Over the last 20 years, I have been engaged with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, his complex life and philosophy and his activities that influenced the world’s view on politics and human rights. Growing up in the 1980s in Kerala, I had a very different perspective about him. I have read literature that criticised the political incorrectness of the Congress party and Gandhi himself. Over time, I began observing the many factors that probably layered one’s perspective on truth, and that it cannot be characterised as a single entity but is dynamic.
While moving from a small town to a mega city, my internal rhythm of absorbing realities and critical rejections went through a massive shuffle. My viewpoints were coloured by different sentiments and I started looking at Gandhi more like a political saint whose rigidness with truth and his values had no parallel in the political history of the world. His ‘militant nature’ in keeping to a non-violent resistance was as dangerous as it was to stand in the middle of a battlefield unprotected. I was fascinated by the errors he committed, the belief systems he was glued to, and the contradictions that nurtured his philosophy.
More importantly, the last few years of his life were a test of his own experiments and their effectiveness in the larger social system. According to him, he failed miserably because the nation witnessed massive massacres and unparalleled cruelty. For me, it is interesting to ‘reinvent’ Gandhi through my art, at a time when his vision is being abandoned by the state and his image is protected as a religious icon.
India’s openness to the global market and a rampant capitalist makeover that shook and uprooted most of the small-scale industry and farming sector was only a starting point. Growing religious fundamentalism and communal based polarisation and violence was to follow.
I remember visiting Porbandar, Dandi and Sabarmati. It was more than 15 years ago. I was searching for the presence of Gandhi in these places, in the narrow alleys of Porbandar, where he spent his childhood. But I felt Porbandar has always stood like this for centuries. It really doesn’t matter to the city who was born here or who died. Perhaps, this is true of many places in the world. Individual efforts merge into social memory and that social memory survives only in the individual self without leaving a mark on the place where that individual lived. Does Gandhi remain as an undaunted social memory where his own ideas about change dissipate into thin air in the place where he was born?
Gigi Scaria’s work, Caution! Men at Work (Credit: Gigi Scaria)
In Ahmedabad, I arrived early in the morning at Sabarmati Ashram. It was alive with people and nature. I went inside the house in which most of the important political decisions regarding India were made for more than a decade. I spent hours inside and outside the building. It is a simple house with thatch-tiled roof. But the house looks really big and has a solid structure. It reminded me of the body of Gandhi, his broad shoulders and strong features. Unlike Porbandar, in Sabarmati, I felt the social memory catching up with the present time. I observed hundreds of visitors walk around the house, spending time inside the airy rooms and in the little backyard. Sabarmati Ashram stood as a metaphor for the political consciousness of this country. And at the same time, it also demands a fresh reading of its historical context. Gandhi left this house on March 12, 1930, with 79 residents from the ashram to Dandi, recalling Buddha’s renunciation, with a vow not to return to this place till India got its freedom. And history proves that he never returned to Sabarmati. The determination of leaving this place was for Gandhi as important as the intention of making it.
I have observed a similar situation in our neighbouring country, China, where the father of the nation has been transformed into yet another icon and the country is moving towards a systematically organised capitalist mode while asserting its militant communist position. To my mind, the principles on which a nation is built are collapsing daily. This makes me look back and forth to the very idea of a nation. And here, I wish to raise a fundamental question: Would fathers of any nation have imagined a nation in the manner in which its people carry their vision forward? How and when do the raw materials that build a nation change its property? When do the politically engaged visionaries of the world become mere creators of a gigantic myth called ‘nation’?
Growing intolerance over the idea of a nation and who is a nationalist has become the debate of the hour. I believe Gandhi offers more clues on this debate than anyone else. Gandhi is the body of a nation who was shot thrice in the wake of its own freedom.
Gigi Scaria’s Gandhi-inspired Work
Porbandar (2008): In this series, Gigi Scaria travels through Porbandar to photograph the overlooked aspects of Gandhi’s birthplace
Who Deviated First? (2010): Alluding to Devi Prasad’s The Martyr’s Column in New Delhi, in Scaria’s inkjet on archival paper Gandhi walks ahead while his followers alter their path and choose the other direction
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In Search of Salt (2010): In this work, Scaria reminds his audience of the relevance of seemingly small acts as Gandhi continues to stride forward surrounded with concrete and small heaps of salt, symbolic of the Dandi march
Caution! Men at Work (2015): With a half-complete figure of Gandhi, Scaria comments on creation and destruction, the tendency to erect and abandon Gandhi statues, even as ‘caution’ is advised
Flyover (2011): Created as part of an exhibition in New Delhi to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of Tolstoy Farm on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, Scaria here places Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram under the shadow of a concrete overpass as the symbol of new India
Gigi Scaria is a Delhi-based contemporary artist
