Where there is authority, there is satire. A look at how the political cartoon has been a pillar of journalism, and its place as a tool of resistance in an evolving landscape.
By Aishwarya Bodke
The sharpest tool in the arsenal of an artist is satire. Reality turns absurd when power begins to parody itself before the pen does. To point and laugh, then, is simply the job. The jokes, though, have survived punches far beyond their weight. They say a little humour does not hurt, but jesters are silenced, pens are being considered weapons of mass illustration and inch-sized cartoons have become ‘dangerous’ metaphors.
Through the pages of history
The art of political cartooning has travelled across time and continents. The caricature style travelled from Renaissance Italy to Britain and then America or the ‘New World’ in the 18th century. While an American-centric history places the country’s founding father Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 creation ‘Join, or Die’, a woodcut published in The Pennsylvania Gazette, as the origin of the present-day political cartoon, English caricaturist James Gillray is generally recognised as ‘the father of the political cartoon’.
What’s common between the cartoons across the printing presses of Europe and America, however, is their questioning of the ruling powers and their policies. While Gillray’s most famous ‘The PlumbPudding in Danger’, depicts the world being carved up into spheres of influence between British Prime Minister William Pitt and Napoleon, Franklin’s ‘Join, or Die’, which shows a snake cut into eight pieces, was a call to the British colonists in America to join forces against the French and their Native American allies, and to convince the British government to support a unified colonial government in America.
Interestingly, while political cartoons emerged organically with the rise of the printing press and other developments, in America, it was the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791 that gave Americans the right, protected by the First Amendment, to create political cartoons through free speech.
Political caricature arrived in the Indian subcontinent as a colonial import, which soon, in the hands of local artists, became a tool of subversion. Punch, the British publication of satire credited with coining the term ‘cartoon’, served as the model for many indigenous publications, including the iconic Shankar’s Weekly. Started by K. Shankar Pillai, who is hailed as the father of political cartooning, it spared no one: neither the British nor India’s own political leaders after the country gained independence.
Crisp and current
“The best satire makes everyone slightly uncomfortable, including the person creating it,” says Manjul, one of India’s most prominent political and editorial cartoonists, known for his sharp social commentary. He does not use a surname.
Manjul’s cartoons have been a familiar presence in several leading dailies of India since the turn of the century. He began cartooning with regional newspapers, starting with Dainik Jagran in Kanpur, while still a teenager. He subsequently worked with Rashtriya Sahara, India Today and The Economic Times. His daily cartoons, including ‘Nobody’s Business’ in DNA Money, ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’ in Mid-Day and ‘First Cut’ in Firstpost, have become synonymous with his name.
His craft was honed in an era where no mornings were complete without an editorial cartoon tucked beside the headlines, offering perspective before the opinion columns had their say. “It was how I made sense of the world around me. As I grew older, I realised that public life was full of contradictions and drawing became my way of asking questions about them,” he notes.
Manjul’s style combines crisp storytelling and minimal dialogue with expressive caricature and symbolism. He does not chase subtlety, leaning instead into the heightened body language and facial expressions of his characters. The trick is to make a complicated issue look simple without making it simplistic. A Manjul toon is almost instantly recognisable, even without his signature. “A good cartoon should communicate before the reader reaches for the caption. A bent shoulder, an inflated chest, a hesitant step or a blank expression can often reveal more than a speech bubble. If the drawing cannot speak on its own, adding more text rarely improves it,” Manjul explains.
Satish Acharya, on the other hand, says there is some comfort in relying on words. A political cartoonist for over two decades, Acharya is inspired by the long tradition of cartooning in India by pioneers, including Pillai and the timeless R. K. Laxman. He began his daily editorial cartoon for Mid-Day in 2003, where he spent nine years. Since then, his work has appeared in publications including The Times of India, The Free Press Journal and The New Indian Express, to name a few. Acharya also has five books to his credit: Mein, Hum & Aap: The Many Colours of Indian Politics, Cartoonishta in Kannada and Negi Puggi in Kundapra Kannada. His cricket-themed cartoon book Non-Striker released in 2015, while his most recent book Go Corona Go was published in 2021.
A large part of Acharya’s oeuvre frequently turns to sports—cricket in particular—as he remains an avid follower. His cartoons reflect the immediacy of a political cartoonist working in tandem with the daily news cycle. They also recognise that sport extends beyond the playground, intersecting with popular culture, institutional shortcomings and collective memory. He brings these worlds together with his characteristic hard-hitting humour. For Acharya, humour is the best by-product of a turbulent political time. But one must not forget the anger and despair that are inseparable from it.
Last year, both Acharya and Manjul found themselves in the cross hairs after receiving notices from social media platform X about claims by the Mumbai Police that their work violated India’s information technology laws. While neither cartoonist was served directly with a police complaint, the episode was hardly their first encounter with official scrutiny.
“A cartoonist’s responsibility is not to entertain those in authority but to examine them critically, regardless of who occupies that position. The temptation to selfcensor is always present, but satire loses its purpose the moment it begins seeking permission,” avers Manjul. Acharya agrees that both emerging and veteran cartoonists contend with this hurdle. While censorship has not affected his creative output, he confides that it continues to haunt him while drawing.
