Gandhi and the Practices & Politics of Visual Representation
There is no question that Mohandas Gandhi remains, more than six decades after his assassination, the most iconic figure of modern India. Indeed, he is the only ‘secular’ figure around whom a distinct and complex iconography began to develop in his own lifetime. Gandhi has been a blessing to cartoonists; and nearly every major Indian artist of consequence over the course of the last half-century, from M. F. Husain and Ramkinkar Baij to Ghulam Muhammad Sheikh and Atul Dodiya, has engaged with Gandhi in his or her work. His statues are found not only all over India but have now begun to grace cities around the world. The photographic archive built around Gandhi is immense, and similarly Indian print-makers from the 1920s to 1940s found numerous ways to build narratives of political, spiritual and cultural nationalism around his figure.
However, the various representations of Gandhi cannot be interpreted as offering a seamless narrative on his unique place in the national imaginary or as a figure of global protest. What we do not see is just as important as what we do see. Printmakers, photographers, painters, and sculptors are alert to different considerations. The photographers of Gandhi, for instance, were naturally sensitive to the play of light and shadows, while printmakers, working with a relatively new medium of mass prints, drew on mythic material that they construed as the grounding of Indian civilization. The interpretation of public statuary leads us to a different set of questions: where are statues placed, with what effect and consequences, and to what end? The dialectic of the visible compels us also to a consideration of the invisible and the divisible. In this talk, I shall examine the life and work of Gandhi in the light of various forms of visual representation, from cartoons and public statues to paintings and nationalist prints, and suggest what kind of insights we might be able to derive from a study of these images. We can speak, for example, of ‘the martyred Gandhi’, ‘the walking Gandhi’, ‘the seated Gandhi’, ‘the sartorial Gandhi’, ‘the gendered Gandhi’, and so on. After offering a lengthy overview of the politics of representing Gandhi, I will move to a more extended analysis of ‘the sartorial Gandhi’ or ‘the martyred Gandhi’ in my talk.
Vinay Lal earned his Ph.D. with Distinction from the University of Chicago in 1992 after undergraduate and masters degrees in literature and philosophy from Johns Hopkins University. He has taught history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) since 1993 and most recently was Professor of History at University of Delhi (2010-11). His dozen books include Deewaar: The Footpath, the City, and the Angry Young Man (HarperCollins, 2011); Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres (ed., Oxford, 2009); The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century, co-edited with Ashis Nandy (Viking Penuin, 2005); Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture (Penguin, 2005); The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India(Oxford, 2003); and Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2002).
He has recently completed a two-volume anthology on the idea of the city in modern India for Oxford UP and is on the verge of finishing two books on Gandhi. His work has been translated into Hindi, Urdu, Kannada, French, German, Spanish, Finnish, Korean, and Persian. He is also honored to have been profiled at some length in David Horowitz’s book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2007).