The 1984 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts

BIOGRAPHY of Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Laxman

The career of India's foremost political cartoonist, RASIPURAM KRISHNASWAMI LAXMAN, began on the cement floor of his home in Lakshmipuram, a quiet, elite section of Mysore City, in the then princely state of Mysore. Here Narayanaswami Gayanambal indulgently allowed the youngest of her eight children, whose artistic talents had been recognized as early as age three by a schoolmaster, to scribble happily with chalk.

One day the seven-year old produced a caricature of his father, Rasipuram Venkatraman Krishnaswami, a "very stern looking man with a wreath of white hair and a Roman nose." He was a scholarly Brahmin from Madras and was headmaster of Mysore Maharajah's High School. Although a severe disciplinarian, Krishnaswami had grudgingly permitted his son to cover the floor with harmless drawings of cats, birds and houses, provided he did not draw on the walls and that the sketchings were wiped away in good time.

The boy had completed the profile of his father and was going on to other things when his mother—as chirpy and mischievous as his father was stern—passed by and started laughing. "Come and see," she called her husband, "what a beautiful thing the boy has done! " Despite his father's annoyance that he was "making fun of people" and defacing the floor, LAXMAN recalls that his mother prevailed and the drawing stayed on until his brothers and sisters could see it and "eventually, dust, wind and time wiped off the caricature—the first in my life."

Although his father was austere and serious-minded LAXMAN feels he was pleased with the talents that LAXMAN and his brother R.K. Narayan who became a well-known author, displayed. (Following Tamil custom LAXMAN shares his first two names with his five brothers. They stand for the village of origin of his father's family, Rasipuram, and for his father's given name, Krishnaswami. His last name, which today has become a family surname, was originally a personal name, therefore the brothers today have different surnames.) Narayan also started his career at an early age, and LAXMAN recalls, "My father used to tell his friends about how talented we were, but something held him back from paying the full compliment to us. He was shy, I think."

LAXMAN was born in the beautiful city of Mysore on October 23, 1924. "If I had been born somewhere else," he muses, referring to the loveliness of his native town, "I would never have been what I am today. It helped my creative thinking."

As a boy he pursued his love of drawing—particularly during dull math classes—throughout his years in Lakshmipuram Primary and Middle schools, and Maharajah's High School which he entered in 1937. (His father died about the time he entered high school so he never had him as a headmaster.)

Sometime during his high school days his irrespressibly comic pen caused the family to lose a good friend. The family subscribed to a number of magazines which it willingly lent to neighbors—but not before they were sometimes filled with the restless scribblings of their resident artist. One day a friend left their house in high dudgeon after discovering the magazine he was leafing through had a billy goat that bore an uncanny likeness to himself. Unconsciously LAXMAN had recognized the resemblance between the goat and their neighbor and furnished him with glasses and a touch of the neighbor's personality. The incident marked the boy's full realization that he had stumbled on the key to the art of caricature. He had also discovered the uncanny resemblance many people have to animate, and sometimes to even inanimate, objects (he claims the wife of a friend looks like the Taj Mahal). Ever since then he has looked "beyond the physical shape, light and shade, or colour of the skin, for that undefinable, elusive, surprise element which a face actually hides and which is so essential to caricature."

LAXMAN earned his first money as a professional cartoonist during his high school years. He began by illustrating the short stories his brother Narayan wrote for The Hindu, receiving two rupees (about US$0.20) for each drawing. Soon he was able to pick up freelance work from local papers, small magazines dealing with rural development and publications for adult education. When an exhibition of drawings and paintings was given at the Maharajah's College, his next older brother suggested that he enter some of his cartoons, although he was not yet an upper division student. They were well received. One evening soon afterwards, while he was sitting in the garden chatting with his mother, the stillness was broken by the sound of a horse's hooves. A soldier dismounted and handed the astonished boy a letter from the British Resident (adviser to the Maharaja), requesting him to draw two postcards of the resident's design for the war effort. One, he recalls, showed an Italian soldier complete with the long plumed cap of the elite Bersagliere army unit and below Italian prisoners of war in India. "Join the Bersagliere," read the caption, "and see Mysore." The 10 rupee payment for those drawings was made in a national defense certificate, cashable after five years, which he quickly sold to a friend at a discount.

