“Incredible India!” “India Shining!” “India Everywhere! The artist strikes back against the branding exercises of a neo-liberal regime with the help of the Mahatma, a brand unto himself.
Sabarmati
2008
Video installation, 5 minutes
After Raise Your Hands Those Who Touched Him, Scaria’s next engagement with Gandhi took him to the city of Ahmedabad where on his arrival in India after more than twenty years in South Africa, the Mahatma established in 1915 the third of his four ashrams.[8] Initially named Satyagraha Ashram, the settlement was moved to a new location on the River Sabarmati a century ago in June 1917. For the next thirteen years, the Sabarmati ashram as it came be called served as his official headquarters, and was the unofficial center for the Indian National Movement. Gandhi envisioned the ashram as a space in which to train a new generation of Indians to be ‘disobedient’ in a Gandhian way even while being civically engaged. The ashram was also ‘home’ to the Mahatma and his wife Kasturba, and to their closest associates and followers who spurned more glamorous cities to retreat to this rustic retreat and attempt a life of self-sufficiency and bare minimum under a strict Gandhian regime of simplicity and restraint. Scaria captures the austerity of the space and place in a luminous video installation that was first exhibited in 2009 at a curated show in Mumbai simply called Bapu, ‘Father.’ The work uses the power of film to reproduce the beauty of a still photograph, as the camera quietly observes and absorbs the aura of the house (Hriday Kunj, ‘heart’s abode’) where Gandhi resided with Kasturba until 1930. Thriving with pulsating life and moral energy in its own time as a place for striving, today it has all the stillness of a dead monument, even as in the name of progress and ‘beautification,’ long time inhabitants of the neighborhood have been displaced. Is Sabarmati today a metaphor for the Mahatma himself, bypassed by a nation hustling towards a different end?
Flyover
2011
Inkjet print on Epson enhanced matte paper, 52 x 36 inches
In 2011, Scaria was invited to participate in an exhibition in New Delhi to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of Tolstoy Farm on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. Titled Tolstoy Farm: The Archive of Utopia, the curatorial mandate to the fifteen Indian artists was to use the Gandhian experiment in living Otherwise in South Africa to reflect on principles of moral community and social justice, but also on the survival of utopian visions in our times. Scaria responded with two works, a single channel video called Talk to Mahatma, and a digital work titled Flyover, on exhibit in this show. In the latter, the artist consciously and conscientiously places Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram, the successor to Tolstoy Farm, in the shadow of a mammoth overpass, the symbol of the new India in love with concrete and monumentality, not to mention mobility. Yet, the serene beauty of the simple thatched structure that Gandhi called home shines through luminously against the gray backdrop of an India that is literally flying over, and past it.
Porbandar
2008
Inkjet print on Epson enhanced matte paper, 52 x 36 inches
Every patriotic Indian citizen learns the name of Gandhi’s birthplace, Porbandar, a city that has importance in the Indian national memoryscape apparently for this reason only. The national and state governments, as well as well-meaning Gujarati philanthropists, have enshrined the memory of Gandhi, converting the house where he was born into a museum, and even building a temple called Kirti Mandir, with the obligatory Gandhi statues and paintings of the Mahatma. Patriotic tourism sustains Porbandar’s economy. None of this however is of interest to Gigi Scaria who in 2008 turned his camera’s lens on ‘the overlooked and rotten’ parts of the former port city that everyone else has forgotten—but not this artist who bears witness to other pasts and other peoples who matter as well.
In Search of Salt
2010
Inkjet print on Epson enhanced matte paper, 18 x 18 inches
Produced initially as an acrylic on canvas, this formerly untitled work was part of a curatorial project titled Freedom to March, which commemorated the eightieth anniversary of what was undoubtedly the most iconic of marches undertaken by the Mahatma in 1930, the so-called Salt March when he walked for over 200 miles from his ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati to the seaside hamlet of Dandi to break the insidious colonial salt laws. ‘I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might,’ Gandhi declared on April 5, on reaching Dandi and on the eve of his disobedient act at daybreak on April 6. He got world sympathy as well as the attention of numerous artists who over time sought to capture his ambulatory act across many media in ways big and small. Scaria is heir to an aesthetic tradition that recognizes the artistry in Gandhi’s many political acts, spectacular and everyday. In this work, with its new title for this exhibit, the Mahatma, clad in his trademark white dhoti, staff in hand, strides determinedly forward, quite indifferent to the concrete structures that dwarf him, possibly intent on reminding Indians of the importance of seemingly humble acts like making salt.
Who Deviated First?
2010
Inkjet print on Epson enhanced matte paper, 90.5 x 30 inches
The Martyrs’ Column (also known popularly as ‘Thirteen Figures’) is an iconic sculptural ensemble occupying a prominent place in the city that Scaria now calls his home, New Delhi. The work of famed Bengali sculptor Devi Prasad Roychowdhury and his disciples in the 1970s, it shows Gandhi, staff in hand, leading a group of men and women to their tryst with independence and freedom. India 2.0, however, is moving in exactly the opposite direction envisioned for it by the Mahatma. In cleverly recalling and redirecting an image that tells the story of a nation-coming-into-being, Scaria compels us to ask if the Mahatma no longer leads, or is no one interested in following him anymore?
Caution! Men at Work
2015
Inkjet print on Epson enhanced matte paper, 36 x 52 inches
Gandhi statues litter the urban and rural landscape of the nation, a vast majority of them standing abandoned, some vandalized, others crowded out by the hustle and bustle of India 2.0 and the consolidation of Hindu nationalism in recent decades. In his most recent engagement with the figure of the Mahatma, Scaria offers a visual commentary on this national penchant for erecting and abandoning Gandhi statues, even while the work alerts us to the public making and dismantling of icons. ‘It is very important to evoke the name of Gandhi at this hour when the secularist position and critical thinking are constantly attacked by religious fundamentalism.’[9] Placed on a pedestal, the half-completed figure of the dhoti-clad Gandhi, his watch prominently on display, stands poised to go somewhere. However, he has possibly nowhere to go in the urban jungle that is the Indian city caught up in paroxysms of creation and destruction. Under these circumstances, the artist cautions whom? The citizen-viewer? Or is it Gandhi himself?
