History Doesn’t Repeat Itself But It Often Rhymes*

Bernard Augustine, my late Malayali Christian grandfather, had been training me to be an Indian citizen even before I was officially one. He was extremely proud to be an Indian. And, I was Nigerian then.

By the age of four, anywhere and anytime the Indian national anthem was within earshot, he’d trained me to stand up and sing along. I’m convinced if he’d put a smidge more effort, I’d have been saluting while doing so too. But I’d already suffered long days of waiting because of the inefficiency and irritance of the single stamp-pusher at the Foreigners Registration Office dealing with the throng of foreign students from the 54 nations of the African continent—as compared to six desks earmarked to service the United States.

I understood that my birth country and continent was very low on the political pecking order from the insignificant infrastructure afforded to immigrants from there. So, I was ready to do anything it took to become an Indian citizen.

It took pots of patience, pleasing politicians and policemen, and a profusion of perfect principles over two decades to become an Indian citizen at the age of 18. Along the way, I rebelled to stay out late, grew my peppercurls out into dreadlocks, and kissed boys. I had also gained the ability to answer back in a way that could make my grandfather belly laugh, smoke cigarettes like an industrial chimney, and had managed to sit down while listening to the national anthem.

I started to have a tense relationship with my grandfather, and in turn, the nation. For my grandfather, making me an Indian citizen was his way of showing me that he loved me. His way of saying I was a part of him more than of my foreign father. He wanted to share the country he loved with me. From the very beginning though, it was an uphill task.

In Bengaluru, he carted me from government office to government office, police station to police station, standing firm on his resolve to never grease the wheels with a few notes, and having to find his polite voice when he wanted to pulverise each one of them. Our rage against the machine didn’t bind us, but it didn’t break us either. It just remained an open, unspoken wound. The naturalisation process left us both with a feeling that we were less than to each other without achieving this goal. Our togetherness was important only during official appointments; outside of this, we were after-thoughts to each other.

I was witness to the violent, vicious, and vile treatment of others who looked like me at police stations across the city. And everyone around me, even my grandfather on occasion, didn’t miss an opportunity to remind me of my foreignness. He made it seem like becoming a citizen would be like being a full-member of a club. Like I could go from dipping my toes into the pool, sneaking a swim when no one was looking, rushing in and out of the changing rooms to lingering around on the lounge chairs like everyone else.

In convincing me to begin the naturalisation process, my grandfather, a practical man, simply reassured me that in the eyes of the world, both passports held the same low esteem. “You’ve got a green passport now, you’ll be changing it to blue. That’s all. Everything else will be just as hard for you,” he’d flatly stated. In this wonderful way, my grandfather introduced me to global politics.

He was a man in love with his country, but he was no fool. He understood its shortcomings too. He loved India because it had allowed him hope, which translated into mobility for him. In the story he told of himself—we’ve never fact-checked it—he stole a murukku-maker from his mother’s kitchen and ran away from Ernakulam along with his best friend—Inasu-achayan. We never learned his full name.

Bernard Augustine arrived in Bangalore, worked in a chai kadai, then branched out to own his own little tea shop. He then worked as a waiter at a five-star hotel, rose to Maître d’, impressed a British chartered accountant with his impeccable service at the hotel and got hired by him. He travelled to Kalimpong along with his British boss, fell in love with my grandmother Dewaki Khawas, married her, and had three children—Anna, Paul and Hubert. They looked after the old Brit till his death and were willed his two houses. For him, this journey couldn’t have taken place anywhere but post-Independence India. His love for this country made me realise that the borders that bind us are made up of desires collectively whispered into them by him and so many others before him.

I hadn’t understood that his determination, desire, and drive to make me an Indian citizen was an invitation to have an opportunity to make my own way too. Actually, I was never gracious enough to give him the benefit of the doubt while he was still alive. Instead, I always assumed it was because in the way that he loved mathi fry, I had to love mathi fry too.

It wasn’t until quite recently that I had this epiphany behind his motivations. While freelancing almost always feels like getting the shit-end of the stick, there are occasionally opportunities that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Last winter in Bangalore, I began assisting the artist Ayisha Abraham and her sister, the sociologist Janaki Abraham, with putting together Abu’s World—an exhibition of the iconic cartoonist (and their father) Abu Abraham’s works in his centenary year.

