30. PVK’s review of G Aravindan’s ‘Cheriya Manushyanum Valiya Lokavum’ (2024)
G. Aravindan: ‘Cheriya Manushyarum Valiya Lokavum’: A review
Books are beautiful for different reasons. Some, judged on content, are top class. Occasionally, the content is so good, one ignores minor problems with production. At the other end, sometimes one comes across a book that is beautifully produced and a joy just for that reason. One that comes to mind is Jonathan Drori’s ‘Around the World in 80 Trees’ (2018). It is in colour and despite some minor factual errors in it, still a book one can pick up and open at any page to feel some unalloyed pleasure. (Let us ignore books on art, architecture, photography and so on since they occupy different niches.)
This work, a collection of a serialization that was a graphic novel, assorted cartoons and
drawings from four decades, interviews and conversations and a critical essay that enhances
appreciation of Aravindan’s work, is unique. At least in India. The best way to describe it is to compare it to a visit to a world-class museum, or a major division of a museum that is set apart to display the work of one artist. Like, say, walking into a building within the Metropolitan Museum premises in New York to one showcasing the work of G. Aravindan.
The journey into the complex of galleries is magical. There is a carefully placed, chronological arrangement that anchors one’s historical understanding to a place and time.
But there is also an expansiveness and freedom that makes this gallery a breathing, warm space with a beating heart, one that makes for some effortless time-travel and wide-eyed appreciation along with enhanced understanding. That is a feat very difficult to conceive and very hard to achieve. There is a studied elegance in the result that is matchless.
The main galleries, where Aravindan’s works are displayed, are wonderful. The atrium through which one enters, the essay by E P Unny, is perfect. Valuable hints are given, with a discreet charm, about things one could notice. Typical is the comment that one can leave to scholars the explication of the movements of thought, culture and ideas that merged magically in Aravindan’s work. Unny then proceeds to describe these features in a succinct and tender style that no academic scholar can match. This, and the other hints Unny gives, linking the local with the national and the global, are invaluable clues for readers not as well informed as Unny. The walk through the main galleries becomes more perceptive and meaningful thanks to these hints. The journey from little insights to a deeper vision can now be undertaken with comfort.
The early readers of Aravindan, the ones who opened Mathrubhumi at the last page, will be happy at the comprehensiveness of the compilation. Younger readers too can find their way through the galleries, handheld by clues provided in the book and by the neat display of dates in each page.
New readers, born after Aravindan had passed on or in this century, will discover in it beauties this age of pictures and visuals appears to be leaning on for pleasure and sustenance.
The essay by Gokul Gopalakrishnan bookends the volume and is a sophisticated look at multiple facets of Aravindan’s work. He points out features of the milieu of Kerala and the extraordinary world that Mathrubhumi’s editor N V Krishna Warrier created for a generation of eager readers.
The characters in Aravindan evolved, he notes, unlike those in western comic strips. The Ramu of 1971 is far removed from that of 1961, with a moral decline that is the opposite of his rise to wealth and power. There is a fine analysis of how time and space are handled in the serial with some insights on those questions from Scott McCloud, the American cartoonist and theorist.
There is an ease and openness in Aravindan that appears to be a function of his lack of a
compulsion to hang every observation or argument on an ideological nail. He renders labels like conservative and progressive redundant, even crude attempts to place the artist on an unavailable dogmatic platform. But the variety of ideas and themes and authors and issues touched on covers the gamut of topics that a tumultuous period in history threw up. One does not need to comment more on it. Let the panels and pages work their magic on the reader.
One remembers M V Devan’s observation that here you have a poem in pictures. Yes, poetry blends with history to capture the agony and ecstasy of an emotional and thinking people in an extraordinary era. With finesse and fidelity, one must add. It was finesse, not fastidiousness, one that did not shut out the semi-starving, near-naked man and woman with potbellied children looking up, with hope, at Someone or Something.
After December 1973, Aravindan moved on to cinema and other areas, but he never threw away his sketch pens or pencils. Side galleries allow us to look at those areas too. The interviews Aravindan gave to Dr Chandradasan are reproduced. To get a man who had the taciturnity of a monk to open up both about life and his movies suggests an extraordinary intimacy between the two. The questions are gentle and allow Aravindan to speak with comfort. Art cinema buffs will particularly appreciate this section. So will anyone with an interest in the evolution of literature and art in Kerala.
