Narayan Debnath’s comic world was rich, but stuck in stereotype and slapstick

The arsenal of Bengali comics had Gaganendranath Tagore, whom the ever hard-to-please pluralist Nirad Chaudhuri had compared to French caricaturist Honoré-Victorin Daumier, the “Michelangelo of caricature”. Bengali comics also had the likes of Upendrakishore Ray Chaudhuri and his son Sukumar, the latter’s bestiary and wondrous critiques of the archetypes of the Colonia remain unparalleled works of sapient humour. Bengal’s caricature repertoire also made space for the gall of Prafulla Chandra Lahiri, the socialist anguish of Chittaprosad, and the political discernment of Rebati Bhushan Ghosh, among several others.

Narayan Debnath, who came to the fore in the 1960s and absorbed the postcolonial political ennui of much of Bengali popular culture, drew well, really well. Debnath had a gift of clean lines and a conspicuous talent to draw figures in fast movement, displaying his ample grip on animated, hand-drawn kinesis that later helped his strips no end. But he did not imbibe the gifts of his predecessors, nor had he stories to tell. So, when he got a chance to do something of his own, he took to the genre of stilted, repetitive adolescent pranks in the capers of Handa and Bhoda, who appeared as double-page spreads in the variety magazine Shuktara in 1962. He repeated the same tricks and clichés when later that decade he created Nante and Fante, a pair of boarding school brats. Stereotypes and reiterations were galore. Every story had to end in dimwit denouement.

Debnath may have been short of ideas, but he was versatile otherwise. He drew biographical comics like Rabi Chobi (on Tagore), detective comics involving super-sleuth Indrajit Roy; a John Prentice and Alex Raymond-inspired strip about a hardboiled secret agent called Kaushik, etc. He was also behind Patalchand — a strip about a young magician; Bahadur Beral — about a smart feline; Danpite Khadu aar tar Chemical Dadu (1983), a Rick and Morty-like pairing of a boy and his grandfather; and Petuk Master Batuklal (1984) — about an insatiable teacher. Most of them banked on the same staple of bawdy slapstick.

His current fame largely rested on his strip Batul the Great, perhaps the only example in Bengali of an indigenous superhero, who was unrepentantly brawny, casually bareknuckle and conspicuously against the tide of the insolent intellectualism of Bengali life. Apparently, this 1965-born strip complemented the emerging aspirations that led to Bangladesh’s Muktijuddho in 1971. But exactly how did this bullet-dodging squat man with a barrel chest, in pink vests and accompanying black shorts, allay the anxieties of Bengali hyper-nationalism is, to date, unfathomable.

And yet, Debnath remained synonymous with comic culture in Bengal, being its most popular face for generations that grew up in the 1960s, ’70s and even the ’80s. That generation has most noisily mourned his death in the last few days, grieving the passing of their childhood. But was Debnath’s gags really constitutive of a childhood where fatuous frolic, vicious mischief and burlesque body-comedy were the primary forms of entertainment? If yes, then how did that same childhood and in that same period, accommodate the commodious, learned humour of Feluda? If it did not, then why mourn?

Chowdhury teaches at Ambedkar University Delhi and has recently put together, with Rituparno Basu, http://www.humourinbengal.info, an archive on the history of caricature in Bengal.