Rethinking political cartooning in India

The session featured EP Unny, chief political cartoonist at The Indian Express, and Unnamati Syama Sundar, who describes himself as an anti-caste cartoonist. It was moderated by Neha Khurana

At a time when the space for political cartoons seems to be steadily shrinking in most Indian newspapers, the panel discussion Political Cartooning in India Today, held alongside the exhibition “Please Touch Gently: A Colloquium on Zines, Comics, Ephemera” at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, last week, opened with a deceptively simple question. Moderator Neha Khurana asked the audience, “How many of you still get newspapers at home today?” and whether they missed the cartoons that once dominated front pages. The framing was deliberate. “This panel basically tries to answer the question: what happened to political cartooning in India?” she said.

Unny began by situating the origins of political cartoons in India within the 18th and 19th centuries, shaped initially by British publications. The influence of magazines such as Punch and its Indian adaptations, particularly Oudh Punch (Awadh Punch) , was discussed in detail. Khurana pointed to the figure of Mr. Punch, “who basically satirises everyone, looks for oddities, finds it in the society,” and linked this to older Indian traditions of satire like the Vidushaka from Sanskrit drama as a parallel to Mr. Punch. Satire, she argued, long predated colonial print culture, even if cartooning as a visual form arrived later. Against this backdrop, she asked whether the emergence of cartooning under colonial rule made dissent its natural language.

For Unny, the answer lay in the medium itself. “An element of subversion is inherent to this medium,” he said, linking cartoons to older traditions where satire was tolerated, even expected, as a way of speaking truth to power.

The discussion sharpened when Sundar raised the issue of caste and archival erasure. “Some of the very crucial cartoons are missing from the archives,” he argued, pointing to controversial depictions of BR Ambedkar and others that can no longer be traced. The absence, he suggested, was not accidental but revealing of power and prejudice within cartooning history itself.

Unny questioned specific readings, insisting that interpretation must account for an artist’s style. Despite disagreement, both panelists converged on one point. “Cartoons are a contribution to history-making,” Unny said, turning the debate toward preservation. “There isn’t any proper archiving of cartoons in India,” he added.

EP Unny, chief political cartoonist at The Indian Express

That historical rupture became stark during the Emergency. Khurana described how censorship altered cartooning practice, giving the example of RK Laxman and how his works were often rejected on the grounds of how much laughter it incited. Cartoons stamped “not passed by censor” within minutes marked a decisive shift. Yet, even then, cartoonists adapted. A seemingly compliant cartoon, Khurana noted, could still “teach the reader to read the newspaper differently.”

As the discussion moved to the present, questions of relevance and survival dominated. Unny linked the shrinking space for cartoons to a larger collapse of public debate. “Cartoons can’t exist in isolation,” he said, arguing that weak access to information and the spread of fake news undermine the form. Still, he remained cautiously optimistic. “Humour is by definition subversive,” he said, insisting that satire will always find new forms – whether in print, digital comics or graphic reportage.

Closing the session, Khurana reflected that cartoons sit at an intersection of journalism, art and satire. In difficult times, she suggested, their lightness is not trivial but essentially another way of insisting that power can still be drawn, questioned and laughed at.