Through Abu Abraham's eyes: A journey of wit, wisdom, and political cartoons

With his wit, humour and philosophical brooding, Abu Abraham and his cartoons talk to us from a place in the future, where the fault lines of yesterdays continue to fester. If Abu were alive today, he would have turned 100 on June 11. On his birth centenary year, Abu’s daughters Ayisha and Janaki are taking a curated collection of his most important works to select cities. Some were on display in Bengaluru in August.

“It’s the centenary year and we wanted to mark the occasion,” says Ayisha, in between two walkthroughs on a Sunday evening at Bangalore International Centre, which hosted Abu’s works for four days. The show ‘Abu’s World’ was first held in Kerala, and then it went to Kolkata before travelling to Bengaluru. Curating Abu, one of the sharpest political cartoonists of India, was an emotional journey for Ayisha.

“You just take it for granted that your father draws and engages with a life of travel and journalism; debates around topical politics and now you look back on his life with a little more objectivity or distance at his body of work, and you are amazed at just how much he managed to do in a short time. It becomes a different relationship to his work,” says Ayisha, who is a Bengaluru-based visual artist.

It took her at least six months to pore over Abu’s extensive collection of work, including cartoons, drawings and his writings, before deciding on what will go up on the walls. Abu had the habit of meticulousl filing away all his original works. He would scribble at a corner of each cartoon ‘please return to my desk’ or ‘please return to such and such address’. “The instructions were clear that once it was made into a block (for printing at the press), the original should come back to him.

Later he started xeroxing them and posting them to each newspaper,” remembers Ayisha. The originals on show are mostly A3, or A4, and the pocket cartoons are smaller — making a much deeper engagement possible for even a first-time audience. His corrections in white paint are also visible providing the lay person a peek into his process of working. Size shrinks considerably when cartoons finally appear in print.

Abu’s originals on display in Bengaluru included the cartoon that summarizes the constitutional meltdown of 1975 — the then president Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signing the Emergency decree into force from his bathtub. Works on the Middle-East crisis, global military-industrial complex, coalition politics, federalism and Indian opposition were also exhibited. One of the fondest memories Ayisha has of her father is that of the travel. “Some of our very precious experiences were when we travelled with him.

He loved to travel and whenever he did, we would be taken along.” Janaki treasures the memory of her father being an avid nature lover. “He used to get excited about how many eggs the hens or ducks had laid, or what the goat (Abu called her Ammini) was doing, or new shoots on the trees. He would ask us to have a look at the new leaves on mahogany,” she says. Abu loved to keep fish and he’d sink a tank wherever he lived, says Ayisha.

“He loved his guppies and mollies, and goldfish, and would look after them even in the centre of Delhi.” “As a cartoonist, he poked fun at those in power. He really believed in a more just society and had a strong political sense.

We used to have differences of opinion at home in terms of politics, but then he was always happy to have a good argument. He never thought arguing about issues was a problem,” adds Janaki, who is a professor of Sociology at Delhi University. Till he was about 73, Abu used to play tennis regularly.

Abu was born in Kollam district in Kerala in 1924. He was fortunate to have had a rare ringside view of the struggle for India’s Independence, the birth of a young nation, and then her subsequent struggles into maturing as a democracy. After graduating from the University College, Trivandrum, he moved to Bombay to work as a journalist.

His big break in cartooning came when he got an offer to work with Shankar’s Weekly in 1950. Abu’s illustrious career includes a 16-year stint in the UK where he worked with various publications, including The Observer and The Guardian.