The five months of this short-term gig was a period of re-education in the history-making of this country. But also, making my way through rooms overflowing with Abu Abraham’s sketches, scraps, and stapled sheets of writing carefully saved by his daughters, I was able to piece together some kind of story behind the stony silence of my own grandfather’s relationship with the nation and his idea of India.

One of the first pieces of Abu’s writing I came across—among the stacks, the heaps of yellowed, typewritten sheets—was a biographical one that traces his journey from being born in 1924 in Mavelikara in Alappuzha District and growing up in Travancore, to moving to Bombay, and then London. Alongside, it maps his choices as well. In an untitled essay, he starts with three questions that in our contemporary life seem threatening. He asks, “What is nationalism? And how and where and when does one acquire it? When did I first get [the] feeling of nationalism?”

I remember reading these lines and thinking: is this man a nationalist? Over the last decade or so, given the political climate, nationalism has felt like a bad word. But in Abu’s writing, it comes across as a fiery, fierce love for the nation—an India that was working hard towards making it possible for every individual to dream, and wake up to them becoming real. It didn’t mean boarding up the borders. It didn’t mean re-designating and re-defining its denizens. It didn’t mean insolence against immigrants. It wasn’t a call for purity either. There wasn’t a missionary zeal to Abu’s nationalism, rather it seemed like it was his expected status quo—equity for all—and any disturbance to it, he’d notice and comment on.

Abu’s brand of nationalism was born of sentimentality, but sharpened into a scalpel over time. He writes that one could buy yards of cloth with portraits of Indian National Congress political icons stuck to their edges. And he was able to put “together a good collection of the most famous film actors and actresses, the mill cloth postcards—stuck on the edge of cloth, a portrait of Motilal Nehru or Jawaharlal, Mahatma Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu or Tilak, and the Nestles chocolate bar stamps,” which made him “a devoted fan of hosts of people, political and cinematic, whom I had never seen or heard of and about whom I knew very little.”

As a child, he was already deeply influenced by the Indian National Congress politics. When he was around eight or nine, he remembers Gandhi stopping at the railway station at Quilon (now Kollam). Abu writes that he “couldn’t get anywhere near the train to get a glimpse of him” but he pretended to everybody that he had seen him, and with his “imagination could even describe him to his friends.” I find the fact that he includes this little detail in his telling of his story quite adorable and endearing.

Another way my life seemed to rhyme with Abu, I discovered, was our leaning towards journalism from our childhoods. Much like him, growing up, I was a newspaper addict. My grandfather subscribed to three newspapers—Deccan Herald, The Hindu, and The Indian Express, along with magazines like India Today, The Week, and later, Outlook. And of course, Reader’s Digest. (I’ve always thought my grandfather got his sense of humour from this one, but I’ve been wrong about this all along.)

My grandfather’s bookshelves were bursting with autobiographies, books on religions and mythologies from across the world, all of Shakespeare’s plays, books on the world wars, and numerous dictionaries. There were also tons of paperbacks, everything from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler, Scott Bradford to Sidney Sheldon and Erle Stanley Gardner to Jeffrey Archer. And so, I read all of these too. My grandparents didn’t censor any of the reading materials—it wasn’t done with some modern parenting mindset; instead, I was left alone to find my own taste, because that’s the path my grandfather had taken. He had taught himself to read, write, and do arithmetic, and much like Abu, he too, was taken with a “fascination of print.” And now, it has seeped into me.

In 1946, this fascination led Abu to leave Kerala and head to Bombay where he started his first job in journalism as a crime reporter at The Bombay Chronicle—an important newspaper in pre-Independence India—as well as writing for its afternoon sister paper, Bombay Sentinel. In 1949, he began freelancing for Blitz, an investigative weekly, and Bharat, another national newspaper.

