Mary Keatinge Das Lecture
Sumathi Ramaswamy (Duke)
"Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience"
Moderated by Gauri Viswanathan, Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities, Department of English and Comparative Literature; Director, South Asia Institute
Abstract: Mohandas K. Gandhi has been described as “an artist of non-violence,” crafting a set of practices of the self and politics that earned him the mantle of Mahātma, “the great soul.” There is an enormous body of scholarship that has explored and critiqued Gandhi’s philosophy and praxis of satyāgraha, non-violent civil disobedience. Yet what does it mean to think of satyāgraha as an aesthetic regime, and its principal practitioner as the paradigmatic artist of disobedience? In this presentation, I set out to answer these questions with the help of India’s modern artists who have over the past century, but especially in recent decades, turned to the Mahātma as their muse. In the process, they have transformed Gandhi into an aesthetic subject worthy of artistic investment across a wide range of media ranging from painting and sculpture to video installation works and digital productions. At a time when Gandhi has been reduced to a hollow symbol and set of empty platitudes in the land of his birth, why have India’s artists lavished so much attention on the Mahātma? This is especially ironical given that in his own lifetime, Gandhi himself appeared to have had little time for the visual arts, or for artists for that matter. I reflect on this irony even as I make a conceptual argument for how the tools of visual and media history reveal the intimate connection between aesthetics, ethical action, and non-violent politics in our time.
Sumathi Ramaswamy is Professor of History at Duke University, and is President-elect of the American Institute of Indian Studies for the 2018-19 term. She is a cultural historian of South Asia and the British Empire, and studied ancient Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University before earning her Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley. Her most recent publications include the monographs The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (2010), Husain's Raj: Visions of Empire and Nation (2016), and Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (2017); and two edited volumes, Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India (2010), and Empires of Vision (co-edited with Martin Jay, 2014). Professor Ramaswamy is co-founder of a trans-national digital network for popular South Asian visual culture called Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture.
