Cinematic and Iconographic Imagery of Gandhi and Public Sphere in India: Some Appreciations, Some Depreciations

Abstract

The text and sub-text of contemporary nation-building programme in India and the institutionalised nationalism that it weaves is strongly anchored on ‘the cinematic and iconographic representation’ of M.K. Gandhi. Media, films in parts, conveys or reaffirms reality, and plays a crucial role in the reproduction of the same and become visual texts embedded with messages. People’s perception of media content influences the way they understand the world and react to other people. Media largely remains a symbolic representation of power and its contesting strands in a given society. The paper first looks at the cinematic representations of Gandhi from the 1950s to 2000s and unearths the variations within the same and contrast them with Gandhian world visions. Second, the paper attempts to locate Gandhi in the Statist enterprise and in the popular imagery and construe the realities of the public sphere in India. The paper observes that in this politics of representation, vocality and audibility, media has realised the weight and effect of keeping alive the image of Gandhi in the minds of the ‘aam aadmi’ (large masses/common man) in India. Consequently media, namely print, television, cinema and the ‘new media’ (internet and the virtual spaces, and also cell/mobile communications) have systematically spun and re-spun and celebrated the image of Gandhi both as ‘Mahatma’ and as ‘Bapu’.