The Man Who Gave Us Chacha Chaudhary

On the 5th of August, Pran Kumar Sharma, the creator of Chacha Chaudhary, passed away at the age of 75. He was a legend, giving us familiar looking comic book characters that later became household names. I doubt there still is, in this age of extreme technological distractions, a kid in this part of the world who has not heard of Chacha Chaudhary's wit (whose “brain works faster than a computer”, mind you) or Sabu's gargantuan strength.
Pran was born on August 15, 1938 in a small town called Kasur that now falls in Pakistan. He started his career as a cartoonist in 1960 for Milap, a monthly based in Delhi. Eleven years later, his first Chacha Chaudhary comic appeared in the magazine Lotpot, and catapulted him into prominence. Chacha Chaudhary, at the time, was a refreshing change for Indians as the comic scene there was largely limited to reprints of The Phantom and Superman.

Today, 43 years after first creating the character, Chacha Chaudhary comic strips have been carried by over 30 newspapers and periodicals, it has spawned a successful TV adaptation surpassing 500 episodes that still airs, and Pran himself became an icon of the Indian comic industry. He won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Indian Institute of Cartoonists, his comics have found a place in the International Museum of Cartoon Art and many more.

What made his creations so loved and lauded was perhaps because they all exuded a kind of innocence. The storylines and themes of his comic strips were versatile and diverse, but they all depicted human goodness in the midst of soft sci-fi, middle class oddities and pure adventure with an influx of genuine humour.
Maybe that's what made it great. All his characters were, in a sense, “superheroes” depicting regular people of our society. Pinky was the teenager who was brave and up to any challenge. Billoo (whose eyes I don't think we'll ever get to see) was the prankster youth, who was nonetheless very smart and could get out of any trouble he managed to get himself in. Even the alien Sabu (from the planet Jupiter), who becomes so fond of Earth and its humans that he decides to stay, was a stand in for the love Pran hoped the human kind would have for themselves and their homeland.

Maurice Horn called him the “Walt Disney of India” in the World Encyclopedia of Comics. If you think of it in terms of “influence”, he was. His creations are relatable, engrossing and by all means entertaining.