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Sketch of Thackeray drawn in 1998. (Credit: E.P.Unny) Close to ten years after his death, India’s cartoonists still remember Bal Thackeray as a brother cartoonist. The Shiv Sena founder has been back in cartoons ever since his party faced its worst crisis ever. Not as Supremo, but as a cartoonist. In several recent cartoons, he is seen chewing his pipe and dipping the brush in ink in the classical garb of the pre-digital, old world cartoonist readying to lampoon the Shinde-led rebels.
If Uddhav could draw like his father, uncle or his cousin, we would have seen searing punch lines, enough to shame at least a couple of rebels back into the parent party. The cartooning gene sadly doesn’t often travel that straight from father to son. Balasaheb’s brother Shrikant Thackeray regularly cartooned for Marmik, the party’s satire weekly. His son Raj Thackeray is an accomplished caricaturist and is as unsparing a cartoonist as his uncle.
If not professionally, Uddhav does bond with Marmik personally. Whenever he is at an event at the weekly’s office, he reminds the gathering that he was born the same year as the magazine. His father left cartooning at the Free Press Journal in 1960 to launch this publication which turned out to be the platform for a bigger start up. In those days before social media, this journal was used to project Marathi pride and invite Mumbaikars to join the Shiv Sena. Uddhav would always add that his dear father was a fan of that legendary Second World War cartoonist of the Evening Standard, Sir David Low. Low angered Adolf Hitler so much that the Gestapo marked him among the first ten to be shot when the Nazis entered London. Uddhav has slightly expanded on this familiar refrain to suggest that he has a legacy of resisting Hitler himself. No local player can intimidate him.
This is as global as you can get and the mash-up can teach Bollywood a lesson or two. The span extends from son-of-the-soil familial politics to left-of-centre Low cartoons. From Matoshree to Mein Kampf and back. What Uddhav chooses not to mention is that David Low was as much a model for Shankar and RK Laxman. The latter was incidentally a junior colleague of Balasaheb at the Free Press Journal. Low was a New Zealander who migrated to London where he went on to become the superstar of Fleet Street for figuring out Hitler’s hegemony long before editors and ministers to His Majesty. What Thackeray Senior acquired from him must be the craft more than the essential liberalism that marked his work. Ironically it is Uddhav who moved closer to Low when he took his party into unchartered centrist waters in the company of Pawar and Sonia. He can look up the Low archives if he wishes to defend this position. Till then the master cartoonist would just be a convenient name to drop.
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First published on: 01-08-2022 at 08:19:46 pm