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The cartoons in The Avadh Punch, which was inspired by the British Punch, were a mirror to the 19th century, writes B. N. Goswamy
Almost everyone knows Punch, that great magazine of humour and satire that was founded as long ago as 1841 by two remarkably enterprising English journalists — one an engraver and the other a writer — and died its much-lamented death just five years back. People still remember the sharp, acerbic wit that almost hid its serious intent, still recall those wonderful cartoons that had them rolling in the aisles, so to speak. It was very proper, very British, but remarkably irreverent. Everything that was happening in the world around it was grist to its comic mill; no one, from the highest and the most pompous to those lazily occupying the fringes of the society, was exempt from its shafts. Its political cartoons are known to have swayed governments, and its social cartoons captured to perfection the tenor of life as it was lived in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its pages attracted the most talented cartoonists of the time — Tenniel, Fougasse, Searle, Scarfe, included — and the finest comic writers eagerly wrote for it: Thackeray, Wodehouse, Wilde, Muggeridge, among them. It was not a magazine, but an institution. In England, and across the Atlantic in the United States, people waited week after week for its issues. In India, it was not that easily available. But from time to time I still take out from my bookshelf, an anthology of some of its best articles and cartoons — The Laughter Omnibus — and, leafing through its pages, break into a smile. Even into audible laughter, sometimes. With all my fondness for the magazine, however — and this I cite as a measure of my own ignorance — I was not aware, till recently, that the English Punch had countless imitators, or counterparts, in India, right in the colonial times: all of them carrying — firmly and unabashedly, the name Punch — and nearly all of them published in Urdu. There was a Punch published from Delhi, thus; one from Agra; another from Lahore; one even from Rohilkhand. As many as 70 periodicals bearing the name, but adding the name of the place from where it was published — Rajputana Punch, Lahore Punch, Delhi Punch, for example — are spoken of in a delightful new publication: Professor Mushirul Hasan’s Wit and Humour in Colonial North India. At the head of them all, undoubtedly on account of its superior content and unrelenting wit, stood The Avadh Punch, founded in 1877 by a distinguished writer, Munshi Sajjad Hussain. Inspired clearly by various English and some Indian comic papers, the Munshi set up a lithographic press in Lucknow; the first issue came out on the 16th of January, 1877: in lithographed Urdu, folio size, 8 pages, each page with two or three columns, each column consisting of 35 words. The title page carried a large graphic: a man dressed clown-like, wearing a Turkish cap, holding sheaves of paper, with his tongue protruding out of his mouth, almost as if he had just made sly fun of someone but had already started apologising for it. Everything on the page was in Urdu — the volume and number of the issue, the rates of subscription, terms for subscribers, etc — except for two bold inscriptions in English, one announcing the name of the periodical, Avadh Punch, and the other like a motto on the man’s ample waist: "Life is Pleasure". The sketch, drawn by Wazir Ali, was undistinguished, even a bit crude perhaps, but it announced the intent of the magazine perfectly: to provide fun, through wit and satire, jest and caricature. In later issues, the graphic was changed, and became much subtler, the line more refined, visual allusions to the English Punch becoming more evident, and the awkwardly phrased motto, ‘Life is Pleasure’ being replaced by the far more agreeable saying in Urdu: "Zindagi zinda-dili ka naam hai". As years went by, the Avadh Punch became a leading publication growing, with time, not only in subtlety and genial dignity, but also in influence. The cartoons it carried, something which lent it a distinct edge, became sharper and more incisive, and were drawn with far surer hands than to begin with: musavvirs like ‘Shauq’ and Kanwar Bahadur and Lal Bahadur, unknown otherwise to art history, turning out some delectable images. To the pages of the magazine were drawn writers who are celebrated in the history of Urdu literature: Ratan Nath Sarshar, Akbar Ilahabadi, Brij Narain Chakbast, Abdul Halim Sharar. Munshi Sajjad Hussain himself, a nationalist and a man of liberal views, wrote with flair on wide-ranging themes that touched as much upon the colonial government’s excesses and the indifference of bureaucracy to the hypocrisy and the narrow-mindedness of our own people. In his book, Professor Mushirul Hasan takes us through all this with wit and gravity, shedding, as he goes along, light upon the eventful colonial times during which the magazine stayed active. The Avadh Punch remains a prism through which he makes us see those events and those times — to be sure, his canvas is much wider than the magazine alone — but the insights and the sharp analyses that he offers are his own. A whole period unfolds itself here, the selection of cartoons reproduced in the book offering a lucid running commentary on the times, as it were. There they all are, issues and rivalries and cogitations: the founding of the Indian National Congress, the Tibet campaigns, the Turko-Russian war, the Home Rule Bill, the proposed changes in the Indian political set-up, the Swadeshi movement, the confrontation between traditional values and ‘imported culture’. In these pages, Sir Syed Ahmed appears as a snake-charmer wandering around with a been; Lord Lytton breaks, Rama-like, the bow to win the hand of Afghan territories; Oudh appears like a fat and tight-fisted baniya being hauled up for making no contribution to the Great Exhibition; the Swadeshi movement appears like a giant bird holding the serpent of foreign-goods in its talons; India sits like a half-clad forlorn woman as Gladstone passes by courting the maiden called Ireland. Unfortunately, however, today’s reader, unfamiliar with Urdu or Persian, will miss the ironies and the satirical intent of the captions to the cartoons, for they are all in those languages. How does one capture the flavour of those biting but genteel words of Akbar Ilahabadi’s on Sir Syed Ahmed: "Sayyad ki roshni ko Allah rakhe qayam/ batti bahut hai moti raughan bahut hi kam hai", or of Zauq’s couplet which appears below a cartoon in which an Indian accuses his English master of indifference to the famine in Kashmir: "Chhurane se na chhoote ga, arey qatil na ban larka/ wafadaaron ke khoon ka daagh kya dhabba hai keechad ka?" However one translates, the relish is gone. And yet what else can one do? The Avadh Punch wound up in 1934. Still, however, much remains of it, and by reminding us of it in this work, Professor Mushirul Hasan has brought us a gift from the past.
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