Gokul .T.

Researcher

The English and Foreign Languages University

Hyderabad, India.

International Journal of Comic Art. Vol.11, No.2, Fall 2009. pp 44-52.

G Aravindan’s Small Men and the Big World: Re- Defining the ‘Comic’ in the Strip.

The referrals of Fun and Comic have taken definite turns by the postmodern advent in the

global culture. Comics, for instance, no more need to be ‘comic’ i.e. hilarious. The case in point

focuses on this divorce of certain senses from their corresponding fields, by locating one of the very

popular comic strips in Kerala as one of its kind in dissociating ‘comic’ from its mere lexical

implications. The reference is to G Aravindan’s comic strip Cheriya Manushyarum, Valiya Lokavum

(Small Men and the Big World) which appeared in the Mathrubhoomi Azhchapathipu, from 1961 to

1973 before an extended bout of conjunctivitis in his family brought about an abrupt and unfortunate

end to it. Aravindan, unable to draw the strip for three weeks found on the fourth that the weekly had

unceremoniously dropped him and replaced the strip with another.

In those thirteen years, this iconic strip split its readers into two equally enthusiastic

categories: while many appreciated the strip for its thought provoking, understated, subtle kind of

humor there were as many readers who derided it for not being “funny”. The translated version of

Walt Disney’s Funny Animals was the only other cartoon that this premier journal carried at that time.

And it was indeed part of a general trend to envision comic strips as well-animated good-time laugh

gags. Cartoons and comic strips only meant good-time humor: they ought to crack a laugh or two
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before they could be forgotten by the reader. Naturally, Aravindan’s strip opened to mixed response in

the readership.

Aravindan needs to be considered a pioneer in the graphic narrative for recognizing the

medium’s potential for narrative complexity and the ability to deal with mature subjects and current

affairs, as early as 1961. In the US it took the underground comix movement and prolonged

counterculture experiments of the latter half of 60’s, to construe this potential. The comix artists and

the head shops were still fumbling with tentative creations in the US, slowly mapping the field, and

trying to outline what would eventuate as one of the most powerful currents of popular culture. Given

that the medium was still inchoate in its ideological foundations with no tall history of such graphic

narratives to lean back upon, it becomes absolutely significant therefore, that Aravindan could put

behind him a few couple of years of work of similar nature, and contemplate a strip of such

deliberation in a mainstream Malayalam literary weekly.

Cheriya Manushyarum Valiya Lokavum began as a series that revolved around Ramu, the

protagonist who kind of represented the archetypical middle class Malayali with ambitions of upward

social mobility. Ramu, at his political best, was an idealistic, educated, unemployed Keralite male with

a qualified taste in literature, music and cinema. Ramu’s unemployment and his constant struggles to

find himself an opening were the main subject matter of the earlier strips. As years limped by,

sustained musings over the meta-physical implications of stranding such a situation in the Keralite

society started to surface in subtle tones of satire and a qualified bitter humor. Instead of keeping

Ramu suspended in a never-changing world as is the usual practice with long-running strips,

Aravindan let him age, love, lose it, think, struggle, find a job, climb up the ‘social ladder’ and finally
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turn into a manipulating business magnate, crushing in that process the pure idealism and the

innocence bordering on naivety that characterized him in the beginning.

A collected edition of these strips was first published by Bees Books in 1978 and subsequently

by DC books in 1996. These collected editions (not definitive editions, only two third of the strips

were included) proved to be a huge success and save for the abrupt ending, reads much in the mode of

the later varieties of graphic novels achieving the sort of ‘culminative effect’ that Charles Hatfield

identifies in certain successfully serialized graphic novels(Hatfield, 154-155).

Perhaps this prompted E P Unny, editorial cartoonist with the Indian Express, to label

Aravindan’s work as the ‘First Indian graphic novel’ (‘officially’ India’s first graphic novel is Sarnath

Banerjee’s Corridor. New Delhi: Penguin, 2004.) Unny comments so:

Cheriya Manushyarum, Valiya Lokavum is the closest we got to a graphic novel. A true

forerunner in the 60s and 70s. It certainly wasn't a pre-set novel, in terms of having

a worked-out plot. What gave it the extra dimension are the ageing characters and all

that went with it. The gradual shift in their relationships and changes in their lifestyle –

suggesting a real life parallel. For the first time the Malayali reader sensed time in a

cartoon strip.
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Figure 1
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The collected edition provides us with an understanding of the strip’s evolving visual narrative.

