Awantha Artigala: Sri Lankas quiet cartoonist

For someone relatively new to game he published his first piece in 2006 he has gone
farther, and faster, than anyone else in his generation.

by Smriti Daniel
( July 7, 2015, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The first time I asked Awantha Artigala for an
interview, he laughed and said no. This was partly because we communicated in staccato, he in
English (my first language) and I in Sinhala (his first language), both of us struggling to frame
sentences. So the second time I asked, I decided to go through a friend who I was hoping would
also be an informal referee for me, and eventually a translator. Artigala agreed but we didnt
manage to meet that day. His phone was off and none of our mutual acquaintances had heard
from him. It was also the Sinhala and Tamil New Year in Sri Lanka and everyone, even a
newspaper cartoonist, must be allowed to enjoy this long holiday.
When Artigala poked his head around the door of an office in central Colombo where we
were to make our second attempt at meeting my relief was immediate. I almost did not
recognise him the only picture I had seen was from last year, where he stood holding his
Cartoonist of the Year trophy at the Editors Guild Awards in Sri Lanka. We shook hands
nervously he, because this was the first interview he had agreed to give after declining several
other requests, and I because I was going into this cold. Despite the almost ubiquitous
popularity of his cartoons in Sri Lanka there was practically no biographical information about

Artigala that I could find anywhere online.

This is odder then you might think at first glance. Artigala is a singular talent. For someone
relatively new to the game he published his first piece in 2006 he has gone farther, and
faster, than anyone else in his generation. He has won Cartoonist of the Year three times, and
today produces an estimated 22 to 25 sketches and illustrations a week for two prominent
national newspapers the Daily Mirror and Ada. (At least 8 to 10 of these are destined to be
stand-alone cartoons.) Kesara Abeywardena, his editor at the Daily Mirror, told me he was
impressed at how prolific, yet consistent, Artigala had proved to be, sometimes producing
several equally good cartoons at one sitting.
He thinks in a way that others dont, said Abeywardena, crediting the cartoonist with
generating almost all of his own material. I think he could match any of the senior cartoonists.
He is already one of the best, but he is still quite young. He may even be able to do better.
Artigala is 34 years old and has a reputation for being intelligent yet self-effacing. I was
advised, more than once, to ease him into the interview and so we started with his home: a
remote village adjoining the Salgala jungle reserve in the islands Kegalle district, with a
population of some 1500 people. For much of his childhood, they had no electricity, but
Artigala was educated in the local village school. His father worked in the maintenance
department of the national railways and his mother kept their home.
The youngest of three children, Artigala remembered the family house as being filled with
books, newspapers and magazines. It was in these that he first encountered the work of the now
iconic Sri Lankan cartoonist Wijerupage Wijesoma; a man who would become, along with
cartoonists Collette, Darshana Karunathilaka and Winnie Hettigoda, Artigalas first guides.
Artigala was nine years old when he drew his first real cartoon. It was the late 1980s, and Sri
Lanka was in tumult. A violent insurrection marked by murders, raids and attacks on military
and civilian targets by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) party and its offshoots was on its
way to being brutally crushed by JR Jayawardenes government.
Having absorbed all the conversations around him, Artigala drew a cartoon where a JVP man
held a gun to the head of a villager. Brought to his knees, the villager was defiantly exhorting
his captor to shoot him, but the latters gun was fake made of wood. (Many insurgents didnt
own weapons in the early years). Artigalas parents were so frightened of the consequences, if
someone from the JVP were to find the drawings, that they burned them. It would be Artigalas
first experience of censorship.

Awantha Artigala at work (Photos by Lasantha Kumara)

When Artigala first came to work at the Wijeya Newspapers, he had already spent six months at
home on a break from university, by this point utterly frustrated and disengaged from his
studies. The publishing group, one of the biggest and most prominent on the island, was his
first choice as employers. To be here, he had left behind a scholarship and a science degree that
he was very close to completing.
Although his elder sister and brother had grades good enough to qualify them for university
entrance, they had not been able to take up the opportunity, needing to work sooner, to earn
money for the family. The youngest, Awantha, was allowed a privilege of higher education that
had not been available to his siblings. Knowing this context, I suspect the choice abruptly to
deviate from a respectable and probably more lucrative career path had to come from a forceful
compulsion.
Gihan de Chickera, a senior cartoonist on the Daily Mirror desk, remembered seeing a selection
of Artigalas earliest drawings. His supervisor, designer Nalin Balasuriya had brought them
over. They were simple sketches but showed clear potential the cross-hatching was
particularly skilled. Initially hired to do layout and design, Artigala had of late been putting
together small illustrations for the paper. His first break came when he was commissioned to do
a sketch for a regular columnist.
Artigala said he was also at the time experiencing what felt like a rapid, dramatic expansion in
his worldview. Staying in the home of a relative in Dehiwala, in the inner Colombo suburbs, he
was a voracious reader. (As a young person, he had an unusually earnest taste in books,
enjoying the work of Nehru, Gandhi and Dickens; as an adult he nurtures an unabashed love for
the films of Charlie Chaplin.) He happily followed the advice of his editors on the paper when
they recommended that he immerse himself in politics and current events. Working on an
English language paper although not fluent in English, he could read well enough to come up
with ideas for cartoons for the paper.

