Narayan Debnath is a name that will not strike most Southasians as odd, surrounded as we are by friends with names like Shiva, Mohammad and Jesus, a man-god symbiosis in sound. Narayan is another name for Vishnu, while deb is 'god' and nath is 'king' or 'ruler'. The name is therefore protean in power, in the kind of productive creativity that is almost exclusive to the gods. Strange it must be, therefore, to imagine a balding, silver-haired man in a white dhoti and ganjee looking at the camera with the surprised eagerness of the first-time photographed, sitting in his middle-class living quarters in Howrah. It is generally men who tend to overestimate – in art and the dailiness of fear – the potency of their creators. Batul the superhero, Hada and Bhoda, Nontey and Phontey, the schoolfriends trying to beat boredom in school, could never have imagined how ordinary a life their creator led.
The comic-strip creator is the poster boy of anonymity. His or her name appears next to his creation everywhere, almost in the fashion of 'c/o', a bureaucratic marker of parenthood on application forms; but by the time readers have reached the last bubble of words, that name has been crowded out by those of his creations. The comic-strip creator thus lurks in the debris of our consciousness, emerging now and then, as during a quiz competition. For a very long time, this writer continued to believe that 'Narayan Debnath' was actually the subtitle of many comic strips, something like 'The Poor Little Rich Boy' that followed the title Richie Rich. Children have no use for names, certainly not for the names of parents of their best friends, and I cannot remember ever having spent much energy on conceiving a likely face and personality for Debnath.
My first encounter with the pintsized, giant-chested superhero Batul was in the Bengali magazine Shuktara. The title refers to the pole star, and indeed pole star it was – right on the first page stood Batul in his vest and hot pants. This was a time when children had yet to develop a preference for glossy colourful pages, and so when Batul emerged his hot pants were coloured with the printer's black ink, while his vest, always without seams and always bursting at the chest, was a baby-pink dye. We were too young to be bothered about the gendered politics of blue boys and pink girls, but in spite of that ignorance we did realise that Batul, in his pink vest, was a most unconventional superhero. He had no fancy automobile, fancy guns or knives, not even an alter ego – he was always Batul, no Mr Walker-Phantom or Kal-El-Superman masks for him.
In the names of Superman, Spiderman or Batman, –man is a diving-board suffix for superhuman strength. With Debnath's creation, however, that noun is replaced by an adjective, an English word that seems like a necessary interpolation for imported strength – Batul is Batul the Great, the best and strongest without apologies. He is, as one of the titles of the books describes matter-of-factly, aekai aeksho, a one-man army. In Jaanowar-o Haar Maaney (Even the beast accepts defeat), Batul domesticates the wildest of animals: the octopus is made to mow a lawn, and he controls the wildest and unruliest of horses, donkeys, bears, tigers and ostriches. In an almost psychosomatic gesture, in one story Batul even becomes a bull himself, wearing a mask and impersonating the animal, all the while assured that his physical strength was no less than the bull's. That is Debnath's Batul – all physical power (what else do young boys want?), tempered by, in the code of all superheroes, an unquestioning moral righteousness.