LAXMAN suffered a severe bout of typhoid in 1942, but recovered and was able to graduate from Maharaja's College of the University of Mysore with his class in 1944. He received his degree in philosophy, political science and economics. During his college years he was doing a fortnightly political cartoon for the Madras-based magazine, Swatantra.

When LAXMAN graduated at the age of 20, he found a job in a film studio in Madras making the key drawings for cartoon films. After two months, however, he decided this was not for him and went to Delhi to visit the younger of his two sisters. In Delhi he applied for a job with the Hindustan Times, but was told he was not mature enough to work on a major all-India newspaper in the capital. It was suggested that he gain further experience in the province before applying again to a national journal

LAXMAN decided to see Bombay before resuming to Madras. The year was 1946 and negotiations for the independence of the subcontinent from Britain, and the partition of it into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, were underway, causing great bitterness between the two religious groups. In Bombay two Muslim soldiers had seized guns from the armory, taken a taxi to the congested Kalbadevi district and shot passersby indiscriminately until they were apprehended by the police. When LAXMAN applied for a freelance commission from Blitz, a biting political weekly, the editor suggested he depict the Kalbadevi shooting in a strip cartoon. The strip was given a double spread in the magazine, and LAXMAN received a second commission, this time to do a comic strip ("Karma") about a modern man in a prehistoric environment.

He was halfway through this assignment when he ran into the editor of the Free Press Journal—whose offices were adjacent to those of Blitz—and took the opportunity of applying for a job. To his surprise and delight the editor recognized his name from the Swatantra cartoons of his college days and hired him on the spot. Six months later he moved over to The Times of India and has been there ever since.

For The Times LAXMAN was at first permitted to do only a Sunday cartoon strip of a novel. The British editor, Ivor Jeuhu, was leery of breaking with the paper's lofty traditions by printing political cartoons, but allowed LAXMAN to submit some to him personally, emphasizing that he was not promising publication. LAXMAN's genial political lampoons, however, proved irresistible, even to Jeuhu, and in three months they became a regular feature of the newspaper.

In 1951 LAXMAN married his niece, Kamala. While it is forbidden, according to Tamil custom, for a man to marry his brother's daughter, it is considered highly favorable for him to marry the daughter of his sister. Certainly this proved to be the case for LAXMAN, who even now phones his wife frequently during the day just to say hello. "I like her company," he says, "we laugh at the same things." Their only child, son Srinivas, was born in 1952.

LAXMAN's cartoons continued to be featured when the editorship of The Times in 1946-1947 passed in a gradual change from British into Indian hands, and he continued to have full freedom to comment on the current sociopolitical scene. His pen skipped happily through the post-independence political maneuvering. During the tumultuous division of the country into linguistic zones his characters insisted on using "their own little invented languages." When the First Five-Year Plan was made without the resources to back it, and delays caused the cost of projects to escalate far beyond their original budgets, LAXMAN's harried officials moaned that they had spent too much money on their projects to scrap them but could not afford the expense of continuing them. In one cartoon the Finance Secretary was shown trying to stop the inauguration of a government factory. "Sir," he explains, "the moment you switch it on we start incurring losses! " The country, LAXMAN observed gleefully, "progressed and lived for the cartoonist."

