2014: Contours of pictorial satire

2014 was the year in which pictorial satire in India deliberately sought and found new worlds to conquer. With notable exceptions — such as Laxman’s austere yet compassionate response to the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 at the hands of her own security staff — cartoons as a rule do not engage with death or national calamity in the first instance.

Nonetheless, when Malaysian Airlines lost their plane, crew and passengers, Jayanto Bannerjee responded with moving graphic representations of shared loss. Similarly, the Amul girl was among the most spontaneous mourners of the loss of Phil Hughes. Clearly, pictorial satire is growing into a thoughtful and generous artform that responds sensitively to personal and national grief.

A new path taken by graphic protest in 2014 was surely its construction of the lawtoon: a sub-genre intended to teach its viewers through a pictorial cautionary tale. This is unusual for at least two reasons. It focuses specifically on young people — a new direction for this genre to take — and also reworks its customary mode of dissent to shape an alternative world of possibility. A good example of this is the nine-panel Letter to our daughters, produced by Indian graphic-novelist and cartoonist Vishwajyoti Ghosh and Pakistani lawyer-activist Ahmad Rafay Khan. They set out to respond to the Peshawar attack by depicting a South Asia in which — although terrorism and fundamentalism combine to make school education their target — children must still try to realise their full potential without fear.

Incidentally, it also suggests how the field of graphic satire is opening up since such new kinds of collaboration (cautionary fiction, cartoons and illustration) require new hands as surely as they open up new horizons. 2014 also saw the confirmation of a continuing trend in the way print journalism contextualises pictorial satire.

As a rule, the daily cartoon is now not so much an entity in itself as one that competes for the reader’s attention with photographs (often in colour), a range of editorial/opinion columns, and sometimes line-drawings or illustrations as well. In other words, pictorial satire is now conscious of the fact that, more than ever, it is merely one way of interpreting a story.

Cartoonists respond, as Subhani of Deccan Chronicle does regularly, by moving from almost painterly representations to those that work caricature into a larger narrative. For example, his representation of Nawaz Sharif drawing a bow across violin-strings atop a smoking volcano labelled “terrorism” has as much to do with recognition through exaggeration as it has to do with our recollection of the tale of Nero fiddling while the Roman empire burned itself out.

It is also possible, however, to see 2014 as the year in which the reading/viewing public for graphic satire began to change. Perhaps as a people we are beginning to relax in the way we decide to recognise our public figures. Recognition — usually through comic exaggeration of a physiognomic detail — is usually the crux of pictorial satire rather than of a more obviously public art form such as sculpture.

The most dramatic reconfiguration of 2014, however, has surely been the concept of what constitutes visual politics in contemporary India. To explain this it is necessary to step outside the strict confines of the genre of pictorial satire into the larger and more complicated field of visuality itself. In a sponsorship trailer that advertises the release of Karan Johar’s Ungli we see Emraan Hashmi saying that he supports the Reagans (a crime-fighting family of the television serial Bluebloods) in their crusade against corruption.

The fight against corruption, he explains, is one which we should all share. In itself this is an unremarkable sentiment. It becomes striking when we realise that — in this cauldron of colliding visual images — a well-known cinematic actor is supporting a relatively obscure television serial, the fight against corruption is becoming an advertising tagline, and India is compulsively reaching out to the United States to set its own agenda.

This in turn introduces the final visual challenge with which 2014 leaves us: the vivid if ambiguous image of the pair of spectacles — clearly intended to be those of Gandhi — that often appear as part of the logo for public campaigns. In the past, Ranga and Navare have redrawn that pair of spectacles for different generations, to serve as markers of vision for a public that often seems to prefer blinkers.

At present Gandhi’s glasses appear as part of the banner of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Do they look at the world from the centre of governmentality or from the heart of revolution? Do they bespeak public authority or personal conscience?  Most of all, do they betoken the right to look, or the duty to see? The jury is still out.

Christel R. Devadawson, professor, Department of English, University of Delhi, is the author of Out of Line: Cartoons, Caricature and Contemporary India