At DakshinaChitra, 70 years of political cartoons trace Indian democracy

When the museum management interns at DakshinaChitra in Chennai brainstormed ideas for its ongoing exhibition, one recurrent theme that they landed on in their discussions was ‘democracy’. They then put together Cartoon-o-cracy, an exhibition that traces seven decades of Indian democracy through political cartoons. The post-2010 period has an entire collage to itself — “For post 2010, we have done a collage of cartoons to signify the boom in digital media and to show that political cartooning is not confined to the newsroom anymore,” says Rituparna. So we focussed on national cartoonists like Shankar, Kutty, Abu Abraham, OV Vijayan, RK Lakshman, Maya Kamath, Mita Roy, Rajinder Puri, EP Unny, Ajit Ninan, Aseem Trivedi, and Surendra,” she says. “Then came the most difficult task of finding the dates and the sources of the cartoons,” she says, adding that they referred to Ritu Gairola Khanduri’s Caricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and History in the Modern World and Unnamati Syama Sundar’s No Laughing Matter: The Ambedkar Cartoons 1932-1956, among others.