His career has outlasted more than a dozen governments. The Mr Magoo-like face of his most beloved character, Common Man, has been immortalised on a postage stamp and adopted as the official symbol of one of India’s low-cost airlines.
Many of his fans have started their day with him for longer than they have with their husbands or wives.
R.K. Laxman is India’s foremost newspaper cartoonist, a celebrated satirist and keen political and social observer who has been drawing his trademark panels for The Times of India for 60 years, many of them featuring the permanently bemused Common Man.
His longevity has given him a ringside seat on India’s twists and turns since independence in 1947.
A collection of his work reads like a history book, a graphic chronicle of an unruly nation struggling to govern itself and embrace modernity amid poverty, corruption and religious strife.
Laxman’s unsparing look at life in India and his instantly recognisable style, all bold lines and subtle shading, have made him the country’s “finest journalist” for much of his career, in the opinion of Dileep Padgaonkar, former editor of The Times of India.
“In a few strokes of the pen and one caption,” Padgaonkar said, “he would encapsulate the particular mood at that time finer than any of these analyses you’d read in the paper.”
Absurdities of life
Now 84, Laxman still sits down at his desk every morning to create the cartoons that skewer the country’s leaders and sometimes the led.
He continues to offer his take on the absurdities and quiddities of Indian life, though some say the sharp eye and wit have dimmed.
His single-panel cartoon, You Said It, runs six days a week, featuring one of the country’s most recognised signatures, with its Zorro-like slash through the X.
“If I don’t do it, I won’t survive,” he declared in an interview at his home in Pune, western India. “It’s a habit.”
A stroke a few years ago impaired movement on his left side.
(Fortunately, he draws with his right hand.) Like pets that begin to look like their owners, he bears a growing resemblance to the bewhiskered, bespectacled Common Man, a character in a rumpled checked shirt with neither a name nor a voice.
The Common Man has become Laxman’s vehicle for expressing the bewilderment, suffering and resignation of those he has described as “the mute millions of India”.
For decades, the cartoonist has excelled and delighted in needling India’s ruling elite, who have promised much but delivered little.
In 1969, after astronauts landed on the Moon, Laxman depicted the Common Man being introduced to Nasa scientists as the perfect candidate for life on the Moon.
“This is our man! He can survive without water, food, light, air, shelter.”
Years later, when India still lacked reliable telecommunications, an office worker in a Laxman cartoon protests to another that “of course” his phone works: “It worked on May 4th, June 21st and again on the 2nd of this month.”
Particularly in the first few decades of his career, Laxman’s acerbic observations and the Common Man’s ever-befuddled expression served as much-needed correctives to the empty rhetoric of officials.
“At a time when India hadn’t opened up in the way it has now ... Laxman’s point of view was very important,” Padgaonkar said.
But the irreverent artist can be critical of his fellow ordinary Indians just as well.
He once remarked that crows, which have fascinated him throughout his life, lined up to jump into a puddle with more order and discipline than seen in any Indian bus queue.
As a child, Laxman spent hours sitting on a bench and sketching the activity around him in the southern Indian city of Mysore.
One of his teachers noted his talent and encouraged him. Another shook with anger when he caught the boy caricaturing him.
Ironically, Laxman was refused admission to an art school in Mumbai, then known as Bombay.
But submissions to newspapers and magazines and his illustrations for books written by his brother R.K. Narayan, who went on to become one of India’s greatest authors of the 20th century, helped build his reputation.
He began cartooning in Bombay, for The Free Press Journal, soon after his university graduation but quickly switched to The Times of India, a partnership that has endured for more than 60 years.
The puckish humour that got Laxman in trouble as a child has occasionally landed him in hot water as an adult.
He was once hauled to court for a cartoon that poked fun at nationalist rioters who were burning vehicles.
“In the cartoon, a person tries to set fire to a motorcycle but he can’t even light the matchstick.
A bystander says, ‘What sort of patriot are you? You can’t even burn a small motorcycle,’” Laxman once told an interviewer.
He was acquitted but “some people got angry and rushed to my trial to throw acid on my face”.
In recent years, Laxman’s greatest challenge has probably been to stay relevant and fresh for a new generation of Indians, many of whom look to TV, the internet and films for entertainment and social comment, not newspaper cartoons.
“The art of cartooning has subsided considerably in the Indian press in the last ten years,” Padgaonkar said. “In the Indian press, there’s so little irony and humour.”
Also, critics say that several of Laxman’s favourite themes and tropes are stuck in time, relics of an India before the 1991 market-oriented reforms that unleashed a flurry of economic activity.
His targets — the sclerotic bureaucracy, the lack of visible progress, the tragedy of unfulfilled potential — are still issues but no longer the whole story.
You Said It rarely addresses globalisation or advances in technology, both of which have been instrumental in India’s economic boom.
Laxman himself despises mobile phones, doesn’t watch television and shrugs off the internet — attitudes imposed on the Common Man.
Thumbing a nose at the march of time is perhaps fitting for a man whose career has defied it and who refuses to keep a diary or wear a watch.
The only time factor he seems to pay attention to is his daily deadline. In the apartment he shares with his wife, Kamala, whose calm demeanour tempers her husband’s sometimes crotchety personality, he works in silence from 8am to 1pm to whip up a cartoon for the courier to collect at 2pm.
He takes ideas from no one — “not even my granddaughter” — whom he adores. Laxman is adamant that the Common Man will never be more than a spectator.
“Does the moon change?” Laxman asked airily. “Does the sun change?”
You said it.
