Reading history through animal imagery from pre–WWII British editorial cartoons: Gandhi’s anticolonial struggle during India’s civil disobedience movement (1930–1931)

Abstract

This article studies animal imagery published in pre-WWII British editorial cartoons offering constant updates about India’s Civil Disobedience movement (1930s) against British colonialism to uncover the processes through which the event and the people participating in it, both Indian political leaders and British administrators, were designated a particular animal symbol that popularly became associated with their identities in the long run. In other words, the article looks into the question of how animal images affect the iconography of historical personalities. The article will be an insight into defamiliarizing/deconstructing the events and people from this movement and then analyse how animals were used as substitutes for defining, explaining, and debating a concept, a human, an event, or a nationality in the cartoons published in British newspapers in those times. Consequently, I will explore satirical representations of everyday politics during the Civil Disobedience movement, thus offering the cultural history of the Raj in those times. As these editorial cartoons are published almost at the same time as the actual occurrence of events in the 1930s, they also give an insight into the prevalent colonial stereotypes, traditions, beliefs, humour, tolerance level, as well as ‘domestic politics, social themes,’ of the existing society (Kemnitz). © 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.