At The Edge

Photograph by great Brian Brake published in 'India, by Joe David Brown and the editors of Life', 1961 [complete book  available at Hathi ] as a visual aid to the text that deals with relevance of Gandhi in India, The Nation's Unsilenced Conscience. It would have you believe Gandhi was alive, in heart and spirit of Indians. As I looked at this beautiful picture, something about it made me realize that this can be a case study about  disjointedness of images, context and text. About giant sweeps of history. Of loss of footnotes. Of lost in footnotes. Of seduction by images. About loss. One may ask why. After all it does look like a perfect picture for an article on Gandhi. Children = innocence = unsilenced Conscience. Children in love with Gandhi = The Nations's un-silenced conscience. Simple and brilliant. The problem is with the details. The book only tells you that it is by Brian Brake and appears courtesy of Magnum. Place wh...

I design games for social networks. The statement basically means I spend an indecent amount of time on Facebook. To be able to work I haven't added too many people as friend and as a precaution I have blocked a lot of incoming distractions that are often likely to appear on one's Wall in form of  timepass  like this : Mahatama Steps Out of character of Gandhi This supposed image of Gandhi dancing with some white woman travelled from hate groups (Anti-Gandhi to Anti-India) with comments about ' Mastikhor Ayyash Gandhi' to liberal groups with 'O! he could dance!' remarks. The basically ended up going viral. If it managed to reach my high wall, it must be really viral, that's my rule. It took me one google image search query to find that the image is actually of an Australian artist impersonating Gandhi for some charity event held in Sydney for India back in those days. -0-

It is believed that while India was having its little “Tryst with Destiny”, Gandhi was at a place called Noakhali in East Bengal(that had already become East Pakistan and what is now Bangladesh). * Noakhali at the time (and in 1946) witnessed some of the most macabre killings with Hindus and Muslims butchering each other ( wiki entry actually reads Genocide ). Gandhi, going against all advice and odds, went to the center of this mindless violence and was pacifying the rioting crowd on the first eve of Indian Independence. People at first abused him but slowly the tide turned. There were no reports of rioting in Noakhali while he was there. Mountbatten went on to call it a miracle. I recently came across some rare photographs of Gandhi's Noakhali experiment in an old Film Magazine. Captions full of ' Bhakti Bhav ' make an interesting read in themselves. On January 28th, at Panchgao (Noakhali). From FilmIndia dated April, 1947 From FilmIndia dated May, 1947 F...

"Gandhi landed in Bombay just in time for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. He was extremely loyal to Britain. British rule in India was not perfect but it did India much good. He took part in the celebrations, proudly singing ""God Save the Queen", and waving the Union Jack." - opening lines of Chapter 8 titled 'To India and Back'. Gandhi was visiting India after his first trip to South Africa where he had already started defending the 'Coolies'. After a short stay he sailed back to South Africa, this time with family. On reaching Durban, after not being allowed to get off the ship for days and with whites demanding that he be deported back, bravely walks out with an English friend but gets mobbed, passes out and is saved by the wife of a white Inspector of Police who takes him to her house. The crowd soon descends on the house asking that Gandhi be handed over to them. Realizing that the situation can get riotous, Gandhi put on the uni...

I had gathered from internet: Vijay Bhatt.'s Ram Rajya (1943) was the only feature film Mahatma Gandhi ever watched. Read about it at Vijaybhatt.net . They even have a scan of old newspaper clipping that announced: M. Gandhiji Sees Prakash's "Ram Rajya": Historical Event of Indian Film Industry. According to the website it happened in 1945 while he was staying at Juhu, Bombay. Then recently I came across the following passage in 'Colonial India and the making of empire cinema: image, ideology and identity' by Prem Chowdhry [ Google Books ] In the late 1930s the marketability of nationalism and its viability were not merely in the films produced by Indians - most of which became popular hits - but also in the way producers, distributors and exhibitors advertised their products. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, was a favorite for advertising the films. Large size photographs of Gandhi adorned the film advertisements along the much smaller photographs of the lea...

Found this at Youtube. Think it's great! video link Reminds me of a Public Service short film that they used to show on Doordarshan in which a paint brush would draw a figure while 'Vaishnav jan to' played in the background. The film ends with an image something like this:

Dipen send in a link to this old ad featuring Gandhi. Timing could not have been better. The Diwali special issue of 'The Navyug' published on October 31, 1948, had Gandhi's picture in  Bombay Company's Rat brand German incense sticks and jasmine hair oil.  From private collection of Atul Shah [more at TOI ] And this was only days after Gandhi's death. At least the product looks complete Sawdeshi (in true Indian tradition even having a foreign touch) And now. Mont Blanc is selling 241 (for Gandhi's 241 Mile Dandi March) Limited Edition 'Luxury' Pen having hand-crafted rhodium plated 18-carat gold nib depicting Gandhiji holding his trademark lathi — all in gold — for 11-14 Lakh. For those how are thinking of selling their house to buy it. Wait. There is also ‘Mahatma Gandhi Limited Edition 3000’ available for Rs.1.7 Lakh (for fountain pen) and Rs.1.5 Lakh (for roller ball. I always thought Fountain Pen rich). So just sell your silverware or...

