Cartoonist Pran, creator of Chacha Chowdhury, dies
Cartoonist Pran, creator of Chacha Chowdhury, dies
Eminent cartoonist Pran Kumar Sharma, popularly known as Pran, whose comic characters Chacha Chaudhary and his friend Sabu are household names in the Indian subcontinent, died of cancer today at the age of 75.
"Pran passed away at 9:00am at the Medanta hospital. He had been suffering from cancer of the intestine for the past eight months," said Gulshan Rai, publisher of Diamond Comics series containing the popular stories of Chacha Chaduahry and Sabu.
He is survived by a son and a daughter, reports our New Delhi correspondent.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took to Twitter to express his grief over the passing away of the cartoonist and described Pran "as a versatile cartoonist who brought smiles on the faces of people through his rich work".
Born in Kasur, near Lahore in Pakistan, in 1938, Pran began his career in 1960 as a cartoonist for a Delhi-based Urdu newspaper with comic strip Dabbu In 1969 and sketched Chacha Chaudhary for a Hindi magazine which shot him into popularity.
With a career spanning over five decades, Pran employed a simple style of art and sense of humour to create a family of characters like Shrimatiji, Pinki, Billoo, Raman and Channi Chachi, which are hugely popular with readers cutting across age.