Caricaturing Culture in India
Cartoons and History in the Modern World

A highly original study of newspaper cartoons throughout India's history and culture, and their significance for the world today.

Ritu Gairola Khanduri (Author)

9781107618572, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 April 2016

368 pages, 59 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

'As Khanduri's cartoonists and their consumers speak across the book, readers get the opportunity to remain alert to the parallel, concentric, and intersecting histories of the political in twentieth-century India, be it colonial knowledge production, Gandhian politics, Nehruvian modernity, or majoritarian, communal, or caste politics. As cartoons and politics co-produce each other, in our current times too, their fluid interfaces become palpable in Khanduri's book, in ever so active ways.' Sanjukta Sunderason, The Journal of Asian Studies

Caricaturing Culture in India is a highly original history of political cartoons in India. Drawing on the analysis of newspaper cartoons since the 1870s, archival research and interviews with prominent Indian cartoonists, this ambitious study combines historical narrative with ethnographic testimony to give a pioneering account of the role that cartoons have played over time in political communication, public discourse and the refraction of ideals central to the creation of the Indian postcolonial state. Maintaining that cartoons are more than illustrative representations of news, Ritu Gairola Khanduri uncovers the true potential of cartoons as a visual medium where memories jostle, history is imagined and lines of empathy are demarcated. Placing the argument within a wider context, this thought-provoking book highlights the history and power of print media in debates on free speech and democratic processes around the world, revealing why cartoons still matter today.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: the empire of cartoons
Part I. Colonial Times: 1. Upstart Punches: why is impertinence always in the vernacular?
2. Gandhi and the satyagraha of cartoons: cultivating a taste
3. 'Dear Shankar … your ridicule should never bite'
Part II. National Times: 4. Becoming a cartoonist: Mr Kutty and Bireshwarji
5. Virtual gurus and the Indian psyche: R. K. Laxman
6. Uncommon women and common men: pocket cartoons and 'situated knowledges'
7. Artoons and our toons: the prose of an Indian art
Part III. Global Times: 8. Crafty petitions and street humor
9. 'All our gods and goddesses are cartoons'
Conclusions: timeless myths and timely knowledge
Notes to the text
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Asian history [HBJF]