Indian Satire: Mining the traditions of the political cartoon

Today, satire is still very much alive on the subcontinent. Among the new generation of cartoonists, the work of Vishwajyoti Ghosh demands attention. His graphic novel, Delhi Calm (2010), gamely takes on the Emergency, a period in Indian history when, from 1975 to ’77, basic civil rights were suspended by the country’s Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. Ghosh recently published This Side That Side: Restorying Partition (2014), an anthology of graphic narratives by 48 artists from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

While Ghosh often employs the language of the political cartoon to articulate his concerns, C.K. Rajan takes a more oblique approach. Having trained as a painter at Maharaja Sayajirao University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, Rajan became one of the youngest members of the highly politicized but short-lived group, the Radical Painters and Sculptors Association. Active from 1985 to ’89, the group aggressively rejected the narrative tendency of earlier Indian artists. After the association’s dissolution, Rajan abandoned painting and produced a series of collages, ‘Mild Terrors’ (1991–96), which is fiercely critical of the rapacious and alienating effects of economic liberalization on contemporary Indian society. These works were shown in galleries, as well as at documenta 12 in 2007. After a hiatus of nearly 20 years, Rajan’s solo exhibition, ‘Classified: For Your Eyes Only’, at Mumbai’s Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in December 2014, included 81 small new paintings.

At first glance, these works recall Nicolas De Staël or Etel Adnan’s semi-abstracted landscapes. Where they differ is that Rajan introduces an element of figuration. Barely discernible people, cars travelling on never-ending highways, planes lost in darkness – all lend the paintings a foreboding quality, although they also have an incisive and humorous element. Rajan often embeds words such as ‘greed’, ‘agriculture’ and ‘so what?’ into his surfaces, emerging from, or sinking into, horizons or occasionally floating in speech bubbles. As the curator Grant Watson observed, they ‘recall the language of political cartoons, where text bolsters image, but they are intentionally without verbal punch or deliberate meaning. Instead, elegant and spare, they inhabit the language of painting and, when they do gesture towards a cartoon language, the result is deliberately inconclusive.’

Rajan subtly borrows from the traditions of the political cartoon. In one painting, Waste Land (2013–14), the title hovers over a black landscape; in Ethics (2013–14), a speech bubble materializes with the word ‘profit’: the response from another speech bubble is empty. It is in these acts of resistance to resolution where Rajan’s boldness lies. Working at their own pace, at a time when freedom of speech is under such fierce attack, artists like Rajan, who quietly formulate their own modes of political expression, are of ever-greater significance.

(Excerpted from the feature written by Shanay Jhaveri for Frieze Magazine)