An artist of Non violence

No project is more difficult to undertake for the contemporary Indian artist, perhaps, then that of representing a historical figure who dominated the recent past. Errors of judgment and the temptation to manufacture kitsch legend are among the attendant risks; and the scale of the difficulty can be imagined when the figure in question is a colossus like Mahatma Gandhi. Not only did the Mahatma live under the continuous glare of public attention, but his life has acquired a mythic dimension; arguable, there is no word, act, gesture, commitment or indecision of Gandhi’s that has not been subjected to the posthumous encrustation of hagiography. Worse, the post-colonial India that was the outcome of Gandhi’s struggle may have been a bitter disappointment to him; a realization that probably informs, in some degree, India’s rejection of his legacy of spiritual effort and social reformation. For these reasons – which turn history into an intimate personal experience of guilt, bewilderment, inadequacy and defiant anger – it is a daunting task for an Indian artist to address Gandhi today, at the turn of the century and the millennium.

This, nevertheless, is the task that Atul Dodiya has set himself in a new series of large watercolours entitled ‘An Artist of Non-violence’. The title is taken from one of Gandhi’s own accounts, in which he implicitly accepts that the psychological motivation for his political activities is an aesthetic one: that of restoring balance, harmony and therefore beauty to a social formation, to human relationships and social institutions that had been thrown into disequilibrium by tragic and violent circumstances. By extension, Gandhi anguish, this outward condition finds expression in the inward bafflement, anguish and hopelessness of the individuals who make up such a society; and it is by curing them as individual social actors that their society could be restored to equilibrium, and not by some grand feat of socio-economic engineering.