KOLKATA: When a cartoon appeared in a Bengali newspaper in 1872 making fun of how the British trained their Bengali bureaucrats, there was quite an uproar. This new art form excited contemporary artists so much that by 1874, two cartoon magazines started getting published from Bengal. They made fun of almost every accepted socio-political norm — be it the Calcutta Corporation, the police administration, the Brahmo Samaj or the Bengali babudom.

Subhendu Dasgupta, who recently retired from the economics department of Calcutta University , has been researching on Bengali cartoons and has in his collection thousands of cartoons that were published over the last 140 years. A part of this collection has already been donated to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences and another portion will soon be given away to Jadavpur University ’s media laboratory. The remaining collection of rare cartoons will soon be showcased in a special exhibition to be organized by the Victoria Memorial. Dasgupta has been working on his Bengali cartoon project under the aegis of the India Foundation for Arts, Bangalore.

The British magazine of satire and humour, Punch, which started creating waves across the colonial world through the 1850s and 60s, is supposed to have inspired Bengali cartoons. However, Punch was replete with cartoons that made fun of Indians as an enslaved race. “Naturally, Bengali cartoons were created to counter this. In 1874, when the two cartoon magazines — Harbola Bhar and Basantak — were published, they were popularly touted as the ‘Indian Punch’,” Dasgupta said.

Basantak was brought out by two scions of the Hatkhola Dutta family — Prananath Dutta and Girindranath Dutta. Take the case of one cartoon published in the 1870s. Here the chairman of the Calcutta Corporation, S S Hogg , who was also the city police commissioner, was likened to the varaha avaatar of Vishnu, thanks to his name. Till this time the cartoons were all made from woodcut blocks and were heavily inspired by the drawing style of Battala and Kalighat pats.

The style was later modernized by Gaganendranath Tagore , whose cartoons came out from 1917 onwards in three books that he published — Naba Hullor, Adbhutlok and Birup Bajra. These were replete with satires against the class of Bengalis that went all out to imitate the British ways. Take this cartoon where Gaganendranath draws himself as the dhoti-clad bhadralok who is not allowed to enter a first-class railway compartment by another Bengali, dressed in European clothes and sporting a pipe. There’s another one in which a Kalighat priest is seen “selling aashirvaad” and yet another cartoon where a Bengali gentleman in a hat and coat is called a hybrid Bengali.

Pointing out to cartoons by Gaganendranath from his collection, Dasgupta said, “You will notice how the cartoons of Gagan Tagore were markedly different from the ones that preceded him. He brought about a distinct modernity with his play of light and shade, depth and volume in his cartoons, something that is comparable with the trends that were popular in Europe then.” This is not all. To give a professional edge to his cartoons, Gaganendranath started using the lithograph for printing them.

Inspired by this trend of printing cartoons, magazines like Bharatbarsha, Mashik Basumati, Bharati, Manashi-O-Marmabani, Sachitro Shishir and Shonibarer Chithi were replete with cartoons that were a great hit with the readers of the times. Cartoonists like Jyotindra Mohan Sen, Satish Chandra Singha, Binoy Kumar Basu were stalwarts of the time.

“We were intrigued when we saw the collection of Bengali cartoons, right from the first days till the present times. You can gloss over the whole socio-political history of the city, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, just by going through these cartoons. The added advantage of the collection is that Dasgupta has traced their evolution through the times and the exhibition is being designed in that order,” said SV Raman, programmes consultant of Victoria Memorial.

Artist Jogen Chowdhury sounded happy. “This genre of drawing has not been highlighted enough, though they have been instrumental in creating political rhetorics for long. I am happy that an exhibition showcasing cartoons over the years is being organized. I am sure this will bring in a lot of visitors and generate awareness,” he said.