Caricatures of dissent
Sujith's cartoons would draw parallels with cinema and literature sometimes, so people could relate to them.
It is like his words, even as he speaks them, could be stopped. Or banned. T. K. Sujith calmly stands in front of his cartoons and says there is no Emergency today like in 1975, but people can still put you in jail for drawing like him, or singing a song or writing a poem that someone didn’t like. “It is a kind of decentralised Emergency now that the local police or the Panchayat President could take you to jail for your art work. Look at what happened to cartoonist Bala in Tamil Nadu, he was arrested for a caricature (of the CM, Tirunelveli district collector and police commissioner),” Sujith says, standing at the Lalithakala Academy Hall in Vyloppilly Samskrithi Bhavan, Thiruvananthapuram. Here, he has hung some of his selected toons from the last two years — political cartoons published for the paper he works in and some award winning ones — for an exhibition that was called Thalavarakal.
“What they don’t realise is it is when you try to stop an artwork that it gains power, there will be more demand and ‘shares’ for the work,” Sujith says. He shows one of his cartoons where a mirror breaks into many pieces and from each, a weapon is raised. He points at a pencil and says, “when you break this into two, you have lead pieces coming from both ends.” Sujith says a cartoonist is never doing PR work for he criticises the state government led by the LDF and the Union government led by the BJP and the opposition at both places led by the Congress. “We are on the people’s side. So we criticise whatever’s anti-people.”
Sujith’s cartoons would draw parallels with cinema and literature sometimes, so people could relate to them. There is the Baahubali reference as well as the last scene of Khasakinte Ithihaasam.
There is even a Da Vinci reference. It can be really simple like a couple of lines and curves that depict a rocket with the caption ‘Himsa’ and Gandhi’s figure with the caption ‘Ahimsa’. It can be complicated with the whole of Ramayana depicted in one picture of political Kerala. “When you put words it is actually limiting, since only those who follow a language can understand the cartoon. So you try to do with wordless cartoons that speak to all,” Sujith says. He points to a cartoon where a man raises a coconut tree on which Manmohan Singh is perched but as he reaches the top he drops a coconut on the man’s head. The man then cuts down the tree, meaning the power is in his hands, and Modi takes turns to climb the tree, who can again have the same fate.