Bruce Petty's review of 'A Cartoonist Remembers', O.V.Vijayan, Rupa & Co, 2002

There is something quite brotherly about discovering a parallel biography. The synchronicity of two people, the same age, puzzling out a cartoon on the same day, on two different contents is an interesting thought.
But when Vijayan mentions Thurber on page one of his book 'A Cartoonist Remembers', an even closer professional bonding flashes up - Thurber was the one cartoonist that suggested to me that the profession should be pursued. I could draw like that. I thought. Not quite, as it turned out.
But there the symmetry comes apart.
Vijayan remembers accurately that the Thurber world was one of dada New York mannerisms. Vijayan's world was the third world as we had conveniently so numbered it. Here we get a taste of his sharp writing style - Oxfam childrens eyes peer out from his world with 'infantile senility'. Thurber would never know, he says. Nor will I.
While I was drawing first world mannerisms for Punch and The New Yorker, Vijayan was confronting the ferocity of his Nations moves to independence.
So his cartoons and essays in this book unfold insights into the story of India from independence through partition, the emergency, regionalism, Russian cold war positioning, a deadly version British style party policies, parodies and personalities. It is a passionate record and elegantly written. He also tells the editor-contributor story, a factor which his critical style turned into an ongoing drama in itself.
As the foreword by Ashis Nandy and the postscript by Sundar Ramanathaiyer & Nancy Hudson-Rodd suggest there is sadness and sacasm alongside acute perception. They both convey the affection and respect with which Vijayan is held in India. They indicate the potency of his comment on Indian politices.
Finally altered to politics by the cold war, 100 new nations, and cartoonists like Vicky in London, I monouvered into political cartooning.
And the third world was finally on the drawing board. It had been our History books as a kind of heroic civilising adventure story. It had been on the Tourist brochures. It supported trade offices and missionaries. Now it became cold war hearts - and minds - territory. Now we were taking sides in countries we could barely position on a map.
Concerned voices and a few politicians in the West tried to give 'the third world' some differentiation, some proper historic attention, - a huge relearning effort began slowly.
Interest was driven by a growing dismay with Western cultural trends - the 'military industrial 'Complex, nuclear fears, student restlessness, 'Private Affluence and Public Squalor', womens liberation and the racial consciousness that began in Americas south. Further, there appeared in new publishing, clear evidence of an intellectual and literary richness that took us Western Turber and Updike people by surprise.
This was the subject matter of my cartoons. They parallel similar anguished observations from Vijayan.
But the scale of urgency he describes, I know nothing. The intimacy with mass tragedy threads through his book.
We of the class of 1929 cartoonists are joined by our respective politicians sliding about on local banana skins, but separated by some huge two-world divide. Two world absurdities it seems to me: one pursuing and defending endless growth, the other competing for the same growth with three times the population, terribly divided.
Post september eleven and Bali have pushed our worlds together. So what do the new cartoonists do about the current issues?
Terrorism was always tribal, Racial and religious, and the worst of it seemed to challenge the third world.
Will our cartoons overlap now? are we joined in absurdity? Is there an impatience in the third world that we have underestimated? Is the West now being asked to confront the effect of generations of colonial arrogance and misreading of History?
It will have to be a crash course if it is to make a difference now.
The wit and intelligence in Vijayan's A Cartoonist Remembers have triggered in me the above reflections. I recognise many of the political deceptions and opportunistic deviousness that generated his angry drawing. I have visited Asia many times trying to find some commonality. But global economic inequality remains intact and in being so, disfigures, as he points out, the society Vijayan draws and writes about. Finally it disfigures my society.
We need some super minds to make the connection between Vijayan's drawings and international economic imbalance in order to begin searching for a new sanity.
Those children he pictures in the oxfam ads deserve not to be so old so young..
Bruce Petty