As a child, when I read RK Narayan’s Swami and Friends, the characters came alive in his brother RK Laxman’s [1921-2015] illustrations. As an adult, like his legion of fans, I relished Laxman’s cartoons in The Times of India. What intrigued me most was that his bonhomous wit was often streaked with irascible ruthlessness. Laxman’s fellow feeling for the unknown citizen, mute and powerless, was endearing. But you also tasted a disquieting pinch of salt; the destitution of the masses became a harsh reality.

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For six decades, people saw Laxman’s Common Man with balding head and bulbous nose, permanently silent and perpetually bewildered by the ludicrous paradoxes of the world in which he found himself.

We knew those absurdities only too well. But Laxman’s rollicking irreverence was new. It made you laugh with a sense of kinship and relief — or should I say release? He mocked opportunism, vainglory, empty promises, regressive ideologies. No one, however highly placed, could escape his shafts of irony.

And through all those decades when Laxman drew his daily reactions to local, national and international events, no boss could leash him, no political regime could tame him. Luckily, he lived at a time when dissent and satire were not muzzled as much as they are today.

Laxman enjoyed this freedom from college days when he illustrated brother Narayan’s Malgudi stories, creating the landscape of this fictional world just as the writer did. His first political cartoons, appearing in the journal Swatantra, revealed the same zany spirit.

When I interviewed Laxman in the '90s he said, “You will ask me what every damn fool asks me, ‘how do you get your ideas everyday?' As if I can explain! And if I did, as if you can understand!"

But this irritation melted when I said, “Let’s talk about your crows. Is it a cartoonist’s instinct for drama and humour that makes you paint them?” “Well, crows and cartoons hit the eye!” he chuckled, and went on, “Crows fascinated me from childhood. My mother encouraged me to draw them because she thought this was one way of pleasing Lord Shaniswara, who rode on crows, and avert his evil eye!” But the dull crow is hardly a thing of beauty, I remarked. Laxman retorted “I think the peacock is ugly, it has overdeveloped colours and a broomstick tail. After finishing his job the Creator must have mixed all the leftover colours to make this hideous thing -- as a joke!”

I asked Laxman if he regretted the fact that as a cartoonist, his major work had a brief shelf life. “I’d like to paint more, but where is the time?” he shrugged. The sigh became a guffaw when he recalled how once, a connoisseur had admired his “painting” – a sheet daubed with leftover paints on which Laxman had signed his name in Kannada for fun. This anecdote was a prelude to his indictment of sham passed off as art. “A great artist agonises over every stroke, that’s quite different from the agony of trying to sell your work to some bank.”  

Years passed. Once again Laxman generously shared his memories, this time for a book. As a child, he had viewed the world through broken bits of coloured glass. “Blue made everything spooky, red was terrifying, yellow was sickly, green brought relief, even cheer. Now I’ve learnt something more: I know that art can transform the way you experience the world.”

Leafing through Rasipuram Krishnaswami Laxman’s You Said It anthology -- whimsical, playful, mischievous, brilliant, I say to myself, “A cartoon can change the way you see the world.”

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist, writing on the performing arts, cinema and literature