Cartooning:India
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A brief history
Jan 18 2015
Atul Sethi
History, they say, has a habit of repeating itself. Nowhere is this more true than in the an nals of cartooning. Even as the world united against the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists and the magazine retorted with another controversial cover depicting Prophet Muhammad, a peek at the past reveals that contentious cartoons have regularly captured public imagination.India especially has a rich legacy of such cartoons right from colonial times. “Cartoons were among the cultural forms that were regularly kept under surveillance by the British,“ says Ritu Gairola Khanduri, author of Caricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and History in the Modern World. “In fact, the British had issued a number of guidelines to Indian cartoonists about imagery that was not acceptable. For example, cartoons showing a British official squeezing an Indian person were prohibited as were cartoons that portrayed Indians chasing or overpowering a British official.“
Not just the colonial government, even prominent leaders of the freedom struggle kept an eye out for cartoons with a potential for controversy.“This was a fascinating time for political cartoons. For instance, there was much discussion between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League in the 1930s and the period leading up to Independence on cartoons with a potential for inciting communal violence,“ says Khanduri.
Perhaps the biggest cartoon controversy that erupted during those times pertained to David Low, a prominent UK-based cartoonist. In August 1925, the Indian edition of the Morning Post carried a cartoon by Lowe which depicted cricketer Jack Hobbs, then at the peak of his popularity, as a larger-than-life figure surrounded by a group of beaming admirers which included among others Julius Caesar, Prophet Muhammad, and Christopher Colombus. The cartoon created a furore especially among the Ahmadiyya Muslims in Kolkata who came out on the streets against the depiction of the Prophet. As a correspondent of the Post noted in his report, “The cartoon has convulsed many Moslems in speechless rage. An Urdu poster has been widely circulated throughout the city, calling on Moslems to give unmistakable proof of their love of Islam by asking the Government of India to compel the British government to submit the illmannered editor of the newspaper to such an ear-twisting that it may be an object-lesson to other newspapers.“
Interestingly, Mahatma Gandhi was quite adept at using cartoons in building opinion against colonial rule. He often introduced provocative newspaper cartoons published in Britain to readers of his journal Indian Opinion in order to familiarize them with British cartoonists sympathetic to the plight of non-whites. One such cartoon which he reproduced in the April 2, 1910 issue of his journal along with a rather elaborate interpretation was “The March of Civilization“ which had been published a few months earlier by the London-based magazine The New Age. The cartoon showed a marching army ahead of which was the grotesque figure of a general whose mouth held a dagger dripping in blood. In the accompanying commentary written in Gujarati, Gandhi remarked, “No one who reads the description of the cartoon can help becoming grave... on reflection, we cannot help feeling that Western civilization is as cruel as, perhaps more cruel than, the terrible expression on the face of the man in the cartoon. Is there anyone who looking at this cartoon alone does not feel in his heart that satyagraha is the only way in which mankind can attain free dom and strength?“ After Independence came what many regard as the golden age of cartooning in India with cartoonists like Shankar, Kutty, Abu Abraham and RK Laxman packing in punches at politicians with alacrity. However, most of them also had their fair share of controversy. While Laxman's cartoon on the anti-Hindi agitation of 1965 drew ire in Tamil Nadu, Shankar's 1949 cartoon depicting Nehru wielding a whip with Ambedkar sitting atop a snail branded as the Constitution, created a ruckus in Parliament in 2012. But it was the Emergency-era that saw many contentious cartoons -most of which couldn't see the light of the day due to the strict censorship enforced at that time. One of the few which could was by Abu Abraham which depicted then president Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signing ordinances from his bathtub. Senior cartoonist and Abraham's nephew Ajit Ninan recalls the cartoon with a chuckle. “This cartoon became famous not just for its depiction of the reality of those times but also on how Abu could get a cartoon of the President past hard-nosed censors. That was a real feat.“
