Indian Institute of Cartoonists is a one-of-its-kind school dedicated to cartooning.
Veteran cartoonist R K Laxman celebrated his 90th birthday last week. His contemporary and equally well-known cartoonist Mario Miranda is now 85. An entire generation of giants in cartooning seems to be fading away so what of the next? “There is no dearth of talent in India, it just needs to be honed,” says V G Narendra, managing trustee of the Indian Institute of Cartoonists.
The 10-year-old institute, off MG Road, is the only one of its kind in the country dedicated exclusively to promoting cartooning — there is even a plaque in Narendra’s office from the Limca Book of Records mentioning this. Narendra hopes the institute can do its bit in grooming the next wave of talent — contests for cartoonists are held with generous cash prizes on offer and by next year, there will be regular workshops for budding cartoonists.
The institute was a dream for Narendra, a political cartoonist with over three decades of experience including stints with the famous Shankar’s Weekly and the Free Press Journal. The institute was initially run out of his home but a cartoon he did following a favourable court verdict for Ashok Kheny, the managing director of Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprises, caught the latter’s attention. Kheny offered Narendra a 2,000 square foot space to set up the institute and gallery, inaugurated in August 2007.
Narendra is effusive in his praise of Kheny as a promoter of the art of cartooning and understandably so, though the man himself is more well-known for the controversial Bangalore-Mysore infrastructure corridor. Most recently, a complaint was reportedly filed against him by the relative of a murdered individual who lost his land to the NICE project and was protesting against further land acquisition, though no charges have been proven.
The institute, nonetheless, runs on Kheny’s benevolence and Narendra says he has also agreed to its expansion, initially to Gulbarga and Hubli in Karnataka and eventually to other places in the country. Till date, there have been 58 cartoon exhibitions in the gallery, with the inaugural one running for a record three months. Miranda, who is currently serving as the chief patron of the institute, and Laxman have both exhibited their works here.
An exhibition of Laxman’s previously unseen cartoons recovered from his brother R K Narayan’s house and donated by his nephew will be held next year. The biggest attraction for cartoonists, especially for the less-established ones, would be that the gallery does not charge for the exhibitions — the cartoonists only have to bear the costs of the inaugural function and the publicity. “We try and have at least 12 exhibitions a year,” says Narendra.
One of the major contests the gallery had held was a Manmohan Singh caricature contest, with a first prize of Rs 1 lakh, sponsored by the V R Deshpande Memorial Trust. Both the first and second prizes in the competition were bagged by Iranians! The gallery has recently been refurbished and is now awaiting its next exhibition which will be by a cartoonist from Hyderabad, followed by one by a Chennai-based cartoonist. “They are queueing up,” says a proud Narendra, who is chock-full of plans for the institute’s expansion.
