Subaltern? Illustrated: A Study of Ambedkar Cartoons

Abstract

Just like any other narrative form, cartoons too, by virtue of their storytelling ability, have problematized Dalit life history and delineated the trauma, tragedy and unflinching representational terms. Charting sociopolitical topics, cartoons are an example of popular culture influencing public opinion. With caricature, prose, topical content and a dash of humour, cartoons form a special category of news and a critical form of political journalism. When Elizabeth Edwards discusses the raw history and potential of photographs, she emphasizes their visual sovereignty, which is not only vital for the production of photography but also for the interpretation of images, and through them, the insertion of the human voice. Similarly, cartoons succeed in combining their visual sovereignty with their ethnographic potential because of their interpretive ingenuousness. As such, cartoons articulate lines of instability indiscernible under the garb of mythical solidarity of a myriad of political ideologies. Cartoonists construct publics and counter publics by problematizing the impact of sociopolitics on human beings through the construction of interpretative communities bound by visual perceptions. In other words, cartoons, particularly political cartoons, represent highly complex modern attempts to formulate visual identities under specific historical and political conditions that resonate with the readership. The present research article seeks to problematize Dalit representation in cartoons by non-Dalit illustrators against the work of a Dalit cartoonist to critically study the politics of representation, the discourse of powers and the dialectics of caste. The article seeks to study if and how Dalit agency is, respectively, illustrated or elided, how symbols and caricatures demonstrate the truth of Dalit life and the aesthetics of the Dalit experience. For the purpose of the study, the article especially focusses on the figure of Ambedkar, the iconic Dalit voice and the benevolent patriarch of Dalit ideology, and studies his representation in a series of political cartoons published between 1932 and 1956.