Just like the Founding Fathers of the U.S.A., right? Well, while their appearances in American animated cartoons were met with patriotic fervour, Ghandi was ridiculed.
Here’s an example from Insultin’ the Sultan, a 1934 Ub Iwerks short.
Willie Whopper grabs the sultan by the beard and swings him around. The beard breaks off, the sultan spins around, becomes a barber pole, his clothes come off, he crashes into a pillar and voila! Gandhi.
To add to the insult, a goat in a picture in a picture ridicules Mahatma by braying at him.
On top of that, we get black stereotypes, complete with dice fetish. But that’s not all. Because they’re guarding the sultan’s harem, we presume they are eunuchs, so we get gay stereotypes, too.
At the end of the cartoon, Willie finishes his tale and gets rewarded by his teacher (the standard Iwerks old crone design) with a dunce cap.
Grim Natwick and Berny Wolf get animation credits and the music was by Art Turkisher.
It happened in live action, too: see the end of the "You're Getting To Be a Habit With Me" segment of 1933's "Forty-Second Street." And I believe there are similar gags in Fleischer and Harman-Ising cartoons as well, and even in one of the early Scrappy cartoons.
ReplyDeleteCaricatures of Gandhi weren't unusual in cartoons of the time. What's interesting is how much they resemble self-caricatures of cartoonist Robert Crumb.
ReplyDeleteI imagine many Westerners in the 1930s thought of Gandhi as a ridiculous figure, a skinny, spectacled little man in a loincloth who motivated his legions of followers by... fasting? In a 1935 short story, P. G. Wodehouse's Mr. Mulliner asks: "Why is there unrest in India? Because its inhabitants eat only an occasional handful of rice. The day when Mahatma Gandhi sits down to a good juicy steak and follows it up with roly-poly pudding and a spot of Stilton you will see the end of all this nonsense of Civil Disobedience."
ReplyDeleteWodehouse, incidentally, has been far and away the most popular English-language writer in India for the better part of a century. As for Kipling... well....