Where Did the Indian Stan Lees Go?
We had Chacha Chaudhary. We had Nagraj. We had Suppandi. We lost them somewhere in the journey of growing up.
[This is an excerpt from Native Place, where I write about Indian art, nostalgia, and pop culture]
I was with my parents at Durg railway station, waiting for a train that would take twenty-four hours to get us home. Durg is a small city in Chhattisgarh, deep enough into central India that most people I have met in adult life have not heard of it. My parents had family there, and we visited every year or two. The trains ran late, and we would always end up at the station an hour before we needed to be.
I was going through what was probably my Agatha Christie phase, which was several years beyond what I was supposed to be reading, but I was already deep into it. I wandered into the AH Wheeler bookstall hoping I would find something detective-shaped to get me through the journey.
I did not.
The stall was a small wooden cabinet of mostly magazines. Grihshobha. Sarita. The kind my mother would buy one of, for the actual content, the long essays and the women’s-magazine reporting at the front. I would borrow her copy when she was done and flip straight to the back, where the recipes were, and to the illustrated story right at the end, half of which I could not follow, but which I liked anyway. The English literature section, if it could be called that, was about four titles wide and consisted of the same Sidney Sheldons and Mills and Boons on permanent rotation. The Mills and Boons I did not yet understand were not for me. There was nothing for twenty-four hours of train.
What there was, in abundance, were comics. Stacks of them. All Hindi.
I bought a Nagraj. It had a green superhero on the cover, snakes around his wrists, and a title in red Devanagari letters that looked like they were melting. I do not remember the issue, but I remember reading the entire thing on the train back, in Hindi, without thinking about the fact that I was reading in Hindi.
That second part is something I want to flag, because I think about it now. There was a long period of my childhood when reading Hindi was just the default thing you did. Not an act of pride. Not a deliberate choice. Just what was around you, so you read it. I have not read anything substantial in Hindi in years. I am not sure I could do it now, at any real speed. I am not sure when that changed, or whether I noticed.
Raj Comics was founded in Delhi in 1984. At its 1990s peak, the imprint was selling in the lakhs per issue across its flagship titles. The artist behind Nagraj, Anupam Sinha, drew most of those panels by hand. On paper. With brush and nib, for thirty years. There was no digital colouring. There was no Pinterest reference library. There were no AI generators. There was Sinha, the deadline, and the ability to draw a foreshortened combat anatomy from imagination because the technology to do otherwise did not exist.
I want to come back to this in a minute.
The only other comics I had read by that point were Archies and the Diamond Comics trio. Chacha Chaudhary. Billu. Pinki. These were two extreme ends of a spectrum and I did not have the infrastructure to put them in the same category.
Archies was incomprehensible. I read them because they were available, but the world they described, with its high school proms and milkshakes and diners and cars borrowed from parents for the weekend, was so foreign that it felt almost speculative. This was years before Netflix’s Riverdale would normalize the idea that American teenagers actually lived like that. To my ten-year-old self it read as fantasy fiction set in a place I had never seen. I also did not yet understand that comics could be tiered for age. I assumed all comics were for me and could not figure out why Archie’s emotional life made no sense. The problem, of course, was that Archie was a few years older than me, and the comic was written for someone a few years older too.
The other end was Chacha Chaudhary, written and drawn by a cartoonist named Pran Kumar Sharma. Just Pran, on every cover. Chacha was the old man with the red turban, the white moustache, and a brain that worked faster than a computer(this was his actual catchphrase, repeated in every issue for forty years). His best friend was Sabu, a giant from the planet Jupiter, who had the bald head and the silent presence. The setting was a small Indian town. The villains recurred. The gags were gentle. I read these every summer vacation, and they are still some of my best memories of childhood reading. The stories were not exactly different from each other, you noticed that over time, but it did not matter. Kids will read good things on repeat. We rewatched Tom and Jerry the same way.
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Pran drew Chacha Chaudhary, plus Billu, plus Pinki, plus several other characters, for decades. Combined, his characters were read by tens of millions of Indian children. Chacha Chaudhary alone has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
If you stopped a random person in India today and asked them to name a comic creator, you would not get Pran. You might get Stan Lee, if they have seen enough Marvel films. You might get Studio Ghibli, but only because of the recent ChatGPT trend that briefly made everyone on the internet aware that there was a Japanese animation studio with a distinct visual style. (You would probably not get Miyazaki the person. You would get the studio, because the algorithm taught you the studio.) You might get nobody.
