Fortoon tellers

IF CARTOONISTS ARE THE VANGUARDS OF DEMOCRACY, THEIR FREEDOM IS ESSENTIAL FOR OUR FUTURE

- ANJULY MATHAI

In the magazine Cartoonists India, former Reader's Digest India editor Mohan Sivanand relates an anecdote about Shankar Pillai, one of the pioneers of cartooning in the country. In 1932, a few months after he had joined as a staff cartoonist with the Hindustan Times, Shankar got a summons from the viceroy, Lord Willingdon. Shankar met the viceroy with some trepidation, only to be welcomed with a broad smile and a pat on the back. He conveyed to the cartoonist how much he enjoyed his work. His wife, however, had one complaint. "Why do you draw my husband's nose so long?" she asked him.

Shankar explained how caricaturing entailed the exaggeration of certain features. "Now, even if I draw only that nose, people will know it is your husband," he told Lady Willingdon. The Willingdons had a hearty laugh. Compare that with today's India, when our leaders have lost their sense of humour so much that exaggerated noses will get them breathing down your neck.

It was not so in the first few years after independence. In fact, Gandhi himself was a great patron of cartoons.

He realised their power in the art of protest.

Right from his days in South Africa, when he was editor of The Indian Opinion, a multilingual paper he printed out of Johannesburg, he reproduced editorial cartoons from the British press in the paper. "The cartoons were displayed without any Gandhian austerity," writes cartoonist E.P. Unny in his book R.K. Laxman: Back With A Punch. "They were generously flashed across full pages and on occasion front-paged." Jawaharlal Nehru, too, enjoyed a good cartoon, even at his own expense. "Don't spare me, Shankar," he famously told the cartoonist. And Shankar never did. He is said to have drawn over 1,500 Nehru cartoons. In fact, a few weeks before Nehru's birthdays, Indira Gandhi would access Shankar's Weekly archives, choose a few Nehru cartoons, and frame and gift them to her father.