From his earliest youth LAXMAN was greatly influenced by the British political cartoonist, David Low. "Even before I learned to write or speak," says LAXMAN who as a boy thought his hero's signature was David Cow, "Low's drawings appealed to me tremendously. He put so much into the human figure." Imagine his surprise and delight when he opened his office door early one morning in 1952 to find Low and his wife quietly waiting for him. They were enroute to Hong Kong to visit their daughter, and finding they had a few hours free in Bombay decided to meet the young artist whose cartoons they admired from afar. LAXMAN took the couple on a tour of the city and noted that his hero was a "very gentle creature." Before they parted Low suggested that LAXMAN visit England.

LAXMAN persuaded his office to send him on assignment to Britain in 1954. The object of this visit, which lasted seven months, was to draw caricatures of such famous people as Winston Churchill, Graham Greene, J.B. Priestley and Bertrand Russell. While waiting for appointments with these luminaries, he regularly sent home a feature entitled, "Our Cartoonist from Abroad."

While he enjoyed sketching his subjects he found it initially difficult to reach them. An article, "Chasing Celebrities," recounts his months of waiting for them to return to London "from the countryside, the Isle of Man, or South America." T.S. Eliot posed a special problem since he let it be known that he granted no interviews. When LAXMAN was talking to Graham Greene he mentioned his difficulty; the author quietly picked up the phone and arranged a meeting. Eliot posed formally for his caricature and fell fast asleep during the sitting.

The cartoonist had no reason to believe, when he rang up the home of Bertrand Russell, that it would be any easier to reach the world-renowed philosopher/mathematician than it had been to reach the other celebrities. But Russell himself answered the phone and, in response to LAXMAN's request for an interview, asked if he would like to come to his house that day. At the end of a "most refreshing and memorable meeting" Russell suddenly exclaimed: "You Indians have discovered nothing! Absolutely nothing! " In his astonishment and indignation LAXMAN could think of no greater Indian invention than chess. Russell's eyes twinkled with mischief. "Nothing," he repeated. "I mean the great concept of nothing. 'Zero' is a great mathematical discovery and the credit belongs to the Indian thinkers." Recalling this interview LAXMAN wrote, "I have never since met a great man so utterly charming."

During his visit to London the young Indian became friendly with a number of prominent British cartoonists, including Vickey, Illingworth and Jaz whom he met regularly at the Artists and Writers Club. The connections he made at that time resulted in a later offer of a position as staff cartoonist on London's Evening Standard. The offer was lucrative but LAXMAN turned it down. "At that time I found our country more interesting," he explains. "There was such exciting drama going on, with characters like Jawaharlal Nehru, C. Rajagopalachari and Morarji Desai. Somehow postwar Europe looked so dull to me with its gray coat and bowler hat and very dog-eared democracy. I found that in our country, which was experimenting with various things, there was such color. The characters we had, I don't think Britain could ever have had."

LAXMAN's genial wit reached its apotheosis in the daily cartoon, "You Said It," begun in 1957 and featuring the bewildered and dearly beloved character, the Common Man. White tufts of hair sprout from behind the Common Man's ears and under his nose; spectacles emphasize his startled gaze. Checkered jacket and dhoti mark him as a lower middle class Indian Everyman.

The Common Man actually began his evolution as a crowd. "I used to draw quite a lot of people," Laxman says, "in order to show that a particular political or social issue was applicable to millions." He quickly discovered that such diligence took too much of a harried cartoonist's time, and gradually drew fewer and fewer people in his crowd—until one day he was left with a single archetypical individual who "was able to stand as a symbol of the mute millions who are at the receiving end of policies and issues, without being able to give their point of view to the government. That is why he has not spoken one word in all these years." The Common Man is there, listening to a smug minister making pronouncements or promises and watching his submissive staff make way for him; observing the harried and usually slippery businessman; caught up in a placard-wielding demonstration that he knows nothing about. He is there, peering around corners, filing an envelope, watching the political and social scene unfold. Sometimes he appears apart from the adversarial group, at other times he is caught up unintentionally in the action itself, but he is there when people decide and plan for him, and he has no say in the matter.

