K. Shankar Pillai
He is considered as the father of political cartooning in India. He founded Shankar's Weekly, India's Punch in 1948, which also produced cartoonists like Abu Abraham, Ranga and Kutty, he closed down the magazine in 1975 due to the Emergency then on he focus exclusively on children’s work. But the children of his times ,be it in India or elsewhere in the world, see him as their uncle who did much to make them laugh and enjoy life.He was awarded Padma Vibhushan in 1976, India's second highest civilian honour given by the Govt. of India.Today he is most remembered for setting up Children's Book Trust established 1957 and Shankar's International Dolls Museum in 1965.
R. K. Laxman
Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Iyer Laxman born 24 October 1921, Mysore, India) is an Indian cartoonist, illustrator, and humorist. He is widely regarded as India's greatest-ever cartoonist
and is best known for his creation The Common Man.R. K. Laxman was born in Mysore, in a Tamil Iyer family. His father was a headmaster and Laxman was the youngest of six sons. One of his siblings is R.K. Narayan, English languagenovelist.Laxman was engrossed by the illustrations in magazines such as Strand Magazine, Punch, Bystander, Wide World and Tit-Bits, even before he could read.Soon he was drawing on his own, on the floors,walls and doors of his house and doodling caricatures of his teachers at school; praised by a teacher for his drawing of a peepal leaf, he began to think of himself as an artist in the making. Another early influence on Laxman were the cartoons of the world-renowned British cartoonist, Sir David Low (whose signature he misread as "cow" for a long time) that appeared now and then in The Hindu.
Kutty
Kutty was born at Ottapalam, Kerala in 1921 to Kayarat Narayana Menon and Kottuthodi Lakshmi Amma. Kutty was educated at Ottapalam and Malabar Christian College, Kozhikode. Kutty's talent was discovered by the famous Malayalam satirist, Professor M. R. Nair (better known by his pen name "Sanjayan"). His first cartoon appeared in the Malayalam humor magazine Viswaroopam (edited by Sanjayan) in 1940.Rao Sahib V. P. Menon, a relative of Kutty's father and a senior official in the British Imperial Secretariat (New Delhi) introduced him to the famous Indian cartoonist Shankar. Shankar used to sketch cartoons for Hindustan Times and was looking for a trainee. V. P. Menon requested Shankar to train Kutty, who reached New Delhi on January 3, 1941. In those days, Jawaharlal Nehru (later India's first Prime Minister), a great admirer of Shankar's cartoons, was looking for a cartoonist for his newly-started English Daily, National Herald, published from Lucknow. Shankar trained Kutty for 6 months and recommended him for Nehru's newspaper. Kutty became staff cartoonist of National Herald (Lucknow). His first cartoon to appear in a daily newspaper was published in the National Herald January 15, 1941.
Abu Abraham
Born in Mavelikara, Kerala as the son of A.M. Mathew and Kantamma, Abu started drawing cartoons at the age of 3. After studying French, Mathematics, and English at University College, Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum) and being the tennis champion, he graduated in 1945. He moved to Bombay where he became a journalist in Bombay Chronicle and its sister paper, The Bombay Sentinel while contributing cartoons to Blitz and Bharat. In 1951, he was invited by Shankar, one of India's best known cartoonists at the time, to move to New Delhi to work in the Shankar's Weekly.
In 1953, he met Fred Joss of the London Star, who encouraged him to move to London.[2] At 32, Abu arrived in London in the summer of 1953 and immediately sold cartoons to Punch magazine and the Daily Sketch and started to contribute material to Everybodys' London Opinion and Eastern World using the pen name 'Abraham'. In 1956, after two cartoons were published in Tribune, he was sent a personal letter by David Astor, the editor of The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, offering him a permanent job as its first ever political cartoonist. Astor asked Abu to change his pen name as 'Abraham' would imply a false slant on his cartoons, and so he settled on 'Abu', a schoolboy nickname of his.
Abu immersed himself in British culture and produced incisive political cartoons. He was described in The Guardian as "the conscience of the Left and the pea under the princess's mattress".He also produced reportage drawings from around the world. In 1962 in Cuba he drew Che Guevara and spent three hours in a nightclub with Fidel Castro.
In September 1966, Abu moved to The Guardian and started to contribute a weekly cartoon to the Tribune. During 1968 he edited Verdicts on Vietnam, a collection of cartoons about the Vietnam war.
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