“Brief as Photos”:

The Cartoonist as Journalist and Historian

Satish Poduval, EFLU Hyderabad

Cartooning has been a relatively under-examined area of visual culture, especially in India. Attracting neither the academic attention nor the social prestige of satirical literature, film comedy, nor even of journalistic commentary, cartoons rarely made it to university classrooms or museum galleries. Neither artifact nor art, they have largely been seen as daily gags without enduring aesthetic or political significance. Yet, with digital archives of cartoons that are being assembled, we begin to discern patterns and motifs running through these hand-drawn snapshots of an all-too-soon vanishing present, parasitic on the quotidian, and designed for transience: provoke a chuckle before breakfast, be forgotten with the coffee soon after. A digital afterlife holds the promise that these images, once confined to mimicking and mocking the everyday, could now resurrect within a new temporal constellation, and function as a panorama or a montage, providing the viewer with a composite sense of something more abiding than the joke of the day. Within the field of visual studies, the availability of such archive could result in the value of the daily cartoon compounding—in terms of revealing or anticipating subjective shifts in societal attitudes or historical structures of feeling.

In my presentation, I shall dwell upon this development—and examine how the "daily cartoon" has tracked and responded to democracy in 21st century India. This is a preliminary part of a collaborative project I am undertaking with Surendra, a cartoonist who recently retired after drawing daily cartoons in a leading English newspaper for over two decades.

Satish Poduval is Professor of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, India. His research interests include film and media studies as well as critical theory. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Potsdam, where he is also currently DAAD’s Postcolonial Chair in Global Modernities. He has edited Re-Figuring Culture: History, Theory and the Aesthetic in Contemporary India, and is part of the editorial team of maidaanam.org and indiancine.ma