Almost all of them have a mashi (aunt) or a thakur (cook) who can be trusted to rustle up delicacies that are favourites across Bengali households,” says Deb as he talks about how these characters became a reflection of the society and the life of those times. “One thing that unites these characters is food. While he might occasionally conspire with Nonte-Phonte, most of the boys’ antics are aimed at this senior as payback for all the times that he devises ways to bully them or get them into trouble with the authorities. This tall, wafer-thin fellow is considerably older than the other teenagers around him, possibly because he has failed in class multiple times. Another memorable character from this comic strip is Keltu da – a 20-something-year-old who also happens to be living in the hostel and is a senior to the two boys.
While at first glance it may seem like they are twins, Nonte and Phonte, despite their obvious similarities, are simply friends who co-exist in the hostel. The only authority figure here was a booming superintendent of the hostel, who, like the uncle in Hnada Bhnoda, often bore the brunt of Nonte and Phonte’s numerous pranks. The prime setting for Nonte-Phonte was in the boarding school of a semi-rural town of Bengal. Perhaps it was because of his enormous appetite or perhaps it was because of his uncomplicated affection for his two companions (brilliant pranksters in their own right), Bantul continued to remain a favourite with audiences both young and old. Despite all that however, the character retained his simplicity. He reflected the people’s sentiments and that was the time when the character really flourished,” notes Debasish Deb as he goes on to talk about the progress of the character from being simply strong to becoming someone akin to superman.
Bullets bounced off his chest and he was sought out by army generals who required his help to stop an attack.
If you flip through a Bantul comic strip, you will often find him single-handedly stopping tanks and diffusing bombs. Complete with a bad-tempered uncle who often ended up being collateral damage for their many mischievous plots, and a few other scattered tertiary characters, the comic strip was a delight for both children and adults. However, by the time most of these stories ended, the former was seen in flight, as a last-ditch effort to escape punishment, unless of course that punishment had already caught up with him, in which case, the reader had the delight of watching him endure (not very gracefully, one might add), the many blows that landed on his back. Hnada, a tall, thin chap with a penchant for creating mischief, was often seen as constantly devising ways to land others, especially Bhnoda, into trouble. Featuring two boys, one lanky (Hnada) and the other bulky (Bhnoda), the comic strips were initially sketched and inked by Debnath himself until Shuktara decided to start printing them in grayscale. It was light-hearted slapstick humour and people loved it,” observed Deb. Here was a pair of characters, very much like the infamous Laurel-Hardy duo, who got into all sorts of trouble and very often paid the price for it. Thus appeared the very first comic strip of Hnada-Bhnoda in the 1962 June-July edition of Shuktara magazine. Despite not being very well-informed about the genre, the then illustrator decided to take up the challenge. Debnath’s foray into comics was because of an increasing demand for comic strips. “In one of the interviews that I conducted with him, he admitted that before he became a comic artist, the only comic book he was familiar with was the Tarzan comics!” recollects Deb, as he tells us how, being a well-known illustrator of the times, Narayan Debnath never had any aspirations of becoming a comic artist. Buy Debasish Deb’s Aankay lekhay chaar doshok here.
0 kommentar(er)
