The Phantom is HUGE in India which I think we all know. So big that Kevin Patrick focused on it with his thesis and subsequent book, and big enough for Glenn Ford from Frew to publically mention on his podcast interview that he wants to target the area with their Frew comics.
The Indrajal Comic Publication series saw over 400 issues published over a 20 year period and there has been at least another 300 comics printed and published in various languages since the 1970's.
India has such a rich history Indian phans are always finding new comics and now recently even new languages the chracter has been published in.
Indrajal published their comics in 10 different Indian Languages including English, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Arabic, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. I personally do not have any from Telugu and there are some phans who question whether it is actually published in that language, but that's for another article.
Diamond Comics Digest have also published their comic in three languages: English, Hindi and Bengali ... or so we thought. Ajay Kumar Misra, who is known to a lot of collectors, recently discovered a comic printed in a fourth language called Assamese which is an Eastern Indo-Aryan dialect spoken mainly in the Indian state of Assam, where it is an official language.
Ajay and a few other local Indian collectors they have confirmed it is Assamese which is very similar in script style as Bengali, which you can see with the attached photos. We have also managed to find issue #54, #55 & #57. You will note no #56 but the likelihood is that it also exists.
Thanks goes to Ajay, Swaroop Chand and others who have helped identify and research this small but important piece of Phantom history.
