Jahnamamu

Children’s magazine ‘Jahnamamu’ has a special place among magazines from all Indian languages. While the Odia name is ‘Jahnamamu’, it is called ‘Chandamama’ in other languages. B Nagireddy and Chakrapani established Chandamama Foundation in 1947 and started pursuing their objective of providing a good magazine for Indian children. Interesting stories, amazing facts, mythological stories and beautiful pictures were the main attraction of Chandamama which was being published in 13 Indian languages. The first issue of Odia Jahnamamu was published in January 1956. In the editorial of this issue it was mentioned that it would be a great achievement if Jahnamamu would be able to boost the happiness of mother and children of holly state of Odisha. Jahnamamu was published regularly till December 1957. But publication stopped from 1958 (?). “

It started publication again from July 1972, after a long gap, on the occasion of its silver jubilee celebration. Both the Odia and Bangla Jahnamamu were being published at that time. Till 1997 December it had been the main magazine for all Indian families. Again from 1998 it became irregular. According to editorial note, publication was hampered due to problems with import of paper for printing. But from 2000 January to 2012 December, for 13 years Jahnamamu was published regularly again. In 2013 only 2 issues were published and after this the magazine stopped publication completely. There is some confusion over the publication dates and volume/issues numbers given in the issues.

There are gaps in the collection presented here because of non-availability of many issues. We would happily fill in the gaps if the missing issues are made available. This collection has been made possible by the sincere contribution of Hemant Nayak (Nayagarh), Nilamani Sahoo (Bhubaneswar), Sri Aurobindo Integral Education Centre, Khandagiri (Bhubaneswar), Swadhin Kumar Mohanty (Bhubaneswar), Anil Kumar Panigrahy (Bhubaneswar), Shyamaa Prasad Satpathy (Bhubaneswar), Alok Kumar Kar (Boudh), Surya Deo (Bhubaneswar) and Debaranjan (Bhubaneswar).

More issues of Jahnamamu are available at https://www.chandamama.in, https://www.OdiaPortal.in and ‘Odia Janhamamu Lovers’ Facebook page.

Jahnamamu Index

The table below contains a list of issues of the Jahnamamu magazine published from January 1973 to October 2013. By clicking on any volume/issue, you can download the corresponding files and save them to your computer. Depending on the speed of your internet connection, the download may take some time.

To get an idea about the magazine and the quality of its digital version before downloading, a few sample issues/pages are provided here. Clicking on any sample will open it in a new browser tab.