Acute Angles and Obtuse Subjects

Vijayan brought a distinctly young voice to Indian cartooning. He had everything that was ‘‘anti’’ that went with the campus mood of the sixties and the seventies. His graphic idiom down to the speech balloon looked modern and defiant. He had considerable peer pleasure. Abu Abraham and Rajinder Puri had levelled up editorial cartooning and they were doing incredible caricatures in the anatomical mode. Vijayan chose geometry instead. He dismantled political figures into templates of circles and triangles.

Indira Gandhi was half a dozen acute angles and a wavy line or two. Brezhnev had thick black patches for eyebrows and a chin that multiplied and sagged like the Soviet map into Afghanistan. Mao’s face was a perfect circle — inhumanly perfect. The sole surviving politician in this collection is Vajpayee shown at the door of the Lok Dal office and Vijayan calls him the religion trying to infiltrate caste. Vijayan wrote his gags with a flow and rhythm that come naturally to an accomplished writer. One such memorable caption is altogether missing from a cartoon reproduced in this collection (Page 71). C. Subramaniam standing beside a club-wielding muscleman labelled ‘‘Rouble’’ is consoling the puny ‘‘Rupee’’: ‘‘I’m no expert and wouldn’t know about the gold content but he assures me he has a heart of gold.’’ A particularly sad miss considering economic issues like the Rupee-Rouble exchange rate seldom figure in Indian cartoons. The cartoon cliche of the ordinary man weighed down by taxes and prices has survived into our post-liberalised times.