(Birla House which is now Gandhi Smriti at Tees January Marg, New Delhi)
There at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New
Delhi, Rabindranath Tagore’s works are mounted in a well curated exhibition.
And in the old wing at the same premises you see the works of one of the
pioneers of Indian documentary photography, Kulwant Rai curated by Aditya Arya.
A couple of kilometers away from there, you can see Mati Ghar, an art gallery
with an ethnic look at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA) where
an exhibition of Indian and international cave art is mounted in a curious
fashion. And a few meters away from there you come across the National Museum,
the prime institution of Indian art. Interestingly these three institutions are
spread around the landmark spot, India Gate where on a Sunday afternoon
thousands of people throng to enjoy sunlight, kites and a bit of nationalism.
While motorists find it difficult to park their cars in the vicinity of India
Gate and visitors find not an inch to move around. However, these three
institutions sport a desert a look with the exhibits stay brooding on their
fate.
Whenever times permits I visit these galleries, allow myself
to be soaked in a sort of feeling that either you get inside a mausoleum or a deserted
patch of land that drags you often with its sheer loneliness. Works of art
return my vacant gaze and the more you spend time there the more you feel like
talking to ghosts. Invisible fingers touch you as you stand in front of a wall
text and read through the lines that explain a part of history that you did not
know existed. You feel a tinge of eeriness at your nape as you loiter along the
dimly lit corridors flanked by frozen moments of cultural history captured by
genuine souls. May be when you stand in a mall or in a market place too you get
the same feeling provided if you are deeply alone and are communicating with the
innumerable moments of history happening right in front of your eyes in the
form of mundane occurrences.
(The place where Gandhiji was shot at)
If you look at the romantic poets and painters you see them
moving away from the maddening crowds and settling themselves in a remote land,
under a tree, with a book or painting materials and some inescapable dreams.
While sitting there they see the visions of life and the truth of life beyond
our naked eyes. Romantics are romantics because they want to go away from their
immediate reality to find another reality that looks more real than the given
real. They romance with time and not with space. For them space is a medium to
engage time and the lonely plateaus, hills, valleys and the flight of fancies
are the spaces that they choose to engage with the time that is not caged by
the clocks and watches. Grave yards are one of the spaces where time transcends
to eternity and most of the creative people have this secret romance with a cemetery.
Whenever I travel by cemeteries I feel like stopping there, walking along the
mounds and marble slabs and forget rest of the things happening around the
world. It is here you get a perspective about life in utter silence created by
dead people sharing their life’s secrets with earth.
May be that’s why artists and people who love art visit
museums; the mausoleums of dead works of art that have gained a spirit status
in their due course of travel from an artist’s studio to the final resting
place. But people are afraid of visiting museums because they are afraid of
listening to silence and reading the frozen moments. They are afraid of museums
because they lose a sense of space and they are transported to Time. They want
to remain in space and time at once so that their sense of immediately felt
realities is kept intact. The moment the time-space correlative breaks your
imagination and experience change their dimensions and you will have to take
off to a different plane of understanding life. In contemporary galleries often
such engagements are impossible why because the temporality of space does not
allow the time to make manifestations. The work of art is so close to you in
time and the artist’s history is so familiar that you keep your viewing
attached to the givens than the perceptions. In a museum, the tags are like
epitaphs, though they do inform about the works and the artists, they force you
to detach from your time-space constraints. A museum liberates you the way a
graveyard does.
(Mera jeevan hi mera Sandesh hai- My life is my message)
That’s why I visit Gandhi Smriti or any museum that has something
to do with Gandhi. In Delhi, less than three kilometers away from the National
Museum, at the Tees January Marg, one could see the former stately Birla House
where Gandhiji stayed during the last 144 days of his life. It was here on 30th
January 1948, Gandhiji was assassinated. Today it houses one of the largest
museums of Gandhi’s memory and the latest addition is a multi media interactive
program on Gandhi’s life and vision by the noted multi media artist, Ranjit
Makkuni. This museum has a perennial attraction for me not because it displays
Gandhiji’s life through visuals and multi media programs but because it is one
place where you could transcend time and space and be one with a time beyond
your naked eyes. You feel Gandhiji’s life as the way you feel it in Sabarmati
Ashram.
For me, Sabarmati and Tees January Marg are two ends of
Gandhiji’s life. It was in Sabarmati, he formulated his plans for the
independence struggle after docking back from South Africa. And at Tees January
Marg, he became a martyr for the causes he held closer to his life. Unlike in
other museums in Delhi, I see a lot of people visiting Gandhi Smriti. They
stand in reverence and watch each exhibit with some sort of meditation. Foreign
students and visitors click photographs and whisper their views to each other.
They don’t giggle the way you giggle even in a temple. Gandhiji holds the grain
of truth and the truth was his life and the exhibited objects you see the
magnanimity of that simple life. At the preserved room of Gandhiji’s last day,
on the blameless white wall a framed statement hangs in all its simplicity. It
says, “My life is my message”. Who else in the world could reveal volumes of
truth in that one simple unassuming statement? Space collapses into time and
time collapses into space here.
(Gandhiji's room at Birla House)
It is not peculiar if one wonders whether Gandhiji’s life
was one of the biggest, most enduring and alluring performative act. In fact,
it was. Each of his acts of was choreographed and rehearsed by a sense of
urgency and sincerity. He was aware of his deeds and each of them contained a
meaning and a message. One of the copious letter writers of the world, Gandhiji
had enacted more messages than he could put them into letters. I remember
reading Thomas Weber’s study on Dandi March. Gandhiji had two bullock carts
following apart from his disciples while he was walking from Sabarmati to
Dandi. In one of the carts khadi clothe was stuffed which he sold in order to
raise funds as well as to raise awareness amongst people about the necessity of
eschewing foreign clothes and entering into a self-reliable economy. And in the
other cart it was a specially designed commode that he used in regular
intervals as he was very particular about his bowel movements. While sitting at
the commode he wrote letters to the world leaders, friends, political leaders
in India and elsewhere and to all those people who sought advice from him.
Being a clever pragmatist he even asked money from those autograph seekers.
With a smile he asked them to pay for his signature so that he could use that
money for the national cause.
(Gandhiji's tools)
May be one is informed of Gandhiji’s life and one could
connect. But what about all those people who visit this museum? Are they all
informed and educated as anyone else is? What about those foreign visitors who
come here because they know Gandhiji but not deep scholars of Gandhism? This is
where I find Gandhiji himself as a work of art with a great effect both aesthetical
and pragmatic all over the world. Like the godheads of world religion Gandhiji
has become a god in himself and for me a god manifested in man is the right
kind of god because such a god could deliver justice with the perseverance and
discretion. Gandhiji is the just god who exists in the conscience of our
socio-political imagination. Gandhiji’s image itself conveys that aesthetic
catharsis that a great work of art in a museum could provide. That’s why
despite the lack of proper historical knowledge people throng before the
exhibited memorabilia of Gandhiji. That’s why may be even a three year old
child looks at the benevolent portrait of a smiling Gandhiji and says, ‘Gandhaji’.
Which artist in the world has got that blessing of being so popular even the
toddlers would stand before his portrait and smile back at him as if he were
his/her own grandfather?
1 comment:
Any updates on Kochi saar ??
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