Tokaii celebrates silver jubilee

Although Rafiqun Nabi’s (better known as Ranabi) Tokaii hasn’t changed in the slightest , the always-mocking cartoon character turns 25 this year. Ranabi’s exhibition of 100 recent wotercolours and 40 ink-and-pen drawings featuring Tokaii was held at Gallery Chitrak in Dhaka.

Tokaii’s  well-known appearance with a bald head, thin limbs and swollen belly, had been an indispensable item of the erstwhile weekly magazine Bichitra since 1978. It is to date surely the only popular cartoon-strip in the country.

Clad in a short checkered lungi, the street urchin lives on the pavement or in the big construction pipes scattered about the city. The dustbins provide his daily meals. Despite the apparent destitution, the boy is always making witty scathing reflections in Dhakaite dialect on things around him.  And the precocious talkativeness attributes an unavoidable sweetness to the boy that has made him famous—perhaps more than its creator Ranabi himself.

An illiterate boy, Tokaii’s fame lies in the playful witty language that always points at the hypocrisy and inhumanity, anomalies and loopholes in the society. Tokaii, however, never speaks of any revolution; no satirist does, for that matter.

Although the exhibition celebrates 25 years of Tokaii, Shahadat Chowdhury, the editor of Shaptahik 2000,  believes that Tokaii’s ‘real age should be 33—Tokaii is exactly contemporary with Bangladesh.’ He points to the unchanged face of Tokaii since it was first conceived and relates it to the fact that the condition of the country has not changed, nor has that of Tokaii. The only noticeable thing is the increased number of such characters.

Tokaii’s fame essentially lies in his dialogue. Sometimes he speaks like a philosopher: asked if he knows what a family is, the homeless Tokaii reflects, ‘I know mine—footpath, dustbin, the crows etc’. Making fun of society’s hypocrisy, a grave Tokaii says that his vow on Children’s Day is ‘To grow up soon’. In one drawing, a man asks Tokaii what he would  do if he suddenly became rich. The urchin replies, ‘Like you I would pose the same question to the Tokaii of that time.’ Again asked what he did at Eid, when Tokaii says, ‘Put on a show of being happy’, the satire is obvious.

Tokaii’s world is full of fantasies where he talks to animals. And his conversation with the harmless animals reflects just how harmless Tokaii himself is. To the fantasy of a crow wondering what would happen if it could exchange life with Tokaii, the puzzled urchin answers, ‘What else!! We would have meals at this some dustbin!!!’ Again when a lean cow reflects on its fate, that no one showed interest in buying it, a delighted Tokaii comments, ‘Then you are a Tokaii among the cows….’ The Tokaii-paintings show the roguish boy at different times of the day—lying on a bench beside an electric pole, or making friends with street dogs, or collecting wastepaper, even sometimes playing on the mandolin. The paintings surely depict Ranabi’s romanticisation of the character.

Although Rafiqun Nabi’s (better known as Ranabi) Tokaii hasn’t changed in the slightest , the always-mocking cartoon character turns 25 this year. Ranabi’s exhibition of 100 recent wotercolours and 40 ink-and-pen drawings featuring Tokaii was held at Gallery Chitrak in Dhaka. Tokaii’s  well-known appearance with a bald head, thin limbs and swollen belly, had been…