Chandamama - The magical magazine

Today I saw my childhood's favorite magazine Chandamama for the first time in more than 2 decades. My friend Srivatsha Joshi writes a weekly column 'Paraga Sparsha' in the Kannada daily Vijaya Karnataka. In his recent writeup he had written about the wonderful days of one's childhood. Starting with Jagjeet Singh's ghazal "yeh daulat bhi lelo" about getting back childhood, he had gone on to reminisce about one's younger days. It is a beautiful article. The link to podcast version is provided at the end of this article. While I enjoyed the article for many reasons, one thing that hit me deep was that it pointed out a link to the website of my childhood's favorite magazine 'Chandamama' - the colorful publication which came every month and contained colorful illustrations and stories. As soon as I heard about Chandamama's web presence I was there looking up the web page. The website is pretty cool with links to Chandamama in various Indian languages as well as in English. It has various categories and you can look up older stories. You can go to the archives and choose older issuea and read them as if you are flipping the printed magazine. The link to Chandamama website is at the end of this article.

Looking at the various pictures and stories I was transported back to my primary school days in Bangalore. During those days we got the English daily Deccan Herald, delivered to our home. Once a week (on Wednesdays) we would receive 'Sudha' the Kannada magazine which had a loving fan-following among Kannadigas. It was a very dignified weekly which catered to refined tastes with serial stories (dharavahi), cartoons, photo comics, interviews and a decent film section. Reading it and discussing its contents formed part of the family's activities. As children, I, my brother and my cousins enjoyed reading comics strips such as Dabu, Majnu, Shuja, Inspector Azad.

I remember that one day I had gone to my aunt's house with my mother. A small book sized magazine caught my eye with its colorful pictures and grand representations of Indian mythology. Flipping through a few pages was enough to suck me into the wonderful magical world this small magazine, namely Chandamama, had created. That particular issue had a picture of Hanuman, his tail wound to form a huge pedestal for himself to sit on. From this tall perch he was staring down at Ravana. Besides this, there was the image of the most spectacular Ashoka Vana, which occupied one full page. When my mother noticed my excitement at reading Chandamama in my aunt's house, she made the decision to subscibe it and I became a regular reader.

Thinking about it now, I feel a lot our mental pictures of ancient India has been painted by magazines like Chandamama and Amar Chitra Katha. I still remember the beautiful representation of Amaravathi - the beautiful capital city of the gods in heaven. I can also recall that eerie picture at the end of the Mahabharatha epic, the picture in which Yudishtira accompanied by a dog, crosses the Vaitharni river to enter the 'after-life' world.


At the beginning of the magazine was the Panchatantra series by Vishnu Sharma. Panchatantra taught valuable life lessons through stories involving characters like foxes, elephants and humans with names like dushta buddi (evil mind) and paapa buddi (bad mind). It was with uncontrollable excitement that I would hold these magazines as they were delivered on the appointed day in the month.


Oh how can one forget the series involving Raja Vikramaditya and the Beethala (ghost). In between all these there would be stories which involve normal human beings. There would be stories about villagers, sanyasis, old time businessmen with names like Ratnayya Sreshti. This was the world from a by gone era. That world was untainted by modern life, technology or vices. Once, I had felt odd when a small story referred to a radio. How can the wonderful world of Chandamama have a radio which is from our 'realistic' world.?

It was mainly through Chandamama that I learnt to read longer Kannada passages. At that age I was perhaps the only kid in my English medium school who could read Kannada stories so fluently. It feels great to experience again that thrill from my child hood days. Here is the link to Chandamama online. Hope you will enjoy it too.

Here is a link to Srivathsa Joshi's Kannada podcast article 'Give me back my childhood.'