From Mao to Gandhi, Bosshard's photographs trace the rise of Asian dissent

They both had armies. It was their choice of weapons that differed. When Mahatma Gandhi was preparing his followers to fight violence through civil disobedience, Mao Zedong was arming his troops with guerrilla warfare tactics to compensate for low numbers on the battlefield. At this moment of history in the 1930s, the two revolutionaries were also contemporaries: Mao and Gandhi, embodiments of war and peace, respectively.

During this era of Asian dissent, a Swiss photojournalist named Walter Bosshard was on the spot, on both sides of the border. He photographed both Mao and Gandhi and, perhaps inadvertently, drew a comparison between their opposing attitudes towards violence, loyalty and leadership.

Mao Zedong posing for a picture in Yan’an (1938)

Bosshard travelled 2,000 km for over eight months, documenting India’s struggle for independence. He captured Gandhi and his followers at the Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat, from where they would begin the Dandi March. Hundreds, dressed in swadeshi clothes, as Bosshard’s pictures show, follow their dhoti-clad leader. On March 12, 1930, they broke the salt law in the coastal village of Dandi.

The event marked the beginning of the Civil Disobedience Movement against the British Raj. Bosshard’s story on Gandhi, published in the German periodical Münchner Illustrierte Presse on May 18, 1930, presented India’s non-violent struggle for independence to the West. His collection of 51 pictures will be on display for the first time in India at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi.

Similar anti-establishment sentiment was brewing in China at the same time. But Mao’s Red Army was taking a different approach. Bosshard had first met Mao in 1921, when he made a silent film on the emerging communist revolutionary. After visiting India, Bosshard returned to China in 1933 and documented the harsh conditions under which Mao trained the Red Army in the caves of Yan’an.

Bosshard’s photographs offer insights into how India and China were shaped by its founding fathers. “They (Mao and Gandhi) are brought together as photographic subjects, both working in the landscape of Asia at a particular time of change,” says Gayatri Sinha, founder of Critical Collective and co-curator of the exhibition with Peter Pfrunder, director of Fotostiftung Schweiz (Swiss Foundation for Photography).

Bosshard shows Mao posing for a picture and Gandhi — who refused to pose — at quotidian tasks of eating, shaving and reading. This body of work documents two iconoclasts — as well as ordinary human beings going about their extraordinary lives.

 

Preparations at the Congress headquarters for ‘Boycott Week’ in Bombay (1930)

Soldiers at the Yan’an City Gate, entrance to China’s Red Capital (1938)

‘Envisioning Asia: Gandhi and Mao in the photographs of Walter Bosshard’ will be on at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi between October 1 and 30