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He also began to develop a visual language that would allow him to communicate complex
ideas in a single panel. Artigala relied heavily on the use of symbolism and idiom to voice his
largely wordless critique of government. For instance, a red scarf, worn over white national
dress, is shorthand for members of the Rajapaksa family and lions and tigers are symbols that
stand in for different ethno-religious groups. The shift of power and influence was seen through
depictions of nations flags which have their colours reversed or their parts scavenged always
by politicians themselves to indicate shifting allegiances. The politicians often don
sunglasses, look well-fed and smug, while their constituents stand deprived and quivering
they never know everything thats going on, but they know enough to be afraid.
Many of his techniques are not new, Artigala is simply learning from the best in his field. From
Wijesoma, for instance, he learned the art of conveying estimations of power through scale so
while current Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena was depicted as physically bigger than
former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, both men were overshadowed by Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi.
De Chickera said this last technique is something he and Artigala have often discussed. In fact,
they are part of a team of cartoonists who share a long desk, two computers and three chairs at
the Daily Mirror office. The space is a magnet for the journalists around, who love to stop by
for a good argument or two.
The cartoons Artigala has produced in the midst of all this reading and debate are distinctively
liberal and progressive. In them, he championed the causes of underpaid plantation workers;
spoke of the toll of city beautification drives on the urban poor; underlined the exploitation of
the taxpayer in the service of bigger profits for government cronies and skewered with

precision the various hypocrisies of local politicians.

One of his pet peeves is astrology (which is prevalent enough in Sri Lanka to determine the
schedules of Presidential elections) and it was in discussing this that he articulated the
philosophy that undergirds his work. The middle path or the objectivity of journalists, he said,
was not for cartoonists. Instead, he sees cartoonists in the roles of activists and as shapers of
public opinion.
He told me, with conviction, that he believed we could make the world a better place. An
optimist at heart, he wanted nothing more than to make his readers think. Perhaps laugh a bit
first, but definitely think. Nowhere did he get more confirmation that he was succeeding than
on his Facebook page where he now has over 55,000 fans. Every new post is shared widely and
greeted with a long chain of comments and arguments. Artigala said he relished the prospect
not only to change minds but have his own changed in return.
Artigalas popularity on social media has allowed him to circumvent, to a small degree, the
pervasive censorship long experienced by the Sri Lankan media. (The island nation was listed
number 4 on 2014s Impunity Index Rating by the New York-based Committee to Protect
Journalists, just behind Iraq, Somalia and the Philippines.) He told me he suspected that
journalists imposed too much censorship on themselves but that there was nevertheless a very
narrow space within which one could operate.
Artigala got married last year. His wife Roshima is an English teacher. Knowing that his chosen
profession was one unlikely ever to pay well, Artigala said they intend to live a simple life. He
could not imagine doing anything else for a living. Back home in his village, however, his
neighbours havent quite reconciled themselves to his profession on his last visit, one told
him gently: Son, its time you get a real job.
Hard to offend, Artigala was genuinely amused by this. First to admit that he had much left to
master, Artigala said he was somewhat saddened that he could not pursue a degree in his
chosen field in Sri Lanka. His colleagues, though, felt he didnt need it. De Chickera said he
thought Artigala was perfectly in the zone and claimed to have predicted this this would be
the case five years ago. I told him hes going to be the next great cartoonist. We had Collettes
era, we had Wijesomas era, but now we are in Artigalas era.
This was first published on Commonwealth Writers
(All cartoons courtesy of Awantha Artigala)

Smriti Daniel is a journalist based in Colombo. An Indian national, she has

spent the last decade as a features writer for the Sunday Times of Sri Lanka. Her work has
appeared in publications including The Hindu, BusinessLine, Cond Nast Traveller and Open.
She manages social media for the South Asian edition of SciDev.Net. (Photo by Suda
Shanmugaraja)