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Title:
Volume 71 - Issue 2
Date:
2019
Table of contents:
- p. 1-7: Ram Rahman , Thematic Ad-Portfolio: Postcards for Gandhi | This article deals with an art project organized by Sahmat in 1994-95 as a continuation of a programme called Artists Against Communalism that emerged in response to the Babri Masjid demolition in Ayodhya. As a part of a year-long series of events that engaged with the Mahatma and his ideas of peace and tolerance, artists were invited to create postcards that could later be displayed as art works in galleries and also be circulated among the general public as boxed sets. The format drew on Gandhi’s frequent use of postcards as an effective method of communication and allowed for younger artists and smaller works to be given greater importance and value.
- p. 10: Latika Gupta , Editorial Note | In this note, the Associate Editor introduces the underlying themes of this volume and how they explore Gandhi’s conceptual understanding of art which combined the ideas of truth, beauty and utility. The Mahatma is also placed in the context of the current times when his legacy is being put to different political uses and needs to be reclaimed outside of this space.
- p. 12-19: Tridip Suhrud , Art as Namasmaran: The Aesthetics of Gandhi | While it is a widely held belief that the Mahatma had no place for art, music and literature in his ascetic life and ideas about national regeneration, a deeper understanding of his writings and habits reveal a subtle but refined aesthetic sensibility and philosophy. In the introductory essay, the writer unpacks these aspects for us by referring to the various human and natural artistic elements that moved and influenced Gandhi, the concepts and patterns that guided and came to be reflected in his choice of attire, living spaces and discipline, and his ideas about truth and beauty that he regarded as the greatest forms of art. He also discusses the way in which later-day artists have explored and interpreted this aesthetic side to the Mahatma.
- p. 20-27: Harmony Siganporia , In the Footsteps of Spectres: The Aesthetics of Gandhi’s Walks | Walking was an integral part of Gandhi’s private and public engagements with politics and truth. Gandhi embarked on several important walks throughout his life, with each journey acquiring its own context-specific significance. They served as forms of flanerie, pilgrimage, mass agitation and individual protest. This essay explores various aspects of Gandhi’s walks by revisiting his writings and the photographs of these historic events. The writer is concerned with the ideas and aesthetics that influenced and found resonance in these acts and their visual documentation. She also deals with the shadows cast by this legacy in terms of the journey it inspired her to take as she retraced the Mahatma’s footsteps along the famous route from Dandi to Ahmedabad with two of her friends in 2019.
- p. 28-35: Sudhir Chandra , Gandhi’s Hindi and His Aesthetics of Poverty | Gandhi’s appreciation of minimalism and purity is evident not just in his sartorial style but also in his use of language. Believing silence to be the highest form of language, Gandhi aspired for the second best option—transparent language that emerged from the depths of the speaker/writer and went straight to the depths of the listener/reader. Convinced that Hindi alone could be India’s national language, Gandhi attempted to transform it into a more inclusive language, incorporating certain words from regional languages and others of Urdu-Persian origins. A Gujarati who never learnt Hindi formally, he developed a Hindi/Hindustani that was both endearing and powerful despite all its quaintness and technical imperfections. This essay discusses Gandhi’s views on language and the manner in which he intelligently moulded the form to cater to his beliefs and politics.
- p. 36-43: Lakshmi Subramanian , Music for the Congregation: Assembling an Aesthetic for Prayer | This essay explores Gandhi’s adoption of musical prayer as an important tool for shaping ashram life and community at Sabarmati. For Gandhi, music was a useful prop to make prayer a joyful experience and prayer was crucial for character-building and instilling a sense of focus and discipline among satyagrahis. His taste for music was shaped by his exposure to the church choirs of England, the communal singing of interreligious hymns at Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, and the larger repertoire of devotional recitation and music that had been popularized in India by V.D. Paluskar and the Gita Press. These influences eventually guided his choices as he approached Pandit N.M. Khare to lead the prayer sessions and public meetings at his ashram and created a collection of songs which would form the Ashram Bhajanavali.
