RAJINDER PURI: A SWIFTIAN SATIRIST WHO SPARED NONE
Cartoonist Rajinder Puri is best remembered for tearing off the masks and puncturing the egos of lofty leaders, rhetoricians and public hypocrites
Cartoonist Rajinder Puri was a standing refutation of WB Yeats’ famous line in the Second Coming: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” He was nothing if not a man of conviction, a nationalist, champion of the poor, whilst his expression in the pursuit of authenticity, social justice and national honour was ever marked by ‘passionate intensity’. He is best remembered for tearing off the masks and puncturing the egos of lofty leaders, rhetoricians and public hypocrites, but at times he was also driven to try more direct ways of effecting social change.
It is therefore most welcome that Niyogi Books has published this book. The introduction by the editors of the volume, Partha Chatterjee and Arvindar Singh, aptly describes him as a Swiftian Satirist, ie, there was a slightly savage edge to his pillorying and commentary on persons and events. They have made the book more accessible to a new generation of readers by adding a few words of explanation below the drawings to background their now distant political context. The selection covers almost half a century from 1960 to 2010 and is a journey down memory lane for octogenarians like myself.
However, I must comment on one cartoon on p.69 captioned ‘Gandhiji and Nehruji 1984’ depicting Rajiv in a loincloth, Arun Nehru in churidar achkan, followed by a hairy Youth Congress thug brandishing a primitive club. The editors explain that Puri thought that Rajiv and Arun were the MK Gandhi and Nehru of 1984 – far from it: he was unmasking their hypocrisy in pretending to be so. Puri admired Gandhi and though he opposed Nehru, recognised him as a confused, mistaken idealist. To him, however, Arun Nehru was a mere fixer.
Cartoons like paintings are better looked at than talked about, so I may be forgiven for taking advantage of these columns to reminisce a little about the long association my husband, the late ML Sondhi and I had with Puri. (ML Sondhi had been an IFS officer, an MP, member of the Jan Sangh/BJP and was professor of International Relations at JNU). We discovered Puri in the early sixties when he was drawing for the Hindustan Times. The ditor S Mulgaokar introduced us to Puri and we remained friends thereafter.
Puri was keen to publish, at this stage privately, a collection of his cartoons and writings, and ML took him along to Megh Raj, proprietor of a print shop in Connaught Circus who agreed to do the job at a reasonable rate. Thus 1971 saw the publication of Puri’s first book, India 1969: a Crisis of Conscience dealing with the unsavoury methods employed by Mrs. Gandhi in her bid for power.
The events in the early seventies leading up to the Emergency require no repetition. ML had left the Jan Sangh to join Charan Singh’s BLD, and both parties were in the JP-led alliance to oust Indira. She imposed an Emergency suspending all civic freedoms, yet two and a half years later announced an election and withdrew it. In response to the latter there was a hasty cobbling together of opposition parties into the Janata Party (a combine of Swatantraites, Socialists, Jana Sanghis and others). Puri became founding General Secretary of the Janata Party in 1977.
One memorable incident of the Janata days was when he took a contingent of labourers into the Asoka Hotel for tea on the grounds that public sector hotels were meant to serve the people – well, here they were! The management of course was not amused, nor was most of the socialistic coffee crowd!
Puri continued to cartoon and publish. For some years after ML’ s passing in 2003 I wrote a literary cum general column for Asian Age and would on occasion receive the proverbial pat on the back from Rajinder when we passed each other in the IIC.
Then one day I received a surprise phone call saying he had to vacate his Defence Colony premises, and would it be possible for him to rent our converted garage not far from IIC! But it was already let, and I was truly sorry not to able to literally accommodate him. He found a flat in a block of apartments in Kasturba Gandhi Marg, and it was here he met his end. During his last days I came to know that he was not well and was struggling to look after himself. I went over with a tiffin-carrier of food which he courteously emptied into bowls but showed me the inside of his new fridge and assured me he was well-provisioned and well-served. He died a few days later and I was glad to have been able to meet him this one last time.
One cannot but remember Puri with a smile, unequivocally and passionately committed to whatever he thought was right. In terms of independence of thought he ranks amongst the great editors and journalists of newly independent India – Frank Moraes, Shankar, S. Mulgaokar, NJ Nanporia and George Verghese.
Especially now do we remember them when, to return to Yeats’ poem: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned’.