The extraordinary life and art of cartoonist R.K. Laxman

Laxman: Extraordinary political perception and an unfailing sense of the ridiculousEach morning of the week nearly a million readers in three metropolitan cities open their newspapers and pause. Unfailingly they are greeted by a familiar figure on the far right hand column of the front page. Tucked between headlines and the cold glare of hard news is the two-inch box they have come to accept as part of the early morning regimen: as essential, as reassuring and as refreshing as the first cup of tea.Thousands of other readers wait for their Sunday editions of the paper as eagerly. Almost before they can focus on the printed word, the three-column drawing leaps out at them. Pause again. Smile perhaps. Chuckle softly. But long after the first glance, the image has a habit of recurring in the mind, not just as an extraordinary perception of the state of the nation or the world, but for its uninterrupted shrewdness and its unmitigated gall.Those not accustomed to looking at The Times of India can recognise the style elsewhere: from the countless caricatures and portraits, illustrations and calendars that have not dimmed over four decades of phenomenal artistry.For most of his 57 years - 34 of almost daily drawing for The Times of India group of publications - R.K. Laxman has emerged as the consummate communicator in the business of communication, a man whose ideas have not staled, and whose sense of the ridiculous has seldom failed.In the course of his prolific career he has drawn over 9,000 political cartoons and another 7,000 socio-political cartoons under the front page box titled "You Said It": he has depicted over 500 statesmen and political leaders in full-page coloured caricatures in The Illustrated Weekly of India and almost as many film personalities in the pages of Filmfare.Starting when he was seven he has illustrated every short story and virtually every book written by his equally celebrated brother, novelist R.K. Narayan, and profusely produced drawings for all of the children's books written by his wife, Kamala Laxman.Despite a daily newspaper deadline he finds time to dip into all kinds of commercial work: he has drawn calendars for the State Bank of India, matchbox covers for Wimco, illustrated catalogues for Air-India and an esoteric income tax treatise for his distinguished lawyer friend Nani Palkhivala. He has written one novel, is working on another, and has turned out short stones, travelogues and memoirs with the same effortless elan that he turns out cartoons.Nor has he given up the pursuit of private pleasure: for more than 20 years now he has spared time to indulge in his personal obsession of drawing crows, impeccably-mounted studies in ink-and-wash of the commonest of feathered creatures. He sells them almost faster than he produces. His other passion is drawing cats."He can't resist them," jokes his wife; "cats, crows and canaries - he'll turn out one at the drop of a hat." But for a man whose pen flows ceaselessly, who has never retreated from the front page to the back, and never been caught with his brush down. Laxman himself tends to slip easily behind his drawing board for refuge.He appears reticent at first, almost shy. Uneasy in new company, he has a loathing for any kind of public platform. Yet drawn away from the clockwork schedule of his professional life, he blossoms into easy, rambling conversation with a metamorphosis that is both effervescent and infectious. He is a natural performer, a deeply-serious clown, a figure so hilarious and unselfconscious that people who have the pleasure of his private company seldom forget the experience.Says a young reporter who recalls a childhood encounter with him: "He was asked to dinner by my parents years ago in Bombay. On a sudden impulse during the evening, he began to imitate a stuffy Englishman. Throughout the meal he mimicked the motions of a white sahib, so well including puffing at a non-existent pipe, that we were in splits. For a child, it was an unforgettable performance."Others agree that he is that rare combination of a funny man in print who can be equally funny in real life. Sudden guffaws and gusts of laughter shake his slight, stooping frame, as his imposing head of white hair is furiously and frequently kept at bay with the aid of an army of pocket combs.Common sense: The thick, black-framed spectacles are put away, and as the first round of drinks is brought in. Laxman's talk takes off overtaking others by leaps and bounds. In turn, he can be cerebral and zany, politically conscious and socially aware, but above all plainly commonsensical in a way that, as in his best drawings, diffuses all esoteric jargon and deflates pomposity.A selection of Laxman's work over the yearsNow he is holding forth on a sculpted panel of the Panchatantra he has