2

PARODY / Colonial Mimicry, Colonial Parody, and the Multiplicity of Punch

In September 2012, the Indian cartoonist Assem Trivedi was arrested for sedition under Section 124a and his website, Cartoons against Corruption, was taken down. A year earlier, as part of an anticorruption movement, Trivedi had launched an internet campaign to disseminate and popularize cartoon-based critiques of the Indian government through social media in order to send “a strong message to the masses.”1 One of the cartoons that prompted the government crackdown was “Gang Rape of Mother India.”

The cartoon’s use of gang rape as a metaphor for corruption at a time when Indian feminists were calling for more sensitive media treatment of its quotidian and widespread nature is lamentable, not least because the gendering of the nation through figures like “Mother India” contributes to the use of rape as a tool of political struggle and a way of flexing patriarchal privilege, especially in the face of other forms of disenfranchisement.2

Yet Trivedi drew negative attention mainly because of his alleged disrespect for his harshest critic, the government. In this way his arrest is part of the living history of colonial censorship, rooted in a time when Indian critics and their British rulers were engaged in a struggle for control over the representation of political power. Because this struggle was metaphorized in affective terms via the law against disaffection, it often took on gendered dimensions. If disaffection meant hatred of the government (or even just “want of affection,” according to a Bombay judge), then the ideal colonized subject loved their ruler—an ideologeme that played into the notion of the colony as female, and thus to its frequent depiction in Indian periodicals as Mother India under assault.

FIGURE 2.1 / “Gang Rape of Mother India,” 2012. https://cartoonsagainstcorruption.blogspot.com/search/label/dirty.

The struggle for control of the public sphere was racialized, as we have seen, not only through the use of censorship law but also via racist writing and images, particularly caricatures.3 Racialization was chiefly used to discredit Indian critics in two ways: (1) by characterizing them as mentally inferior mimic men, incapable of original or rational thought, and (2) by depicting their critiques of British rule as racially motivated and inherently disaffected because they were driven by passion rather than reason.

In a speech delivered to his constituency in Arbroath on October 21, 1907, John Morley, then secretary of state for India, defended himself against accusations of illiberalism for his policies in India by arguing that “the root of the unrest, discontent, and sedition . . . is racial and not political. Now, that being so, it is of the kind that is the very hardest to reach. You can reach political sentiment. Racial dislike, perhaps some would call it in some cases hatred—it is a dislike not of political domination, but of our racial domination.”4 He had attempted to counter this dislike, he goes on to say, by adding Indian membership to the Council of India (which served his office in an advisory capacity)—an action that contradicts his claim about the irrelevance of politics to Indian dissent. But the most noteworthy aspect of this speech is the way it places sedition, discontent, and racial animosity side by side, thus making legitimate political critique impossible because of its equivalence to sedition and racism. While the word “race” in this period could mean cultural, hemispheric, biological or phenotypical difference, or a combination of these, the significance here is the way political domination and material exploitation is displaced onto difference and affect, or “racial dislike.”

Like the Charlie Hebdo killings in France in 2015, Trivedi’s work and his arrest demonstrate how the enduring inflammatory potential of political cartoons is rooted in the colonial history of visual caricature.5 In what follows, I will show how the connections between cartoons, racism, and debates about freedom of the press—and the constructs of affect through which these debates are articulated—are illuminated by the history of imperial censorship that this book traces. Here and in subsequent chapters, I demonstrate how attempts to evade censorship affected the formal tactics used by critics in the Indian Anglosphere. Practices of mimicry, parody, and inversion had particular purchase in the English-language press because imitative form allowed Indian writers and editors to potentially evade censorship while addressing a British audience in terms both familiar and familial (Indian journals based on British ones could position themselves as their siblings or offspring and were referred to as such—British Punch described Indian versions of Punch as its “cousins,” for example).6 Since British journalism was upheld as the exemplum of public discourse that Indian writing should imitate in order to avoid accusations of intemperance, many Indian English-language periodicals echoed the form of popular British periodicals, but with a parodic difference. The widespread practice of print mimicry helped define the limits of empire as a viable public, a political entity, and a form of affiliation.

In this chapter, I focus on the relationship between three journals that circulated within the imperial public sphere which united Britain with its colonies: Punch , the Indian Charivari, a British-run magazine based in Calcutta, and Hindi Punch, a Indian journal based in Bombay and published in Gujarati and English. Imitation is crucial to their relationship to each other; the Indian Charivari and Hindi Punch were based on the form of British Punch, while all three employed parody, a form of satire that involves critical imitation of the text being parodied.

Parody—and visual caricature in particular—was a particularly successful and widely traveled transnational mode in the colonial context, and one that sheds light on the relationship between literary form and historical transformation. In making this claim, I draw upon Homi Bhabha’s influential account of colonial mimicry but use the concept of parody to rethink his theory about the function of colonial discourse. Rather than evacuating the political implications of Bhabha’s analysis, I suggest that a sharper formal focus on the specific iterations of mimicry in print culture—of which parody was one—draws out questions of agency and history that remain submerged in his account.

Parody vs. Mimicry

To date, imitation in the colonial context has most often been understood through the lens of Bhabha’s work, though it was also central to the work of Ashis Nandy. Both critics theorize colonial imitation through psychological and psychoanalytic paradigms. By focusing in this chapter on colonial parody rather than mimicry, I argue that an analysis of imitation that foregrounds form (how parody works) and material circulation (how parodic texts circulated) helps us understand the ways in which the colonial discourse these critics so influentially diagnosed was reshaped by it. If theories of colonial mimicry unpack contradictions and tensions in the colonizer/colonized relationship, the theory of colonial parody offered here demonstrates how parodic forms create change over time by shifting the power relation between colonial and anticolonial representation. As others have argued, parody both incorporates its object and displaces it, positioning it in the past.7 At the same time, I suggest, its analytical stance points toward a future in which its critique has weakened the purchase of the original, while reiteration has diluted its originality and impact—a powerful effect, particularly in the face of virulent racist caricature. Viewed in this light, colonial parody has a temporal logic that distinguishes it from colonial mimicry and accounts more fully for the transformative power of imitative form, while also helping to explain the popularity of parody as an anticolonial mode.

