The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
POLITICAL LINES
In his centenary year, a show of Abu Abraham’s original cartoons in Kochi, including his work for The Indian Express, reacquaints viewers with India’s political history
IN THE middle of a crucial national election, here is a quick way to refresh your political history. At Kochi’s Durbar Hall, the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi is hosting a show of Abu Abraham’s cartoons, the like of which you are unlikely to see in a long time. On till April 21, the show is hosting over 300 cartoon originals.
Where can you get to see such originals in times of the digital? The pen-and-ink, blackand-white drawings on yellowing paper and art work corrected with whitener are as endangered as the sea turtle. Practitioners have long moved to the touch-sensitive tablet and stylus. While it is the most functional shift, it takes the well-preserved original to reveal the magical turns the sheer process of drawing takes. As Mario Miranda put it, an accidental drop of black ink can quickly convert into a crow.
Again, these are not just a random pick of available drawings grouped on walls but a wide sample selected from a lifelong archival collection. To make this happen, multiple uniqueness was at work. To begin with, Abu was an unusually organised cartoonist. He preserved the day’s drawing as meticulously as he crafted it. After the cartoonist’s death in 2002, piles of paper, boxfuls of them, were conserved with equal care by his daughters Ayisha Abraham and Janaki Abraham. And we are the labarthis (beneficiaries).
The archival cartoons have been displayed as they ought to be, context stated. This seems to work as the chuckling youngsters in the gallery testified. For those of us who grew up on Abu, who watched the cartoons live in The
Indian Express, one at a time through days, weeks and years, the revisit threw up one too many reminders of a past that hasn’t quite gone away — of the declared Emergency, committed judiciary and guided democracy, not to speak of, battle tanks and bomber jets back in action in Gaza and Ukraine.
Then in the news-hungry 1970s in small town Kerala where we went to college, there was no TV, no Internet. We had Abu Abraham.
He did for us what these tech devices do for news watchers today. On a much smaller scale but with added punch. Here was a political mind at work, more wicked than any search engine, that picked the day’s top headline and tweaked it into a punchline. The comment was an exchange between two Gandhi-capped characters — one lean and tall, the other short and round.
The dissimilar twins looked every inch Congressmen, very different from the clueless common men who peeped out of newspaper cartoons then. Modelled mindlessly after RK Laxman’s unique character, these duplicates had by the 1970s become ritual fixtures. They were talking less and less convincingly about a politics that was turning more and more guileful. Abu led us away from this done-to-death innocence and into the messy world of politics. His characters were politicians, from the ruling party, Capital’s insiders. The insider-speak, scripted by a practitioner of pithy prose, came across as memorable one-liners.
“Actually, one chief minister is much the same as the next — it’s like Toppledum and Toppledee.”
“The trouble with unanimity is you never know who is for and who against.”
“Ideologically, what are you — right, left or youth?”
“Private View”, the loosely drawn, singlecolumn rectangle that appeared every weekday on the front page became addictive. The multi-edition Indian Express, which ran the cartoon (1969-81), was the country’s widest circulated newspaper. That the paper was editorially driven from Delhi mattered the most in the farthest points it reached. It brought to the far-flung corners of the subcontinent the sheer thrill of looking at the morning news and the commentary fresh from the national capital.
Only the state-run radio had a comparable footprint but then it was state-run. By the mid-1970s, All India Radio had shrunk to All Indira Radio. The nation was making news under an increasingly assertive prime minister. Abu chronicled the Indira Gandhi-era with access to power only cartoonist Shankar had in the days of Prime Minister Nehru. As a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha (1972-78), Abu saw his targets up close.
The proximity showed in the characters in his cartoons. Printed across three or four columns often enough on the frontpage, these drawings featured a range of politicians — from left and left extreme to right and right extreme. At centrestage was, of course, Mrs Gandhi who knew when to tilt to the left or right. The cast around her wasn’t much stabler. Longtime loyalists like Jagjivan Ram and H NB a hug una walked out on her. Her arch rivals Char an Sing hand Raj Na rain walked across for help to ditch their friends. The more ideologically moored leftists, Lohiaites and liberals split and splintered, each faction claiming to be more ideological than the next.
Abu kept his caricature fluid enough to match the political flux. He didn’t stick to stock caricaturing which was hard enough, given the endless range of India’s political faces. He improvised. Not that he visibly altered the face and form every time he sat down to draw. The news mood somehow rubbed off. And on that special day, the big newsmaker transmogrified into bird, animal, fruit or flower. The cosmetic surgery was performed most gently, the flowing line made it all look so inoffensive, yet telling.
If this weekday fare wasn’t enough, in the paper’s weekend edition, we would see our favourite cartoonist in a more expansive avatar. He sketched and wrote his occasional piece on people and places. Which meant he wasn’t quite the fabled cubicle creature we thought he was — one who sat for hours chewing pencils, bent over the drawing board waiting for the bulb to flash. Abu travelled across continents, sat across and sketched the likes of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, superstars of our campus then.
At this show in Kochi, the forever exceptional Gandhiji apart, Che is one figure all young and older visitors would recognise. Sketched in Havana in 1962, long before he morphed into a T-shirt icon, Che is here in the original, about to break into a smile. It takes a masterly editorial artist to get that moment.