by A. J. PHILIP
I KNEW Mr P.G. Koshy for several years but I did not know his connection with Shankar, father of Indian political cartooning, until he dropped cartoonist and writer O.V. Vijayan’s name, while we were chatting the other day. That aroused my interest and I kept asking him how he knew him. He told me that he spent a major part of his life at “Shankar’s Weekly”, mainly looking after its circulation and other administrative work.
Few other subjects interest me more than Kesava Shankara Pillai (July 31, 1902-December 26, 1989). This may be because his ancestral house is, as the crow flies, just 500 metres away from my house at Kayamkulam. Two decades ago, I visited his house for a feature I did in The Hindustan Times. At that time all that was left of the large, traditional house was the roofed gate where the visitors could sit and wait for the call.
With Shankar’s death, the family’s connections with the arts ended. A nephew was good enough to learn art but economic compulsions forced him to take up photography, instead, as a career. He has a hearing problem but that has not affected his specialisation in marriage photography. There used to be a large pond behind Shankar’s house where, as the story goes, a crocodile was once sighted. Neither the pond nor the many-branched mango tree Shankar had fondly written about existed any longer.
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