In The Intimate Enemy, Nandy chiefly explores the idea of colonial imitation via the colonized’s emulation of the colonizer: “In the colonial culture, identification with the aggressor bound the rulers and the ruled in an unbreakable dyadic relationship. . . . Many Indians . . . saw their salvation in becoming more like the British, in friendship or in enmity.”8 For Bhabha, however, mimicry is “one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge.”9 It is both “reform, regulation and discipline” and a “difference or recalcitrance” within that regime of discipline that “coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers.”10 Mimicry, Bhabha contends, “necessarily raises the question of the authorization of colonial representations” because “in ‘normalizing’ the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms.” In Bhabha’s account, then, mimicry is the logic of colonial power and also a way of naming the contradictions therein.

In its desire for “a reformed, recognizable Other,” mimicry is intrinsically ambivalent because the colonial subject has to be both an other but also knowable and visible: “a subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite.”11 Thus, Thomas Babington Macaulay infamously called for the creation of “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”12 Symbolizing this “class of persons,” the figure of the babu explored in chapter 1 is a loaded and vexing one precisely because he epitomizes this ambivalence. While caricatures of the babu were particularly prevalent in India in Kalighat paintings, they also circulated between Britain and India via British Punch, the Indian Charivari, and other forms of illustrations such as the one from Kim reproduced in chapter 1.

An example is this image from British Punch that appeared in the magazine in 1895 as part of a serialized novel about the exploits of Baboo Jabberjee (Figure 2.2). As the lady’s snigger indicates, the babu figure here is a comic one, presumably because he dresses like an English gentleman. But since mimicry is always ambivalent, Bhabha argues, it can easily slide into menace: a turn from what he calls “a difference that is almost nothing but not quite” to “a difference that is almost total but not quite.”13

A cartoon from the Indian Charivari, the Anglo-Indian version of Punch, illustrates a more menacing version of the babu in which he is, at the risk of redundancy, both a parrot and a monkey—a hybrid creature at once comical and monstrous (Figure 2.3). In this image, the “jabber” commonly associated with the babu figure is represented by the doggerel that accompanies the image, which lampoons the Indian press for its grievances against the government by emphasizing its linguistic pretentiousness. As opposed to the sartorial pretentiousness of Baboo Jabberjee, the babu’s critical writings are more immediately threatening, and thus the doggerel and cartoon, despite their comic tenor, more fully register the ambivalence Bhabha describes.

For Bhabha, though, mimicry is not merely the work of power; it also offers opportunities for subversion at those moments when, as he puts it, “the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined.”14 In his writing on hybridity, he contends that “the words of the master become the site of hybridity—the warlike, subaltern sign of the native . . . the repetition of the ‘same’ can in fact be its own displacement, can turn the authority of culture

FIGURE 2.2 / Illustration of Baboo Jabberjee by F. Anstey, Baboo Jabberjee, B.A., 1895, 129. General Reference Collection, British Library. Shelfmark 012206.i.1/51, © British Library Board.

FIGURE 2.3 / “Patriotic Baboo” from Indian Charivari, February 20, 1874, 39. Asia Pacific and Africa Holdings, British Library. Shelfmark SW 238, © British Library Board.

into its own nonsense precisely in the moment of enunciation.”15 As this quote, and his chief examples in “Of Mimicry and Man” demonstrate, Bhabha understands mimicry as something that happens at the level of language or other sign systems, such as images or clothing.

But in cases where Indian editors chose to use parody and its affordances, the process of repetition was a conscious one.16 In this case, visual and literary forms of parody specifically, rather than language more broadly, do the work of generating difference and subversion. The following exploration of Punch variants in the Indian Anglosphere examines the workings and circulation of these forms to understand the way parody produces political effects and, correspondingly, how the potentialities of representation—both visual-verbal and political—change over time. Building on Bhabha’s theory of mimicry, this chapter offers a theory of colonial parody based on a study of its workings in the triangulated relationship between British, Anglo-Indian, and Indian versions of Punch.

Colonial Parody

You’ll be back

Soon you’ll see

You’ll remember you belong to me

You’ll be back

Time will tell

You’ll remember that I served you well

Oceans rise, empires fall

We have seen each other through it all

And when push comes to shove,

I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love . . .

. . . And, no, don’t change the subject

’Cause you’re my favorite subject

My sweet, submissive subject

My loyal, royal subject

Forever and ever and ever and ever and ever

—Lin Manuel-Miranda, Hamilton (2015)

While it has been explored and defined by critics from a range of literary fields and academic disciplines, there is a general consensus that parody involves, in the words of Seymour Chatman, “stylistic imitation for satirical effect.”17 In these Hamilton lyrics, parody works at two different levels—the song of a jilted lover parodies his petty delusions through exaggeration and incongruously jaunty rhythms, while both of these devices are used to parody the affection allegory that structured colonial relationships and the logic that underpinned Section 124a: the idea that colonial exploitation might be understood instead as mutual affection and dependence.