Pran created an IP universe with a reach that, in any other country, would have made him a national cultural figure. In India he is Pran, and Pran needs explaining.
This is the deeper problem, and it goes wider than Pran. It is not just that the artists are unknown. It is that the IP itself has not been allowed to occupy the cultural space it should occupy. Chacha Chaudhary should be a national mascot on the level of Doraemon or Mickey Mouse. Sabu should be a name children recognize before they can read. Surprisingly, the one Indian character we have actually managed to scale into that kind of household-level recognition is Chhota Bheem, and that happened on television, not in print. The original generation of Indian print comic characters did not make the jump.
There is a whole second tier here too. Tinkle, the children’s anthology magazine, ran a stable of recurring characters that an entire generation of Indian children knew by heart. Suppandi, the village simpleton whose every story was a setup for the same joke and was somehow always funny. Shikari Shambhu, the bumbling hunter who was always saved from his prey by accident. Kalia the Crow. Tantri the Mantri. These characters lived in millions of Indian heads through the 1980s and 1990s.
Ask anyone under twenty-five today and most of them will not know any of them. There is no Suppandi reboot. There is no Shikari Shambhu film. There is no Kalia the Crow merch. The characters are sitting in old issues of Tinkle in the storage rooms of houses being slowly sold off, and the people who drew them are mostly uncredited even on Wikipedia.
This is what I mean by a cultural dearth. We have produced IP at an extraordinary scale, for an extraordinary number of years, and we have failed to do the thing that other cultures do with their commercial illustration, which is to take it seriously enough to canonize it.
Many years later I went to design school. I had to take a few classes in figure drawing and human anatomy. I had drawn for years and assumed I knew the territory, but I did not know how hard the territory actually was. Rendering a foreshortened hand from a particular angle was a problem I had to solve a hundred times before the hand started to look like a hand and not like four small bananas.
I do this on iPad now, when I do it. Procreate, layer masks, infinite undos, automated symmetry, AI reference generators. If a hand is off, I scale it. If perspective is wrong, I flip the canvas to check. If the line weight is bad, I change it without redrawing anything.
Anupam Sinha did not have any of this. Neither did Pran. Neither did Pratap Mulick at Amar Chitra Katha. They drew on paper, in ink, with no internet to pull reference from, and they did it for thirty or forty years each, on monthly deadlines, with print runs in the lakhs.
I think about this now, watching young illustrators learn the trade. A lot of them are starting with AI. They generate a base, refine it, composite it, call it done. They will never have to learn what a hand actually looks like at a forty-five-degree angle in moderate-key lighting. I do not blame them. I started on a tablet, not on paper. I am part of the same drift.
But there is a class of artist who learned everything by hand, with no assistance at all, and who solved problems on instinct and brutal repetition that art schools now spend three years teaching. The Indian comic artists of the 1970s through 1990s were that class. They worked in obscurity. Their names did not travel. Their stature is still pending.
There has been some movement, finally. Raj Comics has licensed characters for streaming projects. A Nagraj film has been announced more than once. Anupam Sinha occasionally shows up on podcasts now, recounting his stories. Amar Chitra Katha has had a contemporary revival under new ownership. There is a slowly forming critical conversation around Indian comics as illustration, mostly in English, mostly on Substack-adjacent corners of the internet.
It is not the canonization of Stan Lee in the West or of Miyazaki in the East. But it is something. The next generation of Indian comic readers will at least have access to the names of the people who drew the books they are reading, which is more than my generation got.
I no longer have the Nagraj I bought at Durg. I did not lose it on the train. I am almost certain my mother gave it away to the raddi-wala, eventually, as part of one of the regular old-paper clearances every Indian household used to do. The comic probably cost fifteen rupees. We sold it back for less than one.
Had I known I would still be thinking about it fifteen years later, I would have kept it.
[This is an excerpt from Native Place, where I write about Indian art, nostalgia, and pop culture]
