100 years of Bengali comics-100 years of history

An exhibition aims to gain old Bengali comics some new respect, but it seems like an uphill task as most contemporary artists prefer to work in English rather than Bengali

- SANDIP ROY

When I was young I subscribed to a popular Bengali children's magazine, Anandamela, in Kolkata. My parents thought it might help to add some Bengali fibre to a literary diet that had too much Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton's William Brown, and Tintin.

But the Bengali magazine also carried Tintin. In Bengali.

"I think the golden age of Bengali comics came to an end when magazines started to carry translated comics like Tintin and Tarzan," says Abhijit Gupta, professor of English literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and comics collector and researcher, at the opening of a new exhibition, Comics In Bengal, in the city about Bengali comics from the 1920s to the present day.

Gupta isn't dissing the translations. Tintin in Bengali caused a sensation when it first appeared in 1975. The renowned Bengali writer Nirendranath Chakraborty did the translation, the first one in an Indian language.

Even now translators marvel at how he rendered Captain Haddock's "billions of blue blistering barnacles" into "jotto shob gneri guglir jhaank" (all those swarms of clams and molluscs). Sophisticated Bengalis regarded gneri-gugli as lowly food that poor people scrounged from river banks, giving Haddock's outburst a piquantly Bengali punch while preserving the crustacean flavour of the original.

"It was great," says Gupta. "But did it happen at the expense of homegrown comics?" The homegrown Bengali comics struggled to compete against the cosmopolitanism of Tintin and Asterix.

Gupta's own nickname testifies to their cultural footprint. It's Tintin.

Tintin was not the first international comic to make landfall in India. In 1958,

Phantom Of The Jungle got an authorised Bengali translation as Aranyadev.

But long before that, Bengali comic book artists were happily "borrowing" international comic book characters and sending them on local adventures.