If parody is a “subspecies of satire,” it differs from satire in that its meaning relies on the object it satirizes.18 The parodic text plays off the original with some degree of repetition but also with a difference, either in form or content, that highlights and satirizes some aspect of the prior text. Critics differ, however, as to what parodic element of the text they consider most determining of its satirical effect. Chatman, for example, contends that good parody should be “informative about the features that characterize individual styles.”19 Pierre Bourdieu, in The Field of Cultural Production, locates the change not as much in the form as in the context of the work, arguing from a materialist-sociological perspective that

the meaning of a work . . . changes automatically with each change in the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader. . . . Breaks with the most orthodox works of the past . . . often take the form of parody . . . which presupposes and confirms emancipation . . . the newcomers ‘get beyond’ [‘dépassent’] the dominant mode of thought and expression not by explicitly denouncing it but by repeating and reproducing it in a sociologically non-congruent context, which has the effect of rendering it incongruous or even absurd, simply by making it perceptible as the arbitrary convention it is. . . . Pastiche or parody [is] the indispensable means of objectifying, and thereby appropriating, the form of thought and expression by which they were formerly possessed.20

Margaret Rose, in her transhistorical analysis of “ancient, modern, and postmodern” parody, sees parody as “the comic refunctioning of preformed linguistic or artistic material.” More than Chatman or Bourdieu, she emphasizes the importance of the reader in the proper functioning of parody. Though it can imitate both the form and content of the “preformed” material, it usually changes one or both of these so as to create a critical relationship to the original. For this reason, “the reception of the parody by its external reader will depend upon the latter’s reading of the ‘signals’ given in the parody text which relate to or indicate the relationship between the parody and the parodied text and its associations.”21

Like mimicry, parodic discourse is hybrid and ambiguous. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, it is hybrid because it involves two languages “crossed with each other, as well as two styles, two linguistic points of view, and in the final analysis two speaking subjects.”22 It is ambiguous because parodists can be sympathetic or critical toward their objects, or both (Chatman argues that parody is best defined as “at once ridicule and homage”).23 Pointing out that the term “para” in Greek can mean both nearness and opposition, Rose notes that the parodic text simultaneously inhabits and identifies with its object and reifies it, holding it up for scrutiny. Even the explicitly critical text is ambivalent because, while it makes “the comic discrepancy between the parodist’s style and that of the target text into a weapon against the latter,” it is “refunction[ing] the target’s work for a new and positive purpose.”24 The parodied text is thus both a bad and good object—at least to the extent that it provides fodder for the new, positive purpose.

Colonial parody was a key tactic of disaffection. Instances of colonial parody offered an image of a British or Anglo-Indian public (addressed by the original text) and an Indian counterpublic (addressed by the critique of the original text), and in doing so provided a critique of their object while drawing attention to the contours and limits of imperial citizenship. As well as changes in form and content that contribute to the parody, the shift from public to counterpublic—in Bourdieu’s terms, from the perspective of the “dominant mode of thought and expression” to that of the “newcomers”—is a change in field that alters the meaning of the object being parodied.

A short satirical fictional piece by the Bengali humorist Rajshekhar Basu (best known by his pen name Parashuram), entitled “The Scripture Read Backward,” exemplifies and metaphorizes this change in field by imagining a shift in the space of empire itself: the action takes place in a Britain that has been colonized by India and reverses the logic and dictums of colonial discourse to comic and critical effect. The piece might loosely be described as a play, but one clearly not designed for performance. Far from observing Aristotelian unities of time, it shifts rapidly from one site to another to highlight the different scales empire works at—a kind of sped-up version of the “meanwhile” that Benedict Anderson associates with the novel and newspaper.25 It begins in a local school, where students are being taught “official” history: “The condition of the Europeans is gradually improving. Their greed has been curbed, their barbaric love of luxury dispelled; they look less toward this world and more toward the next. The children of India have crossed the seven seas and thirteen rivers to selflessly spread peace, order, and civilization through these wild and remote lands.”26 At the same time, in a “women’s quarters,” British girls attempt to learn Bengali manners; in Hyde Park, a speaker tries to rally the crowd against the government before being bribed into preaching compliance; and in Germany a local prince describes to a Chinese traveler how he has stayed in India’s political good graces (“I’ve just arranged for everyone in the state to have a happy time—they’re all stoned”), in a compact reference to the effects of British imperialism on China.27

As well as parodying British imperialism by reversing the order of things on the level of content, Basu also deploys parodic form. The play is not only fragmented and made modern by its rapid changes of scene but also by the extracts from newspapers and periodicals that are interspersed throughout it. Some of these are based on real Anglo-Indian periodicals such as the Statesman. But the fictional versions, like the rest of the play, reflect a topsy-turvy world. An ad in one of them for ambergris powder, for instance, declares that “memsahibs need not feel frustrated anymore. This miraculous powder will remove the unfortunate pallor of their skins and give them the complexion of Bengali women.” Basu also plays on the divided public of the Indian Anglosphere, for the paper’s other ad seems to be aimed at Indians rather than their British subjects and satirizes the ads in Anglo-Indian newspapers for packaged British goods: “Don’t ruin your health by eating English biscuits larded with fat. Try our Joy-laddus. They strengthen your teeth. Nothing but ground rice and molasses. Not touched by machine: made by Bengali women with their own hands.”28 In a few short pages, Basu’s writing exposes both the fallacies of its parodic object, liberal imperialism, and elucidates how it operates and circulates through modern forms like the novel, the newspaper, and the ads that appeared in both, as well as through institutions like schools.

As “The Scripture Read Backward” demonstrates, parody is like mimicry in that it imitates and produces difference from that which it copies, thereby calling the authenticity of the original into question.29 But, as Carolyn Williams has contended, parody also makes the original an object of the past, by surpassing it. In her work on Gilbert and Sullivan, Williams defines parody as “powerfully modernizing”: “In taking up its models, parody implicitly leaves them behind or, rather . . . casts them back into the past, treating them as outmoded relics compared with itself.”30

In the colonial context, parodies that targeted colonial governance were able to hold British claims about the backwardness of Indian culture, which often relied on comparisons to Britain’s own feudal past, up for scrutiny. Parody instead cast British rule into the past, both through its form, which leaves behind that which it critiques, and via its content, which represented colonial government as autocratic, fearful, and reactionary—hence backward and passé. Basu’s alternative parodic history makes British rationales for imperialism appear ludicrously, transparently false, and dependent on the power of propagation; once this so-called scripture is read, or analyzed, from a different vantage point, it becomes untenable, as well as antiquated (as the word “scripture” indicates). Basu’s piece was published in 1927, long after the first Indian Punches began to appear in the mid-nineteenth century. But its wicked irreverence built upon the years and years of Indian parodies of imperialist forms, discourse, and imagery that rendered colonial views of India increasingly impotent and unconvincing.

