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Chatterjee, Sourav. "The Itineraries of a Medium: Bengali Comics, and New Ways of Reading." Interdisziplinäre Zeitschrift für Südasienforschung 5 2019. Accessed 27Feb. 2020. <https://crossasia-journ ... izsa/article/view/10443>. Added by: joachim (2/28/20, 9:04 AM) Last edited by: joachim (2/28/20, 9:05 AM) |
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| Resource type: Web Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed DOI: 10.11588/izsa.2019.5.10443 BibTeX citation key: Chatterjee2019 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: Caricature, India Creators: Chatterjee Collection: Interdisziplinäre Zeitschrift für Südasienforschung |
Views: 23/767
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| Attachments | URLs https://crossasia- ... article/view/10443 |
| Abstract |
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When the nineteenth-century social reformers with their prescribed practices and trenchant pulpiteering failed to revive the virility of bootlick and sycophant Bengali bābus (the genteel class), political cartoonists pompously rose to intercede in the dispute. Political cartoonists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, like Prannath Datta (1840–1886), Gaganendranath Tagore (1867–1938), and Binoy Basu (1895–1959) realized that ākhꞋṛās or gymnasiums, wrestling, body-building, and martial arts were inadequate to trigger a seismic rearrangement in the disposition of the English-educated debauched and profligate bābus because the prevalent decadence, corruption, and colonial complicity had already hindered the out-come of such social reforms in the first place. Political cartoonists in late colonial Bengal, therefore, assumed the public role of stripping the bābus of their accoutrements of Western modernity with the artistic deployment of satire and caricature. This lecherous, imitative, pretentious, anglophile bābu became a cultural stereotype in late colonial Bengal that allowed it to metastasize into a fecund trope of caricature, parody, and literary imagination.
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