The War of Images: Mohammed Ali Jinnahand Editorial Cartoons in theIndian Nationalist Press, 1947 (2003)

The anti-colonial nationalist movement in India was significantly constituted by propagandizing popular art and literature at the same time as it established new and popular modes of expression. Literature proscribed by the government and newspaper culture of the decades leading to Independence (1920-1947) attest to the above as, does the fact that the editorial policy of newspapers it supported absorbed the colonial government. (1) The shift in the movement from mass protest to constitutional negotiations, that occurred around 1945, also saw an intriguing shift in the place of the press. From being central because of its propagandizing power, it became, seemingly, about as marginal as the people themselves, returned to a press's usual role as 'disseminator' of information. It could be argued, however, that the press occupied an even more critical place between 1945 and 1947 for in these years it was the only public forum that continued to legitimize the participation of a people aggressively lobbied previously by leaders keen first to organize and then maintain the momentum of the anti-colonial movement. (2) In the culminating year, 1947, editorial pages are given over to polemical debate and political problem solving--should there be one or two nations? Where should the boundaries be located and in accordance with what principles?--that parallel similar debates occurring behind closed doors at the political centre. While letters to the editor, articles, aphorisms, gossip columns are lively indeed, and obsessively political, editorial cartoons surpass these forums of opinion in their wrestling with a vexed political process by recoursing to heavily inflammatory visual rhetoric. (3) It is, of course, in the nature of editorial cartoons to be polemical and inflammatory. What makes such rhetoric surprising in this instance is the fact that censorship and self-monitoring were never more severe than in 1947. Judging by the prolific production of such cartoons in 1947, the genre itself escaped the censor's eye but not the ever-watchful eye of the public, some of who comment on the 'injudicious' nature of cartoons on their leaders. (4) In these years, the political cartoon is, literally, a radical intervention in a discursive field heavily determined and weighted by a naturalized 'consciousness' of the need to be very circumspect. Considering what kind of 'frank' social history leaks out in editorial pages in this last and exclusionary stage of the movement is a large and fascinating project. Here I attempt to unpack the editorial culture of nationalist newspapers such as the Hindustan Times, Tribune, Pioneer, the National Herald, Janata and Leader as such a culture was inscribed in the (playful) form of the political cartoon. (5) I do so by directing attention to the figure to appear most consistently in the nationalist press's English-language dailies and weeklies, in 1947, and to have provoked the most anxiety, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the All India Muslim League and, for the Congress, the most intractable figure of opposition to their own, and 'modern,' view of a state. (6) In addition to considering the discourse that builds around the figure of Jinnah as well as what authorizes it, I attempt to establish the kind of untidy intermixture and complexity, to borrow terms from Gyan Prakash, that typified the thinking and rhetorical expression of an elite anxious to be read by the world community as the generation responsible for bringing India into modernity. (7) Although it is inadvisable to read texts, visual or otherwise, by a single individual or group as representative, in the instance of the cartoon, there is perhaps some ground for making qualified claims for a larger culture based on such a reading. A commonplace understanding of the genre is that it is clearly motivated to convince its readership. Given this overriding objective, to communicate, the political cartoon draws on the cultural collective for its performative, formal and thematic aspects. …