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Literary Review
It isn't funny
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The tragedy of O.V. Vijayan's record of the past is that it should be so relevant even today, says MARK TULLY.
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THERE are cartoonists who make you laugh and cartoonists who disturb you. At the start of his memoirs O.V. Vijayan makes it clear that he set out to do both. He writes, "It is an unutterable sadness which punctuates the reality that I am called upon to portray, and yet the dominant superstition of my profession demands that I raise a laugh." His unutterable sadness is often conveyed through his familiar child, watching the antics of those who claim to be committed to the development of a society, which will change his life. The child looks on more in amazement than in anger. He is shown in this book reacting to the barrel of a gun labelled Bofors with "slush" pouring out of it, by saying, "Wow! Power growing out of the barrel of the GUN." The child and his father who often accompanies do have a streak of cynicism too. Sundar Ramanathaiyer, a development academic has written a closing chapter to this book titled The Cartoonist as a Development Critique. In that chapter he describes a Vijayan cartoon in which there are four wall posters, each put up by a different political party, but all promising to eradicate corruption and banish poverty. The child comments, "the trouble with democracy, dad, is the absence of choice."
Vijayan has shown great courage in lampooning the icons of his own country's nationalism and all the shibboleths of development, officially the first item on its economic agenda. Take national security for instance; in a cartoon dating from the time of the war scare in 1987, a smiling General Zia ul Haq of Pakistan stands on one side of a barbed-wire fence listening to an Indian politician on the other side saying "Cooperative wars for peaceful purposes". The purposes are defined in two clouds. On the one over Zia's head is written "War Clouds to meet MRD threat", while on the Indian side of the fence there are "poll time war clouds." And on the same theme Vijayan writes, "For the countries of the Third World security is nothing more than the mystique on which their ruling elite sustain themselves."
O.V. Vijayan is a very unforgiving cartoonist; some might say he is almost too explicit in his determination not to let anyone get off the hook. He often uses very strong language too. During the sordid, self-seeking, horse-trading which followed the fall of Morarji Desai's government, he showed a porcine Indira Gandhi, with an equally piggy Charan Singh on one side and Jagjivan Ram on the other. Under the cartoon he wrote, "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from, man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
But who were O.V. Vijayan's targets? I can't imagine he thought even the porcine cartoon would shame politicians and history has showed that it did not. In his introduction to this book Ashis Nandy suggests that Vijayan's goal might be to expose the urban middle classes who would be the readers of the papers which published his cartoons. Certainly, according to Nandy, he makes the middle classes look "comical and laughable". Vijayan himself has chosen a target. He writes, "My child is real. He sits out there outside this unreal city, below the poverty line (what a sanitised use of language) in Bihar and Orissa and eastern UP, as his mother feeds him the boiled roots of grass. I think of this tryst with grass, and when I do that, I want, in one suicidal sweep to repudiate all those who lied to me about the tryst with destiny." There you have it — the stern, some might say bitter language, no punches pulled, the attack on the icons of nationalism and the scorn for the shibboleths of development. But later on in the book a ray of hope does break through when Vijayan writes, "The Indian experience is so compelling that it precludes trivialisation. And we have an inheritance which could embody a new imagery, and make the Indian cartoon a thing of great serenity."
The relevance today of so much of Vijayan's record of the past indicates that the serene Vijayan cartoon is still a long way off. In fact we will never see it because he has laid down his brush and retired to Kerala where he is one of the most highly acclaimed novelists and short-story writers. This book, his legacy as a cartoonist, is anything but serene. It is disturbing. If I could end with just one complaint, A Cartoonist Remembers would have been even more disturbing if a few of the cartoons on international issues had been dropped, leaving more space for the lampooning of Vijayan's own country mentioned by Sundar Ramanathaiyer in the last chapter. I felt cheated not seeing all those cartoons. Some space would have been available if one cartoon had not appeared twice in the book.
A Cartoonist Remembers, O.V. Vijayan, Rupa, Rs. 395.
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