When he started out, Aravindan adopted a wide-angled panel construction cramming in every possible

detail into these panels. The panels are crowded with people, automobiles, buildings and text balloons

and the strip invariably inhabited a public space with the events mostly taking place in parks, libraries,

railway stations, offices, schools, restaurants, shops, roads and other such spaces with Ramu remaining

inseparable from the fabric of the society he lives in. He is constantly found in the company of his

mentor and friend the philosophical ‘Guruji’, animatedly discussing literature, films and music. In the

earlier strips, the library which formed the intellectual epicenter of the Malayali youth of the 1960s

remains a major plane over which the action is played out. Ramu often finds the four walls of his

home/room claustrophobic and yearns to escape to the vastness of the outdoors (Fig 1)

As the strip progressed and entered the 70’s, there occurred a gradual but striking transformation in its

visual language. The background of the panels got totally stripped of any details (Fig 2). The story

now shifts from the old, familiar public spaces to such exclusivised, private spaces like Ramu’s air-

conditioned cabin or the elite club which he is a member of. This withdrawal to self and individual

(ironically, Ramu achieves greater social acceptance in the process) is accentuated by the close up

shots and proves a case of the form mirroring the content; the text balloons that once dominated the

panel space shrink, the text itself becomes sparse and characters are pushed into corners of the panel

frames, often to the extent of nearly disappearing from the panel altogether.

While the earlier strips are more or less constructed on the lines of conventional paintings

keeping the ideas of perspective and vanishing points in place, the later strips are devoid of any centre

or point of focus. The waning of centre-points, the demeaning of the ideal in art and other ways to defy

the conventions of visuality, marks an artist’s qualms with the normalized ways of understanding the

spectacle.
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Considering Aravindan’s later feats in filmdom, his fascination for and association with the

camera must have informed his brush much in the course of drawing. Camera and its impact on the

artistic frames had been pondered about much in the context of early 20th century visual theory. Ways

of Seeing is a case in point. It informs the context of discussion, when John Berger associates the act of

decentering (that Aravindan had employed) with the invention of camera (Berger, 18). Aravindan’s

evolving style can be thus understood as a shift from the aesthetics of painting to that of cinema. In

fact, the strip does mark an important stage in his development as a film maker, for with it he

developed a visual narrative style that his films would be appreciated for.

Aravindan’s first film Uttarayanam was made in 1974, a year after he had stopped drawing

the strip. In this acclaimed film, as in his strip, Aravindan reflected on the life of an unemployed youth

in a society with eroding values. As if a logical progression of the comic strip he had left behind,

Aravindan’s maiden directorial venture divulged the cartoonist in him, the streak particularly evident

in the film’s portrayal of the then Keralite society (Vijayakrishnan, 150). Elements of caricature

resurface in a later film Oridathu (1986). Here, he resorted to a lot of exaggeration and humor,

especially with the characters and their dialects. In fact Oridathu, which is about the electrification of

a village and the changes that it brings in the power relations of the society, is Aravindan’s most

comic-strip like film. Here again, Aravindan is more preoccupied with societal changes and the need

for some basic ethical premises, than with the merits or demerits of technology and mechanization.

More than the individual characters, it is the society, the macrocosm that interests him.
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Figure 2.

It would therefore be grievously reductionistic to read the strip as a mere tragedy/black comedy

of an individual’s life and times. To Aravindan, the individual’s ‘tragedy’ spanned the ‘tragedy’ of the
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society he lived in. Thus the strip is also about a society gravitating from Idealism to materialistic

‘pragmatism’ or to speak in political terms, from the vestiges of the Nehruvian socialism (of the early

60s) to Mrs. Gandhi’s manipulative power politics of the 70s. By1961, Nehruvian socialist model of

nation building had demanded that some compromises be made with the high idealism of Mahatma

Gandhi. Even though the country did move away from Mahatma, Nehru’s presence served as a

reminder of those idealistic times. Right from the beginning of the strip, Ramu is aware of this shift in

the value system of his society and even as he continues to turn down jobs and make other decisions

on moral and ethical grounds, he retains in his mind, reservations about the veracity and ethic of such

choices. But as the time takes pace, reflecting the real world, the characters of the strip exhibit a

tendency to self-justify their actions and show a strange willingness to adjust to the social realities. In

the end; very few remain as they were in the beginning.

Passing away of Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri in the mid 60’s mirrored the demise of the

ideals and the times they represented, and paved way for the emergence of the ‘Syndicate’ (a

collective of some powerful regional party bosses).The Syndicate wielded great power and was

instrumental in Mrs. Gandhi’s rise to the post of Prime minister (Chandra et al. 220-21). The scheming

‘Syndicate’ took decisions, pulled the strings and manipulated the party, and oared the government to

their advantage. The syndicate lost much of their power later and was replaced by Mrs. Gandhi’s

coterie, headed by Sanjay Gandhi. Emergence of Ramu and his rich friends as manipulators and

powerbrokers reflect this shift of democracy to oligarchy. These mad scrambles for power and its

consolidation into a few would later culminate in the darkest phase of Indian democracy: the

declaration of national emergency by Mrs. Gandhi, conferring upon herself the power to rule by

decree, suspending elections and civil liberties.

