31st January, 2009
In the bylanes of Porbandar
Gandhi is a silent social memory in the town of his birth
Gigi Scaria
I visited Porbandar for the first time in the summer of 2008. After an 8-hour road trip from Ahmedabad, I reached the sleepy town around 10pm. With cameras in hand, I trawled through its roads, not knowing that Mahatma Gandhi, its hero—and its only claim to fame—was as inconspicuous in the night as in the day.
A half-constructed ship at the Porbandar port
I was already working on a project on Gandhi when art critic and curator Gayatri Sinha, who had seen a video film on Gandhians in New Delhi that I had done earlier, asked me to participate in the Saffronart show. On 1 May, I reached Gujarat, and over the next six days, travelled through the state, documenting every Gandhi landmark I came across. The Porbandar photos on display were taken by a Canon 5D camera on a very bright and cloudless May afternoon, and digitally printed on archival paper in editions of five.
In Porbandar, Gandhi’s house, Kirti Mandir, is situated at one end of the town’s arterial road, near a square where a clean and well-maintained marble statue of his stands. Early in the morning, I saw a man stop his scooter, climb the statue and put a fresh garland around its neck. This, I later discovered, was a daily ritual—the only way the people of Porbandar are trying to keep Gandhi alive in his birthplace. Kirti Mandir was rumoured to have collapsed during the 2001 earthquake, but it wasn’t significantly damaged. I went in and climbed the narrow, steep staircase with the help of a rope hanging from the ceiling. I walked around the small rooms, imagining the person who grew up in them—a boy without academic brilliance or any spark of genius, who went on to become a hero of the 20th century. In the afternoon, a few locals and some visitors from outside Porbandar walked through its three floors—looking at its walls, also perhaps imagining a hero.
A dilapidated lighthouse
Porbandar’s buildings, its architecture and broad roads seem to belong neither to the present nor to its historical past—it’s a town lost somewhere in between. The last time we heard of this port town was two months ago, when it was found that it had been the first Indian stop for the terrorists from Karachi (Pakistan) who attacked Mumbai.
I walked along the long wall constructed between the sea and the road which runs along the entire length of the Porbandar port, the town’s most famous landmark. I took a right turn into a gate and found myself looking at thousands of fishing boats.
Poor boatbuilders and petty businessmen, contaminated seawaters, polluted air, half-constructed boats, wrecked and abandoned boats, flags of India, heat, wood and dust—everything intermingled to create a picture of decadence and activity. Most ships and boats in the port are used by fishermen and
The main arterial road of Porbander
locals for their small businesses. At least that’s what the locals tell you. The port has done little to improve the prospects of the town—it has been a long time since it was developed. Most boats on the shore are made of wood, but are unpainted.
Around the port area thrives a large community of boatbuilders, most of whom are Muslims. Some boats and houses along the sea have inscriptions in Arabic. There’s a deep divide between the Muslim and Hindu populations in this area.
The locals react to the mention of Gandhi with pride and amusement. They smile if you ask for directions to Gandhi’s house. Other than that, they don’t really talk about Gandhi or anything related to Gandhi. Unlike Sabarmati, Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad, which attracts tourists from all over the world, his home in Porbandar is a quiet, inconspicuous structure maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India.
Gandhi is just a social memory in the land of his birth; there is no room for his own ideas about change in Porbandar’s present.
Gandhi at crossroads
The Mahatma’s statues can look like Advani, Groucho Marx or even a high school teacher
Pavitra Jayaraman
Bapu doesn’t look like Bapu any more. Or at least that is what seems to be the point of artist Vivek Vilasini’s work Vernacular Chants II—a set of nine photographs of Gandhi statues and busts taken in south India. The idea was born when Vilasini visited the town of Attur in Tamil Nadu to pick up some granite for his sculpting work. On his way to the granite dealer, he had to take a turn at the town’s Gandhi statue. "I found that it looked nothing like the great man," he recalls. "Instead, Groucho Marx was staring down at me. That’s when the idea of putting this work together occurred to me."
Sculpted by Vivek Vilasini. ‘Vernacular Chants II’ is a series of photographs of Gandhi statues. (clockwise from top left) A statue resembling L.K. Advani; a Tamilian face, smeared with ash; a Groucho Marx lookalike in Attur, Tamil Nadu; and a C. Rajagopalachari lookalike. At Saffronart Gallery, Mumbai, till 15 February
Soon after, Vilasini set off on a two-week expedition with his brother to photograph Gandhi statues and busts, and managed to capture 30 cement sculptures. Nine of these make Vernacular Chants II. Most of them have been shot in Tamil Nadu.
"The visualization of Mahatma Gandhi seems to have become imaginative, and it speaks volumes about the open-mindedness of Indians," Vilasini says. A Gandhi statue that he found outside a municipality office in a town near Salem, Tamil Nadu, looked uncannily like Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Lal Krishna Advani. The resemblance probably has nothing to do with the town’s political allegiance, says Vilasini, as the BJP doesn’t have much of a presence in the state. "In all probability, it just speaks of the artist’s imagination," he says.
Vilasini also stumbled on a statue which reminded him of his high school art teacher. "If Mr Das shaved his head, he’d look like that," he says. Another statue he spotted by a bus stand resembled C. Rajagopalachari, or Rajaji, independent India’s first governor general and father-in-law of Gandhi’s son Devdas. One, in front of a temple, looked very Tamilian, complete with sacred ash smeared on the forehead.
"It (my work) is rather humorous, and yet makes a socially relevant statement," the artist says. "As I toured towns and villages looking for Gandhi statues and busts, I found that while there were plenty of them, most of them were neglected. They got attention only once or twice a year."
Vilasini’s work, infused with humour as well as satire, has already provoked some Gandhi loyalists to question whether the artist indeed visited these places and photographed statues that exist, or sculpted them himself to make a point. | |
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