Opinion Narayan Debnath’s comic universe was home for the peculiar joys of a certain kind of Bengali childhood
🔴 For those who grew up on Debnath’s friendly neighbourhood heroes, the energy of his panels, the prankster mischief and even the onomatopoeic speech bubbles he drew are a part of an older, analogue innocence.
Debnath was an illustrator and artist of some feat, but it was the long life of his comics that made him a cultural institution. 
For over half a century, from his home in Shibpur, Howrah, a suburb near Calcutta, Narayan Debnath, who died on Tuesday, drew a comic universe that would become a home for the peculiar joys of a certain kind of Bengali childhood. This world was not glossy, nor glamorous, and was scandalously short of female presence. But it was full of slapstick antics of hawai-chappal-shod boys, always eager for a hearty meal and mostly smart enough to escape a hiding from grown-ups in authority. All the blundering action took place in the para — a place that could pass for the scruffy lanes of any small town in Bengal, where children (and even superheroes) are regularly cut to size with cruel nicknames.
Was ordinariness this artist’s superpower? Even the superhero he created — Bantul the Great — first appeared in Shuktara, a children’s magazine, in 1965 as a bald, barefoot hulk wearing a pink banian and black half-pants, mortally fearful of his irascible aunt. Bantul’s greatness was his strength. In later editions, he would go on to hurl tanks at the Pakistani army, disable all firepower by simply having bullets bounce off his 40-inch chest and crumble walls with a gentle touch. The other iconic characters Debnath created were Handa-Bhonda (Stupid and Stupider), the Laurel-Hardy like heroes of his first comic, and later Nonte-Fonte (another pair of boys trying to survive hostel life and its tormentors).
Debnath was an illustrator and artist of some feat, but it was the long life of his comics that made him a cultural institution. For those who grew up on Debnath’s friendly neighbourhood heroes, the energy of his panels, the prankster mischief and even the onomatopoeic speech bubbles he drew are a part of an older, analogue innocence. May they live on, for future generations, as in-jokes, memories and memes.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on January 20, 2022 under the title ‘Neighbourhood heroes’.
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