50 Great Cartoonists | Rajinder Puri

RajinderPuri: the humorist

Rajinder Puri, besides being a well known political cartoonist is also a veteran columnist and political activist. He was on the staff of The Hindustan Times and The Statesman as a cartoonist and writer. Currently, his column appears in Outlook magazine. He also writes for The Statesman and for the website Boloji under his column “My Word”. He does not draw cartoons these days as often as he used to do.

Puri was born on 20 September 1934 in Karachi, now in Pakistan. He drew cartoons for The Statesman in 1956-57, after which he went to London, where he drew cartoons briefly for The Guardian and The Glasgow Herald (1958–59). He returned to India to become cartoonist for the Hindustan Times from 1959 to 1967. He started working as a columnist and freelancer after this stint. From 1972 to 1977, he was the editor and proprietor of Stir Weekly. From late Seventies, he has been a freelance journalist and his work has appeared in several leading dailies and weeklies of India.

RajinderPuri moved into politics in 1977. He was the founding General Secretary of the Janata Party in 1977 and was in charge of campaign publicity in the 1977 general election that brought the Janata Party to power. Later he was founder General Secretary of Lok Dal, then Member National Executive and Labor Cell-in-Charge of BJP. Since 1988 he has been attached to no political party.
RajinderPuri was most active as a cartoonist in what is regarded as the golden period of Indian Cartooning: 1960-1980. He holds a major position in the great lineage of cartoonists in the country that include Shankar, Kutty, O.V. Vijayan and Kerala Varma.

Puri is nostalgic about those days. Terming the golden days of cartooning as ‘much more political and lively,’ Mr. Puri said in an interview “Cartoons in mainstream English newspapers have now become more graphic. There is not much critical comment in it. Cartoonists are more interested in illustration using computers. In some newspapers, cartoons have become just illustrations.” Urging the new generation cartoonists to develop greater interest in politics, Mr. Puri said they should also exhibit an independent assessment of political events. “They should be able to add something to the written word. Today’s young cartoonists are highly talented. Seniors have a lot to learn from them. They could also learn from us. Cartoonists of older times had greater ideological understanding than those now.”

In the evening of his long and illustrious career as a political cartoonist, thinker and writer, he lived in Delhi where he breathed his last on February 15, 2015.

This is what Times of India wrote about him on its 15 Feb issue:
“Junior cartoonists were in awe of the mind and art RajinderPuri generated. Senior cartoonists joked he wielded a dagger. That was him, the power of his mind, a combo of Vijayan, Abu, Ravi Shankar,

RK and Shankar, so beautifully amalgamated into a synchronized punch. Puri’s mind was pure because he had the anti-establishment mindset years before AAP, that was the power of his mind.

He was very audience conscious in the visual sense — never clutter art to respect the reader. His intellectual cartooning senses were forceful and his columns were equally cerebral and thought provoking. Never has a cartoonist wielded so much power in the pen for sheer impact. I studied his lines and said to myself. Never deviate from the power of the black and white line.

He taught us that cartooning is like a laser thin beam, the sharper it is the more incisive it is. His personalties, unlike Laxman, portrayed the other side devil ethos of leaders, perfect features, powerful metaphors and excellent rendering with the most advanced political mind much superior to columnists who could never illustrate their minds … which he did. That was his power — to write and illustrate your own verbiage”.