I’m not dismissing it – I’m contextualising it so that your argument that everything else ought to be dismissed in deference to what was admittedly a horrific tragedy can be refuted. I’m very acutely aware of the political consequences of partition as well – and the continuing effects of the trend that it, as an incident, reflects – including a communalist/nationailst understanding of politics in former British India, a turn away from more genuinely democratic left politics as a result of said violence, and other things. I’m just saying that people who suffered in Godhra or Telengana or in Kolkata during the Indira government crackdown in the 1970s or Bangladeshis who were killed during the War for Independence or persecuted Ahmadis in Pakistan or all the women who have been subjected to violence in South Asia or the farmers who committed suicide ebcause of their level of debt, or many, many other people, might object to focusing on ONE incident of massive massive violence, compared to a continuous stream of violence brougth on by a variety of British imperial tactics and failures as well as the subsequent politics in South Asia.

If Gandhi were alive today, I would guess he would be dead, since he would be quite old.

Just to add on to this, I think the argument also says that somehow Indian’s aren’t responsible for any of their own history, and it’s just others that came in and dominated them unilaterally, and didn’t eventually become part of their culture. Also, as others have mentioned, the idea that Gandhi’s death is the first time when Indian-on-Indian violence begins also wipes out the horror of partition, and maybe implies that with partition, non-Indians (i.e. Pakistanis) were fighting against Indians (i.e. Hindus/Indians), and that they were somehow excised. Or at least, you could easily take that generalization to those places.

It also implies that if we had only kept the Gandhian ideals, somehow things would have ended up alright. I think this is romanticization at its best, and shows a yearning for something that now acts more as a weight on Indians consciousness rather than an actual positive guiding force.

art should be pretty pictures that make walls look beautiful and poems should rhyme.

Yeah! good for the regular people.

that’s quite a disconnect,no?

Yes, but a disconnect between what appropriation means in art and your being of the intellectual vanguard. You kill me, Manju. Let’s hear more from the natives.

well, she’s no bjp outrage machine, but i’m pretty sure she wouldn’t like it. i think regular people have no problem with appropriation as long as its done with respect or at least neutrality. gwen stefani in a bindhi, no prob. crucifix in urine, outrage. that’s common sense.

this is mildly disrespectful to gandhi b/c it puts him in a context much lower than his status of saint. so people don’t like it. not me, mind you, i’m of the intellectual vanguard, albeit neocon version.

the point of my comments really had nothing to do with this but since you bought it up i’d say a certain irony has been revealed. the people get offended b/c their images are appropriated in a disrespecful way and the intellectual vanguard stays silent, or warns us of cultural jingoism. but when the vanguard does get outraged ever a disrespect of icons the regular people barely give a rats ass.

that’s quite a disconnect,no?

Polls be damned. Manju, I am sincerely curious about what your mom & co would think of this artwork.

“I see what Roy/you are saying, and I don’t want to open up a horrible can of worms with this comment, but ya gotta realize that that’s a huge generalization that I’m sure historians would have a problem with.”

Yeah, it’s not me—and English is not Roy’s first language either, for what that’s worth, so he may have been finding it hard to articulate… and the art itself is conveying a complicated message… many things at once. Frankly, art’s really hard to write about—one of the reasons I try to do it. It’s a good challenge for me. Your way of articulating it is certainly helpful—I really like this:

“Gandhi and his murder by a fellow countryman signify a very real blow to intra-country/culture reconciliation (though, again, he certainly wasn’t the first) as well as desi-on-desi violence of a whole ‘nother beast than was seen before.”

I said “violence,” and not “all violence,” for just the reasons you allude to above, and was concerned for precisely the reasons you raise—so thanks for your suggestion. It’s got a bit more nuance.

I only care to consult polls if we’re making an argument about offensiveness toward an identity group, in which case it helps to have a majority offended among that group, no? Even then I allow for the possibility of vanguard intellectuals seeing things the plebeians, socially constructed with false consciousness, can’t.

But other than that you should know by now my default stand is the people be damned.