The everyday is a sticky business. It is that most evasive of Schrödinger’s cats, a reclusive novelist confined to his fortress, always within a box in plain sight yet impossible to observe when inside it. The everyday is “what is left over”, the sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre wrote; it is that which lies beyond specialized fields of knowledge. Yet, he went on to insist, it is “profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and conflicts”. Everyday life is commonplace and colossal, both utterly trivial and impossibly ambitious.
It is this profligate politics of the everyday Indian life that was inked, most succinctly and cynically, for over six decades by the pen of R.K. Laxman. Laxman’s cartoons—which appeared every day in The Times Of India for more than 50 years since 1947—represent, with deft draughtsmanship and tongue firmly in cheek, the travails of the everyday in post-imperial India. In small pocket cartoons and larger-format editorial cartoons, Laxman has successfully drawn, for almost as long as India has been an independent, “modern” nation, the everyday. And in doing so, he has depicted it as what Lefebvre, in his monumental Critique Of Everyday Life, called the intersection of “illusion and truth, power and helplessness”.
With some exceptions, the single-column pocket cartoons tend to deal with the social and civic issues of everyday life, while the editorial cartoons focus on politics. Taken together, they form a narrative of the inefficient democracy and the doomed developmental agenda of a post-colonial state, but always seen through the intimate and the specific. In these cartoons, the minutiae of the everyday come to symbolize abstract ideas like nationhood, identity and the very notion of progress. All this, of course, is communicated to the gentle reader via Laxman’s eternally bewildered voyeur, the Common Man.
The Common Man is a masterpiece of a narrative sleight of hand that is usually exceedingly difficult to pull off—he is a well-developed reader surrogate (Arthur Conan Doyle’s Watson is another that comes to mind). He is, in Laxman’s own description, “a mythical character in a striped coat, with a bushy moustache, a bald head with a white wisp of hair at the back, a bulbous nose on which is perched a pair of glasses, and he has thick black eyebrows permanently raised, expressing bewilderment. He stands for all Indians and goes through life without uttering a word, but watches with amusement the ironies, paradoxes and contradictions of the human situation.”
The Common Man serves the narrative double function of surrogate and comic scapegoat: In a cartoon satirizing both India’s ambitions and lack thereof, he is produced at a “Man on the Moon Project” lab as the perfect person to send to the moon. The scientist introduces him to his colleagues by exclaiming: “This is our man! He can survive without water, food, light, air, shelter…!” Here, Laxman allows the reader to laugh at her own predicament as a citizen of a failing democracy, a state that is trying to send a man to the moon but cannot take care of the essential needs of millions of its citizens.
In addition to his narrative function as a reader surrogate, the Common Man satisfies an instrumental exigency—he saves Laxman the effort of portraying diverse communities, thus minimizing his deadline woes and taking over the “strenuous task of representing the mute millions of the country”—as well as serving a symbolic function, because he is an Everyman, the soul of modern India. Perhaps he also serves a mythic function in the discourse of cartooning in India—by becoming a “mythical character”, he has liberated his creator from ever having to draw gods, demons or folk tales to represent political events.
The political cartoon, neither “art” nor “news”, yet simultaneously both, relies on a long tradition of the aesthetics of deformation. The art historian E.H. Gombrich traced it back to the 16th century Carracci school of Baroque painting in Bologna, Italy, noting that the caricaturist, much like the portrait painter, attempts to capture some sort of essence of his subject, not through the “perfect form but the perfect deformity, thus penetrating through the mere outward appearance to the inner being in all its littleness or ugliness”.
In fact, this practice has a much longer history, dating back to medieval marginalia, early studies of physiognomy, popular satire, and even Leonardo da Vinci’s grotesque heads. Laxman’s “credible exaggeration” is undoubtedly part of this tradition. In his own words, “I followed the standard rules of perspective, drapery and anatomy; when I caricatured a personality I exercised controlled distortion”. In this respect, Ritu Gairola Khanduri explains in Caricaturing Culture In India: Cartoons And History In The Modern World, Laxman’s cartoons stand in sharp contrast to the images found in many Tamil-language newspapers, for instance, that attribute divinity to politicians, resulting in an “aestheticization of the state”.
Walter Benjamin would have called this an inherently fascistic impulse—humanity’s “self-alienation”, he wrote in his seminal work, The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction, “has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.” But in Laxman’s cartoons, as Khanduri points out, these “inept political mortals are fatal accidents of democracy.”
They say an image speaks a thousand words; with Laxman, a single image sums up entire national psyches and systems of behaviour. Any number of fawning bureaucrats negotiate the gap between the mantri (minister) and the Common Man, thus mirroring Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the modern bureaucracy as having taken over from Christianity in its role as a central institution that structures the everyday life of a society. His objects of satire range from the bleak monotony of modern life to the general election, and national obsessions like cricket to bureaucratic red-tape and corruption.
Laxman’s critique is always interrogative, not “a negation of democracy...but a probe at its embedded possibilities, its capacity to be otherwise,” writes Sushmita Chatterjee in Cartooning Democracy: The Images of R.K. Laxman published in 2007 in the American journal PS: Political Science & Politics.
Through it all, the Common Man trudges wearily along, witnessing the daily breakdown of the nation, while interchangeable politicians and their retinues of development specialists come and go. As the Chinese say, same shit, different flies.
Sudipto Sanyal is a Kolkata-based freelance writer.
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