a director of the Mumbai-based studio — called the series an attempt to “resurrect and nurture the dying folk art forms,” while “Tilak Shetty, Director of Graphiti,” said he expected to win but was even more excited to watch Indian stories play for children from different parts of the world (AnimationXpress). The nomination also opened a window onto Graphiti’s ambitions for the property: the studio disclosed that three further KTB feature films were in pre-production, each built around folk art never before adapted to animation — Chitrakathi from Maharashtra, Gond paintings from Madhya Pradesh, Phad paintings from Rajasthan, and Kalighat paintings (AnimationXpress).

Bharat Hain Hum: the government co-production

The series’ second life began on 11 October 2023, when Union Minister Anurag Thakur launched the trailer for KTB – Bharat Hain Hum, a 52-episode season of 11-minute films dramatising India’s freedom struggle from the 1500s to 1947 — co-produced by the I&B Ministry’s Central Bureau of Communication and Graphiti Studios. The Ministry’s own statement fixed the authorship on the record: “the series has been created by Munjal Shroff and Tilakraj Shetty from Graphiti Studios” (The Hindu). The trade press corroborated the same credit in its own spelling — “Created by Munjal Shroff and Tilak Shetty” (Cinema Express). The scale was industrial: more than a thousand people worked on the production, and a single episode carried 50–100 characters against the 25–30 typical of a normal animation show (The Hindu) — a density that implies the co-production was engineered as a flagship demonstration of Indian animation capacity, not a routine season renewal. The series aired simultaneously on Doordarshan, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video in 12 Indian languages and seven international languages, and was shown to parliamentarians (The Hindu). Season 2 itself was formally launched at the International Film Festival of India in Goa on 23 November 2024, with Nagarjuna Akkineni at the event, and streamed on Prasar Bharati’s Waves platform (The Tribune). A month earlier, Shetty — now styled “director and chief executive officer” of Graphiti Studios — had appeared at FICCI Frames 2024 in a masterclass on the making of Bharat Hain Hum alongside Shroff, Prasar Bharati CEO Gaurav Dwivedi and MIB officials (AnimationXpress). The capstone came that December, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi devoted part of his 117th Mann Ki Baat address to the show: “now in ‘Mann Ki Baat’ i.e. MKB, we will talk about KTB… KTB is a superhit among them,” he said, describing the trio’s stories of lesser-discussed freedom fighters and noting the Season 2 launch at IFFI Goa and the show’s multilingual broadcast on Doordarshan and OTT platforms (Prime Minister’s Office).

Selected credits

Year	Work	Role
2002	Graphiti Multimedia	Co-founder with Munjal Shroff, pivoting the studio from ad films to original IP (BusinessToday)
2007	Cash (dir. Anubhav Sinha)	Animation director; ~10 minutes of animation, ~200 shots, ~60 days (Business of Cinema)
2010	Krish Trish And Baltiboy (CFSI films)	Director and screenplay; six folktales, four years in production (Hindustan Times)
2012	Krish, Trish and Baltiboy 2	Co-director quoted on its nomination at the 21st Cairo International Film Festival for Children (AnimationXpress)
2023–	KTB – Bharat Hain Hum	Co-creator (Ministry credit); CBC–Graphiti co-production; Season 2 launched at IFFI 2024 (The Hindu; The Tribune)

The name on the credits

No single source spells out his legal name, and the variants in circulation need untangling. Series credits and databases use “Tilak Raj Shetty”; the Information & Broadcasting Ministry — quoting its own press note on the Season 2 launch — names him as “Tilakraj Shetty”, one word, alongside Munjal Shroff, both “from Graphiti Studios” (The Hindu); the animation trade press consistently writes “Tilak Shetty” — as co-founder and CEO of Graphiti (2010), as the director quoted on the Cairo nomination (2012), and as “Co-Creator and Director at Graphiti Studios” (2024) (BusinessToday; AnimationXpress; Filmibeat). The roles converge on one man — Graphiti’s co-founder with the same partner, Munjal Shroff, and the same studio’s KTB creator — so the variants are spellings of one person, not two people sharing a studio. Where sources disagree on the exact form, this profile keeps each source’s spelling in its citation and uses “Tilak Raj Shetty” as the title form.

Frequently asked questions

Is Tilak Raj Shetty the same person as Tilak Shetty? Yes. The I&B Ministry’s own account credits “Tilakraj Shetty from Graphiti Studios” as co-creator of the series with Munjal Shroff, while the animation trade press credits “Tilak Shetty” — Graphiti’s co-founder and CEO — with the same series and the same partner. The roles, studio and partner converge on one person; the difference is spelling, not identity.

What is Tilak Raj Shetty best known for? Co-creating and directing the animated series “Krish, Trish and Baltiboy” with Munjal Shroff — first the folk-tales films of the 2010s, nominated at Cairo’s children’s film festival, and later “Bharat Hain Hum,” the government co-production about lesser-known freedom fighters that Prime Minister Modi named in his 117th “Mann Ki Baat” address.

What was his role at Graphiti Multimedia? He began building the studio with Munjal Shroff in 2002, pivoting it from advertising films to original animation IP; BusinessToday called him co-founder and CEO, and he was still its director and chief executive officer at FICCI Frames 2024. Both founders had trained under Ram Mohan, regarded as the guru of Indian animation.

Did he work on films outside his own series? Yes. In 2007 he was the animation director for Anubhav Sinha’s feature Cash: Graphiti added about ten minutes of animation — roughly 200 shots — in some sixty days, with character development by Ram Mohan and his team, according to the film-trade press.

What is “Bharat Hain Hum”? The second season of the series, subtitled Bharat Hain Hum, co-produced by the Central Bureau of Communication and Graphiti Studios: 52 episodes of 11 minutes dramatising lesser-known freedom fighters from the 1500s to 1947, aired on Doordarshan, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video in 12 Indian and seven international languages, and launched at the International Film Festival of India in November 2024.

What this profile does not claim

• It does not declare any one spelling his legal name; “Tilak Raj Shetty,” “Tilakraj Shetty” and “Tilak Shetty” all appear in citable sources, and no birth, incorporation or statutory record was located to fix the form.
• It does not give a birth date, birthplace or education; no full-read source in this pass provided them, and they are not asserted.
• It does not assert the often-repeated 2005 start of the KTB folk-art research; that date rests on a single tier3 case study, while the Hindustan Times confirms only that the first films were four years in production by 2010.
• It does not claim the PIB press release’s creator credit as read first-hand; PIB’s page returned a 403 in this pass and was not worked around — the Ministry’s statement is quoted from The Hindu’s on-the-record report.
• It does not assert that he co-directed every later Season-1 special; databases assign varying per-title credits, while the full-read sources name him as director of the CFSI films and as a Graphiti director quoted on the Cairo nomination.
• It covers no personal or family details; the sources document a public professional career only.