Being a central government employee Aravindan was, in some ways, an establishment figure.
But the tendrils of creativity in Kerala were supported by a framework of institutional and
individual entities. They included businessmen, editors, theatre people, producers, financiers and influential patrons who often brought with them the clout of powerful organisations. A strange alchemy allowed people with very different temperaments and attitudes to collaborate and coevolve while helping each other produce work of the highest quality. Art is not always the product of individual talent. Men can push aside egos and work together to produce exquisite work.
Aravindan was often at the centre of such creative circles.
The harshness and violence of the decades Aravindan lived through and observed are never
ignored. They are the background against which Aravindan’s dramatis personae play out their
roles. Their harshness is muted in the telling, but the issues are faced without any attempt at
escape. The satirist, even the gentle satirist that Aravindan was, never averts his gaze from things that matter. Self-deprecation, like an occasional reality-check, peeps in, now and then. Much of this is in the galleries that display sketches and cartoons from 1959 to 1991. “Cultural leaders” a species nearly worshipped here are examined with a cool eye as are types like the popular singer, the poets gazing at the sky to locate a forest and, most telling of all, the thinkers and creators of Kerala who see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. Towards the last, the sketches acquire a grimness that anticipates the reality of 21st century India. This culminates in the two-page sketch that shows a fierce giant, communalism, with a club or danda resting beside him telling a nervous politician who is looking up to him “Heard you calling me!” It dates from 1990 and is a diagnosis of a condition that turned into a permanent disease.
Aravindan was the quintessential global Malyali, rooted in his culture but open to cross winds
from across the world. It is amazing how much of global trends his work anticipated. Alan
Moore’s criticism of over simplified versions of complex stories is foreshadowed in Aravindan.
One suspects he also sensed in this a possible opening for intolerance, especially of the political kind, to sneak in. When Aravindan captures philosophies and schools of thought in cartoons and sketches one sees in them the influential “The Idiot’s Guide to …..” series that introduced complex thought to the layman. That series came after Aravindan, one recalls. He understood the Malayali intellectual, the curious and ambitious one and the one in scare quotes – “intellectual” – pretentious and pompous and very much a part of every Kerala scene.
He also noticed how, late in the evening or late in life, the two merged to seek refuge in their favourite poison. Reality cannot be escaped, he notes often.
Ramu Aravindan, who has curated the work, never over explains. There is a restraint and balance that is thoughtful and respectful of the reader, which is why the book is a joy to hold, behold and peruse. His acknowledgements, unusual for a people with a reputation for gracelessness, stands out like a warm tent inside the museum of thought and delight we have traversed. Running one’s eyes over it is itself educative. But the grace of that footnote is the grace of elegant thought and civilised criticism that was with us from the moment we walked into the museum father and son have created for all of us.
It is a mystery why this exceptional volume has not attracted any reviews in Kerala or elsewhere.
Sometimes we are slow to open our eyes. E P Unny recalled how Aravindan reacted when a
security guard blocked Aravidan’s way at a London theatre that was actually holding a repertoire of his films. When the guard observed that Aravindan was fifteen minutes late, he gently said: “That’s how long it takes in India for us to bat an eyelid”.
G. Aravindan: ‘Cheriya Manushyarum Valiya Lokavum’ is published by DC Books, Kottayam.
Price: Rs 2500/.
A footnote: There are few things I enjoy more than irony. The more refined it is, the more I relish it.
So, I found it delicious to chew over the fact that a book, or rather its compiler ‘Ramu Aravindan’, that has thanked everyone involved in producing it and in helping the genius Aravindan was, omitted one thing.
It was to thank me for a review that got published in the digital version of ‘Frontline’ on Feb 05, 2025. He must have known this, through E P Unny. But it must have slipped his mind.
I do not take any offence. I am glad it has given me a small anecdote to relate.
P. Vijaya Kumar / PVK
profpvk@gmail.com
Thank you. Nandri. Namaskaram.
PVK 09/June/2026
PVK's Book mark 