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Magazine
COMMENT
Gandhi: From substance to shadow
CHITRA PADMANABHAN
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As another Dandi March anniversary went by, the question looms large: Who wants the ‘real’ Gandhi when the image more than suffices?
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It has taken 60 years for a young nation to make this quicksilver, contradiction-laden, troublesome figure invisible by making his images omnipresent in our daily lives, whose contexts we control so well.
PHOTOS: BIJOY GHOSH, C. V. Subrahmanyam, K. MURALI KUMAR
OMNIPRESENT IMAGE: The motifs have acquired a life of their own.
His benign face on the Indian rupee accompanies our daily rhythms — from necessities to acquisitions. His toothless smile marks time in an unending cycle of calendars, stamps our communications. He is a presence on the wall in moments of relaxa
tion, as a sepia portrait lending authority to every government functionary’s lair.
As for official announcements on giant leaps forward — and, perhaps, away from his vision — bearing his image on advertisements, he keeps an understanding mien. And for anyone in quest of a metaphoric motif of a grand resistance, there’s the image of his fluid Dandi March stride hewed out in black stone in Delhi. Like a Mount Rushmore backdrop.
Brand mark
This is the common cache of images of Gandhi that we encounter on a day-to-day basis. Reproduced relentlessly in geometric progression as graphics for any context, public or private, Gandhi’s images are brand mark, talisman and endorsement, in photo, silkscreen print, and pixel.
Over time these images have melded into a here-and-now domesticated presence: a “Bapu and child” calendar rubs shoulders with a one of goddess Lakshmi to promote a cloth merchant’s wares. So much so that each of these image-motifs seems to have attained a life of its own (or is it lifelessness) divorced from the flesh and blood historical Gandhi: a man known for his civilisational churning of ideas, and for the rigorous moral and spiritual component that he demanded in politics, starting with the self. Going by the modern-day axiom, “to photostat is to know”, to watch Ben Kingsley’s “Gandhi” is to know Gandhi.
Whenever the historical Gandhi intrudes into this safe domain, we panic. Some dates are unavoidable, like January 30 on which he was shot to death by Nathuram Godse (in 1948). That event was symptomatic of a deep schism in the body politic accompanying the birth of a nation and shadows its fate to this day. But we have efficiently tamed the bloody imprint of that moment with standard media images of sanitised homage at Rajghat by political leaders. These unvarying images in their annual ritualistic cycle are more akin to a nativity play than an incisive moment of self-reflection on a crime pointing to still unresolved issues.
This year’s script was somewhat different. On January 30, the last of Gandhi’s preserved ashes were immersed in the sea by his descendants in Mumbai. This was a fragment of history directly linked to the historical figure. But the occasion notched up a straggling crowd of a few hundreds. Had it been a film shoot for a similar scene, there would have been a few thousands at least. The desperation of crowds jostling to enter the frame would have convincingly portrayed the ‘despair’ of multitudes over Gandhi’s killing.
The only safe issues left to engage with in everyday life are queries whether Gandhi’s last words were ‘Ram Ram’ or ‘Hey Ram’, following recent media reports about a conflicting eyewitness account. In a nation hooked to the small screen, such curiosity is befitting; some smart person could become a crorepati with an inspired hit on the button. MC: what were Gandhi’s last words? The options are: a) Hey Ram b) Ram Ram c) Sita Ram d) Jai Shri Ram.
We live in an age of multiple choice questions; long format, “comprehension” questions requiring individual inputs of reflection are increasingly passé, as any youth below the 25-year barrier will tell you.
What we see is what we get. Gandhi is a stodgy typeface ubiquitous and eternal on the visual horizon — as the nomenclature of countless schools, colleges, institutions and roads. In Delhi, the Mahatma Gandhi road is commonly known as Ring Road, the road circling the Capital — without beginning or end, mirroring the existence of Gandhi in our lives. Such beings do not have a history, they have a mythology. One ‘sees’ their lives through modular, epigrammatic incidents, without having to understand the ideas of a historical figure in the context of his times. Like comic strips and word balloons. So Gandhi equals Champaran, Dandi March, Noakhali and January 30, equals the conflict between good and evil, equals the heroic resistance of a David against a Goliath.
What is left to understand or teach about him in the classroom? Several generations of free Indians have been comfortable with Gandhi as image to relish the historian’s quest of seeing the man in a multi-dimensional, historical perspective.
Gandhigiri
In recent times the enormous popularity of ‘Gandhigiri’ in the Bollywood film “Lage Raho Munnabhai” bears this out. Here, Gandhi talks Mumbaiya, walks Mumbaiya, to get across to Munnabhai — not as a political figure, but more as a personal guru who teaches the art of living by certain principles, as several social scientists pointed out.
A model much in demand, Munnabhai’s Gandhi spoke our language and comfortingly addressed our little contexts. Best of all there was no intrusion of politics. So who wants the ‘real’ Gandhi when the image more than suffices?
It has taken 60 years for a young nation to make this quicksilver, contradiction-laden, troublesome figure invisible by making his images omnipresent in our daily lives, whose contexts we control so well.
No one can say we have not succeeded. So like other years, we saw the shadow play of political sentimentalists going through the charade of making salt, in commemoration of the ‘Salt March’ to Dandi, which commenced on March 12, 1930. The implicit political risk of that historic act now tamed through theatricalisation, Gandhi will continue to remain the safest bank to invest our symbolic capital, even as we relish our branded salt.
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