Ink that bites: Why political cartoons still rattle the powerful

From Nehru's invitation to be mocked to today's meme-fuelled wars and anxieties, the political cartoon endures as a sharp satirical mirror, one that those in power are still wary of facing, writes Savitha Karthik.

“Don’t spare me, Shankar,” India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, famously told cartoonist K Shankar Pillai when Shankar’s Weekly was launched in 1948. Shankar, as he was widely known, duly obliged by not sparing the prime minister in his cartoons. Shankar was even part of Nehru’s entourage during the prime minister’s visit to the erstwhile Soviet Union in 1955. Such was the sway the political cartoonist held over India’s collective imagination back then. On cartoons about himself, Nehru said, “It is good to have the veil of our conceit torn occasionally.” Shankar had 4,000 cartoons featuring Prime Minister Nehru. 

And yet, cartoons have drawn so much ire, and people in positions of power have often taken a greater offence to the cartoon than other forms of expression. This becomes all the more true in the age of viral content. Widely published cartoonist Satish Acharya observes, “The popular perception is that cartoons go viral easily and so offend powerful people because images communicate effectively. That could be one reason. The other reason could be that cartoons hit hard because they are unfiltered, unlike a 1000-word article.”

Satish feels that an editorial cartoonist has greater freedom to criticise, tease, ridicule and sometimes instigate readers to think.

A long history of defiance

Cartoons have, for centuries, been used to express dissent and satirise events and personalities. Eighteenth-century English artist William Hogarth’s The Humours of an Election, a series of four paintings, reflects the competitive canvassing and wooing of voters during elections. An Election Entertainment (1755), one of the four paintings, depicts a gathering at an inn where the potential electorate is being treated to a feast by a political party, in the style of The Last Supper. 

One can’t talk of political and satirical cartooning without mentioning the New Zealand-born British cartoonist Sir David Low, whom the late British prime minister Sir Winston Churchill called the “Charlie Chaplin of caricature.” “Tragedy and comedy are the same to him,” Churchill wrote of the cartoonist, who was, on many occasions, critical of the then prime minister.

David Low also served as an inspiration to a generation of Indian cartoonists, including Shankar and the legendary R K Laxman, says veteran cartoonist based out of Bengaluru, V G Narendra. Narendra’s work during his stint at the Free Press Journal caught the eye of Shankar, who asked him to work at his weekly journal in Delhi. Narendra was part of Shankar’s Weekly for two years, leading up to the Emergency, which was when the weekly had to stop. Narendra later went on to work in other newspapers and eventually started the Indian Institute of Cartoonists, the first national-level organisation of cartoonists in India. 

Although Shankar captured the pan-Indian imagination, there were many names that had a formidable following. Mita Roy, who has been a political cartoonist for four decades and has contributed to various newspapers, reels off names like R K Laxman, Rajinder Puri, Abu Abraham, Kutty, Ahmed, and OV Vijayan, each of whom had a distinctive and compelling style of depiction. She looked up to her own father, Sovendra Nath Roy, who introduced her to the finer nuances of the craft. 

Satirical cartoons in colonial India

India’s satirical cartoons can be traced to the colonial period. The book, Caricaturing culture in India, by cultural anthropologist Ritu Gairola Khanduri, traces the culture of caricaturing and the editorial cartoon in India, and draws richly from the accounts of many eminent cartoonists in the country over the decades. The author mentions the magazine Punch, which frequently offered insights into colonial India and the politics of the time — “the lion, tiger, sepoys and Colonia offer visual tropes signalling how cartoons employ gender, animals, and objects to formulate the human experience of colonial politics.” A famous Punch cartoon from 1857 is titled The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger by John Tenniel, a noted cartoonist of the time. Her book references an assessment of the cartoonist, which states that “Tenniel’s India cartoons in general “suddenly brought about an increase in circulation that year.’” 

Commentary on colonial India by the British was notable, but Indian cartoonists were not too far behind. Many versions of the Punch emerged, from Awadh Punch to Parsee and Hindi Punch, between the 1850s and 1940s. The Delhi Sketch Book, which was published by the Delhi Gazette in the 1850s, offers a commentary on British rule, the officers and their mannerisms. Then there was the 19th-century poet, social reformer, and leader C Subramania Bharati’s journal, India, which published cartoons. The magazine Koravanji, which provided a platform for one of the biggest names in the cartooning world, R K Laxman, was launched in 1942 by Dr M Shivaram, aka Ra Shi. 

The Everyman and Everywoman

Readers of this newspaper may recall B V Ramamurthy’s Mr Citizen, a long-running pocket cartoon series, featuring the Everyman in a Mysuru peta and panche, commenting on the happenings of his time.  Another Everyman is R K Laxman’s ‘Common Man’ who, for over five decades, observed and judged life around him. Through the ‘You Said It’ series, Laxman made sharp observations about everyday life, governance and the political class, among other themes. 

In her book, Ritu Gairola talks about the evolution of the common men and women in cartoons over the years. Talking about late cartoonist Maya Kamath’s work, Ritu notes, “Kamath’s Common Woman reveals a tongue that is not always tied or safely tucked away in silence.” “We lost Maya early,” says V G Narendra, who has been associated with the cartoonist in the past and is highly appreciative of her work. “The cartoons reveal debilitating truths about the modern nation that the prose of news and specialists’ jargon of all stripes refuse to acknowledge,” writes Ritu. 

Is there a Laxman Rekha?

When does a cartoon become less critical and more offensive? Is there a line or not? Should there be boundaries at all?

Explains Satish Acharya, “Before a cartoonist draws the first line, they draw a Laxman Rekha. Mostly, it’s a self-imposed boundary. In a diverse country like India, a reckless cartoon could lead to riots in a fragile society like ours, which is always on the edge because of inflammatory social media.” The cartoonist adds that he draws his own boundary within which he has enough freedom to criticise or question the most powerful people. “Despite this boundary, people in power get offended because they are worried more about their image,” he adds.

Says Mita Roy, “As the adage goes, the pen is mightier than the sword. It wields power, and with power comes responsibility. Political cartoons are a vital democratic instrument for fostering accountability without resorting to malice or endorsing hatefulness. They should be thought-provoking, not provoking; insightful, not inciting.”

Every time you check your social media feeds, you are bound to find memes and web comics that perform the same role as the editorial cartoon — critiquing and satirising events and personalities of the day.

Anonymity on the Internet has ensured greater freedom of expression. However, there is no dearth of takedowns across the globe, and in India as well. According to the Freedom in the World 2026 report, India has been tagged ‘partly free’ with a score of 62 out of 100. The report, released by a US-based NGO that advocates for human rights and democracy across the world, says global freedom has dropped for the 20th consecutive year.

And yet, the satirical cartoon doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere — it may take a different avatar, but like the proverbial Hydra, “you cut off one head, and two more shall take its place.”