Chandamama holds a rather special place in the heart of every Telugu reader. This beloved book won the hearts of its audience with its magical stories and adorable comics. But many of the writers of popular series in this book were left unknown. One of those legendary writers is "Dasari Subrahmanyam", who wrote most of the folklore short stories in Chandamama. His serialized adventure stories were published for years long in Chandamama magazine. His stories are usually fantasy backdrops and are set in ancient and medieval times.
Subhramanyam was born on 17th August 1932 and worked with Chandamama for more than 50 years. Until his retirement in 2006, he wrote numerous stories which made us enter the magical world of fantasy. His writings mostly came to light after his death. It was a hard time for his readers to find out which story was his as he wrote them under many names. During the five and a half decades he wrote many detective, mysteries, folklores and social series. Due to the fact that Chandamama never published the name of its in house authors, many of his serials went without his name on them. His serial ‘Mruthyuloya’ which was published in Bommarillu was a super hit and people got to know it’s written by him only after his death.
He was given the title ‘Janapada Navala Samrat’ after his immense contribution to our folklores. Only after the India Today published an article on him in 2011, people got to know about this magical writer. He shared most of his writings with his close friend and relative Dasari Venkata Ramana, who shared these details in an essay written about Subhrahmanyam in Rachana magazine. That was when readers of Chandamama finally understood from whose pen these mesmerising tales came from.
