Overwhelming. That’s the feeling one gets while taking in the frames and videos projected on white cloth, and the audios that echo at the Durbar Hall Art Gallery in Kochi.
From the newly set up grey walls, the idea of Mahatma Gandhi envelops one’s core. He stares into one’s with the quiet defiance that he was known for.
The exhibition begins with the ‘end’. Photos of the Tricolour that was used to wrap his body, a wooden installation with the imprint of the gun – a 9mm Beretta M1934 – that was used to assassinate, images of the bloodied clothes that he wore during his final moments on January 30, 1948, and frames of his ashes set the tone for the exploration inside.
The multimedia exhibition, titled ‘You I Could Not Save, Walk With Me’, reveals the lives and places that were touched by Gandhi’s unwavering principles of ahimsa and communal harmony.
Powerful, provocative, poignant – these words might not suffice to describe the experience.
Images, videos, installations, and poems remind one of much that appears to have been forgotten by the country’s collective consciousness.
The articles on display are the result of a one-year journey retracing the Mahatma’s paths through an India that was caught in a communal mayhem.
Lensman Sudeesh Yezhuvath, poet P N Gopikrishnan, and artist and curator of the exhibition Murali Cheeroth have mapped his journeys in the last two years of his life.
They even met the people who still remembered the ‘half-naked fakir’. Later, human geographer Jayaraj Sundaresan also joined them as a curator of the show.
There is a deep study of Noakhali, now in Bangladesh. “Noakhali was where the Gandhian ideal of ahimsa faced a litmus test. After Jinnah’s call for Pakistan, the first riots had broken out in Noakhali. Gandhi doubted whether he would succeed in swaying the people who were baying for blood,” says Sudeesh.
“It’s here where Gandhi began his satyagraha against the communal riots that erupted across India in 1946. On arriving in Noakhali, Gandhi declared he would fast until the mobs shunned violence. The people yielded. They laid down arms for that one man.”
The Gandhi Ashram Trust in Noakhali guided the trio to the remote villages that the Mahatma had visited. “After 1946, Noakhali never witnessed another riot, according to the Ashram officials,” says Sudeesh. “That proves the power of Gandhi and ahimsa.”
While Hindus were targeted in Noakhali, in Bihar it was the Muslims who were under attack. Sudeesh says, Bihar hasn’t been recorded in such detail in history. “More than 10,000 Muslims were killed there at that time. Many villages there have no Muslim population even now,” he notes.
An abandoned mosque in Barari village in Bihar is a testimony to this past. The trio traces atrocities as well as acts of humanity, those who went beyond religious barriers to help those affected by the riots.
From Bihar, the exhibition moves to the ‘Miracle of Calcutta’, where Gandhi addressed an angry mob that pelted stones at the house in which he was staying. His words calmed them down. Gandhi went on to call it “a turning point... a cleansing effect.”
Finally, the journey reaches Delhi’s Birla House, where Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse. The first attempt on Gandhi’s life took place on January 20, 1948.
“The Birla House staff, or even the librarian, however, are not aware of where it took place,” recalls Gopikrishnan.
“This indifference was palpable at Red Fort, too, where a special court was held to hear the case of Gandhi’s assassination. The staff managing the fort are not even aware that the hearing was held there. There is not even a signboard indicating the court’s location.”
At Birla House, the artists saw only one instance where the culprits behind the assassination were mentioned. Godse’s accomplices and co-conspirators such as Narayan Apte, Madanlal Pahwa, Vishnu Karkare, Digambar Badge, Shankar Kistaiyya, and Gopal Godse are largely forgotten, says Gopikrishnan.
“People only know Nathuram Godse as his murderer, not the others. Also, at Birla House, nowhere is it written why Gandhi was assassinated. The assassination is portrayed as the work of one person, not as a larger conspiracy and a planned crime that it was. This is how people forget, erase history.”
This exhibition is not about revering Gandhi, it is a reminder to reflect upon. A response to those who say we don’t need Gandhi anymore in India.
