RK Laxman: Of, for and by the common man

Moralists were not RK Laxman's most favourite people. Asked if he saw himself as a moral crusader, he replied, "I don't make cartoons so that people can learn.… It is not my business. To make people laugh and understand the ridiculousness of the situation, that's all." His most famous creation, the Common Man, was the proverbial Everyman in a perennial checked jacket and dhoti — and quite often with his far more assertive missus — who steadfastly played the role of barometer-cum-victim-cum-witness of society since his birth in 1949 in The Times of India. Laxman was his Common Man, with the brilliant ability of laughing at 'himself'.

Apart from his unheroic hero, Laxman also used politics and its purveyors as ingredients for his visual commentary down the decades. In a 1978 cartoon, he showed Indira Gandhi holding a newspaper bearing the headline of her victory in Chikmagalur and telling the magic mirror in imperious Evil Queen-style, "I told you, you wouldn’t stand in my way!" He lampooned, satirised and took rapier-thrusts at every repository of power, without holding back to criticise the travails of the herd, thereby avoiding the results of lesser wits and artists to make comic relief just a one-way street between perpetrators and victims. RK Laxman was an Uncommon Man. It is obvious to Everyman.