Of late the Indian Institute of Cartoonists (IIC), Bangalore (estb.2001), a first-of-its-kind 2,000 sq.ft gallery sited in the garden city’s tony M.G. Road has gone into overdrive, staging exhibitions display-ing the doodles of several of the country’s small but influential community of newspaper and magazine cartoonists. A few months ago it showed the work of veteran Mumbai cartoonist Vijay N. Seth (aka Vins), and more recently of Hyderabad-based doodler Shyam Mohan. Promoted in 2001 by V.G. Narendra, a staff graphist of the city’s regional newspaper Kannada Prabha for the past 23 years, IIC has hosted over 49 public exhib-itions curated by Narendra, repres-enting the country’s most popular cartoonists including R.K. Laxman, Abu Abraham, Ranga and Mario Miranda among others.
“The objectives of IIC are to preserve and promote the art of cartooning, offer a platform for cartoonists to publicly display their work, and encourage budding cartoonists,” says Narendra. Though the idea was conceived by him in the early 1990s, it germinated in 2001 when IIC was registered as a not-for-profit trust.
However Narendra’s pleas to the state government to sanction a land grant to establish a cartoonists’ gallery fell on unresponsive ears, prompting him to operate out of a home office for five years. The turning point came in 2006 when a cartoon published in Kannada Prabha depicting the legal battle between Ashok Kheny, founder managing director of NICE (Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise Ltd) and the then ruling JD-(S)-BJP coalition government of Karnataka headed by H.D. Kumaraswamy over building of the 111-km Bangalore-Mysore expressway, attracted Kheny’s attention. “He readily agreed to donate 2,000 sq. ft of prime real estate on M.G. Road to IIC and become honorary chairman of the institute,” recalls Narendra, managing trustee of IIC which apart from the gallery houses a fully-wired 75-seat conference hall and a CD/animations film library.
A science graduate of Bangalore University, Narendra began drawing caricatures while in school and his first cartoon was published in a Kannada weekly Karma Veera when he was 15 years old. Inspired by legendary cartoonist Shankar Pillai, founder of Shankar’s Weekly, he turned his passion into a full-fledged career and began freelancing for publications such as the Free Press Journal, Mumbai and Shankar’s Weekly. In 1974 he was taken aboard by Shankar’s Weekly and moved to Delhi, returning to Bangalore four years later to work in Samyukta Karnataka, followed by Kannada Prabha.
Given generous support by Kheny, Narendra has ambitious expansion plans for IIC. “We want to promote a chain of cartoon galleries on the lines of IIC in all the metro cities, host workshops, lecture/demos and exhibitions apart from organising national and international competitions for young cartoonists. Longer term plans include building a national cartoons museum, adding original works of cartoonists to the IIC library, launching a monthly magazine and producing animation films,” says Narendra, a one-man army soldiering on to preserve the art of cartooning.
Paromita Sengupta (Bangalore)