Narayan Debnath, born on 25 November 1925 in Shibpur, Howrah, created the Bengali strips Handa Bhonda, Batul the Great and Nonte Phonte. When he died in January 2022 at 96, he held the record for the longest-running comic by an individual artist.
Debnath's family had migrated to Shibpur from Bikrampur, in present-day Bangladesh, before his birth, and ran a gold retailing business. Designing jewellery patterns gave the boy his first training in line and ornament. During the Second World War years he studied fine arts at the Indian Art College for five years, though he left in his final year without taking the degree, and then freelanced for advertising agencies making movie slides and logos.
In 1950 a friend introduced him to Dev Sahitya Kutir, one of Bengal's major publishing houses. For the next decade he illustrated children's books, adventure novels and Western classics in translation, and he would eventually illustrate Tarzan stories continuously for 42 years. It was the editors at Dev Sahitya Kutir who pushed him towards comics, even suggesting the name of the strip that changed his life.
Handa Bhonda debuted in the magazine Shuktara in 1962 and was an instant success. The mischievous duo belonged to the terrible-twins tradition that runs from Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz through The Katzenjammer Kids, but Debnath made the formula thoroughly Bengali. The strip ran continuously for 53 years, a record for an individual artist, and it is still printed in Shuktara every month.
His superhero came to him on the road home. Debnath said the idea for Batul the Great arrived while returning from College Street in Calcutta, the name and the barrel-chested figure forming almost instantly. Batul first appeared in Shuktara in the May to June issue of 1965, drawn in red and black ink, and observers have noted his kinship with the British strongman Desperate Dan.
History then rewrote the character. When the Bangladesh Liberation War flared in 1971, editors asked Debnath to give Batul an aura of invincibility, and the hero began shrugging off tanks, aircraft and missiles as bullets bounced off his chest. In 1969 Debnath had already created his third classic, the boarding-school pair Nonte and Phonte, whose stories ran regularly in Kishor Bharati.
The catalogue beyond the big three is vast. Debnath drew Rabi Chobi in 1961 for Rabindranath Tagore's birth centenary, recreated Swami Vivekananda's life in Rajar Raja in 1962, and produced detectives, magicians and talking cats across titles like Detective Koushik Roy, Patolchand the Magician and Bahadur Beral. He even drew advertising comics for Benzytol soap in the early 1970s.
Recognition arrived late but fully. Debnath became the first and only comics artist in India to receive a D.Litt degree, and in 2022 he was awarded the Padma Shri, the country's fourth-highest civilian honour. He was admitted to hospital that winter and died in Kolkata on 18 January 2022, having drawn Bengal's childhood for six decades.
Compiled from published archives and public records.
