The editors of Tragic Idiom, Sundar Ramanathaiyer and Nancy Hudson-Rodd, observe that the collection of cartoons represented in this book is an "autonomous editorial commentary on `Independent' India". His astute historical insight saved many of Vijayan's cartoons from contextual trappings and gave them extended temporal relevance. He always returned to the farces and absurdities of Indian politics. He once updated a political cartoon, which had Indira Gandhi looking at the poster pasted on the "Democracy Wall". The poster said Charan Singh and Raj Narayan were back. The cartoon had the caption, "Updating a Cartoon: See in Figure 1 Rajiv Gandhi, Figure 2 Indubhai Patel, Figure 3 Dr. Swamy". It could go on like this, even today. Only faces change, realities don't.
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This book has 9 sections - cartoons classified into: State of the nation, Foreign Encounters, Democracy Wall, State of the States, State of the Economy, Rite of Rhetoric, Domestics, Nuclear, Emergency, with a Prologue and epilogue.
Reviews and Author details: The O.V. Vijayan collection Tragic Idiom is a fascinating set of observations on India, told through various literary and cartoon prisms. Cartooning could be older than story telling. There must have been some interesting Palaeozoic contests between the person inventing words and the cave artist. The image and the written and spoken word tell parallel stories. In his interwoven drawing and his writing, O.V. Vijayan underlines his personal modern version of this characteristic of information. The cartoon remains a curious voice in the huge assembly of modern media messages. Various studies of its peculiar relevance and effect have been put forward. Academics have observed its positioning. Many cartoonists have at times reflected on their weird craft and usually left it in the tradition basket. This collection is much more than a retrospective of clever observation. Vijayan seems to represent a rare restless witty intelligence, moving from literature to political cartoon, intertwining the two, searching for a way to affect opinion in the most complex and challenging of nations and at the same time reflecting on the process itself. In exploring the day to day events of a nation he is obviously devoted to, drawing them, and reflecting on them, he has done much more than provide a comic synthesis of events for a particular set of literate Indians. He has set his mind off in pursuit of the puzzle of the human race. In a way his country left him no alternative. His concern for an India searching for a just society is the great story of modern humanity. Equity is the global issue. The issue of Indian poverty in the context of Western institutional systems is relevant to the global problems of the day. What Vijayan has commented on all his career is relevant to human future in a way Western cartoonists can never be. Vijayan writes about this. In the West the professional world and his citizenship are two parallel universes. For him it has to be one. He was inspired, as were many Western cartoonists, by people such as Cruikshank, Low, Vicky, Feiffer, and Thurber. From his reading and these models he got concepts and motivation. These people seem to have affected European public opinion. But that's all the help he got. European issues were specific and arrogantly local - the drama of the world wars, the iconic characters representing good and evil, and the theatre of the Western wealthy. The East was another story. It was colonial, post-colonial, racially divided, caste layered, operated by borrowed institutions, subverted by corruption. His world was encircled by Western economic barriers and neo-colonial processes. His targets were systems and vestiges of the past. The people he wanted to address were always in survival mode. Indian illiterates were the basis of his concern. The world Vijayan had to comment on was always global. So it seems to me Vijayan had to invent a satirical language, a vocabulary of style, sarcasm and irony in order to satisfy his own hopes. He had to reinvent the cartoon heritage left to him. He devised a unique drawing style for himself, a hybrid of European, Eastern and intuitive images, an aesthetic of his own. So he has left a trail not only of a special history of his times but a set of perspectives from which to observe a village, a nation and a world. One of the subject headings in the collection is Rite of Rhetoric. Another is the Domestics, the State of the States. This breadth of concern and ingenuity, satirists in the West could well give attention to. The written comments on each chapter in the book show the difficult task Vijayan took upon himself - the understanding of the two converging worlds in which he was enmeshed. Paradoxes, frustration, irony, misgiving are his concern. There is love and passion here. So the title Tragic Idiom seems most apt. The Western cartoonist I would suggest, comments simply on the Western world somewhat complicated by the chaotic East. For a Westerner, the Vijayan cartoons themselves have to be deconstructed into the elements of a particular fragment of Indian history. It is a history we should know about. What Vijayan seems to reveal is a reminder of a kind of poetry and impressionistic approach to observations familiar to the voices of India. He presents satire and political comment in a manner we see in Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, novelists, editorial writers, filmmakers, and musicians. We all live by simplistic image representations of events, it seems to me. Cartoon type representations of events are probably what we file away in the receptors of our brains. For all the elegant verbal analysis, the massive precise information that is available, a series of shorthand images may well be what we make decisions on. I think Vijayan, as a great master of words, felt this and so his venture into the cartoon world. So we have this fascinating book. Bruce Petty, The Age, Melbourne.
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