Through the mechanism of parody, the Indian critique of British governance, even in very moderate journals such as Hindi Punch, came to stand in for the modern, both because it displaced and surpassed the object of its critique, to use Williams’s terms, and because, like British Punch, it provided an up-to-the-minute commentary on political developments. In a preface to its 1903 annual, it explicitly identified itself as a modernizing force by taking on colonial stereotypes about Indian torpor: “Hindi Punch has often pondered upon the awful thought and marveled that men in this country should cling to the notion that the old is for ever to be with them. . . . But hark! There’s a gentle whisper in the air! The spirit of novelty, bearing near kinship to change, is at last abroad. The murmur grows in volume.” However ironically the idea of Indian passivity is staged here (as an “awful thought”), Hindi Punch allows it to stand in order to position itself as an engine of progress, sweeping in not only novelty but unity. Punch’s gift, it proclaims, is a meal “from which Hindus, Parsis, Mussalmans, Christians, and others of every caste and creed in this caste-ridden-land, may joyously partake together in one pangat, or company, without the least fear of Excommunication.”31 In this utopian image, imperial stereotypes of a divided, caste-ridden, and stagnant India are definitively surpassed.

The nature of parody, I am arguing, allowed writers and periodicals to contest and reshape the nature of the public sphere which they addressed and the ways it was defined by the criminalization of disaffection. In imitating British Punch, Hindi Punch performed both affection—the filial “taking after” its model that the government sanctioned—and disaffection, a rejection of the model that took the form of ridicule and critique. The Janus-faced nature of parody allowed the rhetoric of affection and disaffection and the space of public and counter-public to exist simultaneously, while strategically making it hard to tell one from the other.

Punch Proliferates: British Punch, Indian Punches, and Hindi Punch

Hindi Punch was only one of many versions of Punch that circulated in India during the years of direct British rule.32 Alongside other forms of comic journalism, there may have been as many as seventy Indian versions of Punch, according to one estimate.33 While the greatest number of unofficial Punches were produced in India, Punch takeoffs proliferated in other parts of the world as well, including Istanbul, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Melbourne.34 Though, as Ritu Khanduri demonstrates, both Indian cartoonists and Punch itself generally considered British Punch the original indigenous parent of all these copies, it was in fact itself derivative of the French satirical magazine Le Charivari (hence its subtitle, “The London Charivari”) and the figure of Punch himself drew from Punch and Judy puppet shows influenced by the Italian Punchinello satiric puppet tradition—a tradition with roots as deep as the ancient world and with multiple global iterations, both ancient and modern.35 Even though the Indian Punches were accused of being upstart imitators of the British version, then, in the hall of mirrors that was the world of Punches in the colonial period, there was no original.36

The British version, Punch; or the London Charivari, did have an impressively broad reach, however, as the abundance of indigenous Punches suggests. An illustrated satirical magazine founded in London by the journalist and social reformer Henry Mayhew, Punch was famous for the political caricatures and satirical drawings about contemporary events that filled its pages, many by influential artists such as John Tenniel. As well as popularizing the use of cartoons as a mode of political critique, it is credited with first giving the word “cartoon” its modern connotations (i.e., comic drawing, or caricature) by using it this way in 1843. By midcentury, it was widely read in literary and political circles and over the course of the century published significant Victorian writers such as William Thackeray, George du Maurier, and Douglas Jerrold and, later on, equally renowned twentieth-century ones such as P. G. Wodehouse, Sylvia Plath, and Penelope Fitzgerald (it survived, with varying degrees of success, into this century, finally folding in 2002).

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Punch was commercially successful, selling fifty to sixty thousand copies a week.37 At this point, it had established itself as the magazine of respectable satire, staffed by members of the professional classes and with content that shied away from the politically malicious or sexually outré caricatures associated with other illustrated magazines. Yet it nonetheless “saw no contradiction between avoiding personality and caricature for elite politicians and subjecting minorities or marginal groups such as the Irish, Catholics, Jews, and colonial native peoples to unpleasant and cruel treatment.”38 Punch was produced by woodblock printing, which made the production of illustrated periodicals in particular faster and less work-intensive. The technique that allowed Punch to enhance its profitability and cultural influence by readily reproducing back issues and collected volumes was called stereotyping and the magazine’s influence and reach also contributed to the etymological and phenomenological emergence of the other kind of stereotype—that associated with portable and recognizable racial and ethnic caricature.

Both Punch’s popularity, and its corollary ability to generate stereotypes, had much to do with its engagement with colonial events—in particular the 1857 Rebellion, which led to a surge in circulation. “Iconographic elements in Punch . . . emerged in relation to the market in colonial India,” Khanduri notes, because colonial administrators and military personnel were an important part of its readership.39 Tenniel’s famous cartoon about the Rebellion, “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger,” helped make empire a subject to which its visual style seemed well-suited, for cartoons could produce an immediate affective response more powerful than verbal accounts of political events; “cartoons evoked sense and sentiment: terror, horror, and fear constitute the vocabulary for translating a visual form.”40

Punch’s proprietors were aware not only of the importance of empire as subject matter but also as a source of potential markets and developed ambitions to produce multiple versions of their satirical magazine for different colonial regions; “Punch proclaimed its exalted status by noting its influence and its role as a model for political satire in the colonies and elsewhere.”41

Figure 2.5 depicts Punch jumping through a hoop that is also a map of the world, held up by two figures of ambiguous ethnicity, but clearly meant to be indigenous. Punch himself wields a bow and arrow, another signifier of indigeneity, perhaps suggestive of his ability to beat indigenous Punches at their own game. This goal was never achieved, however, for British Punch failed to expand significantly in India, perhaps because of the growing popularity and abundance of vernacular Punches that rapidly entered the colonial public sphere from the mid-nineteenth century onward, muddying the commercial waters.42

