Exactly 40 years have gone by since the world woke up to ‘Tintin est mort’- Tintin is dead on 3rd March 1983. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Tintin is 94, and very much alive and well, thank you. It was Tintin’s creator Hergé, who had died that day. However, the intrepid globetrotting reporter with a heart of gold shows no signs of slowing down. Georges Remi reversed his initials to form his famous pen name Hergé, and left an enduring legacy that continues to charm and enthral millions.
The final Tintin album, ‘Tintin and Alph-Art’ describes the occult world and avant-garde art. It remained incomplete, being released 3 years after Hergé’s death. It has sketches and scenarios, and an incomplete storyline, and yet, it’s a hugely popular collectible. Hergé’s rough notings indicate that Captain Haddock had completely lost his taste for whisky. Blistering barnacles and ten thousand thundering typhoons!
Belgian in origin, Tintin, alongwith his Fox Terrier Snowy, Captain Haddock, Professor Cuthbert Calculus, the twins Thomson and Thompson and others, travelled far and wide.
Tintin gained a whole new audience after Anandamela, a children’s magazine, translated Tintin into Bengali in the mid-1970s. In Bengali, Snowy, originally Milou, became Kuttush and Thomson and Thompson were renamed Ronson and Jonson. The first Hindi translation came much later, in 2010, where Thompson and Thomson became Santu and Bantu. Snowy once again got a new moniker- Natkhat and Calculus turned into Professor Aryabhat Suryamukhi.
Tintin’s brief affair with India began in 1934, in ‘Cigars of the Pharaoh’ and in his next adventure ‘The Blue Lotus’, in 1936. Tintin’s entry into India was dramatic, as always. His plane crashed in a dense jungle, where he encountered a feverish elephant whom he cured and rode without further ado. Tintin had come to India as the guest of the Maharaja of Gaipajama, whom he then saved from poisonous darts of a snake-charmer fakir. 26 years later, in 1960, Tintin revisited India during a brief stopover at New Delhi en route to Kathmandu when, along with Captain Haddock and Snowy, he visited Qutub Minar and Red Fort, barely making it back to the airport in time after being delayed by a ‘sacred cow’.
Satyajit Ray was an unbridled fan of Tintin and modelled his Feluda stories upon Hergé’s enduring characters. Topshe is often found reading Tintin comics in the stories. In fact, in Joi Baba Felunath, the cover of Tintin’s ‘The Broken Ear’ provides the eureka moment to Feluda.
There’s one forgotten Tintin adventure set in India between ‘The Crab With The Golden Claws’ and ‘The Shooting Star’. It was a Belgian three-act play ‘The Mystery of the Blue Diamond’ written in 1941. Tintin ventured forth in search of a fabulous diamond to the Padakhore Palace. The play had been performed in Belgium and was well received. But sadly, its script has been lost forever.
Deepam Chatterjee is the author of The Millennial Yogi. He can be contacted on deepamchatterjee@yahoo.co.in