When cartooning wasn’t “brave”
A first-time voter in the 2014 general elections, Rachita Taneja’s webcomic Sanitary Panels’ cheeky title is both a pun and a deliberate attempt to unsettle. In 2012, she worked with Greenpeace India, where she helped create a graphic alluding to a major scandal surrounding the Indian government’s allocation of coal deposits. The image showed the then Prime Minister with rotting teeth and carried the caption ‘Coalgate’. Looking back, she notes that none of them was worried about the repercussions of political lampooning at that time. “We used to regularly make fun of political leaders, and nobody ever applauded us for bravery. It was understood as part of how a democracy works,” she tells us.
In 2020, however, Taneja faced criminal contempt proceedings over a cartoon commenting on the Supreme Court’s handling of the Arnab Goswami bail case. The proceedings remain ongoing, even as her work received international recognition in 2024 with the Kofi Annan Courage in Cartooning Award, which honours cartoonists working under pressure around the world.
The pressures persist, but Taneja refuses to cower under the burden of self-censorship, rejecting the term itself. “If someone puts a gun to your head and asks you for your wallet, you are not ‘self-robbing’ when you give your wallet to them. You are responding to a viable threat in order to protect yourself. So, I don’t like the term ‘self-censorship’ being used in this way because it is good old-fashioned censorship,” she says.
All satirists face this conundrum, for the element of fear is undeniable. Courage is regularly met with severe consequences, especially if you belong to a minority or an oppressed caste. Taneja points out, “It is important for privileged creators like me to acknowledge it and avoid speaking on behalf of a community whose experience we have not lived.”
These sensibilities are also reflected in Taneja’s craft. Stick figures with sparse black-and-white panels and an emphasis on dialogue make room for addressing issues surrounding mental health, internet culture, free speech, feminism, communalism, climate and queer rights. She jokes that the style emerged partly because she did not know how to draw, and has, over time, become her signature. Looking at her work is a disarming visual experience, especially when it is about heavy subject matter. It does not intimidate. Instead, it puts you at ease and makes you believe that this cannot be anything serious. They are, after all, just stick figures.
Taneja uses recurring characters—paying attention to changing details of hairstyles and mouth shapes—and a rare speck of colour. “I try to insert women characters into my comics. It is perhaps a shallow way of showing diversity because I can’t do much to show different ways women look. But if a character is talking about politics, I will try to make her a woman because I am tired of the perception that only men have political opinions. I also try to include queer characters and people from different religious backgrounds wherever I can.”
From the streets to the web
Political cartoons were first created in the 18th century, but it was much later that they became a staple in newspapers and magazines. Before that, they were often posted on walls or passed from person to person. Perhaps what the printing press was to that era, the internet is to ours.
Traditionally, political cartooning and satire have been gatekept spaces often limited to privileged artists—predominantly men—who had access to newspapers and mainstream media. The internet has completely flipped the script, creating opportunities for voices that generally do not occupy these spaces. Sanitary Panels was born and bred on the internet. “I love the internet,” Taneja affirms, “my comic would not have been possible without it. It is not something you would necessarily expect to see in a newspaper. A young woman speaking about politics and making political comics would not have been taken seriously.”
Many artists arrive at activism through their art, but Taneja’s journey began in policy. Alongside her work with Greenpeace, she was among the co-founders of the Internet Freedom Foundation and has consistently worked on digital rights.
The tension between traditional and digital media is less a battle than an ongoing negotiation. Acharya, too, believes that the digital publishing system has successfully created an equally efficient and essential parallel platform. Artists have adapted to the online medium, which offers unprecedented reach but not without its vulnerabilities. The same platforms beget increased surveillance, legal pressures and privacy concerns.
“The biggest change,” shares Manjul, “is not technology but the speed at which information now travels. Earlier, there used to be a shared conversation in the newsroom and the cartoon responded to that conversation. The challenge today is not drawing a cartoon but deciding which story deserves one.”
The internet has also given political humour its freshest and swiftest language: the meme. Now a welloiled, anonymous machine, memes churn out comedic gold every hour and make satire an interactive and replicable medium. There are no editorial rules. They are fuelled by the irreverent and the young. No wonder then, they do not possess the reputation of high art. They come and they go. But what they do harness is a very serious power to disarm, to get the viewer to laugh along, to mobilise. They are a definitive reflection of the fact that political conflict and grief have to coexist with humour and fierce celebrations of survival. It is on the internet that I read: We buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. These lines, which have resurfaced today, are said to have originated during the AIDS crisis, when queer people fought for their right to exist amid a plague while the government turned a blind eye.
Today, memes and comics are acts of celebration and resistance. But in their most undistilled form, they are the simple joy of dissent. It was a satire page, after all, that managed to awaken the collective conscience of India. It was a joke that became a pressure group that became a revolution, and for a second, we all knew what it was like to have hope.
Time, technology and terms change but the instinct of political humour remains unchanged: to question and hold up a mirror to its time. It is remarkable how much trouble a silly little cartoon can cause.
– With editorial inputs
This article was originally published in the September 2026 issue of ON Stage.
