Page 250 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

CARTOON AND CARICATURE 247

banners and festoons on the Language Movement. Artists like Murtaja Baseer, Bijan
Chowdhury, Aminul Islam, Qayyum Chowdhury, Abdur Razzaque, and Imdad Hossain
were involved in the Language Movement. They did cartoon like illustrations on
posters and festoons with slogans.
In the sixties the publication of dailies and other periodicals began to increase and
gradually the institutional practice of cartoons also increased. The point that we need to
note is that in the first two decades the cartoons were largely making comments on
social issues. This means that cartoon strips or caricature drawings for pure fun were not
done at that time. This happened much later in our country. Although the cartoons of the
initial period were done from socially conscious angles, these dealt more with unjust
and contradictory social issues rather than completely political issues. It should be
remembered that for almost the entire Pakistani period the country was under martial
law and it did not allow for the development of an environment of democratic criticism.
Under such circumstances it was, perhaps, not very easy to do political cartoons. But
those who had done cartoons in the sixties, especially the student of the Art College or
those who had just completed their courses from it, did direct political cartoons on
smaller, less circulated little magazines. It is known from a discussion with artist
Rafiqun Nabi that those cartoons sometimes presented direct comments on specific
political issues. One could not even think of publishing such cartoons in well-
established, widely circulated daily newspapers.
From the early sixties Purbodesh- the Bengali daily of the Observer Group, started to
publish cartoons. Initially artist Kalam Mahmud and after that artist Rafiqun Nabi did
cartoons there under the pseudonym ‘Ranabi’. In this decade, Ranabi did cartoons in
Purbodesh for the column titled ‘The Diary of Black Owl’ by Abdul Gani Hazari. At
that time cartoonist Aziz from Karachi did cartoons for the English daily Morning News.
He followed the school of western political cartoons. However, one must mention that
Morning News supported the government. Naturally, the political cartoons published in
this paper were not very sharp despite the form they took. The Bengali weekly that fig. 5.8 Kazi Abul
published cartoons in large numbers in the sixties was Sachitra Sandhani. Initially two Kasem, cartoon on
cartoonists named Zamir and Mizan did cartoons for this magazine. Filmmaker Subhash Language Movement