LAXMAN speaks for him in satirical captions. He is never cruel, but he exposes the problems of life as the result of petty, self-serving, unthinking actions on the part of those in authority. Reader response to the little man who represents them has been tremendous. Surveys indicate year after year that "You Said It" is the most popular feature of The Times, and LAXMAN receives 70 to 100 letters a week from all over the country.

The Times of India is published in English in Bombay, Delhi, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Jaipur, and LAXMAN's cartoons are translated and carried as well in the Navabharat Times and the Maharashtra Times. After 1968 his cartoons began appearing in paperback collections, including specialized volumes on science and management. To date seven books of You Said It cartoons have been published.

Although many of the letters he receives concern suggestions for cartoons from disgruntled citizens who want him to take up the cudgels for them, LAXMAN does not accept suggestions from others. "It's not possible for a cartoonist to accept another's ideas," he contends, "unless he is just an illustrator." He himself thinks visually and undoubtedly agrees with Proust that style is a matter, not of technique, but of vision.

Political thinking is a full-time occupation for LAXMAN, who starts his mornings at 8:30 a.m. reading a stack of newspapers: The Times of India, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Herald Tribune and The Times of London. Somewhere between the lines of all those papers lies the idea that must come to him before his 4:30 p.m. deadline. He finds the printed page a far more fecund field for the cartoonist's imagination than, for example, his periodic attendance at sessions of parliament. What you actually see is less interesting than what is written about it, he believes, and he thoroughly enjoys the picturesque language of interpretive reporting.

After absorbing all the day's news—"and I must say, our country keeps the cartoonist working very hard indeed"—he assumes a yogic position, refuses tea, phone calls and visitors, and stares off into space until the inspiration for the day's lampoon arrives. This normally takes several hours, and the relief he feels when the idea finally comes is "like taking a holiday after strenuous work." LAXMAN likens the process of implementing the long-awaited theme—choosing the characters, writing the scenario, placing them on a set, drawing the final picture—to directing a film.

A cartoon, he notes, consists of three elements: the idea, the drawing and humor. Therefore a good cartoonist must have that rare combination of "a modicum of education, a ready wit and the ability to draw." The cartoonist must also be blessed with a flair for caricature. The art of caricature LAXMAN points out is to distort an individual's face in order to accentuate his personality. Since he must press and pull faces out of shape—whether they belong to an errant politician or the venerated Mahatma Gandhi—a cartoonist must possess a healthy irreverence towards society and public figures.

Neither a photograph nor a painting, LAXMAN feels, can reveal the true nature of an individual as aptly as a caricature, for sometimes "what you physically see is not the real personality of the man." He uses as an example a man whose caricature originally gave him a great deal of difficulty, India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. For many years he could not seem to rid Nehru's face of a wooden, expressionless quality. "He was a bit too handsome for caricature," laments LAXMAN, who loves nothing so much as a long nose, a large moustache, or some other prominent or imperfect feature. One day, however, he inadvertently forgot to ink in the white "Gandhi cap" that Nehru always wore—and suddenly the prime minister's personality stood out.

From then on Nehru's bald pate was doomed to be exposed in LAXMAN's cartoons. When the prime minister himself asked the reason for this LAXMAN replied, "Sir, the Gandhi cap stifles your style;" Nehru was satisfied.

LAXMAN does not rule out the possibility that the cartoonist creates, rather than merely reveals, the true character of his subjects. "Alarmingly, the politicians walk, talk and behave as though they were modeling perpetually for the cartoonist," he wrote in "The Ugly Politician." "Who knows, perhaps cartoons do exercise some sort of subtle influence on their manners and even looks, reducing them to the two-dimensional characters they have become in real life."

Despite the difficulty of the process, LAXMAN creates 12 separate cartoons each week, and a weekly caricature and any other illustrations required for The Times of India Sunday Review. He also finds time to illustrate his wife's children's books and to fulfill special commissions such as colored calendars. He accepts commissions from no more than two companies, and one is usually the State Bank of India.

