If you ask Dyutiman Bhattacharya whether he is a cartoonist who became a policeman or a policeman who is also a cartoonist, he’ll tell you he’s the former — a cartoonist who happens to be a policeman.
“Policing is just my job, cartooning is my passion,” Mr. Bhattacharya, 47, an Indian Police Service officer currently serving as a Deputy Commissioner of Police in Howrah, tells The Hindu , when asked how he reconciles the two avatars. He then adds, “A policeman is usually at the receiving end in cartoons. I have turned the tables.”
Mr. Bhattacharya — the cartoonist, that is — is a busy man these days. He’s an integral part of the month-long, first-ever Cartoon Mela in Kolkata being hosted by a bookshop Read Bengali Books in south Kolkata. The festival began on December 5 and is being anchored by the Cartoon Dol, a group of seasoned cartoonists from the city.
Mr. Bhattacharya spends most of his evenings these days at the shop, doing live cartooning and interacting with the spectators and aspiring cartoonists. The shop even has on sale a 2022 desk calendar featuring caricatures done by him. “The idea is to demonstrate that cartoons need not be confined to newspapers. I love doing on-the-spot caricatures of people I meet. My pet cats and dogs feature in most of my cartoons. I also love doing caricatures of celebrities,” he says.
Mr. Bhattacharya is a self-taught artist whose inspirations include R.K. Laxman, Mario Miranda and Bud Blake. He got introduced to the world of cartoons through R.K. Laxman, thanks to Malgudi Days on Doordarshan. “I kept changing jobs, but I always kept my passions alive. I keep sketching in between tasks,” says Mr. Bhattacharya, also an amateur painter — he recently sold all of his 22 works at an exhibition in Howrah — and a novelist and has a column on policing in a periodical. He and the Cartoon Dol now plan to institutionalise the Cartoon Mela.
