A retrospective in his native Kerala displays Abu Abraham’s many creative tensions – as cartoonist and parliamentarian, patriot and cosmopolitan – and reveals his humanist lens on Indian and global politics
Editors’ note: This article was originally commissioned by, and published in Himal Southasian in July 2024.
S. Harikrishnan
In March this year, the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi celebrated the work of the cartoonist Attupurathu Mathew Abraham – or Abu Abraham, as he was popularly known – at the Durbar Hall in Ernakulam. This was the first ever full retrospective of Abu’s cartoons, writings and sketches, and was curated by Abu’s daughters Janaki and Ayisha Abraham. Speaking at the opening ceremony, M K Sanoo, the noted writer and thinker from Kerala, spoke about how Abu’s corpus of sketches and writings must be seen as an archive of how a Malayali viewed India and the world.
Abu grew up in the quiet coastal town of Quilon, now Kollam, in the 1920s, during a period when Kerala was transitioning from centuries-old feudal and caste-based societal structures and dreaming of a more egalitarian future. Abu grew up, in other words, in a Kerala that embraced movements for social justice, equality and, indeed, Indian nationalism. He would leave Quilon at the age of 15 to study in Trivandrum, following which he would move to Bombay, Delhi and then to England, where he spent nearly two decades honing his skills as an artist and writer. Abu eventually moved back to India and came to realise in his own words, that “Quilon was not just a town” he lived his early years in but rather “something which had become a part” of him. He passed away in Thiruvananthapuram – the renamed Trivandrum – at the age of 78, in 2002.
At first glance, the corpus of Abu’s sketches – a large collection of which were on exhibit in Ernakulam until 21 April – suggests an outlook more cosmopolitan than any typically Malayali perspective. It shows Abu’s nuanced understanding of society not just in India and England, where he lived, but also in conflict areas far removed from his homes – as his sketches from Palestine, Vietnam and Bangladesh illustrate. Janaki Abraham, a professor of sociology at Delhi University, told me her father keenly followed the Israel-Palestine issue, and the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip would have affected him deeply.
After over a decade living and working in London, Abu returned to India and worked as a political cartoonist with the Indian Express between 1969 and 1981. By this time, his works had appeared in the satirical magazine Punch and the British national tabloid Daily Sketch, as well as in Tribune, The Observer and The Guardian. No matter where it appeared, there was something very uniquely humanistic about Abu’s work – a trait that we can only better appreciate if we look closely at not just Abu the cartoonist but also Abu the politician.
There is already a significant corpus of work on Abu’s life and legacy, but most of it celebrates his art while rarely tapping into his time at the Rajya Sabha, India’s upper house, where he served for six years. Yet it was there that Abu, in all his complexity, displayed an especially fascinating range of creative tensions: between cartoonist and parliamentarian, patriot and cosmopolitan, simultaneously a member and a critic of the government.
Politics, in one sense, was already familiar to him through his sketches and writings before the nomination to parliament came knocking at his door in 1972, via Indira Gandhi and her faction of the Indian National Congress. He would hold his position in the Rajya Sabha until 1978, on the other side of Gandhi’s infamous Emergency. Perhaps ironically, Abu’s most popular sketches on Indian politics would also belong to this tumultuous period, and be aimed at Gandhi herself.
On 4 February 1975, amid the Emergency – Gandhi’s 21-month suspension of constitutional freedoms in favour of absolute rule – a resolution was moved in the Rajya Sabha against the Prevention of Publication of Objectionable Matter Ordinance, tabled by the government and aimed at censoring media organisations. After a long debate, and immediately after a back-and-forth between various speakers, Abu rose to speak.
Taking a stance against censorship, Abu began by expressing surprise at the “extraordinary” circumstance where the ostensibly liberal Congress party had tabled a bill for media censorship while the Communists, who opposed the bill, had become the harbingers of press freedom. It wasn’t so much that Abu particularly disliked the Communists; for example, he is said to have had a “soft spot” for the anti-imperialism of Che Guevara. In the early 1960s, he had made multiple trips to Cuba while working with The Guardian, and had been one of the earliest cartoonists to have made sketches of the young revolutionary leader.
Ideologically, he was a Nehruvian socialist at heart. Abu spoke about how he had travelled across the country and met journalists and people who were worried that the newspapers had already become dull and less credible since the Emergency’s start, and added that such a law would only result in the further decay of news reporting. Abu compared the government, with its assurances that the bill would not be used against the press, to the walrus in Alice in Wonderland, which sympathises with the oysters it eats, even as it eats them. He quipped that if Vidya Charan Shukla, the minister of information and broadcasting, had had a “beautiful moustache”, he would have liked to draw a cartoon showing Shukla as a walrus eating oysters.
Humour came naturally to Abu; it was a tool he used generously in his articles and sketches even on the most serious issues. But his words – as, indeed, his sketches – were never discourteous. In another parliamentary debate on 12 November 1976, after the government had tabled a resolution to further extend the Emergency, Abu argued in favour of fresh elections at the earliest despite his “appreciation” for the “gains of the Emergency”. He stated that he, like many others, believed that the Emergency had “worked itself out” and “achieved what it was intended to achieve,” and that it was “now time that the country should give up this medicine and return to normal healthy food so that we can maintain a normal life.”