In 1951, he started his career as a cartoonist in New Delhi. He drew humorous cartoons to accompany his film reviews in Shankar’s Weekly, an Indian satirical magazine founded and run by the political cartoonist Keshav Shankar Pillai. In early 1953, a chance encounter at the offices of Shankar’s Weekly with the British political cartoonist and caricaturist Fred Joss of The Star—one of London’s three evening newspapers—propelled a change. On seeing Abu’s cartoons, Joss had remarked, “This stuff would sell in London.” This was enough for him to set sail to England that same year.

But more than vicariously living through Abu’s exciting early life of practising journalism in Bombay, I found myself devouring the recorded details of his everyday life in this new, changing city. His vegetarian thali at Gopal Ashram below Press Club, his prawn salad at Pioneer Coffee House on Churchgate Street, his first time eating pork and enjoying Goan cuisine at Paris Hotel.

I felt moved imagining him at midnight on August 14, 1947, on the lawns of the Secretariat, next to the Oval Maidan, hearing the news of India’s freedom. On reading these details, I kept thinking about my grandfather’s first years in Bangalore. Where did he stay? What was his daily commute in the city? Where did he have his meals? Did he, like Abu, happen upon a restaurant where he tasted a food item for the first time? Did he become a regular at any joint? Where was he when India was declared independent?

Even poked and prodded over many decades, my grandfather managed to remain suitably vague about details. Or maybe, we just never asked him the right questions at the right time.

In the last week of July, 1953, Abu set sail for England. In another one of the many yellowed, typewritten sheets, he had noted buying a ticket for “53 pounds or about 700 rupees at the rate of 13 rupees six annas to a pound.” He also wrote about boarding the Scindia Steamship’s Jal Jawahar—“Passing through the glorious Red Sea (after a few hours’ stop in Aden where some of us went to see the Queen Sheba’s baths), and slowly up the Suez Canal, green on one side and yellow on the other, where caravans could be seen moving across the dry desert in the distance”—before docking at Liverpool; and then a four-hour journey by train to London’s Liverpool Street Station.

It’s simply a fact that Abu was tremendously and terrifyingly talented. But perhaps, he also had the gift for being at the right place, at the right time. At London’s Writers and Artists Club, Fred Joss introduced him to journalist and satirist Malcolm Muggeridge, who was then the editor of Punch, a British weekly humour and satire magazine founded in 1841.

On seeing a couple of Abu’s cartoons, Muggeridge found them to be “charming.” And within a week of being in London, he made an impressive debut in Punch. He also began freelancing with Daily Sketch, a British tabloid newspaper, contributing cartoons to two sections: “Everybody’s London Opinion” and “Eastern World” under the pen name ‘Abraham’.

After two-and-a-half years of freelancing in London, “something happened which changed my life radically,” he writes in one of his many reflective essays found in the archive. Michael Foot—journalist, and later British politician—published two of Abu’s political cartoons in Tribune, which got David Astor, the editor of The Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, to offer him a job as its first-ever staff political cartoonist in its 125 years. On Astor’s request, he would change his pen name from ‘Abraham’ to ‘Abu’, a nickname from his school days, to stave off his cartoons from being received with a bias because of his Jewish-sounding name. “‘Perfect,’ Astor said, ‘suitably mysterious.’ Thus I was re-christened on that morning, Friday, April 6th, 1956,” Abu writes.

Abu spent the next decade with The Observer (1956-66), then three years with The Guardian (1966-69) before returning to India to work with The Indian Express (1969-81), and later syndicating his work in newspapers across the country until his passing at his home in Thiruvananthapuram on December 1, 2002, at the age of 78.

Abu’s career as a journalist, political cartoonist, and general hawk’s eye spanned over 50 years. Going through hundreds of folders all bursting with daily cartoons, writings, and sketches at Ayisha’s Bangalore apartment, which doubled as the archives, it was clear—Abu Abraham had a ringside seat to the goings on in the world. Sitting with his paper and pen, sketching, coming up with cutting, compact, and clever lines—while the world was shifting.

Our world still hasn’t settled but there aren’t watchdogs like Abu around anymore. His cartoons stand as thoughtful testament to our collective social and political pasts that brought us to the present day. While with some of the daily cartoons—especially the highly particular ones from his years at The Observer and The Guardian—their immediacy or context is lost, his brilliance, his comic tone sparkles.

