On the eve of India’s 75th Independence Day, Akar Prakar presents Toying with Gandhi, an exhibition of works by contemporary artist Debanjan Roy. The show will feature Roy’s iconic sculptures, drawings, and prints that pay attention to the practice of appropriating Mahatma Gandhi’s image and ideals in contemporary culture. The online exhibition runs from 14 August to 15 September 2021.

Exhibition Note by Sumathi Ramaswamy

In post-colonial India, artists have emerged as Gandhi's conscience-keeper, drawing upon the Mahatma's over-circulated image to attack much that has gone wrong with and in the country. Debanjan Roy is one such conscience-keeper, and a complicated one at that. Over the past decade and more, he has developed, across the body of his work, what might be called an aesthetic of edgy playfulness to draw attention to the misappropriations and over-appropriations of the Mahatma's image in the production of Brand Gandhi. There is something disorienting about the Gandhi we encounter in Roy's drawings, prints, and sculptures, but that is precisely the point the artist intends to make, for his grand project is to get us to reflect upon what we have done with and to the Mahatma over the decades, and particularly with his image.

After a decade of toying with the Mahatma - and with us - and after castigating venal politicians who have toyed with his image for their dubious purposes, Roy literally cuts him down to size in his Toy Gandhi project, drawing upon the toy-making traditions from India and fashioned from a variety of media (wood, fibreglass, silicon, clay and paper, sola pith). There is enough of the Mahatma in the series for us to identify the referents - the dhoti, the staff, the Mickey Mouse ears - but just about. All the same, we walk away feeling unsettled because that well-known face and figure does not seem all that familiar. The final-ironic-takeaway from the Toy Gandhi series might well be that the Mahatma can only be toyed with at our own peril, his message undone, his image destabilised, his name reduced to a mere trifle.

[Sumathi Ramaswamy is a professor of History at Duke University in North Carolina, USA.]