page_title: Narayan Debnath
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Narayan Debnath / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: He is an eminent cartoonist &amp; child novelist from Bengal.
context_page_description: Narayan Debnath is an Indian comics artist, writer and illustrator. He is the creator of the popular Bengali comic strips of Handa Bhonda, Batul The Great and Nonte Phonte. He holds the record of longest running comics by an individual artiste for Handa Bhonda comics series which have now completed its continuous 53 years of running. He is the first and only Comics-Artist in India who has received a D. Litt. degree.
  His other creations like Rabi Chobi was published to celebrate the birth centenary of Rabindranath Tagore in the May, 1961 issue of the weekly magazine called Anandamela. The full length 50-page comics were first published in the book format by Sarvodaya Sahitya Prakashan, Varanasi. Rajar Raja, it was illustrated by Narayan Debnath and written by Bimal Ghosh to celebrate the birth centenary of Swami Vivekananda. It was published every Monday for two years in the weekly Anandamela magazine. Eventually the 100-page comics was published in the form of a book in 1965 by Anandabajar Private Limited.
context_section_description: Narayan Debnath was born and spent most of his life living in Shibpur, Howrah, India. His family hailed from Bikrampur in what is now in Bangladesh but had migrated to Shibpur before his birth. In an interview published by Laalmati Publication in Narayan Debnath Comics Samagra, Debnath confessed that he was interested in visual arts from a very early age. The family business was retailing gold and he had ample scope to design patterns for jewellery. During the time of World War II, Debnath would study fine arts at the Indian Art College for five years. He did not continue to get his degree but instead discontinued in his final year. For the next few years he freelanced for advertising agencies creating movie slides and logos. Debnath recounts in Narayan Debnath Comics Samagra, Vol. 2 that on the day of his wedding Gandhi was assassinated, which caused much inconvenience to the guests. The four volumes of Narayan Debnath Comics Samagra provide rich information about the life of the author.
  In 1950 he was introduced to Dev Sahitya Kutir, a major publishing house through a friend. People such as Pratul Chandra Banerjee, Shailo Chakraborty, Balaibandhu Roy, and Purnachandra Chakraborti were associated with the press at the time. From 1950 to 1961 he illustrated a number of children's books including adventure novels and Western classics in translation. His journey in comics started in 1962 with 'Handa-Bhonda' in Shuktara.
  He began as a freelancing comics-artist and soon went for comics on his own . However, when still a struggling freelancer, he was instructed by the publisher to adopt 'well accepted foreign comics' to make comics for their magazine(s) to get easy business.
caption: Narayan Debnath in his study.
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