Way back in the defiant 1970s, you couldn’t have had a more unholy trinity to worship: Abu Abraham, Rajinder Puri and O V Vijayan.The cartoon that arrived a good half-century before democracy did in this country had already been mainstreamed by Shankar and taken forward by Kutty, Laxman and a host of language cartoonists. So there was a readership that was waiting for the trinity to happen. While Abu and Puri arrived in the capital with craft and content tested and approved in London, the global cartooning capital then, Vijayan emerged straight out of Palakkad, Kerala’s small town. He had to be doubly defiant.First, he rejected the very master who gave him his big break in Delhi — Shankar. Not the person, but his Good Cartooning Practices. Vijayan junked anatomical drawing and went in for geometrical forms and created a look and feel somewhat like today’s computer graphics. Here was a cartoon that didn’t showcase a political situation for necessarily funny effects. His cartoon was the coffee house table where you sat across a very provocative and subversive political creature who didn’t like to lose an argument. But he risked it. It was somewhat like a video game in print. For once the viewer was drawn into this game called cartooning. Such respect for the cartoon viewer has rarely been seen.Till Vijayan came, it was a sin not to like a cartoon. Everyone sided with the cartoon; there’s not a soul who would like to think he hasn’t a sense of humour. The readers would either understand, pretend to understand or see what they want to see in the day’s cartoon. Instead, you could quarrel with the Vijayan cartoon, swear at it, even dismiss it only to return to the next cartoon itching for another fight. This is the kind of self-esteem Vijayan wanted in the reader. Remarkably, he found many such readers in this third worldish society over a cartooning career that seldom reached critical mass in a single platform. He never stayed long enough in a newspaper that had a concentrated or a nation-wide readership. Nor did he cartoon like many of us who think there is no tomorrow. He seldom did more than three edit cartoons in a week.Today he could have cut across globally more than many of us. You find traces of his merciless style in Steve Bell who has revived the political cartoon majorly in Europe and his reflective streak in Leunig, whom Australia has declared as its national asset.