The 60s and early 70s proved to be an invigorating time for literature in Malayalam with the

emergence of a group of writers with strong modernist sensibilities. The group included O V Vijayan,
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M.Mukundan, Kakkanadan and Anand who were largely influenced by the writings and philosophies

of the modernists and presented an aesthetic totally different from that of the earlier generation of

social realists, humanists and romantics. Aravindan himself came from a group with modernist

leanings and it is not just coincidental that Cheriya manushyarum, Valiya Lokavum imbibed this

significant shift in the aesthetic sensibilities of the Malayali reader. Ramu and his mentor Guruji are

seen discussing writers like Camus, Lorca, Sartre, Kafka, Durrell, Saul Bellow and Genet. The

discussions also premise on the masters of world cinema who inspired the then nascent ‘New Cinema’

movement in Kerala. The strip on its own exhibited strong modernist influences with a plot that drifted

from the societal to the individual, fragmented visuals and undercurrents of cynicism, alienation and

existentialism. All this helped the Malayali reader to acquaint himself with the western Modernist

movement without which the consolidation of the modernist literary and visual sensibilities in

Malayalam might have been quite arduous.

This period also witnessed an intense self fashioning of the Malyali identity. Even though this

process had commenced with the social renaissance decades ago, the Indian independence movement,

integration with the Indian union, the formation of the state of Kerala, land reform acts of the first

communist government, library movement, spreading of education and literacy, the Naxalite

movement, proliferation of newspapers, magazines and the evolution of a Malayali Diaspora meant

that the Malayali identity had undergone a significant transformation by the 60s and the70s.While they

first had to reconcile with an Indian/national identity, there was also this urge and conscious effort

amongst the educated to mould themselves into global citizens, informed of and actively participating

in the issues of their age. This enables Aravindan to discuss events like Che’s murder in the forests of

Bolivia; without having to worry about his reader’s awareness of such global affairs. In a manner that

truly represents the nature of the Malayali identity of his times, Aravindan contrasts Che’s
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relinquishing of the post of a minister with the desperate endeavors of a local politician to be one,

thereby casually connecting the global with the local.

For the major part of the strip, Ramu exhibits this insatiable urge to escape the encumbering

surroundings of his society by drowning himself in the vast sea of humanity of the cities like Delhi,

Calcutta and Bangalore. Without the prying eyes, probing questions and constrains of caste and class,

the city emerges as an exhilarating and liberating space.

Thus, the strip not only opened up a ‘bigger’ world and its possibilities to the average

Malayali, but also played a seminal part in describing to him/her how s/he perceived it. The

contemporariness of the medium and the long run that it had in a mainstream weekly of fairly good

circulation facilitated the strip to undertake such a project. The importance of Aravindan as a comic-

strip artist rests in how he managed to conceptualize those issues which were deemed outside the

scope of a so called ‘Low art’ medium and thereby obliterating the compartmentalization of high and

low art. It sort of drove the point home that the art in itself could not be “high” or “low” by virtue of

any specific medium. In his hands, we see the last page comic-strip space metamorphosing into an

important site where the cultural, political and the social mingle, reflecting and in turn shaping,

discourses of a phase in the history of a locality.

Works Cited

Aravindan, G. Cheriya Manushyarum, Valiya Lokavum. Thiruvananthapuram: Bees, 1978.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972.

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Chandra, Bipin, Mridula Mukherjee, and Aditya Mukherjee. India after Independence, 1947-

2000.New Delhi: Penguin, 2000.

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Oxford, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2005.

Vijayakrishnan. Malayala Cinemayude Kadha. Kozhikode: Mathrubhoomi, 2007.

Unny, E. P. E-mail to the author. 21 Sept. 2007.

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Aravindan

Figure 1
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Panel 1
Guruji: Hurry up, we need time for selection.

Panel 2
Guruji: I’ve already selected one. (New Arrivals: Camus’ Resistance , Rebellion and Death)

Panel 3
Ramu: Here is Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet!
Guruji: Don’t hesitate, Take all four.

Panel4:
Ramu: Please show the orginal price, It’s public money.

Panel 5:
Ramu: This selection will prove to be a great asset to our library.
Guruji: We will be creating a sensation, no doubt!
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Panel 6:

Library Member1: What? You’ve spend 200 Rs and there are not even 50 books! I object to this
selection.
Member 2 : And not even one Perry Mason!

Member 3 : You should have bought detective stories first and then this garbage with the
money left.

Figure 2
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Panel1: Yeah, I bought a car yesterday.

Panel2: Ok, any time, it’s your convenience…
Panel3: 1967 Herald, eight now, cash down, good deal, is it?
Panel4: 4515, hmm...Good number?.. I really don’t know numerology… its not that I don’t believe…
Ok.
Panel5: Oh it isn’t problem; The Motor Vehicle Inspector is a good friend of mine…Oh yes, without
taking the driving test…
Panel6: Exactly, these pedestrians are the real nuisance…

Figure 3
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Panel 1: Clerk: Good morning sir.

Ramu: Good Morning. Has Damu come?
Damu: Ready Sir.
Panel 2: Ramu: Please switch that on, too hot in here.
Damu: Sir.
Panel 3: Ramu: Yes… Holding… Oh Yes…take it from me, I speak as the managing partner of this
firm.
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Panel 4: Ramu: Tell them that I can’t see them now. They just won’t let you sit alone for a while.
Nuisance.
Panel 5: Ramu: Once I used dread sitting alone in this room.
Panel 6: Ramu: Must have been my poor conscience that used to haunt me.
Ramu: Damu…
Damu: Sir…