NEW DELHI // Tributes poured in for RK Laxman, the cartoonist who patiently but persistently chronicled the travails of the average Indian, as the state of Maharashtra prepared for his state funeral on Wednesday.
Laxman passed away on Monday at the age of 93. He died of multiple-organ failure at a hospital in Pune after being on life support for nearly a week.
He is survived by his wife Kamala and their son Srinivas.
“India will miss you, RK Laxman,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Twitter. “We are grateful to you for adding the much needed humour in our lives & always bringing smiles on our faces.”
For more than 50 years since 1951, Laxman's pocket cartoon, titled "You Said It", illuminated the pages of The Times of India newspaper. It spoke with gentle wit, and a mild exasperation communicated through the eyes of his most popular creation, the Common Man.
In a single panel on the newspaper’s front page, the Common Man – a balding, bespectacled old man in a checked jacket – has alternately amused and bemused Indian society. He never spoke himself; instead, he suffered and bore witness in silence.
The Common Man has become a legend. Since 2001, an eight-foot-tall statue of him has gazed down upon students in the campus of a Pune college; another was built in Mumbai in 2007.
In 1988, he featured on a postage stamp.
“He’s been with me throughout his career,” Laxman once said of his creation. “I didn’t find him. He found me.”
Born in 1921 in Mysore, Laxman was one of seven children. His elder brother Narayan, who died in 2001, was one of India’s most acclaimed novelists.
In his autobiography, The Tunnel of Time, Laxman narrated a vignette from his childhood to explain how he knew he would one day become an artist.
His class had been set an assignment to draw a leaf, and when his teacher hovered over his desk, Laxman expected nothing but criticism.
“But to my great surprise and joy,” he wrote, “he held my slate up before the class and announced, ‘Attention! Look how nicely Laxman has drawn the leaf!’ He turned to me and said, ‘You will be an artist one day. Keep it up.’ I was inspired by this unexpected encouragement. I began to think of myself as an artist in the making, never doubting that this was my destiny.”
However, success did not come instantly.
After high school, Laxman was turned away from the prestigious JJ School of Arts in Mumbai. He enrolled into Mysore University instead.
While studying there, he began sending his illustrations to The Hindu newspaper which often accompanied his brother's short stories.
After moving to Mumbai and spending six months with the Free Press Journal, Laxman joined The Times of India in 1951. He never left.
Laxman took inspiration from Sir David Low, the British cartoonist who sketched dynamic political figures to match his satire.
But while Low’s barbs were rarely sheathed, Laxman’s criticisms were wrapped in the befuddlement felt by many Indians, who were forced to contend with large political issues even in the midst of their daily struggles for running water or inexpensive vegetables.
In one cartoon from 1995, a minister at a science and technology convention is seen reading by the light of a lantern, saying “ ... we expect to make still more brilliant progress … in the coming years” – the electricity had failed him at that ironic moment.
The Common Man was only infrequently at the centre of such action. Often, he was peering around a doorway or walking past the commotion.
His cartoons irked those in power.
During India’s emergency, from 1975 to 1977, Laxman complained to then-prime minister Indira Gandhi that his work was being censored by the government. According to another story, a chief minister of the former state of Bombay who was often lampooned by Laxman, once held a cabinet meeting to determine how to stop “You Said It”.
Ajit Ninan, a political cartoonist who followed Laxman’s work closely thought he was “the complete cartoonist for the Indian audience”.
Always sticking to black-and-white, with plenty of cross-hatching and bold lines, Laxman worked swiftly, responding to the latest events within the space of a few hours.
The Common Man was Laxman's first love. Even though he went on to write two novels and several short stories and essays, he never strayed from the Common Man and continued to draw sporadically for the Times of India even after he suffered a paralytic stroke in 2003.
Mr Laxman won two of India’s most prestigious civilian awards – the Padma Bhushan and the Padma Vibhushan. He also won the Magsaysay Award for Journalism in 1984; the citation lauded his “incisive, witty, never malicious cartoons illuminating India’s political and social issues”.
ssubramanian@thenational.ae
