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An art without a tradition: A Survey of Indian Comics
by Bharath MurthySummer, 2008. (revised, Oct. 2009) First published in Marg magazine, Vol.61, No.2, Dec. 2009. (For some of the images, I haven't been able to find out the exact year of publication. Sorry!!)Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer and Nobel laureate tells an amusing anecdote on art in one of hisessays. A sultan, wanting to find new ways to amuse himself, called for a painting competition, whereartists from the East were to compete with artists from the West (with the Muslim world being in thecentre of course). The Eastern artists were Chinese and the Western ones European. Each team wasgiven a wall to paint on. The walls faced each other, with a curtain between them. When thecompetition started, the European artists promptly took out their colours and began to draw. TheChinese artists, deciding that the wall was dirty, started cleaning it. Work continued for months. Whenthe curtain was finally drawn, the sultan saw that the Chinese had scrubbed their wall so well that it hadturned into a mirror which reflected precisely the paintings created on the opposite wall. The sultandecided to give the prize to the Chinese. From this parable, Orhan Pamuk draws the idea that the mirror in which the Easterners saw the Western “other”, “makes us feel as if we are somehow lacking, as if weare a bit inauthentic or uninteresting.”This story resonates with another one, relating to Indian art, told by Sir Thomas Roe, who representedthe Embassy of the East India Company (1615-18) in the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir.Among the gifts he presented to Jahangir was a small oil painting of a woman, by Isaac Oliver. Onviewing the painting the impressed emperor came up with a curious wager – that his painters couldmake such an exact copy of the original that one would not be able to distinguish between the two.After three weeks, the emperor summoned Sir Thomas Roe to his
ghusalkhana
and by candlelightshowed him six identical paintings, five by his artists and the sixth the original one. The Englishmanwas astonished.These are two Eastern responses to the visual regime unleashed by Western art during theRenaissance. As we shall see, in the narrow aesthetic bylane of Indian comics, artists, publishers, andwriters continue to engage with Western forms and have created a small body of work that is worthevaluating.
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V.S. Naipaul, another Nobel prize winning writer, wrote about India’s current lack of a paintingtradition in his book
India: A Wounded Civilization
(1977). He noted that while India had recovered itstraditions of classical dance, music and its weaving arts, the painting tradition had remained brokenever since Mughal art died out. The Western artistic vision was too dominant and too varied, whichmade Indian artists insecure and imitative. The irony is that art schools in India were established at thevery moment when Indian painting traditions were wiped out.In Indian comics, one can see an aesthetic struggle to adopt and adapt a Western form to tell Indianstories, while also competing with the overwhelming influence of other media like film and TV. Thedifficulty in “reading” the genre of Indian comics arises first of all from its problematic status as art. Ithas an obscure position at art schools in India. Since comics are considered low art anyway, they tendto easily escape any critical scrutiny, so there are no standards except those set up by whoever is in a position of power, which is most often the publisher/editor. There is no tradition to follow.This article will stake out the territory of comics practice in India and some of its key players. The boundaries are porous, and some areas are not discussed here – comics in the Northeast for example,or the small vernacular comics companies, many of whom died out.To start with, a distinction should be made between cartoons and comics, with cartoons denotingsingle-panel combinations of text and image, and comics being those that also represent “time” usingmultiple panels, thereby enabling narrative storytelling. Thus comic strips qualify as comics, whileR.K. Laxman’s “You Said It” is a cartoon. R.K. Laxman, though he is an important artist doesn’tfeature in this essay because he drew only single-panel cartoons. It is strange that he never tried hishand at the newspaper comic strip.
Editorial cartoon by R.K.Laxman.
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It is interesting that cartooning, especially political cartooning, has enjoyed respectability and has beenable to build its own tradition in India, so much so that it has been institutionalized, possibly because of its close connection to journalism. In the 19th century, the British introduced Indian versions of their magazines like
Punch
which had political cartoons, and cartooning in India has continued in thattradition. The Urdu language
Oudh Punch
, for example, was started by Munshi Sajjad Husain inLucknow in 1877, and featured political cartoons drawn by Indians.
Cover of the first issue of the 'Oudh Punch', one of the earliest Indian magazines featuring the modern cartoon/ comic strip.Art by Wazir Ali. 1877. Lucknow. Courtesy: Wit and Humour in Colonial North India, by Mushirul Hasan, 2007.
Shankar’s Weekly
, an influential magazine started by the political cartoonist Shankar (and whichclosed down during the Emergency in 1975) gave a voice to a whole generation of cartoonists.Recently in Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Cartoonists (a take-off from Indian Institute of Science?)
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