Subhash Chandra Bose should have known better. Bose visited Berlin in 1939 to enlist Nazi support for his independence movement and shook Hitler's Hand. And I come to have more and more respect for Gandhi. If you say yes to A of  Z then B of Y certainly follow and C of X can't be logically denied. So Gandhi said clear no to A. Image found in Hindustan Times (dated April 17, 2009) story on a collector of vintage currency and coins. I looked around for some more information on this note and found this: It turns out that Azad Hind may have never actually minted any banknotes meant as currency ( according to a rumor Germans printed banknotes for Bose, but  allegedly they were lost when the ship they were sent in was torpedoed on its way to Japan). The 1000 (currency unit less) notes depicting Bose shaking the hand of Adolf Hitler were commemorative propaganda banknote minted at the end of the war and meant to be sold with the profits going to various charities for the ben...

“I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away.” - Mahatma Gandhi [Last Phase, Vol. II (1958), P. 65] . Lines could be found on the first page of every school text book printed by NCERT (National Council of Education Research and Training). Hindi text books had a translation of the lines. -0- Photograph: A child on the outskirts of Delhi. 14th May 2009. Unrelated post from my Kashmir blog: Bhookha Nanga Hindustan

Caricatures of (clockwise) Mahatma Gandhi, Jinnah, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan (this one really stands out), Sheikh Abdullah and Pandit Nehru. Found these in wonderful book called Faces, Through the Eyes of R.K. Laxman (Bennett Coleman & Co, 2000) ("Presented by BPL Mobile.")   The 155 page book has a collection of great R.K.Laxman's caricatures of not only those leaders and personalities who shaped recent Indian history but also of some famous international personalities ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Mao and to Bernard Russells.

Mahatma Gandhi on way to his last prayer meeting On Trial looking relaxed: (Front row, left to right) Nathuram Godse , Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare; (back row, extreme left Digambar Badge - the government approver) The photographs can be found in The Men who Killed Gandhi by Manohar Malgonkar. Found these in a review of the book published by India Today dated Feb11, 2008.  -0- "perhaps it was not an accident that Godse began his political career as a participant in a civil disobedience movement started by Gandhi and ended his political life with a speech from the witness stand which, in spite of being an attack on Gandhi, none the less revealed a grudging respect for what Gandhi had done for the country" -  Ashis Nandy Long ago, I had posted an extract from an essay by Ashis Nandy titled The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi that appears in his book At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics And Culture . The extract traced the early life of Gandhi...

Gandhi was visibly depressed during his last days. According to political psychologist Ashis Nandy : “If Gandhi in his depression connived at it, he also perhaps felt- being the shrewd, practical idealist he was-that he had become somewhat of an anachronism in post-partition, independent India; and in violent death he might be more relevant to the living than he could be in life. As not a few have sensed, like Socrates and Christ before him. Gandhi knew how to use man’s sense of guilt creatively.” Did Gandhi know what he was doing? He once said: “I find no parallel in history for a body of converts and their descendants claiming to be a nation apart from the parent stock. If India was one nation before the advent of Islam, it must remain one in spite of the change of faith of a very large body of her children” Gandhi in “Jinnah of Pakistan” by Stanley Wolpert , New Delhi 1985(1st edn 1984) page 232-3. Ironically, the same line became a battle cry for BJP in the 90s.

Gandhi’s assassin was born in 1910, in a small village in the margin of the Bombay-Poona conurbation. He was the eldest son and the second child in a family of four sons and two daughters. His father was Vinayak R .Godse, a petty government official who worked in the postal department and had a transferable job, which took him to small urban settlements over the years. Three sons had been born to him before Nathuram and all three had died in infancy. Both Vinayak and his wife were devoted and orthodox Brahmans and, understandably, they sought a religious solution to the problem of the survival of their newborn son. The result was the use of a time-honored technique: Nathuram was brought up as a girl. His nose was pierced and he was made to wear a nath or nose ring. It is thus that he came to acquire the name Nathuram, even though his original name was Ram Chandra. Such experiences often go with a heightened religiosity and a sense of being chosen. In this instance, too, the child soon...