Ink, irony, insight: A tribute to political cartoonist Abu Abraham (1924-2002)

Pick your favourite of the images below. Chances are you will remember it for years.

That was the power of Abu Abraham’s work.

Look closely and the details become riveting. Even when the only human presence is a speech bubble (as in the bomber plane cartoon, one of our favourites at Wknd), one can almost hear the crackle of the voices. That too was the power of his work.

As compelling as his aesthetic, was his voice.

Abraham wouldn’t pull his punches, not even during the Emergency. His wit was razor sharp but rich with nuance. His caricatures were instantly recognisable, occasionally grotesque, but never cruel.
He was merciless, but not without compassion. “In very few strokes and less than 10 words, he could give us, within that tiny frame, a whole story,” Nair says.
Abraham began drawing when he was three. He went on to sketch for newspapers in the UK (Tribune, The Observer, The Guardian). He returned to India in the 1960s, worked with The Indian Express, and served as a Rajya Sabha MP. In the art world, his centenary is being celebrated with some exhibitions and memorial shows.
Outside the art world, he isn’t being celebrated at all. And he should be. So here goes.
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Born into a Syrian Christian family in the city of Tiruvalla, Kerala, Attupurathu Mathew Abraham grew up in the coastal town of Kollam, where his father was a magistrate and his mother, a homemaker.
It was a time of social upheaval, as Kerala transitioned from a feudal society into a socialist state. Through his life, he too would hold to these ideals of state-enabled opportunity and access; public welfare; and a wariness of capitalism and its single-minded pursuit of profit.
In his early 20s, having graduated in math and French, Abraham set out to be a journalist and moved to Bombay. He was hired by The Bombay Chronicle and assigned to the crime beat.
Between deadlines, he found himself sketching cartoons for Blitz magazine and for the political journal Bharat.
He revelled in the opportunity to use satire. He married his ready wit with his sharp eye for detail and for observing human behaviour, honed in his time as a reporter.
By the time he was 26, Abraham had made enough of a mark that the famous cartoonist Keshav Shankar Pillai invited him to New Delhi to draw for his periodical, Shankar’s Weekly. “There, he met the British cartoonist Fred Joss, who said that his cartoons would do well in the UK,” says his daughter Ayisha Abraham, an artist too.
The idea of emigrating took hold and, three years later, in 1953, Abraham had set things up enough to move to London. It wasn’t easy going. The money he arrived with, much of it borrowed, soon ran out, Ayisha says.
He was able to sell his cartoons to publications such as Punch, London Opinion and The Daily Sketch, but the earnings were sporadic. He lived in cramped, shared accommodation, and missed the sun of Kollam and Bombay.
He eventually started providing cartoons regularly to Tribune, the socialist newspaper then edited by Labour Party leader Michael Foot. This helped somewhat.
Then, in 1956, the editor of The Observer, David Astor, offered him a position as the first-ever staff cartoonist for that Sunday newspaper.
Astor suggested that the paper’s new cartoonist adopt a new pen name. “Israel-Palestine tensions were escalating and the editor didn’t want my father to get ethnically pigeonholed as partisan, because of a name generally associated with the Jewish faith,” Ayisha says.
Wondering what to call himself, Abraham thought back to school, and chose his nickname from those years: Abu.
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His art flourished in its new context. A prime example from that time is a panel published in 1959, weeks ahead of a British general election. It satirised a Conservative Party campaign slogan with a banner that said: “Summer is Better with the Conservatives – Don’t Let Labour Ruin It!”
As with so much of Abraham’s work, the panel was universally resonant. It was also incredibly current, playing, as it did, on the incumbent party’s actual campaign slogan: “Life’s Better with the Conservatives – Don’t Let Labour Ruin It”.
In its subtlety was an invitation to laugh at the absurdity, but also some gentle reminders: of the exaggerated claims of prosperity on which the party was running; and of the fact that politicians will take credit even for the year’s favourable weather, and then seek to politicise it, if you let them.
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For a journalist who commented on the news in single-frame sketches, Abraham’s life took some surprisingly dramatic turns.
While working and living in the UK, he went on a US government-sponsored tour of Saigon, amid the Vietnam War (1955-75).
He was in Jerusalem when the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, a key organiser of the Holocaust, was tried there, in 1961. (Eichmann was hanged the following year.)
In 1967, during the Third Arab-Israel War, Abu visited and sketched Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza.
He was part of a number of press delegations to Cuba. His daughters still have a series of sketches he made of the revolutionary leader Che Guevara; and vividly remember his tales of Havana and its nightlife; and the underground clubs that were once rebel strongholds.
Abraham would eventually move from The Observer to The Guardian, and then return to India, in 1969.
He missed home, Ayisha says, and was concerned by rising anti-immigrant sentiment. He and his wife didn’t want to raise their two daughters (Ayisha and her sister Janaki Abraham, now a sociology professor) in such an environment.
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Back in India at age 45, Abraham settled in New Delhi. He worked with The Indian Express until 1981, chronicling a turbulent period punctuated by the Bangladesh Liberation War, massive student uprisings in Bihar, the rise of a national opposition, and of course, Emergency (1975-77).
From 1972 to ’78, he was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha, giving him an unusually close look at the workings of the Indian democracy.
In a parliamentary debate in November 1976, after the government tabled a resolution to extend the Emergency, Abu spoke in support of fresh elections. He believed that the Emergency had “achieved what it was intended to achieve,” he said, and that it was “now time the country gave up this medicine and returned to a normal life.”
“Abu’s work during the Emergency stands out as his boldest,” says Ashish Anand, CEO and managing director of the DAG group of galleries. “His critiques were not driven by partisanship but by a commitment to holding the powerful accountable and advocating for democratic values.”
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A cartoon that curator Uma Nair remembers with particular fondness, from this time, is also one of his most famous: the bathtub panel. In it, then-President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed is shown hurriedly signing the declaration of Emergency, while in his bath. ‘If there are any more ordinances, just ask them to wait,’ the speech bubble says.
“A brilliant cartoonist is intuitive, not impulsive, and that’s what Abu was,” Nair says.
Working freelance again by 1981, Abraham created the Salt and Pepper comics, featuring conversations between an elephant and a crow.
Collections of his works were published, through the years: Verdicts on Vietnam (1968), Abu on Bangladesh (1972), Private View (1974), The Games of Emergency (1977; this book included cartoons that printed during Emergency, and ones that were censored at the time), and Arrivals and Departures: Abu Abraham on Janata Rule (1983).
Abraham died in 2002, following a brief illness. He was 78. The boy from Kollam was cremated in Thiruvananthapuram with full state honours.
In many ways, he lived in a better, more idealistic time, says graphic novelist George Mathen aka Appupen, 45, author of Legends of Halahala (2012).
“He could play with literary layers and metaphors, because he didn’t have to remind people about the basics of being human — like it’s bad to kill people, or it’s wrong to commit genocide. That’s what we are doing today,” Mathen says. “And it strikes me, from time to time: Is this all it has come to, the legacy of this art form? Is this the best we can do?”