Bujjai (Devulapalli Subbaraya Sastri) was a renowned cartoonist, children’s illustrator, caricaturist and a pioneer of strip-cartooning in India. A multi-award-winning artist, his acclaimed comic-strip version of the complete Panchatantra appeared in the Illustrated Weekly of India in the 1960s for a period of five years. His very first book, Banisa Pilla (‘The Slave Girl’), written and illustrated by him at age seventeen in the classic comic book mould, received rave reviews and was a sellout. Born in Pithapuram, Andhra Pradesh, and moving thereafter via Hyderabad to Chennai, his was a fruitful artistic career of nearly eighty years. His most famous works include Dumbu (on the adventures of a small, precocious boy), Pillalu Puvvulu (adapting famous European works for children), Pettandaru (a tongue-in-cheek look at post-Independence Indian life), the pictorial biographies of Telugu freedom-fighters Tanguturi Prakasam and Kandukuri Veeresalingam, and the Mahabharata. His characters Dumbu and Pettandaru remain household names in Andhra Pradesh. Other than his books, he contributed to children’s books, newspapers and magazines in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Hindi apart from English. His unique interpretation of the Panchatantra stories, where the animal characters are anthropomorphized, was published in book form in 1999 and 2005 to great success. A memoir in Telugu of his days with his father, the modern Telugu poet Devulapalli Krishna Sastri, entitled Naanna, Nenu (‘Father & Me’) was published in 2010 and became a runaway bestseller.

Forthcoming from Running Head is the translation into English of his memoir, and a new edition of the Complete Panchatantra set to stimulate the minds and delight the hearts of a new generation of Indian children.