Annual Conference, 2026

The Culture of Satire in 18th-19th Century India

24-25 Apr. 2026

Invited Speakers

Prof. Parul Dave-Mukherji, School of Arts & Aesthetics, JNU

Dr. Prabhat Kumar, Faculty, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)

Satire’s ubiquity as a mode of expression begs the question of its function and power. The vastness of satirical literature from the ancient to modern times attests to its enduring survival despite censorship, deftly blending humour and critique, to both entertain and enlighten. Canonical theorizations of satire have often underlined a moral impetus, in which the moral dimension often subsumed the social and, by extension, the political. Relying on the exploits of irony to convey itself, satire has a complex relationship with the established order, ranging from preservation to subversion. With the emergence of cartoons and caricatures within the sphere of satire, modern theorists have foregrounded the representational paradox that underlines satirical expression. It can castigate excesses only by being an excess itself, poke fun at asymmetries by producing another mimetic asymmetry.

In eighteenth-century India, satire flourished within a diverse provincial culture even as political authority declined. Courtly traditions of wit used humour as a shield for truth-telling, while performative forms such as Kerala’s Ottanthullal combined comedy with sharp social critique. The contrast between waning Mughal power and persistent courtly indulgence became a fertile site for satire, visible across media like the miniature paintings and the mangal kavya. In north India, the vernacular Urdu poetry offered a radically non-courtly satire, using everyday idioms and popular imagery to mock religious pretension, social hierarchy, and moral hypocrisy. Similarly, in western India, Marathi tamasha and lavani traditions employed erotic humour and musical performance to satirise elite affectation, social inequality, and declining Peshwa authority.

With the expansion of colonial print culture in the nineteenth century, satire acquired new visual and textual forms. The English-educated “babu” emerged as a central satirical figure, most vividly represented in Calcutta’s Kalighat paintings and in works such as Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, which critiqued social aspiration and colonial modernity. At the same time, periodical satire introduced new materialities by combining image and text, establishing graphic satire as a major and often best-selling form. Although adapted from European models, these formats were reworked through vernacular idioms and local social types, evident in the proliferation of “Asian Punches,” as noted by scholars. The illustrated satirical press also brought the market into satire, transforming it into a commodity shaped by circulation and readership, and enabling the emerging urban middle class to shift from being targets of satire to its producers, negotiating self-critique alongside social aspiration.

By situating satire during the eighteenth and nineteenth century India, this conference seeks to trace its movement from indigenous forms to transcultural expressions, and from local ironies to broader modes of critique.

Themes and related concerns:

• Modes, mediums, and materialities of satire: visual, performative, literary, and journalistic forms, and their shifting affordances.

• Imperatives of wit and humour: satire as moral critique, political subversion, and a mechanism of taste-making.

• Sites of production and consumption: courts, coteries, communities, and satire in the emerging public sphere.

• Satire and print modernity: the rise of periodical culture, from colonial borrowings to vernacular and decolonial critique.

• Comic representations of social types and classes: mirzas, babus, elites, and declining aristocracies as satirical figures.

• Iconicity, iconoclasm, and visual excess: the use of cartoons, caricatures, and mimetic distortion as satirical tropes.

• Censorship and self-censorship: ironic modes of regulation in satirical practice.

• Self-fashioning of identities: from elitism, vigilantism to deliberate buffoonery.

• Narrating a past through transcultural satirical exchange: contemporary cross-continental satirical literature that looks back on the tragicomic aspects of the eighteenth-century.