Because of their appearance in the second half of the nineteenth century and decline after World War II, the existence of so many Punch variants has been read by critics as an effect of British global hegemony in the period and the flexibility of Punch’s form as a response thereto; the indirect and comic nature of this particular form of satire served as a mask for serious dissent.43 Since both satire and parody had a long history in Britain, flourishing in periodical culture from the eighteenth century onward, it may have been more acceptable as a form of criticism than other, more direct modes.44 In India in particular, the law against disaffection no doubt made Punch an attractive model, for its humor gave a light-hearted flavor to political critique and the Indian Punches could appear to be eager students of British publishing norms. Indeed, as noted earlier, British Punch acknowledged Hindi Punch as colonial kin, referring to it as “family” and as its “Indian cousin.”45 But as Khanduri points out, the familial alibi performed by Indian journals was a recognizably cagey one: “Both officials of the colonial state and newspaper proprietors were cognizant that using the British Punch as a template for humor aesthetics offered a particularly effective challenge to British claims of liberal governance.”46

FIGURE 2.4 / “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger” by Sir John Tenniel, Punch vols. 32–33, August 22, 1857, 76–77. Courtesy of NYU Special Collections.

The colonial state thus kept a close eye on the vernacular Punches, just as it did on other potentially subversive publications; “For the colonial government, the profusion and popularity of the comic newspapers, particularly in the vernacular, transformed satire into something dangerous and therefore worthy of surveillance.”47 Notices that appeared in Hindi Punch from other newspapers

FIGURE 2.5 / Frontispiece to Punch, 1857. Courtesy of NYU Special Collections.

(including British ones such as the Manchester Guardian and the Graphic, as well as similar publications such as Melbourne Punch) suggested that the government had good reason to worry about its effects outside India as well as within. Applauding it for its illustrations and astute political sensibility, the Manchester Guardian stated that Hindi Punch might well change British public support for empire by altering “the popular estimate of the Hindu as simply a ‘native.’ If these cartoons appeal to the average Hindu, he must be credited with a sense of humour and quite average intelligence.”48

If the format of Punch was appealing to Indian journalists because it potentially helped mask the force of political critique, it may also have been popular because it fit well with existing Indian satirical and comic modes, such as the Kalighat caricatures (see chapter 1). Historians of the Indian Punches have also noted that the character of Punch recalled the clown tradition of Sanskrit drama, while simultaneously evoking the word panc, which has connotations of local and collective wisdom (panc refers to the number five, and village councils, made up of that number, were known as panchayats, and the head of council as the sarpanch, or leader of five).49 Furthermore, Mr. Punch as a narrator figure evoked the “figure of the kathak, a speaker or narrator of scriptural or mythological stories.”50 The fact that Punch was both a visual and verbal form also helps explain its appeal as a vehicle for political commentary, as it could be appropriated by a range of Indian languages (“Mr. Punch appeared in his various incarnations speaking Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati and English in colonial comic papers,” Khanduri notes) and could potentially appeal to the nonliterate—a point that Trivedi, the contemporary satirist mentioned at the start of this chapter makes when he describes his desire to reach a mass audience through his cartoon website.51 Produced more quickly and easily than many other forms of art, cartoons could also serve as a portable visual vocabulary for the burgeoning nationalist movement through the portrayal of iconic figures such as the Bengal tiger and the stalwart elephant (which came increasingly to represent the nationalist movement), as well as figures like Mother India. For all these reasons, the Punches, and other publications that employed cartoons, were popular media forms during the colonial period which circulated as widely as regular nonillustrated newspapers.52

The importance of cartoons to the nationalist movement is underscored by Gandhi’s efforts to create a politicized, critically astute, and broad newspaper readership through his periodical Indian Opinion, published in South Africa in English, Hindi, Gujarati, and Tamil from 1903 to 1915.53 Khanduri notes that “the term ‘cartoon’ made an early appearance in the political vocabulary that Gandhi formulated with the help of his readers,” and that he emphasized the ways “the making and reading of the cartoon was a political act, deserving of their attention.”54 To emphasize their significance to political discourse, he reprinted cartoons from Hindi Punch and analyzed them in detail; “His exegesis of the cartoons signaled his recognition of the lack of cultural capital, thus political capital, among the expatriate Indian readers of Indian Opinion” and his efforts to remediate this lack.55

The Indian Punches, particularly those that closely imitated the style of British Punch, did similar critical work by highlighting the verbal-visual semiotics of colonial discourse through their ongoing response to cartoons and caricatures in the British and Anglo-Indian press. If British Punch was parodic because of its irreverent imitation of the appearance, rituals, and rhetoric of British politics and public life, Hindi Punch was doubly so, for its imitative form satirized the visual-verbal forms of British Punch and the politics of racist representation and caricature. Of the many vernacular Indian Punches that existed in the period, I focus on this publication because it was an influential example of the comic journal tradition, with a relatively long print run and robust sales compared to most of the other publications.56 More importantly for this book, though, it was clearly in conversation with British and Anglo-Indian publications, not only because of its dual-language format and its close adherence to the form of British Punch, but also because it reached audiences in Britain. While Hindi Punch did not have a distribution office there, it sent copies to various British periodicals for commentary, and was frequently extracted in W. T. Stead’s Review of Reviews. An ad for Stead’s publication also appeared in its own pages, suggesting their synergistic relationship (Khanduri points out that cartoons were appealing to Stead because of their accessibility, a quality essential to his publishing philosophy, as discussed in the next chapter).57 The fact that British Punch claimed kinship to Hindi Punch also suggests that it recognized the Indian publication’s influence in the imperial public sphere more broadly—a space that the British publication was itself trying to impact.