LAXMAN from the very beginning of his career has been given free rein with his political cartoons, and he has never been sued for libel, in both cases, perhaps because he never attacks public figures personally, nor draws them in a gross or vulgar manner. He only attacks their policies and punctures their complacencies and inconsistencies. In consequence he is not bound by the editorial policy of the paper, and is permitted to send his cartoons directly to the printer.

For a cartoonist to retain his independence of outlook, LAXMAN strongly recommends giving politicians a wide berth, because politicians he finds often take themselves and their programs very seriously. For example, Morarji Desai, when he was Chief Minister of Bombay State, tried to prevent LAXMAN from poking fun at the puritanical laws he had introduced to prevent drinking, gambling and horseracing. He did not succeed in stopping LAXMAN's pen because of constitutional provisions protecting freedom of expression and the rights of the "fourth estate. "

The strength of the constitution—and of LAXMAN's rights under it—received its greatest challenge when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared martial law in 1975 on the grounds of a national emergency. During the emergency the press was severely censored. Day after day LAXMAN's cartoons were rejected so he began to draw slapstick figures —a man slipping on a banana peel, a fat man jumping into a puddle. Even these were seen as a subtle attack on the government, which insisted that his cartoons henceforth be censored at the national rather than the provincial level. There his cartoons were again rejected and LAXMAN traveled to Delhi to find out why. He was told by a censor that if the cartoon was good, he couldn't allow it to be published because he would get into trouble. He would likewise reject any cartoon he didn't understand, lest he have missed a barb whose publication would get him into trouble. And finally, he couldn't accept a cartoon he considered bad, for its subject might become offended—and get him into trouble!

In exasperation LAXMAN collected a number of his drawings and took them personally to Mrs. Gandhi, presenting them with a memorandum declaring that he could not function with this kind of censorship. As he expected, she replied that, of course freedom of the press is essential in a democracy, and she would give instructions that he not be censored. For a whole month his cartoons passed without difficulty. Unfortunately, however, LAXMAN couldn't resist testing his new freedom, poking fun at a political session here, an economic problem there, until finally he drew a cartoon lampooning the emergency itself—which The Times of India boldly printed on the front page. Within hours the Minister of Information and Broadcasting was on a plane for Bombay to inform LAXMAN that, instructions from Mrs. Gandhi notwithstanding, he was not to publish critical cartoons. LAXMAN decided it was time to retire. He drew no cartoons for one week, and then, as good fortune would have it, Mrs. Gandhi lifted martial law and called general elections. LAXMAN was back in business.

Mrs. Gandhi was defeated and the new governments under Desai and Charan Singh "bungled," says LAXMAN, "in no uncertain way," and before long Gandhi was back in power but censorship was not reintroduced. Cartoonists now had a field day. "Thanks to our leaders who are so colorful, and create so many crises and mishandle so many plans and ideas, the cartoonist indeed thrives very well in India," LAXMAN has commented. "And I hope the state of affairs will continue because no cartoonist can thrive in a utopia."

LAXMAN's writing talent is not confined to cartoon captions. In 1968 he published a romantic tragedy set in a small boarding hotel. The novel, Sorry, No Room, was well received by critics; he has been offered film contracts but so far none of the scripts has met with his approval.

Over the years he has also applied his special comic vision to a number of short stories, travelogues, essays and anecdotes, many of which were gathered in 1982 into a paperback volume entitled Idle Hours. Even in these works of prose, his gift for caricature bubbles forth. In "The Critic" the butt of his verbal barbs is an esthete whose overrefined perceptions prevent him from enjoying either art, as it is imperfectly performed, or nature, whose beauty lacks art. The critic was irritated by a colorful sunset. He found it "thematically traditional and to a degree rather repetitive, . . . . the undertones of blues and purples lacked texture . . . . the sinews, in terms of tonal values that bind all life to eternal Art, were ignored or carelessly treated."

