Cartooning Through Crisis: The Case of Abu in India’s Emergency Years 1975-77

This paper is an attempt to understand the communicative potential of political cartoons in the face of censorship. The Emergency Years in India (1975-77) saw the most stringent censorship of mass media in the public sphere in independent India, and thus has been chosen as the period of study. The cartoonist Abu Abraham, who continued to draw cartoons for the national daily Indian Express throughout the period and claims to have not been disturbed much by censorious authorities becomes the axis of this analysis. Taking cues from theorists Judith Butler and Louis Althusser, the paper focusses on the techniques and strategies employed by Abraham in his cartoons that allowed most of his cartoons to pass through the censorship filters, and still make an impact on the general public.