While his critique of the Emergency within parliament was more measured – in another speech he would accept that there had been “benefits of the Emergency”– his published cartoons and articles from the time are evidence of just how critically he viewed the abuse of power. Abu was particularly scathing of the compulsory sterilisation programme undertaken by the Gandhi administration, part of its misplaced zeal to arrest the country’s exploding population. A satirical article he published in 1976, titled ‘The Games of Emergency’, features a game where the “Anti-Dowry Girls’ League eleven” defeat the “Dowry Boys’ eleven”, as well as a report of the mixed doubles final at a table tennis tournament being interrupted to carry out a vasectomy on the table tennis table. In a more serious article, he wrote about how the government machinery had been misusing the powers given to it under the sterilisation programme, and how it is “always the poor who suffer when compulsion becomes a policy.” He argued that education and the intelligent use of incentives can do far more than compulsion and coercion.
Abu got away with his cartoons and articles against the state during the Emergency – a courtesy extended to very few political commentators at the time. “How I got away,” he says in his published Emergency-era collection, “I do not know and do not wish to find out.” Nevertheless, Abu’s commentary persists as one of the most telling histories of the Emergency in India.
Ayisha Abraham told me she thinks her father’s politics was about “responding to the world” and speaking truth to power. “He was in the mould of the British socialism of the 1950s, which was a left-leaning socialism that was not aligned to extreme communism of leftist dogma,” Ayisha said.
Abu’s “openness” to being convinced, to conversations and to change, is reflected in his cartoons, which were often designed as opinions presented in a conversational format. “Private View”, a column he maintained during his time at the Indian Express, is perhaps the best example. It featured two Congress men who, in Abu’s own words, represented the ideological and political “dissimilarities” contained in the Congress party at the time. Some of his sketches in the 1980s, when he started freelancing, showed conversations between an elephant and a crow, in a series titled ‘Salt and Pepper’.
Abu’s illustrations on the Hindutva movement of the 1990s appear to portray it as essentially a series of experiments by the high priests of Hindu nationalism. Consider his illustration from December 1992 of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh stalwart L K Advani. Published just a week after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, it shows Advani writing a book titled “The Story of my Experiments with Trisul” – a play on M K Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth. A trisul – a trident symbolic of the karsevaks, or volunteers, who had taken to Ayodhya in large numbers on Advani’s call – rests against a wall in the background. A few months later, he made another cartoon of Advani, this time depicting him shouting the words “Hindutva” and “Ayodhya” into the distance. A sign board below reads “echo point”.
Abu would have been deeply disturbed by the 2002 violence in Godhra and the Gujarat riots that followed – events that occurred just a few months before he died. “I think he supported the Congress because he believed in a secular India,” Ayisha said. The mainstreaming of Hindutva in the decades since has affected the social and political fabric of the country in a way that would also undoubtedly have pained Abu.
In an interview shortly before his death, Abu spoke about how he believed challenges make him a better cartoonist. The Emergency was one example of such a challenge, and he believed his extensive travels across the country during that time helped him take a nuanced position on the period and the highhandedness of the government of the day. By his own estimation, his best cartoons were made during the wars in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Abu’s success in the United Kingdom opened up many worlds for him. He sketched the former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann’s famous 1961 trial for his role in the Holocaust; and, in 1967 – the year of the Third Arab-Israeli War – visited and sketched Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. During the Vietnam War, he was taken on a tour to Saigon and other regions by the US army. For this, he later recalled, he had briefly been “made” a major in the army so that he could get greater protection, and so his family could be informed immediately if something were to happen to him. During the Bangladesh Liberation War, he travelled to Tripura and reported on what he called the “pure massacre” in East Pakistan that created some ten million refugees.
To someone as experienced as Abu, it was probably not difficult to find humour in Indian politics in the 1970s, a decade by which post-independence optimism was fast being replaced by frustration, as embodied by the emergence of new political and electoral experiments, widespread party infighting, and Indira Gandhi’s struggle with myriad judicial, political and social challenges. It would appear that Abu’s politics was one of siding with the weak and vulnerable in society. He believed in using his voice for the cause of what was just – be in within or outside of the parliament. Perhaps it is here, in Abu’s politics – which, indeed, influenced his cartoons – that one can see the influence on Abu of the early-20th-century socio-political movements in Kerala, as Sanoo suggested. Sanoo also recalled that Abu was acquainted with M Govindan, the Malayalam writer and cultural activist who inspired some of the most brilliant artists, thinkers and writers to emerge from Kerala in the 20th century.
Ayisha said the idea behind organising the exhibition in Abu’s centenary year was to share his work and his legacy with the world. While highlighting the relevance of Abu’s corpus to today’s politics – both global and domestic – the exhibit also addressed itself specifically to younger audiences. “It’s been quite overwhelming,” Ayisha said. “There are so many young cartoonists in Kerala.”
“People travelled from different districts to come to see the show,” Janaki said, connecting the interest in the exhibition to Kerala’s strong habit of engagement with the arts. At a time when digital mediums are fast replacing traditional ways of cartooning and illustration, the exhibition also offered a peek into the artistic practices of the century gone by. Lines erased with correction fluid, annotations and corrections written in pencil and pen, censorship stamps that marked cartoons during the Emergency – all features of Abu’s exhibited work – reminded the audience of the craftsmanship at work.
Ayisha expressed concern that there has been lukewarm interest from authorities to archive Abu’s works in India, and shared her hope that archives in the United Kingdom might also be interested in acquiring them. Yet it would be an unimaginable loss to India for such a rich repository of artwork and documents on Indian political history to be archived abroad, especially at a time when Abu’s world – one of contradictions, conversations and humour, of aspirations for secularism and social justice – could serve as both a reminder of India’s past and a beacon for its future.
About the Author: S Harikrishnan is a researcher and photographer based in Dublin, and writes on politics and culture. He is the author of Social Spaces and the Public Sphere: A Spatial History of Modernity in Kerala, and a co-editor of Ala.
