Media365
4 min readOct 1, 2026 03:13 PM IST
First published on: Oct 1, 2026 at 03:13 PM IST
Whenever there is an official crackdown on Indian cartoons, as has just happened to the work of Satish Acharya and Manjul, a Nehruvian contrast is cited. A high point from where the state’s tolerance has slided. The good old days when PM Jawaharlal Nehru walked across to inaugurate his good friend Shankar’s weekly are dutifully recounted. The citation no longer shames the authorities into course-correcting.
In any case, nothing Nehruvian would cut much ice with the dispensation running the country for over a decade. But it cannot ignore a Gandhian factoid: Bapu had a bigger involvement with cartoons than Nehru. In the global phase of his career, the barrister from Gujarat edited India Opinion from Johannesburg. He ran cartoons, reproduced from the English press and displayed them big with captions translated into Hindi and Gujarati.
Editor Gandhi asked readers to suggest a suitable Gujarati translation for the word “cartoon”. Perhaps he did not insist because like “cinema”, soon the C word for the funny picture became part of all Indian languages. Dravidian politicians were the first to harness the power of cinema in the 1950s. In 1966, Bal Thackeray put the cartoon to lethal use in launching his own regional party. Both grabbed the evident one-sided propagandist potential of the visual image, moving or still. Cinema was used to build political heroes and the cartoon to demonise political rivals. Gandhi instead delved into the very DNA of the cartoon, its core strength to subvert. He reprinted British news cartoonists, practitioners lauded in the imperial press. He knew that they were unwittingly echoing him, asking why the burdened colonial Whiteman wasn’t exactly following the civilisational values he swears by.
Gandhi found in the cartoon the mirror to the political language he was perfecting. A basic language that shared a common ethics and sustained conversation. The news cartoon had both. Cartoonists spoke clearly in terms of right and wrong. And it was a serial art practice meant to be read day after day on the same page in the same publication. It fitted with the Gandhian practice of protesting, persuading and persisting with an argument. Leader of a gradualist non-revolutionary movement, Gandhi had to constantly negotiate and buy time.
Back in India, Gandhi quickly lost this luxury of harnessing the cartoon as an activist outsider. He soon became the country’s biggest newsmaker and a prime target of the day’s cartoon. Here he pulled off the biggest coup known in cartooning history. He transformed himself into the simplest possible form any cub cartoonist could get and a veteran like Ranga would eventually iconise into a single flowing line. The first stirrings of this cartoon-friendly makeover happened on September 21, 1921, at the Madurai AICC. The barrister shed suit and boot, shaved his head, and switched to Khadi.
A decade later, his absence or presence at the Round Table conferences, was lapped up by Western cartoonists from Emery Kelen to David Low. America’s Daniel Fitzpatrick drew him as an ethereal apparition representing passive resistance. Not one of these unsparing faultfinders could find anything in his politics that was at odds with the image.
On home turf, cartoonist Shankar struggled with the man Sarojini Naidu called Mickey Mouse. How do you frame the 5 feet 5 inches Gandhi along with British Viceroys, some of them like Linlithgow a good one foot taller? Shankar elongated Bapu and often made him stand clearly taller than the Britisher who was shown squatting awkwardly.
If we ban and bury a work practice so central to our history, how do we retell these stories?
The writer is chief cartoonist, The Indian Express
