ADIPUR, India - Wearing bowler hats and fake mustaches while carrying walking sticks, hundreds of Charlie Chaplin fans shuffled bow-legged through a small Indian town to celebrate the comic actor's birthday this week.

Every year on April 16, residents of Adipur - in India's far western state of Gujarat - honor the legendary silent actor's birthday by imitating his slapstick style in a parade.

Participants, which include young and old, male and female, are members of Charlie Circle, a local fan club that has been marking Chaplin's birthday annually since 1973.

Chaplin enthusiast and impersonator Ashok Aswani set up the club.

He was cycling to work one day in the early 1970s when he passed a theater showing Chaplin's 1925 hit "The Gold Rush"

He bought a ticket and went in. Aswani was immediately hooked and watched three consecutive shows, skipping work. He was fired from his job the next day.

Aswani discovered that he enjoyed copying the mannerisms of Chaplin's most famous on-screen persona "The Tramp" and began paying homage to his new-found idol.

"Earlier I used to celebrate his birthday alone by just cutting a cake. But then my neighbors started asking me what I was doing so I told them about Charlie Chaplin," he said.

"Gradually people started joining me in celebrating his birthday and the numbers swelled," added Aswani, a 70-year-old Ayurvedic doctor.

"We've done it for 44 years and this is the 45th."

On Tuesday, Aswani was joined by roughly 300 others marching for the 129th anniversary of Chaplin's birth, a solid turnout for the event that started with one man.

The suits were crumpled and the ties badly knotted during the two-hour-long procession.

Many had used black marker pens to draw on Chaplin's trademark toothbrush mustache while others opted to stick on fake ones.

Children wore Chaplin face masks while some carried life-sized cut-outs of the English-born filmmaker as a stereo loaded onto a truck blasted out popular Bollywood songs. - AFP