Bantul and Handa-Bhonda, who will take care of you?

It was a lazy Sunday morning a couple of years back. Narayan Debnath, the creator of Bantul the Great, Handa-Bhonda and NontePhonte, was reading the newspaper in his drawing room as his granddaughter watched television. Looking up, he saw the animated Nonte-Phonte series on a school hostel running on TV . What's more, Nonte was smoking a cigarette! He couldn't believe his eyes but had no idea how to stop this perversion of his characters.

It took him a lot of effort to ensure that the creative agency for the animation, which had initially taken permission from him, stopped producing the series. But this is only one example. Over the years, many creative platforms have used Debnath's characters -arguably as iconic and recognisable to Bengalis as Satyajit Ray's Feluda drawings -for their own benefit, interpreting and changing their context freely .

This has been possible because Debnath, who has created 15 characters and drawn more than 3,000 pages of comics over six decades, has not secured the copyright to his comics and characters.Now, at the age of 91, as he sees his characters being increasingly misused in the digital age, the hurt and embittered cartoonist wants his creations to die with him. “If things are like this when I am alive, what will happen after my death?“ asks Debnath.

He had tried to secure the copyright to his characters a few years ago, but failed because of financial issues and improper preservation of his work. The lawyer asked for `4 lakh to secure the character copyrights and I am not in a position to arrange the money . Besides, I have created more than 3,000 pages of comics and they are not well preserved. That also complicates the matter of copyright,“ says Debnath.

In the late '50s, after graduating from Indian Art College, he began his career as an artist. Starting with Bantul the Great, the first Bengali superhero, Debnath also created Nonte-Phonte, Handa-Bhonda, Bahadur Beral and Shutki-Mutki for two major Bengali magazines.

Since he has never been a full-time employee of any of the magazines, taking copyright protection never crossed his mind when he was young. “He is a pure artist. For him, his work was the most important thing and he never paid heed to other issues.He is very down to earth and saw the world in the same way ,“ says Debnath's son Tapash.

But he realised how wrong he was in 2006, when Kishor Bharati magazine published a four-page Nonte-Phonte strip in their Puja edition, which was actually an ad for a popular health drink brand. “Some other artist drew it and the publisher did not even ask for my consent. After I raised the issue, they apologised and tried to pay me `2,000,“ remembers Debnath. Surprisingly, next year the publication repeated the same thing.

The same year, in a documentary film on Narayan Debnath by Pratim Charrerjee, the publishers of Deb Sahitya Kuthir and Patra Bharati announced that they planned to continue with the characters after the death of Debnath. “Again in 2011, when my father was admitted to hospital, Kishor Bharati published Nonte-Phonte drawn by another artist. This hurt my father deeply ,“ Tapash added.

Tridib Chatterjee, the proprietor of Patra Bharati and the editor of Kishor Bharati magazine, agreed that they once printed Nonte-Phonte drawn by another artist, but only because Debnath was ill and in hospital. “We took his permission and paid him `5,000,“ he contends. But more than all of these, Debnath was hurt by the misuse of his charac ters. “All his characters are created with specific ideologies. Bantul, for example, was created during the Bangladesh War and it is a personifi cation of India. Now, if someone starts drawing the character, deviating from its basic philosophy , it would be unjust to the character and also the creator.

For this reason, Hergé did not allow Tintin to be drawn after his death,“ says comics researcher Santanu Ghosh.

Sourav Mondal, the proprietor of Softoons Entertainment Media LLP, the company that had made the Nonte Phonte series and sold it to different television channels from 2001 to 2010, agreed that some changes were made in the storylines -like the smoking episode. “When we had to make a 20 minute episode from a two-page strip, some changes were inevitable,“ Mondal said.

But the question remains that if Debnath has never applied for copyright, how can he stop others from drawing his characters after his death?
Siddharth Das, a city-based copyright lawyer, says, “At the time of creation, the painter or the author automatically gets the exclusive rights to his creation.For that he does not have to apply for copyright. But if his characters are being misused, then the matter goes to court, where having a copyright certificate makes it easy to assert one's claim,“ he said.

Abroad, artists either give up their cartoon characters for syndication, which leads to spinoffs on multiple media outlets and also earns huge revenues, or, like Bill Watterson and his Calvin and Hobbes series, they ensure that no one has access to the characters but themselves. Since Debnath has done neither, the fate of his characters -among the most iconic in Bengali literary and art history -hangs in balance.