ABSTRACT
Caricatures or cartoons had almost a negligible presence before the advent of the colonial empire and print culture in India. As an art form, it emerged, developed and refined with the cultural interaction and dialogue between the empire and colony. On the one hand, British cartoonists’ political vocabulary clubbed with humour and representation of the ‘oriental other’ was driven towards the essentialisation of native and to reinforce the legitimacy of the British domination. And on the other hand, Indian’s mastery over the art form and the vernacularisation of cartoons, including Punch versions in local languages and non-Punch magazines, led to a subversion of British ways of looking and laughing. Such a subversive politics of humour and expansion of print culture facilitated Indian cartoonists’ to redesign the socio-cultural space through which Indian sensibilities, experiences and expressions could engage into a dialogue with British cartoonists’ political vocabulary. This essay, therefore, engages and explores the inter-textuality and dialogic discourse between British and Indian cartoons. Such cartoons, in those times, became the cultural markers to actively indulge into the production, circulation and consumption of subversive discourses against the modern British narrations of nation and nationalism. Thus, cartoons became a site where politics through humorous representations started taking shape at the level of everyday life affecting the privileged and non-privileged.
