Photojournalists, press photographers, amateurs, followers and family members visually documented Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s life in great detail. Many of these photographs are housed in specialized archives, the National Gandhi Museum being a leading repository. Based on several photographs displayed at an exhibition organized by the National Gandhi Museum and the India International Centre and curated primarily by Aparna Basu, Gandhi’s Vision: Freedom and Beyond is a compelling introduction to Gandhi’s role in the country’s freedom movement. The use of photographs—albeit of varying quality—to illustrate particular phases, incidents and events brings alive much that might soon be forgotten, or is not too well known. The book would have a particular salience for the generations and persons far more used to visual stimulation.
Aparna Basu was (she passed on shortly after the book came out) a dedicated historian with a reassuringly meticulous penchant for dates and details and her last book bears the mark of scholarship tailored for a more general readership. Juxtaposed with her well-organized chronological account of the various phases of the freedom movement are carefully chosen photographs from the National Gandhi Museum’s vast collection. The stage is set with an introduction to Swadeshi, secret societies and the Home Rule League. Around this time, Gandhi was honing his notion of satyagraha in South Africa and there is a 1913 photograph of him clad in a dhoti and kurta and holding a staff; he had organized the struggle against the ruling by the Cape Town Supreme Court that only marriages performed according to Christian rites were legal. At this time, he was equally at home in a three-piece suit as is evident in a very typical studio portrait of the couple taken in the same year.
Basu writes, `Gandhi went to South Africa in 1893 as an unknown barrister. He returned to India in 1915 as a well-known public figure and political organizer’ (p. 51). As is evident from the large corpus of images available, the emergent leader soon became aware of the power of the photograph. The book has reproduced some rare ones of Gandhi with Kasturba soon after their arrival back home. Soon, he was testing the waters, and the power of the strike was evident after the Ahmedabad mill workers’ strike of 1917. Earlier, his success in influencing the authorities to address the grievances of the indigo planters in Champaran in Bihar had made him a hero in the region, as `these were local struggles where Gandhi took up a specific issue, made a careful study of the problem and successfully resolved it by non-violent means’ (p. 62).