“TRAGIC IDIOM BY O.V.VIJAYAN”
This book is tragic, because it is about India! And its tragically insurmountable problems,
which seem to be propelling it back to its past as it claims nuclear status in the world’s
Democracy Club.
A democracy where some people have to eat grass to survive! A democracy where
scapegoats are the largest political herd of animals, even more untouchable than their
other sacred cows!
Vijayan argues that because of the extreme complexities of his country and its life and
death political and social imbalances, his job is not to make you laugh but to ‘destroy
illusions’ and cartooning becomes extremism and rebellion, but the difference is that it is
virtuous rebellion.
Social responsibility is his constant muse! Bruce Petty does a magnificent job writing the
forward that bridges the gap between the western reality of cartooning & India’s.
There is a lot of Petty in Vijayan and lot of Vijayan in Bruce. It’s probably one of the best
Forewords ever written in the front of a cartoon book. Re-read it often, as it bears great
social responsibility fruit!
If you put Feiffer, Petty, Tanner, a touch of Low and a sprig of Vicky into a blender, you
would pour out Vijayan.
He’s a political social thinker/writer/novelist, who used verbal quotes and simple visual
metaphors to further his writer’s expressive solutions to his country’s problems. And tries
to use the bit of truth that these simple cartoons have in them, with dark humour and
bitter irony and other assembled bits of graphic and verbal truth, to kick start the thoughts
of his people on the long and hard road back to Gandhian ideals!
He (I suspect), at his very core is a Gandhian cartoonist.
“The cartoon is ideally word and picture, with words chosen with poetic exactness. Even
when the cartoon is mere visual (I strongly disagree with this comment, but) deep down
within it there is the experience of the word and it is that experience that ultimately
communicates”.
One gets the impression that behind all his cartoons Vijayan is asking the special
question, what would Gandhi have done!
There are lots that I do not understand in this book. The people, politics, organizations
referred to, the historical epochs discussed in passing and the relationships between
individuals, parties, countries, etc.
This book also has very few dates to fix a cartoon to a historical spot.
The characters who inhabit these cartoons are also vaguely guessed at, as to who they are,
what they represent etc.
But the overall feeling in every single cartoon is the lack of any kind of livable balance in
India.
Vijayan is not just a cartoonist who points out the bloody obvious, as his readership is
drowning along with him, in a realistic world where unfairness and starvation is like the
seasons themselves.
He uses a little boy to point out the truth of situations ala Emperor’s new clothes, but his
nearly naked little boy is informed by the realities of Vijayan’s years of struggling with
his country’s dilemmas! “If only scapegoats were edible dad, we’d never starve!”
He is a very sparse and minimalist cartoonist, who uses his dry brushing technique to
blacken, contrast and give ‘more weight’ to his comments, and they also bridge and
signpost word, image, torn out headline and signature together, just like a writer’s literal
sentence.
The title of the book is the Tragic Idiom and it is tragic because it is on India.
And at the back of the book has a photo of Vijayan thoughtfully crushed by the news in
the newspaper in his hands and next to this photo are the words – “It is an unutterable
sadness which punctuates the reality that I am called upon to portray”!
Vijayan cries everyday in these cartoons for his beloved India.
He tells of its betrayals, its past and now its backwards future – “we inherited an empire
[when the British left] and sought to rebuild it, instead of building a nation…we have
carried the centralization to its ultimate symbolic absurdity…family rule [Gandhi family,
by no way related to the Mahatma].
For somebody who knows very little of India and its ways, this book has thrust me into
the serious problems of India like no other novel, film or newspaper/magazine has ever
done.
Vijayan has lowered his Tragic Idiom on me, and I don’t think I’ll ever be the same
again.
Jim Bridges
Melbourne Member of AHSN
07/09/2006
Tragic Idiom ~ O.V.Vijayan’s Cartoons & Notes on India. Eds: Sundar Ramanathaiyer &
Nancy Hudson-Rodd. Foreword by Bruce Petty. Publisher: DC Books, Kottayam, India.
2006. Hardbound, Price: Rs.595