Sagas in a tiny frame: Art critic Uma Nair on political cartoonist Abu Abraham
The proof of his genius lies in the resonance of his minimalist works, Nair says. He was a humanist: witty but not cruel; scathing but compassionate.
As a child, Uma Nair read the newspapers diligently. As a little art lover, she was particularly drawn to the cartoons.
RK Laxman’s Common Man was already a national favourite, as she made her way through school in the 1960s. Nair was a teen, better able to appreciate subtlety, by the time Abu Abraham returned to India and began drawing, mainly for The Indian Express, in 1969.
“My father would discuss the irony and satire with me, especially just before and after Emergency (1975-77),” says Nair, now 69.
As an art critic and curator, her love of Abraham’s work deepened. Subtlety and humanism typified his cartoons, she says. The proof of his genius lies in the resonance of his minimalist works today.
A great cartoon should have an enormous shelf life, Nair adds. “After all, they preserve human memories like no other art form can.”
In just a few lines
In our world of fake news, tangled conspiracy theories and oversimplification, Abraham’s style of storytelling is tragically rare, Nair says. “To be able to translate satire into politics, one needs to have an understanding of human frailties; a subtle sense of humour that can differentiate between the literal and ironical, and Abraham had that ability. In very few strokes and less than 10 words, he could give us, within that tiny frame, a whole story. Today, we are not seeing stories; we are seeing just a hint of what the whole story is about.”
His works can still jolt the viewer, and stay with them, even as they tickle the ribs, she adds. “As a cartoonist, he represented the highest point of the pyramid.”
Staying alive
“To be a political cartoonist, you need to be alive every day,” says Nair. “Abraham was a voracious reader. That is how he understood the world. It is beautiful to think of a time when people had that urgent need to put pen to paper; when people needed to read a book to top off their night.”
Abraham lived and worked in a time when information was scarce, but as a result, nuance and detail got the storyteller’s and the listener’s attention. “As an artist, he identified such fractions of moments and translated them into art. This can only be achieved with patience and integrity, because a brilliant cartoonist is not impulsive,” Nair says.
In the end, she adds, the best political cartoons aren’t about politics. They are about the world. “They play with metaphor and are only laced with politics. Abraham knew how to do that. How many cartoons created today does one even remember? There’s a reason we keep going back to RK Laxman and Abu Abraham.”
Lessons for our time
“Great artists and great cartoonists can stir the minds of young people. But even that is hard to achieve, in our world of image overload,” Nair says. “People today are unable to sift the chaff from the grain. They are looking but they’re not really seeing.”
We’ve lost the ability to express nuance in simplicity, she adds. “Today, we over-complicate. Look how simply Abraham and Laxman expressed themselves. In their work, the political element was minimised and the human element was strong. A work by Abraham can still hold your attention for minutes. How many of his successors can we say the same of today?”
