Opinion E P Unny’s tribute to Ajit Ninan: A Master of Irreverence

The closest dose of irreverence that then came periodically was thanks to Ajit Ninan in India Today. Ajit single-handedly filled the pages of the political journal with a rich fare of national comedy, amply aided by the chaotic Janata coalition that succeeded Indira Gandhi. No government helped cartoonists more. Cacophony seldom translated better into comics. Ajit loved it. He was a master at blurring the needless distinction between cartoons and comics.

He caricatured serious political personalities for grown-ups in the same spirit in which he created his own fictional character, Detective Moochwallah, for children. This was unstated levelling and inherent irreverence. Not every comic illustration of his in India Today cried out like a punchy stand-alone cartoon. Instead, he took you across sumptuous imagery that worked like modern-day murals to show the pious and the pompous as eminently laughable.  

He was also happily free from the tyranny of text, a luxury his newspaper peers could only envy. His drawings in India Today were part of the written article that explained the context. He could freewheel and reach out to readers who read as well as those who didn’t bother to read. In hotel lobbies and at airports, you would see people simply gazing at his cartoon and chuckling. Even when he migrated to daily news-cartooning at The Indian Express and The Times of India, he didn’t quite give up this urge to visualise more than textualise.

Ajit made the clearest departure from a certain minimalist approach that marked early Indian cartooning down to his uncle, the illustrious Abu Abraham’s work. From the British news-cartoon mode, it was a visual leap into the Mad magazine mode. This would have been blasphemous in any Supreme Leader era. Mercifully, Indian politics has had breathing spaces that came and went before leaders gained much self-importance. The collective leadership that reigns in these phases typically throws up a range of faces and forms. In one such, when Chandra Shekhar, the most visibly bearded neta around at that time, was joined by a no less bearded Ramakrishna Hegde, Ajit exclaimed, “What a pain!” and promptly sat down to treat the bristles with precise distinction.

His was a drawing rich in detail and colour that printed well on quality paper. A far cry from the kind of flimsy newsprint on which some of the country’s best cartoonists were printed for decades. Thanks to this and the generous display, his work was seen nation-wide. He became the most imitated cartoonist next only to RK Laxman. Like Laxman and Mario Miranda, he was among the few Indian cartoonists to do promotional work for commercial brands.

When he migrated to Outlook and then to The Times of India, his characteristic style stood out through the technological sweep in the newsroom. Quick to adapt to computer graphics and digital devices, he must easily have been the first among us to discard the idea of an original drawing. There were many who sought an original from him and they would be surprised to receive a series of computer prints that added up in layers to the final cartoon output. Despite all the tech he assimilated, that unmistakable hand-done drawing remained. Few packaged the cartoon better and few retained its organic flavour.