What drew Gandhi to cartoons and satire

Twenty years after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, American cartoonist Bill Mauldin captured the poignancy of the moment by linking it to another moment of moral rupture. In his famous 1968 cartoon, published after the killing of Martin Luther King Jr, Mauldin depicted Gandhi stretching out his hands in solidarity and saying, “The odd thing about assassins, Dr King, is that they think they’ve killed you.” This cartoon collapses time and space, binding two architects of non-violent resistance through shared martyrdom. It also attests to the power of visual satire: its ability to keep alive ideas of peace, freedom and civil disobedience long after the men who embodied them are gone.

The power of the political cartoon was famously evident during the dark days of the Emergency. Abu Abraham’s unforgettable cartoon of President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signing the Emergency proclamation from his bathtub, or RK Laxman’s Common Man crushed beneath a newspaper screaming headlines that said “Very Good”, “Marvellous”, “Very Rosy”, were blistering indictments of state power. But the full political charge of cartoons in India predates Independence.

During the Swadeshi movement, when nationalism began to take on a mass character, leaders like Gandhi and Subramania Bharati understood that they could be wielded as a powerful tool against the British.

Gandhi’s engagement with cartooning, in fact, began even before his return to India. While in South Africa, where he was very much involved as a political activist against apartheid, he brought out the weekly newspaper Indian Opinion. Gandhi would regularly reproduce British cartoons published in other news publications and review them. And he also requested readers to find Gujarati equivalents for the words such as “passive resistance”, “civil disobedience” and, of course, “cartoons”. As Ritu Gairola Khanduri notes in ‘Caricaturing Culture in India’ (2014), this was not a casual exercise. It was intended to enable readers to deconstruct the visual text and peer into the “minds of the Whites”. It was also a lesson in understanding how “cartoonists projected satyagraha’s force as an armament that punctured imperial plans”.

Gandhi was also acutely aware of the role of cartooning and its ethical limits. In 1939, he took offence to a cartoon of Mohd Ali Jinnah drawn by the legendary Shankar in Hindustan Times. He peremptorily sent across a note to Shankar that read thus: “Your cartoon on Mr Jinnah was in bad taste and contrary to fact. You fulfil merely the first test of a cartoonist. Your cartoons are good as works of art. But if they do not speak accurately and cannot joke without offending, you will not rise high in your profession.” And yet, when Shankar later left the paper, Gandhi acknowledged his stature, asking pointedly whether Shankar had made HT famous, or whether HT had made him famous.

This combination of moral seriousness and affection for satire also marked Gandhi’s relationship with cartoonists like David Low. Low often drew Gandhi accompanied by a goat — a playful nod to his fondness for goat’s milk. When the two met in London, Low recounts in his autobiography that Gandhi laughed and asked, “Do you also want to interview my go-o-oat, Mr Lo-o-o-ow?” During their conversation, Gandhi lamented the “dearth of cartoonists” in India and expressed the hope that Indians’ appreciation of satire might make the country a congenial place for Low to visit and work.

Perhaps what drew Gandhi to cartoons was their capacity to attack without violence and to build a shared sense of humour. “If I had no sense of humour,” he once said, “I would long ago have committed suicide.” During the Second Round Table Conference in London in 1931, he refused to abandon his dhoti, sandals and walking stick, despite the cold and rain. When asked whether he was adequately dressed for a meeting with King George V, Gandhi replied, “The King had enough on for both of us.” On another occasion, a friend advised Gandhi to ease an ongoing conflict with the British Viceroy, saying that “Lord Irwin never makes a decision without praying over it first”. Gandhi quipped: “And why do you suppose God so consistently gives him the wrong advice?”

Physically, Gandhi was a caricaturist’s dream. Sarojini Naidu would playfully call him Mickey Mouse because of his large, rounded ears. When a French cartoonist showed him a caricature exaggerating this feature, Gandhi wondered aloud whether his ears were really that big. When told they were, he replied: “I have never seen myself in a mirror. That is why I did not know whether my ears are big or small.”

Gandhi’s visual identity was sparse and extraordinarily potent. The frail body, round spectacles, dhoti, shawl, the stick and the charkha — these formed an iconography that spoke directly to ordinary people during the freedom movement. It is telling that decades later, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan needed only the outline of those spectacles to summon Gandhi’s presence. One wonders whether, without these visual “props”, Gandhi would have been so instantly accessible as a symbol.

That image continues to have a long afterlife. Cartoonists repeatedly invoke Gandhi in moments of crisis — war, communal violence, corruption, democratic backsliding — as if asking him to bear witness once more. This recurring return speaks to the enduring power of Gandhi’s visual grammar: as a moral anchor and a flicker of hope in a world where violence and inequality are too often presented as inevitable, or even necessary.

— The writer is based in Bengaluru