Despite its name, Hindi Punch was published in English and Gujarati, not Hindi, and was originally named Parsee Punch (the word “Hindi” in the period was rarely a reference to the language, as it is today, but more often used to denote “India” in a nationalist tenor). One of the earliest Indian Punches, it was founded in 1854, not long after British Punch, which launched in 1841.58 Parsee Punch was initially designed to appeal to, and consolidate, the small but influential merchant class of Parsis in Bombay, but also to provoke a national conversation about reform; for this latter reason, it eventually changed its name to Hindi Punch to broaden its appeal.59

Unlike its British predecessor, which used wood engraving for its illustrations, Hindi Punch used lithography as its printing method, like many other Indian periodicals of the time. Graham Shaw traces the first example of lithography in printing in India to 1822, after which it was widely used (in Britain, by contrast, letter-press remained the chief means of print production). In India, Shaw argues, lithography was preferable to letter-press printing during this period of a burgeoning print culture for a number of reasons: “It was far simpler and quicker to master than typography; it was less cumbersome and more portable involving less equipment; and it was cheaper, appealing therefore to the amateur or small-scale operator in particular.”60

The particular appeal of lithography to Indians is evidenced by the fact that it was not widely used by missionaries for Bible production, who may have found it more impermanent-feeling in comparison to the letter-press they were used to, and thus “totally inappropriate for a message of eternal truth.” For Indian publishers, however, the reverse was true: “It was the letter-press printing page which lacked visual authority, being totally alien to traditional Indian book production. It was still the manuscript which was vested with visual and cultural authority and this was the key to lithography’s rapid acceptance and lasting appeal.”61 Lithography would have been particularly appealing to periodicals that used cartoons, and that were published in different languages—like Hindi Punch—because it allowed for different scripts and a greater range of visual effects, as well as the integration of text and image (whereas in letter-press printing, wood-engraved images are inserted independently of the letter blocks). Printing method was thus another difference between British Punch and the Indian Punches that might have added to the satiric effect of the Indian caricatures; they looked (and were) hand-drawn and quickly produced, and thus more spontaneous and scrappy.

Hindi Punch announced its reformist agenda in its first editorial, stating that “A comic journal plays a good part in the development of the political and social reform of a country and it shall be always our aim and desire to advance that end.”62 But it also positioned itself as moderate and sent one of its issues to the India Office for approval. According to Partha Mitter, the journal did receive the government’s “guarded approval” but “with the comment that the paper was necessarily one-sided.”63 After Congress was established in 1885, however, it became more explicitly political, especially in its commentary on freedom of the press and the animosity of Anglo-Indian newspapers toward reform and Indian culture in general.64

Punch, Counterpunch

In the turn-of-the century period I focus on here, Hindi Punch was run by Barjorji Naoroji, a supporter of moderate elements in Congress and a vociferous critic of the more revolutionary forms of nationalism that emerged over the course of his magazine’s publication. Anarchism, for example, was just as often a target of satire as the colonial government. In fact, in its imitation of a British periodical and its use of English alongside Gujarati in its captions and articles, Hindi Punch could easily be read as a “loyal” publication: an explicit goal of editors who wished to evade censorship (because, according to Section 124a, critique of the government was acceptable as long as a publication demonstrated loyalty as well). The first title page of the journal thus announced that it was published “Under the Patronage of H. E. Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Viceroy and Governor-General of India” and many images and headings celebrated British rule and royalty in the manner of British Punch. Figure 2.6, for instance, was published to celebrate the succession of Edward VII as emperor of India after Victoria, and depicts a somber Panchoba (Hindi Punch’s Punchinello narrator figure) singing alongside equally devout-looking women.

But the magazine was increasingly ambivalent in its loyalties over time: seven years later, on the occasion of the Delhi Durbar held to commemorate the coronation of George V, an image of a different flavor appeared on the cover (Figure 2.7). Here, Panchoba is more comically rendered and the British flag is repurposed as an elephant diaper so that the publication’s performances of loyalty read as insincere and its parodic elements as the “travesty of high genres and lofty models embodied in national myth” that Bakhtin associates with classical iterations of the genre. As in classical parody, the “high” culture of royal pageantry is “contemporized and brought low, into the everyday.”65 The image also echoes one that appeared on the cover of British Punch in 1858, after the quashing of the 1857 Rebellion and the Queen’s Proclamation declaring that she had taken over governance of India from the East India Company (Figure 2.8).

In this illustration, the elephant kneels awkwardly, signifying its obeisance, and is dominated by Mr. Punch, who is disproportionately large and dances on the elephant’s head, contributing to its discomfited appearance. The Indian version, however, reverses the elephant’s stance, making it giddily, actively upright; rather than being danced upon, it dances beside Panchoba, who encourages its revelry.

Alongside its deployment of cartoons and caricature, Hindi Punch’s use of two languages helped it navigate the treacheries of a racialized public sphere. Most English-language periodicals were monolingual but nonetheless spoke to different audiences—those in Britain, the British in India, and formally educated Indians who could read English (though the Indian audience would have extended beyond this as individuals might have translated out loud for nonliterate or non-English-speaking listeners). Hindi Punch’s innovative dual-language format, on the other hand, made visible the different audiences

FIGURE 2.6 / “Hind on the Delhi Durbar” from Hindi Punch, 1903–6, 4. Asia Pacific and Africa Holdings, British Library. Shelfmark SW 576, © British Library Board.

addressed by the English-language press and the role of perspective and language in the interpretation of events and their representation. Cartoons were often captioned in both languages: while translations of the Gujarati captions correspond closely to the English ones, the visual effect of the different scripts side by

FIGURE 2.7 / Elephant and Mr. Punch from the cover of Hindi Punch, 1910. Courtesy of New York Public Library.

side literalize the double-coding strategies of Indian Anglophone journals and suggest possible differences in interpretation of the images that might result from linguistic variations, or from the more distanced viewpoint provided by the lens of an Indian language. Some pages of the journal, meanwhile, were exclusively

FIGURE 2.8 / Frontispiece to Punch, 1858. Courtesy of NYU Special Collections.

printed in Gujarati and addressed the Parsi and Indian communities directly with poems and articles, such as “A Parsi Manifesto,” a short polemic urging the Parsi community to unite and strive for political power.66

But it is the journal’s parodic criticisms of imperial rule, of press censorship, and of Anglo-Indian racism that seem most carefully designed to reshape the Indian Anglosphere into one in which the Indian, rather than Anglo-Indian, press, played a vital, truth-telling role as the voice of reason and moderation. Hindi Punch’s parodic cartoons about press censorship, in particular, drew out the race-baiting representations of the Anglo-Indian press and reframed them as the product of irrationality and hysteria.

