Memorialization

Memorialization

Nehru was strikingly self-conscious about Gandhi’s memorialization

and reflexive about the ways in which Gandhi’s memory could be

appropriated for national causes after his death. While wishing

to honour him and to avoid opportunistic commemoration he was

also astute about the utility of Gandhi’s death-memorials to the

national cause. The importance of theatricality, performance, ritual

and commemoration was as well understood by Nehru as by his

viceregal predecessor—‘. . .brick and mortar has its uses’ he wrote

on a proposed national memorial for Gandhi, ‘and is desirable to give

some solid and substantial shape to our work. This has a psychological

importance and a permanence’.

The ownership of Gandhi’s memory and its connection to state

power, however, rapidly became a challenge to centralized authority.

Nehru in particular consistently attempted to define the limits of

commemoration and to create a centralized monopoly on the project

of Gandhi’s memorialization. Provincial Congress cadres and local

groups went too far and Nehru complained that too many streets and

places were being named afterGandhiwhichwould result in confusion.

He was concerned at signs of coercive actions to extract donations to

Gandhi memorial funds. He intervened to reverse an order making

sory deductions from the salaries of civil service officers in

Uttar Pradesh. He also personally oversaw the sites associated with

the cremation and funeral. ‘The surface of the platform on which

Mahatma Gandhi’s body was crematedmay be cemented in order that

people in search of sacred earth from the spotwill not be able to tamper

with it’ he instructed within days of the cremation. Concrete, then,

the ultimate symbol of the modernizing and developmental aspirations

of the postcolonial state, could, quite literally, be used to seal

Gandhi’s memory and to limit people’s interaction with his corporeal

remains.Nehru also made protestations about ‘unauthorized’ or public

expressions of grief in the form of statues, basing his arguments on an

aesthetic sensibility underpinned by a hierarchy of artistic expression

which is worth quoting at length:

Nevertheless, it is perhaps inevitable that some statuesmight be put up. If so,

the greatest care should be taken that only real works of art are permitted.

Unfortunately the standard in India of such statuary has been low and most

people are satisfied with anything that bears a remote resemblance to the

person concerned. Our cities and public places are full of structures which

cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called artistic or pleasing to

the sight. I have been shocked on many occasions at seeing these totally

inadequate efforts. I should like towarnmost earnestly thosewho are thinking

in terms of having statues not to take any hasty decisions and to await a full

consideration of this question by the National Memorial Committee under

the chairmanship of the Congress President.

This intervention was a pronounced attempt again by the new

prime minister to reassert the authority and sovereignty of the

state in public spaces. This speaks of the distance between the

Nehruvian executive and its secular logic and the vernacularization

of commemoration, grief and memorialization in a different cultural

register. The Congress High Command tried to discipline the ways in

whichGandhi was remembered, Nehru deploring temples, statues and

other memorial shrines which would ‘savour of idolatry’ being erected

all over the country. Nevertheless, public expressions of grief were

outrunning the ‘authoritative’ versions of public commemoration.

These events also worked as the end of an era. There was closure

on the nationalist struggle which was associated with Gandhi more

than with any other human being. As P. Sitaramayya, a future All

India Congress president, stated in his tribute in an All India Radio

broadcast in early February 1948:

Mahatma Gandhi had finished his task and while the world will mourn his

loss, by no means premature but altogether unnatural, we must recognise

that as an ‘avatar’ that has finished his task has no place anymore in the

domain of his functioning. . . .

He is the tenth avatar that has descended into the world in this age of kali to

make dharma walk on two legs. Indeed since June last year Mahatma Gandhi

had reason to feel that he was outliving his need and that the gulf between

his concept of society and policy and the accepted concepts around him was

widening. The avatars in the past met with such a crisis on the eve of their

nirvana.

This reflected a widespread sense that Gandhi’s death had

completed his work. His death marked a temporal shift and

underscored transitions from colonialism to post-colonialism in the

profoundest sense. A most compelling question is to what extent

Gandhi himself may have anticipated this, or even had a death-wish,

as Ashis Nandy has speculated. In this light, Nehru’s observation that

‘Even in his death there was a magnificence and complete artistry’

could not be more fitting.

In this way it was not only the grief which accompanied Gandhi’s

death whichmade it a seminalmoment in the foundation of the Indian

state’s legitimacy, but the sheer fact of his death. Whether it was

mourned, celebrated, or discussed as a legal case or as a source of

conspiracy theories and intrigues, indifference to such an event was

impossible and the shared experience of his death developed a new

sense of Indian-ness. Spatially this gap between citizens and state was

narrowed by the close connections between the capital, New Delhi and

the transmission by radio, newspaper and film of the ritualswhichwere

taking place across the country (and within the new country’s borders)

and then, later, of the trial of Nathuram Godse. Today this point is

upheld by ‘Gandhi’s prominence in local memories of independence

and partition’ and, as Peter Gottschalk has described in his fieldwork

probing contemporary memories of Gandhi’s death, ‘the ubiquitous

description by Arampur residents of Gandhi as rashtrapita (father of

the nation) demonstrates the determination and success of the state

to craft a memory that recognizes independence as both continuous

with a venerable past and discontinuous with foreign domination’.