lately seen in the ruins of Halibid: now he impersonates the urban decay of Bombay through the flaccid, ineffectual movements of a city policeman. One minute he is tracing the great European tradition in visual satire, from Hogarth to Honore Daumier, the next he is detailing the precise difficulties he experienced in drawing credible caricatures of Nehru. Says an astonished artist friend. Jehangir Sabavala: "What is fascinating is the agility and constant sprightliness of his mind. The facility of his pen is a reflection of the rate at which his mind moves."Artistically, he owes his debt to a generation of Anglo-Saxon cartoonists of the 1940s and '50s, notably of the Punch school: among them. David Low whom he greatly admired. "His drawings were works of art, they were perfectly finished compositions." In the '50s when Low visited India, he came to The Times of India office.In a dazzling gesture of reciprocity almost the first person he demanded to see was Laxman. Recalls publisher J.C. Jain, then general manager of the Times group: "Low came into my office and asked for Laxman whose cartoons, he said, he had admired for many years. When I rang Laxman to fell him Low wanted to see him. Laxman almost sank in his chair out of disbelief."Low apart, Laxman admired Vicki, another English cartoonist who later committed suicide; Illingworth of the Daily Mail, Punch cartoonists of an earlier era like du Maurier and H.M. Bateman. and Herblock of the Washington Post. Today, he is convinced of the fact that "cartooning is a dying art".There isn't, he believes, the kind of flagrant eccentricity that political leaders once flaunted: more over politics itself is bereft of the kind of excitement that convinced him in his early working years that post-Independence India provided excellent material. Partly, Laxman thinks it is the proliferation of photography that has radically altered our visual sensibilities; and partly it is the sheer speed with which news is gathered and disseminated that makes "a cartoon dated almost as soon as it appears"."There was a time," recalls Laxman, "when it would take a month to get a despatch in print, and 12 days for the cartoonist to finish a drawing. News had a longer life: there was time for the thinker to think, the cartoonist to draw. Today political issues evaporate as soon as they arise." As a result cartoonists have diversified into images that veer on the abstract, and jokes that become increasingly esoteric."There is no limit to abstractions." he admits quoting the example of English cartoonist Ralph Steadman, whose spare and savage sprawls and splotches are almost surreal in comment Or the kind of new work that appears in long-standing humour and literary magazines that appals him. "Punch has become crude beyond belief, and the drawings in the New Yorker which had style and competence are so ingrown and obscure today as to be beyond the reach of most people."That is one sentiment that cannot be applied to Laxman's work. Without becoming pedantic. even at the cost of being occasionally repetitive, his drawings have always remained approachable to the maximum number of people.Pampered: Rasi Puram Krishnaswamy Laxman was born in Mysore, the youngest of eight children of R.V. Krishnaswamy, an official in the education department. Being the youngest, he was the parents' favourite, especially his mother's to whom he remained completely devoted all her life. Laxman himself remembers being "always indulged and spoilt".He first attended a municipal school a stone's throw away from their home, then enrolled at the Maharajah's College, the city's premier institution for higher education. Mysore was the ideal place for the flowering of talent. The campus was congenial, the family encouraged artistic temperaments.Admits Professor M.E. Bharat Raj Singh, Laxman's tutor in college, that his pupil "approached studies like measles - something one had to grow up with"; even so, there was nothing to dispute his special line of interest. Laxman's earliest memories of drawing are of following his mother to the vegetable market armed with drawing books to fill with sketches.By the time he finished school - having failed once because of an experimental syllabus - he knew he wanted to be a painter. In pursuit of this ambition, he applied to the J.J. School of Art in Bombay for admission for a short course in art. The school in due course replied to say that the specimen drawings Laxman had submitted did not justify admission."Years later," says Laxman, "when I had established myself in Bombay, the same school asked me if I would distribute prizes at their Annual Day. So I did, and was forced to admit in my speech that the institution long ago had turned down a young aspirant from Mysore. But thank God they did: if I had got in I would have ended up in some commercial studio. Still, I got my