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Magazine
Regaling watchdog
WHILE reading "Laxman's world" by Ranjit Hoskote (Page 2 of The Hindu-Magazine, dated February 13, 2005), my thoughts went back to R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends, in which Laxman's cartoons had first appeared. Narayan was lucky to have had such a talented brother who alone could have presented Swami and the other characters to such perfection. The cartoons made Swami and his friend, teachers, headmasters in Albert Mission School and the Board High School and his grandmother walk out of the pages, and they still remain green in the minds of those who had read them when they themselves were schoolboys. Narayan was also lucky to have had an excellent Tamil translation of his book, Swamiyum Snehithargalum, serialised in the Ananda Vikatan together with Laxman's cartoons.
It is, therefore, surprising to know from R.K. Narayan, The Early Years (1906 to 1945) by Susan Ram and N. Ram, published by Viking in 1996, that Graham Greene, with whose support Narayan could get Swami and Friends published in England by Eyre and Spottiswoode in 1948 (after its successive rejection by many publishers), did not agree to Laxman's illustrating the book. The drawings, he told Narayan, were not, in his view, good enough. Could Narayan make any alternative suggestions? Laxman had to wait for many years before the Oxford University Press published Swami and Friends along with Laxman's cartoons. Since Eyre and Spottiswoode who first published the novel rejected the supporting illustrations by Laxman, it would appear that the Ananda Vikatan was the first to present them in its Tamil translation. It would also appear that while Graham Greene helped Narayan get Swami and Friends published in England as he could sense the authenticity of the presentation of Malgudi, the imaginary small town in Tamil Nadu, he was not as receptive to Laxman's illustrations of Swami and the allied characters which were just as real as any Indian reader, especially in Tamil Nadu of those times, could have seen them.
Laxman's projection of Swami, his friends and others in the novel presented them exactly as they looked in the thirties of the last century with their caps and dhotis. (They would now, however, be passé as we could see from the present generation of schoolboys in their well-starched uniforms). The headmaster of the Albert Mission School was the well-dressed Englishman in his waistcoat and tie while his counterpart in the Board High School was the famished native in his coat buttoned right upto the neck, looking quite spectral and suggesting he ate roast pupils for breakfast and in a state of bad temper most of the time.
The world of Swami and Friends which Laxman had first come to, has now become the idyllic never-never-land of lost innocence even to him. However, Laxman continues to laugh at those who are taking themselves very seriously as ministers, politicians, officials and others because he sees them as fools providing merriment on the world arena, just as did Shakespeare who sang, "God, what fools these mortals be!" The unfailing presence of his "common man" is a fantasy which Laxman allows himself, as in real life he would have been a trespasser into wherever he sneaks in and he would have been booted out. The response from all those whom he has regaled is "a willing suspension of disbelief". Laxman is telling politicians bureaucrats, ministers and others that his common man is the unseen but unsleeping watchdog, telling the world at large of what is going on.
C.V. GOPALAKRISHNAN
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