Ambedkar’s cartoons ‘No Laughing Matter’

New Delhi, August 4

A cartoon by K Shankar Pillai in 1949 showed Jawaharlal Nehru whipping a snail-borne Bhimrao Ambedkar, alluding to the ‘slow’ pace of framing India’s Constitution. While it didn’t stir a controversy back then, it did so in 2012 when the cartoon was included in a school textbook causing an uproar in the Parliament. And, also presented itself as an opportunity to Unnamati Syama Sundar to compile a book archiving cartoons on Ambedkar.

“After this Ambedkar cartoon controversy, I started archiving Ambedkar cartoons right from 1932 to 1956,” author Sundar said at a discussion at India Habitat Centre here.The archive then resulted in a book, titled No Laughing Matter, which is essentially a collection of 122 cartoons from India’s leading publications, drawn by Shankar, Enver Ahmed and RK Laxman, among others, “laying bare the perverse and thoughtless hostility Ambedkar often contended with”.

While the NCERT later dropped the controversial cartoon, the Dalit author said he started analysing these illustrations to see how Ambedkar had been depicted, how the press projected him and the kind of insults he faced. “The book is basically about how the cartoonists projected him negatively,” he said.

“These cartoonists injected their casteism in their cartoons.” Pointing at a cartoon from Film India magazine in 1949, which depicted Ambedkar as “the modern Manu”, author-activist Harsh Mander was surprised at the “extreme caste insensitivity”.

According to Hindu texts, Manu is considered to be the one who founded the Hindu caste system.”If there was anything that Ambedkar fought against all his life, it was against what Manu left for us over the centuries,” Mander said. — PTI