own back on them."His first drawings were published in Sivaram's humour magazine, Koravanji: later, throughout college, he took to illustrating his literary elder brother R.K. Narayan's short stories that frequently appeared in The Hindu. For this, in the '30s, he used to be paid the princely sum of Rs 2.50 per illustration by money order.In college, also, he took to drawing for the veteran journalist Koka Subba Rao's Madras paper, Swatantra. "Each fortnight I would submit a political cartoon; but my forte I knew was caricature."Having graduated with a B.A. in politics, philosophy and economics. Laxman worked for a brief spell in the animation department of Gemini Studios in Madras. But he was bored with the long hours of cooperative effort required in producing animated strips; so in 1946, armed with a portfolio of cartoons and drawings and his savings of a few months' salary, he boarded the train to Delhi.His intention was to make the rounds of newspaper offices in search of a cartoonist's job. He recalls meeting the newspaper baron Ram Nath Goenka in the Imperial Hotel and also Durga Das, then editor of The Hindustan Times, with little success.Ahmed, then the paper's cartoonist, had some solicitous advice for the young man: you're too young; he said, why don't you go and work for some years in a provincial paper? Dispirited, Laxman took the train back to Madras but decided to break journey in Bombay.He had Rs 50 in his pocket and intended to stay no more than a couple of days. Bombay, when he arrived, was in the throes of Hindu-Muslim rioting. On an impulse, he went to see R.K. Karanjia, who had started Blitz a few years earlier.Karanjia saw Laxman's portfolio and asked him to draw. Recalls Karanjia today: "I couldn't believe that the young man sitting in front of me had such tremendous potential. We were an entirely new paper, and badly required new talent. I gave him a job on the spot."Debut: Laxman's first assignment from Blitz was to draw a pictorial account of an incident, later known as the Kalbadevi shooting, which had hit the headlines in newspapers that week. Laxman went to the spot, studied the incident thoroughly, and drew his illustrative account which Blitz splashed over two pages. Karanjia then decided to use the young man to draw cartoon strips."We had no strip cartoonists in India those days, so I asked him to invent a character. What was amazing was that within a few hours, Laxman had one ready: it was called Tantri - the Magician, a weekly strip." Although it was, admits Laxman, the first and last strip he ever drew, he was paid handsomely for his labours: Karanjia paid him Rs 700 in a lump sum. "a fabulous amount", according to Laxman, and especially lucrative since it enabled him to stay on. As it turned out, he stayed on for 35 years to become one of Bombay's legends.The young Laxman at his drawing board: A consummate communicatorA few weeks after theBlitzwindfall. Laxman went to see J. Natarajan, editor of theFree Press Journal. Natarajan had seen his cartoons inBlitzand immediately offered him a job for Rs 300 a month. Laxman sat next to the paper's other illustrator, Bal Thackeray, today a powerful Shiv Sena leader. But Laxman became, as he puts it, the only cartoonist who "actually did night duty".He worked extremely hard and at all hours, producing up to live cartoons a day. Besides a daily political cartoon, he would draw a weekly column called "Political Who is What" and drew for the Journal's sister paper Bharat Jyoti as well as for the weekly State's People Supplement. In addition he would turn out caricatures and story illustrations at incredible speed.Returning home, he would often sit up all night producing yet more work for Blitz on the side. Inevitably, all his indefatigable output landed him in trouble. One day Sadanand, the paper's owner, summoned him. The paper was undergoing a shift in its political affiliation and the proprietor urged Laxman "to draw Communists nicely".The cartoonist was infuriated. He went back to his desk, typed his "quarter sheet" as he calls it and handed it to a protesting Sadanand. Gently, Laxman explained to him that his decision was final: he would go back to his home in the south, and cultivate his patch of land.Instead, Laxman went out on the street, got into a horse-drawn buggy - there was a taxi-strike in Bombay" - and in great style arrived at the portals of The Times of India buildings. Some of his resolve evaporated as he was ushered into the presence of Walter Langhammer, "a formidable German, a huge hulk of a man with steely blue eyes and a foghorn of a voice" who was art director of Bennett Coleman and worked out of a specially air-conditioned chamber. Langhammer was acquainted with Laxman's work in the Free Press Journal but was unconvinced of the young cartoonist's capabilities. He produced a few sheets of blank