IN MARCH THIS YEAR, the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi celebrated the work of the cartoonist Attupurathu Mathew Abraham – or Abu Abraham, as he was popularly known – at the Durbar Hall in Ernakulam. This was the first ever full retrospective of Abu’s cartoons, writings and sketches, and was curated by Abu’s daughters Janaki and Ayisha Abraham. Speaking at the opening ceremony, M K Sanoo, the noted writer and thinker from Kerala, spoke about how Abu’s corpus of sketches and writings must be seen as an archive of how a Malayali viewed India and the world.
Abu grew up in the quiet coastal town of Quilon, now Kollam, in the 1920s, during a period when Kerala was transitioning from centuries-old feudal and caste-based societal structures and dreaming of a more egalitarian future. Abu grew up, in other words, in a Kerala that embraced movements for social justice, equality and, indeed, Indian nationalism. He would leave Quilon at the age of 15 to study in Trivandrum, following which he would move to Bombay, Delhi and then to England, where he spent nearly two decades honing his skills as an artist and writer. Abu eventually moved back to India and came to realise in his own words, that “Quilon was not just a town” he lived his early years in but rather “something which had become a part” of him. He passed away in Thiruvananthapuram – the renamed Trivandrum – at the age of 78, in 2002.
At first glance, the corpus of Abu’s sketches – a large collection of which were on exhibit in Ernakulam until 21 April – suggests an outlook more cosmopolitan than any typically Malayali perspective. It shows Abu’s nuanced understanding of society not just in India and England, where he lived, but also in conflict areas far removed from his homes – as his sketches from Palestine, Vietnam and Bangladesh illustrate. Janaki Abraham, a professor of sociology at Delhi University, told me her father keenly followed the Israel-Palestine issue, and the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip would have affected him deeply.
After over a decade living and working in London, Abu returned to India and worked as a political cartoonist with the Indian Express between 1969 and 1981. By this time, his works had appeared in the satirical magazine Punch and the British national tabloid Daily Sketch, as well as in Tribune, The Observer and The Guardian. No matter where it appeared, there was something very uniquely humanistic about Abu’s work – a trait that we can only better appreciate if we look closely at not just Abu the cartoonist but also Abu the politician.