The modern day Mahatma

They say there are more photographs than there are bricks in the world. Such vast exposure to images seems to have trained us to read images in formulaic ways. Thus, in a single glance, we crown what we see into “types”. Debanjan Roy plays on this shortcut to seeing, creating work that we are able to effortlessly classify as working in the space of binaries.

His new series exemplifies this well. In each one, Gandhi, the maestro of frugality and peace, is recast as living the urban middle class Indian life in the 21st century. Thus, a bust of Gandhi shows him with earphones and a mike, as if he were skyping. Another shows him, dhoti draped around him like a beautiful shield, lying on a recliner. Or this one, where Gandhi focuses his concentration on his laptop. All these works are a glossy red, and small enough to function as teasingly ticklish sculpture on the tables of our living rooms, seducing us with their visual beauty. By subverting given notions of Gandhi, Roy makes it easy for us to read into these works as mocking the idea of (a finally) Shining India.

It’s hard not to, and there is some sense in such simplistic reading. Both history and our current reading of Gandhi — 60 years after his death — compel us to make this binary, self-flagellating reading — frugality versus consumption — a mandatory stop in the viewing trajectory.

Yet, the restlessness of Roy’s work goads us to take a second look. When we do, it starts becoming increasingly clear that Roy also uses these devices as complex conceptual tools to identify drivers of new social norms. Gandhi becomes the social scientist’s baseline study, the axis along which it is possible to plot the shifts. In this reading, Gandhi is not the wise voice from the past chastising us for being self-delusionary about “progress”. Instead, he is the body, the living creature that contains the shifts while simultaneously marking them. He stays willingly robed in the stereotypes of himself, as part of this exercise. The iPods, laptops, the Internet — all these are new means of connecting with others, while also carving out a me-space.

The ideas we link with Gandhi have taken recognisable new avatars, Roy suggests. Our everyday reality seconds that. Non-violent mass protests have shifted online, on sites like Facebook, where several thousand people protest, as it were, with the click of a mouse. On this same site, it is possible to report any violence to political correctness. Fighting for freedom — not for countries but individuals incarcerated in them — is now an entirely different community effort — recall the relentless online petitions to free activist Binayak Sen in India, or Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. And this year, one of Time magazine’s environmental heroes is a blogger on climate change.

Roy’s Gandhi series, therefore, doesn’t gaze at the gap between our home-grown global icon and our own daily lives, but marks the distance we have covered to morph into the contemporary society we are.

(bharati@chintan-india.org)