LAXMAN and his wife have traveled widely in the United States, Europe and Australia, often on the invitation of the governments of those countries, and he often writes of his experiences. Three of his visits to the United States (1958, 1971 and 1983) were study tours at the invitation of the United States Information Service. On these occasions he met a number of American cartoonists including Al Capp, Herblock and Bill Mauldin. He describes some of his experiences in his essay, "Idle Hours in the USA," and in one vignette turns his satiric attention to a self-styled hippie he met on a park bench.

" 'You see how free I am,' says the hippie. 'A poor man is free and has no obligations and responsibilities . . . .'

"He further declared that if an electric iron or a blender or any electric appliance went out of order he never threw it away; he repaired it himself and used it again. Finally he said, 'Even my car I have not changed even though it is nearly five years old . . .' and proudly thumped his chest; the bells jingled and the glass beads tinkled. I sat dumbfounded and amazed at the effort one has to put in in that country to remain poor! "

Once a year The Times sends LAXMAN and his family on a holiday to any place of their choice within India. Thanks to Kamala's adventurous spirit, these holidays have taken them to such farflung spots as Darjeeling and the Andaman Islands, and he has treated the public to his delightful impressions in numerous travelogues written for the Indian press. However during his absences he sends in no cartoons nor does he have a replacement.

LAXMAN has received numerous awards for excellence in his field. The first was the B.G. Horneman Award for Journalism, given in memory of a former editor of the Bombay Chronicle and conferred on LAXMAN in 1972. The following year the government presented him with the third highest national award, the Padma Bhushan. He received the Durga Ratan Award in 1975; the Jaycee Award from the Bombay Junior Chamber of Commerce in 1982; the F.I.E. Award from the Kholapur Industrial Estate in Maharashtra in 1983; the National Organization for Professional Excellence Award in early 1984, and the Giant International Award for continuous high quality of work over a period of two decades in 1983.

In 1978 Maratawada University, recognizing his visual contribution to Indian letters, conferred on him an honorary doctorate of literature.

An unpretentious man, with a thick head of wavy steel-gray hair and stern black-rimmed glasses, LAXMAN has a twinkle in his eye and a ready laugh, as irrepressible as his quick tongue and even quicker pen. Aside from his secret habit of seeing people as animals, and objects as people, LAXMAN's vices include a compulsory drink before dinner. He used to smoke heavily as well, having started at the age of 13, but he discovered that it interfered with his other activities. Smoking gradually gave way before driving, reading, sketching and thinking until finally, he says, "it gave me up completely." Now he unwinds after a long day at the drawing board by repairing a leaky faucet, taking apart a clock and reassembling it, or mending his wife's jewelry. Sometimes he designs and makes her jewelry himself.

LAXMAN refuses to acknowledge any message or mission in his work other than relieving the frustration of the common man through laughter. "If I had a message to give and visions of an audience waiting to receive it, I couldn't function," he says. Instead, like the Pied Piper, he draws us into his own special world, where all the actors are clowns upon a private stage, where the self-inflated ego, the mean and the vicious are revealed in their true light—as merely fools. In the end we are forced to conclude with LAXMAN that it would be a "drab world indeed if [people] really were what they seemed and not a bit like what a cartoonist makes them out to be."

October 1984
Manila

REFERENCES:

Laxman, Rasipuram Krishnaswami "The Cartoonist as Illuminator of Underlying Social and Political Issues." Presentation to Group Discussion, Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation Manila, September 1984. (Typewritten transcript.)

______. Idle Hours. Bombay: IBH Publishing Company. 1982.

______. Management of Management. New Delhi: All India Management Association. 1977.

______. Science Smiles. Bombay: IBH Publishing Company. 1982.

______. You Said It. Books 1-6. Bombay: IBH Publishing Company, 1968-1983.

Interviews with Rasipuram Krishnaswami Laxman and those familiar with his work.