The Indian Charivari was one of the Anglo-Indian periodicals to which Hindi Punch seemed to be directly responding. If the early Indian Punches were a response to British Punch (and then to each other, as they proliferated), the Indian Charivari was probably itself a response to them, for it appeared in 1872, almost two decades after Hindi Punch was launched. Owned by Colonel Percy Wyndham, the Indian Charivari stated in its “Prospectus” that its goal was to direct “the sharp, pungent sting of wit and humour against the foibles of those around us.” In practice, this usually meant the Indian press, in particular the Bengali bhadralok. The parrot-monkey image mentioned earlier was only one of many that degraded the babu to the position of ape to emphasize his imitative and atavistic qualities.

Figure 2.9, for instance, “The British Lion and the Bengalee Ape” (1873), takes aim at the criticism of the British in the Indian press (as did the doggerel in the parrot-monkey cartoon); the caption of this image specifically cites the Hindoo Patriot, a nationalist periodical, and pokes fun at the Raj’s self-representation: “Therein the Lion has painted himself.” But the lion’s violence quickly changes the monkey’s expression from smugness to pain, so that the cartoon’s satire of the Indian press is also a tacit threat of violent reprisal. Ironically, since it takes issue with imitation via the baboo-monkey, the cartoon was itself a citation, based on an 1848 caricature in British Punch, “The British Lion and the Irish Monkey,” that satirized the Irish nationalist and political journalist, John Mitchel (Figure 2.10).

Here, racism as well as the cartoon itself is derivative; a mode of defanging political critique borrowed from an earlier colonial context and imported to Calcutta to contend with a new form of nationalism.67

FIGURE 2.9 / “The British Lion and the Bengalee Ape” from Indian Charivari, January 24, 1873, 66. Asia Pacific and Africa Holdings, British Library. Shelfmark SW 238, © British Library Board.

Another cartoon from the same period, “The Baboo’s Progress, or What We Are Coming To” (1873), similarly lampoons Indian presumptuousness; in this case it targets ideals of equality and self-rule that were increasingly circulating in the Indian press at the time. A parody of “The Origin of Species,” meanwhile, combines the zoomorphic racism of the parrot-monkey and its critique of the press with the specific concerns about a burgeoning discourse of nationalism by lampooning the idea of Indian “progress” (Figures 2.11 and 2.12).

In response, Hindu Punch parodied the Anglo-Indian parody of the Indian press. Cartoons that did this explicitly were especially prevalent in the magazine after the 1905 Partition of Bengal—an act which separated the predominantly Muslim areas into East Bengal and the predominantly Hindu ones into West Bengal. India’s viceroy, Lord Curzon, who initiated the partition, cited administrative reasons for this drastic action, but it was seen by many Indians as a divide-and-conquer strategy deployed to weaken Bengali anticolonial activity. Instead, the act served as a turning point in the nationalist movement, inspiring political protests ranging from Swadeshi boycotts to terrorist bombings; this led, in turn, to repressive government actions, such as the imprisonment and exile of nationalist leaders, and the arrest of editors, printers, and publishers of nationalist articles. By 1911, however, alarmed by the amount of resistance the partition had inspired, the government reversed its decision and Bengal was reunited.

FIGURE 2.10 / “The British Lion and the Irish Monkey” by John Leech, Punch, vols. 14–15, April 8, 1848. Courtesy of NYU Special Collections.

Hindi Punch remained relatively moderate during this galvanizing period, attacking radical leaders such as Tilak for the repression they had brought down upon moderates and revolutionaries alike and notably steering clear of the Swadeshi and Bande Mataram slogans that characterized the period. But it reacted to this moment through a series of cartoons that criticized both the government and Anglo-Indian newspapers by representing their response to nationalist agitation as overwrought, reactionary, and censorious: in figure

FIGURE 2.11 / “The Coming K____ (The Baboo’s Progress, or What We Are Coming To)” from Indian Charivari, March 7, 1873, 110. As Asia Pacific and Africa Holdings, British Library. Shelfmark SW 238, © British Library Board.

FIGURE 2.12 / “Origin of Species” from Indian Charivari, January 9, 1874, 8. Asia Pacific and Africa Holdings, British Library. Shelfmark SW 576, © British Library Board.

2.13, for example, a doleful Panchoba looks on skeptically while a grotesquely enormous British policeman wields a barbaric torture instrument—the titular cat-o’-nine-tails, consisting of various repressive measures.

In its parodic criticisms of the Anglo-Indian press and the government, Hindi Punch drew upon many of the stereotypes about Indians that had by this time circulated widely in the press and colonial literature but recontextualized them as colonial fantasy. Thus, an image representing the repressive censorship that followed the Partition of Bengal, in its disturbing portrayal of two women bound and gagged, turns liberal British sentiment about the oppression of Indian women on its head by associating the violence of the image with censorious acts of government.

The women, identified by their dress as Muslim and Hindu, are drawn as twin images of Mother India, by now a familiar and iconic figure in the Indian press but, here, bound in a way that suggests sexual vulnerability. Their sisterly appearance and defiantly upturned heads counter British notions of Indian female modesty as well as the idea (notoriously used as a rationale for the partition) of India as internally divided by religion (Figure 2.14).

A cartoon that uses gender similarly, “Liberty in Fetters!” draws together elements of the two others, representing censorship through an image suggestive of sexual violence and the slave trade and thereby contrasting the repressed history of empire to its self-representation, embodied by the smug and dapper British administrator.