- p. 44-51: Venugopal Maddipati , Architecture as Weak Thought: Gandhi Inhabits Nothingness | Taking off from an essay that Gandhi wrote, titled “Akash (Ether?)”, where he discussed matters related to bodily health and living spaces, the writer engages with Gandhi’s larger concepts of architecture. As case studies, he looks at two houses inhabited by Gandhi in Segaon (Sevagram), Wardha—Adi Niwas and Bapu Kuti. While the former is very spartan and minimalist, the latter is more elaborate in design with clearly partitioned rooms. While it would seem that architecture played a secondary role in Gandhi’s life and was relegated to the marginal spaces of domesticity and interiority in favour of foregrounding the centralized concern of living by one self and with a community in the open, the writer has an alternative reading to offer. Through a close study of clerestory openings in Gandhian homes that allowed plenty of light and air to enter, he suggests that the designs served to suffuse a sense of akash within seemingly closed and sheltered dwellings.
- p. 52-57: Jutta Jain-Neubauer , The Long Walk to Freedom | The essay brings into focus a lesser-known aspect of Gandhi’s personality as a designer and maker of chappals. Gandhi saw in handmade sandals an aesthetic route to eradicate the stigma that had been associated with the communities of skinners, tanners and leather workers. Inspired by the Trappist Roman Catholic monastic order who were staunch believers in austerity and manual labour, Gandhi set up a shoemaking unit at the Tolstoy Farm for his friends and co-workers in South Africa and later replicated the model at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad. While making chappals, he kept in mind not just design but also comfort and convenience, such that these chappals soon became part of the apparel of other freedom fighters and Gandhian followers. Made from the skin of animals who had died a natural death, these iconic ashram patti chappals also came to be known as ahimsak chappals.
- p. 58-67: Vinay Lal , A Biography in Prints: Gandhi and the Visual Imaginary | From the 1920s, nationalist prints produced in cities such as Kanpur, Calcutta, Allahabad and Lahore became an important means of disseminating popular visuals and narratives associated with the Indian freedom struggle. Predominating many of these prints was the figure of Mohandas Gandhi who was depicted alongside other important leaders and events and came to acquire a mythic modern-day Buddha or Christ-like status post his assassination in 1948. This essay closely studies the evolution of these representations through a range of prints that offer a chronological rendering of his life, charting his transformation from a law student in England to a satyagrahi in South Africa and finally the architect of India’s independence. The writer discusses the subtler meanings and politics conveyed in the compositions through what they choose to include or leave out.
- p. 68-79: Sumathi Ramaswamy , Reducing Myself to Zero: The Art of Aparigraha | Over the course of his long political and spiritual career, Mahatma Gandhi frequently stated that his life goal was to reduce himself to zero. This was a goal that he variously pursued by shedding worldly attachments, declaring celibacy, adopting abstinence, and periodically undertaking punishing bodily fasts, all for the sake of meeting his ideal of aparigraha or “non-possession”.The essay reflects on the aesthetic dimension of this key Gandhian aspiration of possessing non-possession and explores how older and newer Indian visual artists have responded to this pursuit of the Mahatma. The painters discussed include Nandalal Bose, Dhiren Gandhi, Haku Shah, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Ravikumar Kashi, K.M. Adimoolam, Atul Dodiya and Surendran Nair.
- p. 80-87: Ananya Vajpeyi , Ark, Saint, City, Cipher: The Gandhi of Gulammohammed Sheikh | This essay focuses on the Baroda-based artist Gulammohammed Sheikh’s close engagement with the Mahatma and his ideals. Sheikh’s fascination with Gandhi stems from their shared Gujarati identity as well his interest in the leader’s experiments with politics, spirituality and sexuality. Looking at a series of paintings made by the artist from 2000 to 2019, the writer analyses the manner in which Sheikh draws on references from various older texts and images and places Gandhi as an interlocutor across different time periods and philosophies. The Mahatma becomes a symbol of a larger Indian tradition of interfaith dialogue and coexistence and stands as a voice of protest in contemporary times when the values of secularism, peace and tolerance are gradually being eroded.