paper. "Now draw," he commanded.Impressed at the result, he strode out of the room. Laxman thought perhaps the samples were being taken to be further scrutinised. Instead, Langhammer returned with an Order for Appointment letter from the general manager's office which employed Laxman as an artist at Rs 600 a month.His first assignments for The Times of India publications were not cartoons at all, as the main newspaper did not believe in political lampooning. He worked mostly for Shawn Mandy, the English editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India: illustrations for long serials, random sketches titled "Diwali in the South".But political cartoons were unheard of when Laxman broached the subject with the main paper's editor. Ivor Jehu, the suggestion, was pompously dismissed. But Laxman persisted. Regardless of the editor's stance, each evening he started to leave him half-a-dozen political cartoons of topical interest. A fortnight later Laxman's pictorial persuasion prevailed.Successful Series: Laxman began producing cartoons for both The Times of India daily and the Evening News, but it was not till Frank Moraes, the paper's first Indian editor took over in 1950 that their frequency became regular and the tone freely political.Moraes insisted that Laxman draw a front page political cartoon at least every alternate day. The same year Filmfare was launched, and Editor Simon Perreira asked Laxman to produce full-length colour caricatures of film stars. So began one of his longest-running, most successful series called 'Stars I Never Met'.A few years later, following a long sojourn in England where he met and drew the greatest British political leaders and intellectuals of the period, among them Bertrand Russell, Aneurin Bevan, T.S. Eliot and Lord Attlee, Laxman returned home to be persuaded by the paper's general manager to originate a front page pocket cartoon. J.C. Jain's argument was that Laxman's cartoons were getting more and more political. "I offered him an incentive of Rs 50 extra," remembers Jain today," and asked him to create a common man's point of view."On December 2, 1957, the Common Man made his appearance on the front page of the paper: the balding, bespectacled, dhoti-clad little man eternally bamboozled by the ways of the world. Says his creator: "His is the omnipresent eye, he appears everywhere, in political chambers and in slums, with ministers and panwallas, but he never speaks a word. He is ever the eavesdropper on the remarks of others, including his slightly foolish wife who does all the talking for him."Says humorist Behram Contractor, alias Busybee, who worked with Laxman for 17 years before recently switching to Mid-Day as news editor: "He is so particular about being left alone, that he has a special peon placed outside to prevent people from entering his cabin. Not even visiting dignitaries are permitted."He has similarly eliminated the possibility of any editorial interference in his work. "I don't discuss my work with anyone, and I would never permit any interception. I insist on functioning in my own introspection," he says with sharp emphasis.All his editors have recognised this prerogative. Which is one reason why his loyalties to the paper have never altered. "They have been extremely good to me," says Laxman of his employers who, in turn, have indulged him: they have not only encouraged his travelling but occasionally sponsored it.And they have never raised objections to his taking on commercial or literary assignments on the side. Although he has for years been offered jobs he has refused preferring to remain in India and on the staff of The Times of India where he has become an institution. It is a position that he has made indispensable. being, as his wife puts it, "by nature a very habit-forming person".Laxman's views on younger cartoonists are frequently contemptuous. Compared to the steady resolve and steely dedication that has marked the rise of his own career, he tends to locate dissimilar qualities and is easily disappointed. "Youngsters think that anyone with an art degree can draw. The trouble also is that so many rags have now appeared that younger-cartoonists think that to be printed once or twice means they have arrived. It is hard to explain to the many aspirants I meet that cartooning is something that requires years of discipline and observation, besides an understanding of the mechanism of politics."Laxman also argues that it may be the distintegrated quality of Indian politics today that is responsible for the reduced understanding among younger journalists and cartoonists.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Oct 23, 2013 14:22 IST--- ENDS ---

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The extraordinary life and art of cartoonist R.K. Laxman

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