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Journalism of Courage
This newspaper has been home to the broadest variety of Indian cartoonists. Variety is common to cartooning anywhere,but few countries have had such organic bio-diversity. Organic because,despite its century-long presence,cartoon has survived here without much organised effort. Clueless beginners start off with a role model and quickly move on to find their own style. There is nothing common between a measured,minimalist Abu Abraham and the generously fleshed out,expressionist Rajinder Puriexcept their news vigil and the unsparing political gaze,which more than anything else has marked Indian cartooning. Barring a Mario Miranda,our masters have been intensely political because politics makes much of news here. So much so that even pink papers feature cartoons and cartoonish illustrations,often on the politics of policy making.
Every cartoonist on this spread migrated from his hometown to the countrys capital and from his first language to English. This is a familiar Indian success story,and this one had more success coming. With the spread of English in India,our readership should soon outmatch our counterparts in US and UK. The use in textbooks was a mere acknowledgement of the cartoon as a learning device. The comic art is seen as a broad enabler like IT. Not just political science,even quantum mechanics is taught through cartoons. The very idiom of the cartoon,a playful mix of text and image,is seen as a useful background to study the emerging communication practices that employ the visual liberallyfrom PowerPoint to emoticons. Graphic novel,the cartoons new avatar,has brought the drifting reader back to books. The way Joe Sacco has used it to probe the war-torn Middle East could well herald an intense stream of reportage. And how Marjane Satrapi told her Iranian graphic story could be hugely motivating to our small-town girl students.
The genre has a tradition of partnering urbanisation as it did in the early decades of the last century in the US when migrants came to big towns in search of a new life and a new language. They took to the part-pictorial,part-verbal cartoon idiom in which they found an easy route to the host language,English. The comic art rose with the cosmopolitan culture. Just as we are poised for a similar scale of urbanisation,our cartoon has become a suspect art.
