Book Review: Life’s Like That

The author’s pick is from collections — once removed from newspapers, the natural habitat of these cartoons. This conscious research choice comes with the benefit of hindsight that recasts the rebellious everyday art as part of “a shared national evolution through endurance”. The author doesn’t indicate cartooning trends. Instead, she dissects individual cartoons in a detailed news context, beginning with Shankar on the national language. The Constituent Assembly debate is presented amidst a crowded ensemble that includes some 14 recognisable personalities with as many takes on the subject, explained across 11 pages.

Laxman’s protagonist is a far cry from Shankar’s heroic nation- builders. He is the Common Man, a mere mute witness. The only public personality Laxman seems to endorse is Gandhiji, more precisely the Mahatma’s screen avatar, courtesy Richard Attenborough. The cartoonist seems to share the sentiment of his ministerial character stepping out of the biopic’s 1982 premiere, “Very moving. I understand it is a true life story!” Abu Abraham is studied here not so much for such distrust of public personalities as for his watch over public institutions under the Emergency — the “committed” judiciary and the extended Fifth Lok Sabha described by Atal Bihari Vajpayee as “Parlok Sabha”. Abu’s gently ironic pocket cartoon ‘Private View’ featured two Congressmen caught off guard every weekday on the front page of this paper.

Abu’s illustrious contemporary Vijayan never got close enough to overhear leaders off guard. He saw them from stark corners far away from power centres. Sparing nothing, least of all his own profession, he lamented the sheer futility of drawing comedy from drought-hit Kalahandi. The legendary editor S Mulgaonkar, heading a journal that backed the JP movement, told him, “I am hiring your talent. Not your conscience.” Vijayan wouldn’t play along; he remained a reluctant cartoonist till he retired in 1989. The journey from Shankar to Vijayan hit a fundamental dead end — how do you articulate third world tragedy in a first world medium that can’t suppress laughter?

Redemption came when Narasimha Rao rebooted the country’s politics. Even the cartoonist could begin to aspire beyond the third world.

The author chooses Ajit Ninan and Neelabh Banerjee to represent this post-liberalisation phase which offers the cartoonist extended web presence as well as advanced work practices like coauthoring, in this case with senior editor Jug Suraiya. The new lot is as alert on Nandigram as Vijayan was on Kalahandi. Cartooning is very much on course, at least in print. The state seems to be touchier about the web cartoon and intolerant of the archival cartoon. Perhaps, more and more netas value virtual space over the real, and the past over the present. Also, what might provoke them is when the “silly daily cartoon” migrates to the respectable space this kind of study offers. May such books abound.