Gandhi and the Politics of the Image

14 JULY

BHARAT TOURIST HOME

The talk, “Gandhi and the Politics of Image,” explored the political relevance of the cultural representations of Mohandas Gandhi. The historian Vinay Lal began with a presentation of various images of paintings, sculptures, statues and caricatures of Gandhi. Lal and the sociologist Ashis Nandy then discussed these images. Nandy saw Gandhi’s solitude reflected in some of the images, and spoke at length about the idea. He further talked about how the grandiosity of the images creates a narrative of a historical event for the viewer. The discussion ended with a comparison between images of Gandhi and some of Mao Zedong, and an analysis of how differently the two have been portrayed.

~ Raina Paul