The slave cage in which Liberty (identified by her cap with the French Revolution) is of the type used for prisoners taken to the Andaman Islands, the destination for those punished by the state with “transportation for life” under Section 124a. As in figure 2.13, there are two female figures, both allegorical: the uncaged one, Mother India, looks on in “alarm and indignation” at the treatment of Liberty. Significantly, the text underneath this cartoon, which uses these affective terms, stresses the way British policy itself creates the disaffection it seeks to curb. During and after the 1857 uprising, the specter of sexual violence against British women played a crucial role in representations of reprisal and in justifications for various modes of illiberalism such as censorship. In both of these images, however, the bound and gagged women suggest metaphorically that empire acts as a form of violence against Indian integrity; on a more literal level, the intimations of sexual exploitation turn Mutiny-inspired lore about Indian men raping British women on its head by suggesting that Indian women are the ones vulnerable to the predations of British men. These images, then, prefigure the Trevedi cartoon mentioned at the beginning of this chapter (figure 2.1) and, like that one, exploit sexual violence as a bracing metaphor in their political commentary, leaving the lived reality of rape and its connection to political power dynamics to languish at the level of the literal.

FIGURE 2.13 / “A Terrible Cat!” from Hindi Punch, June 7, 1908, 16. Asia Pacific and Africa Holdings, British Library. Shelfmark SW238, © British Library Board.

FIGURE 2.14 / “Gagged!” from Hindi Punch, May 23, 1907, 17. Asia Pacific and Africa Holdings, British Library. Shelfmark SW238, © British Library Board.

FIGURE 2.15 / “Liberty in Fetters!” from Hindi Punch, April 1906, 39. Asia Pacific and Africa Holdings, British Library. Shelfmark SW238, © British Library Board.

Another cartoon from 1907, “The Lyre-(?Liar)-Bird” reverses the accusation of mimicry and irrationality so frequently leveled at the Indian press. The caption, “The Lyrebird is remarkable for its power of imitating the cries and songs of other birds,” along with the words that appear as part of the bird’s plumage, suggests that the British press and colonial public opinion, rather than Indians, are characterized by mindless imitation, hysteria, and dishonesty (“The Lyre-(?Liar)-Bird,” reads the cartoon’s title, spelling out the pun to emphasize its blunt accusation and the disparate resonances of such symbols across the Indian Anglosphere).

FIGURE 2.16 / “The Lyre-(?Liar)-Bird” from Hindi Punch, June 30, 1907, 14. Asia Pacific and Africa Holdings, British Library. Shelfmark SW238, © British Library Board.

A similar critique is launched in an image of a witch doctor stirring a cauldron. In figure 2.17, small sticks representing “sedition,” “strikes,” “riots,” and “dissent” are used to produce an enormous conflagration composed, like the plumage of the lyrebird, of “misrepresentation(s) of the truth” and hysterical affects: fear, panic, and above all, a sense of enmity (the rendering of the witch appears to draw on racial caricatures of colonial subjects—both African and Indian—but here the demonic and primitivized witch-doctor figure is identified with the British, in another instance of parody by reversal).

The caption refers to a speech by John Morley, secretary of state to India, to the British House of Parliament in which he says he must speak with reserve because what he says will be heard by “enemies” “thousands of miles away.” Who are these enemies, Mr. Punch asks? His answer is that “the Scare Manufacturing Company in India and England” (i.e., the Anglo-Indian and English press explicitly named on the cauldron) “has succeeded in its object of creating a hue and cry in England against the political workers in this country and has poisoned the mind of the English public.” This cartoon, then, is significant in its refiguration of disaffection in the public sphere as British rather than Indian.68

The cartoons reprinted in this chapter from three different versions of Punch—British, Anglo-Indian, and Indian—are only a tiny window onto the infinitely rich world of Punches and of cartoons and caricature in India during the colonial period. But they give a sense of how closely the British, Anglo-Indian, and Indian presses were in conversation in the Indian Anglosphere, and the degree to which the Indian press actively and consciously engaged with the paradoxes of imperial rule and the parameters of the public constructed therein.

Mimicry and parody are both vital concepts for understanding this engagement. Not only are they closely related in terms of how they functioned structurally but also in terms of how they work together in a journal like Hindi Punch, which uses parody as a self-conscious form of mimicry. Taking the mimic man and mimicry as its object by commenting on representations of the Indian press, Hindi Punch’s parody captures the nuances of the mimetic problem, imitating in order to critique colonial assumptions about imitation. If parody provides valuable information about the style of the original text parodied, as Chatman argues, Hindi Punch provides insight not only into the visual-verbal style of Punch but into racism-as-style—a series of signifiers that can be imitated, imported from one context to another, and widely circulated in print culture.

FIGURE 2.17 / “Our Enemies, Who Are They?” from Hindi Punch, April 1906, 39. Asia Pacific and Africa Holdings, British Library. Shelfmark SW238, © British Library Board.

Imitating Punch also allowed Hindi Punch to bypass local colonial hierarchies and address the metropole directly by invoking one of its most recognizable periodicals and thereby to contest the way India was represented, both governmentally and discursively, by the colonial administration. While the legislation against disaffection outlined in Section 124a was ostensibly designed to purge the public sphere of its excesses, the cartoons in Hindi Punch, by redrawing that sphere as a space of negative affect and bitter colonial contest, suggest it had the opposite effect. In parodying the forms and stereotypes of colonial discourse, Hindi Punch both exposed its logic and positioned it as antidemocratic and backward-looking. The critical, parodic distance of the Indian Punch, the periodical suggests through its tactical use of images and text, helps make sense of British representations of India, while self-representation within the imperial public sphere reveals itself, knowingly, as always already compromised.

Through the caricature of politicians, national iconography, and racial stereotypes, Hindi Punch made visible both the psychic and physical violence of imperialism and racism, so that disaffection became the text rather than subtext of public political discourse. In accounting for the disappearance of the journal in 1930 after its long and relatively successful run, Mitter speculates that it fell too far out of step with the more uncompromising forms of anticolonial nationalism that came to define the 1930s.69 But looked at through the lens of the modernizing force of parody, the demise of Hindi Punch at the moment of nationalism’s ascendance can be seen not so much as a failure of its ongoing relevance as the success of its built-in obsolescence.