Abu had this sense of humour that I’ve come to recognise in most of my Malayali relatives, including my grandfather Bernard: an ability to rupture an ego with the swiftest, surgical strike. It’s always pointed and precise, never an extra word. And once the bullet has left the barrel, there will be damage. They never missed.

While before, I might have recoiled from it, encountering this familiar brand of wit in Abu’s cartoons as I sorted, re-sorted, categorised, catalogued, and ordered allowed me to find a sense of pride. It produced a sense of knowing I might have inherited this muscle too. Even if I haven’t been using it. On reading the cartoons, I could nearly hear Abu laugh. I imagined him like my grandfather sitting in his planter’s chair in the verandah, cracking up to his own jokes, shaking uncontrollably.

Another element that struck me about handling these original cartoons was that each one of them possessed all of the ephemera of being particularly produced for printing and public consumption. (None of this ‘art for art’s sake’. Abu wanted his cartoons to be seen by all. He’d be thrilled that we are still looking at them today.)

On these originals, there are still pencil markings designating the size of the cartoon for the printer in the following day’s newspaper, editor’s comments in red ink, whitened-out, redrawn, and retouched lines of the artist. And of course, each one of them on the bottom corner have that signature, assured flourish of his nom de plume–abu–written with a lowercase ‘a’ as if to belie the power of the cartoon.

One kind of markings on his political cartoons speaks to the power possessed by the press in the past. During the 21-month period from 1975 to 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency, elections were cancelled and many civil liberties were withheld. Under this constitutional cloak, Gandhi’s political opponents were sent to jail and silenced, and the press was heavily censored. But instead of entirely buckling down, kow-towing to power, it seemed some newspapers had spine. These blue markings “NOT TO BE PUBLISHED” stamped by the Chief Censor on Abu’s cartoons show that he just learned to sharpen the pen more. He kept pushing the envelope, and at times, they went through.

One of his most famous cartoons from this period has President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signing ordinances stretching out of his bathtub. Without referencing anything in particular, he manages to convey the hold that Indira Gandhi had over the nation—that even the president was at her command, any time of the day or night, even during his bath. And this made it to the front page of the The Indian Express on December 10, 1975.

We’ve been having a similar period in our political history recently, the tenets of the Constitution are being twisted for personal power; we live in a cloying, dog-eat-dog climate—we’re feeling choked. And the newspapers, the media, have mostly turned into amplifiers of this strangle-hold. But ensconced in this tunnel, going through Abu’s cartoons from the Emergency was comforting. It assured me that making our way through it, intelligently, there is light at the end.

I find resonance again in Abu tiring of New Delhi, missing the “temple bells, festivals, and the scent of jasmine” and returning to Kerala in 1988. With the simple instructions that he “believed a straight line was as beautiful as a curve,” he built “Saranam” in Thiruvananthapuram, a stunning house designed by the acclaimed architect Laurie Baker.

Besides making the move from Kerala to Bangalore, My grandfather Bernard didn’t move much over his 95 years. But, he did love to take long drives across the length and breadth of his country, with my grandmother Dewaki in the front seat, and me stretched out in the back. His long association with the British gentleman rubbed off on him. For decades, he wore three-piece suits in the day and matching pyjama sets at night, ate everything with a fork and a knife (except for mathi fry), and never taught any of us how to speak in Malayalam. He’d polished his own accent away, and we were encouraged to speak in crisp, clipped English too.

But towards the end, my grandfather returned to Kerala without leaving Bangalore. In his last decade and a half, he wore only white shirts and mundus, ate everything with his hands, and was very sad that he hadn’t taught any of us to speak in Malayalam because he was desperate to talk to us in his mother tongue.

During this gig, having access to Abu’s mind through his cartoons, sketches, and writings through his archives, I think I have changed a little. I might not be entirely proud to be an Indian but also, I’m not not proud of it. I might have never spoken honestly with my grandfather throughout our time together, but lately, I have felt a lot closer to him, his dreams and his desires, for himself and for us. And for this country of his, and now, mine too.

*A quote attributed to the American humorist Mark Twain.