Cartoonists: Putting art to the practice of everyday resistance

Recently, the online Malayalam journal Navamalayali (the New Malayali) announced its seventh cultural award. It has gone to EP Unny.

In our country, where awards and prizes are a dime a dozen, why should this merit attention, you might wonder. Unny is a cartoonist, and the award is meant to honour contributions to culture.

While cartoonists in India have been honoured, including with the Padma Vibhushan, few awards have explicitly recognised the cartoon or the cartoonist as a fully-qualified resident of the universe of art and culture, this haloed space being reserved for writers, painters, poets, musicians, dancers, and other practitioners of what are commonly recognised as high art; cartoonists, if at all visible in the realm, are viewed as dubious interlopers.

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Navamalayali’s own previous awards have, for the most part, been faithful to the conventional understanding of culture: the awards have gone to eminent writers, including to Arundhati Roy. Cartoonist Unny is being honoured for putting art to the practice of everyday resistance.

Cartooning tradition

Do cartoons and comic art in general qualify as art? The French have a name for them: the Ninth Art. Asterix and Tintin receive as much scholarly attention as Godard and the rest of the avant-garde. But why talk of the French? We were colonised, after all, by the British, with their obsession with cartoons, whether in the Punch or daily newspapers that granted them the editorial freedom, for example, to excoriate Hitler, even as British prime minister Chamberlain was trying to secure ‘peace in our time’ by placating him.

In America, the larger and more influential bit of the Anglosphere, the cartooning tradition has been exceptionally strong, ranging from editorial cartoons from masters like Herblock to searing graphic novels from the likes of Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco.

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American newspaper editors have discovered, however, the better part of valour in recent times, with the New York Times dispensing with political cartoons and the Washington Post witnessing the resignation of Ann Telnaes, after the paper refused to publish her cartoon criticising Trump and his grovelling billionaire acolytes, the Post owner Jeff Bezos among those bending the knee. Telnaes recently won the Pulitzer for cartooning.

Power of political cartoons

Let us set aside how other countries treat cartoons and cartooning. Let us consider what political cartoons do. The centrepiece of the cartoon is, of course, a drawing, a visual — often funny, but not necessarily. The visual could speak for itself or it could be accompanied by text. Together, they could allude to history, literature, art, iconic figures, contemporary heroes or events, in order to provoke thought and persuade the viewers to find new meaning, a new connection with other parts of what makes us tick, and an insight into contemporary events that is either not obvious or deserves emphasis.

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After the Prague Spring of 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into the Czech capital to crush a bout of political liberalisation attempted by the local communist leadership, OV Vijayan drew a cartoon that skewered the Indian Left for their refusal to see how far Soviet Communism had veered off Communism’s original ideals. The cartoon focussed on the mighty battle tanks, with the words, “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism”, emblazoned over the black smoke swirling above the tanks. Those who recognise this to be the opening line of the Communist Manifesto — the vast majority, those days — appreciate the irony in full. The rest also get the drift.

India’s hard-hitting cartoons

Consider Abu Abraham’s depiction of the cavalier decapitation of constitutional propriety in Indira Gandhi’s declaration of Emergency. The cartoon shows a portly President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed sitting up in his bathtub, covered with nothing more than his own hair, and twisting his torso around to scribble his signature on a document held out by a hand discreetly thrusting in the direction of the bath tub from behind the mostly-shut bathroom door. The speech balloon carries the President’s irritated comment: if there are any more ordinances to sign, ask them to wait.

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When the beef controversy broke out at the beginning of Narendra Modi’s first term at the Centre, Unny depicted a diner at a restaurant asking the waiter to kindly bring him the Menusmriti, to bring out the incongruity of past prejudice with lived modern reality.

Carrying the burden of dissent

At a time when media reportage and commentary have adopted quiescence, if not acquiescence, with regard to the prejudicial policies of the government at the Centre, cartoonists have been carrying the burden of dissent, with support from stand-up comedians.

Sandeep Adhwaryu, Manjul, R Prasad, Sajith Kumar, Irfan, Ponnappa, Satish Acharya, Alok, and several others critique authoritarian politics, day in and day out, some more subtly than others, some able to marshal more of the known universe, across subjects, time and space, in their effort, than others. Unny leads the pack.

Humour has been more active in the service of democracy in India of late than the Opposition. But that, of course, is no excuse for the latter’s seeming aspiration to become a joke.

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Cartoonists, as we saw, bring visual art and commentary to bear on contemporary developments, in order to mobilise our senses and the totality of our learning, aesthetic as well as otherwise, and inspire new insights that enhance our understanding of where we stand as individuals in society, and beckons us to corrective action.

Culture is, of course, larger than art, comprising the totality of what makes a community behave in a particular fashion, and is transmitted to fresh generations of the community. Culture is capable of change, of course, and can empower individuals and community to discover and celebrate each other’s shared humanity and extend it, in quality and quantity — or it can do the opposite.

Removing dead habits

Cartoons tend to be on the side of identifying and removing dead habits and striving to enlarge the sphere of reason and moral courage.

If, in form and function, cartoons obviously overlap so much with art and culture, should we not accept these squiggly bringers of morning freshness to awaken dulled sensibilities as permanent residents of the world of art and culture?

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Many balked at the Nobel for literature to Bob Dylan. People hear songs on a daily basis, and they stroke our natural orientation towards beauty and harmony, embedding the aesthetic in our collective cultural subconscious. Cartoons perform a similar function, going beyond the aesthetic to our sense of fairness and justice, of being part of a shared collective, whose welfare is at stake.

Navamalayali has removed a set of blinkers. May more of us see cartoons and their place in the world with greater clarity.

(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal)