Talking Pictures

What art tells us about popular narrative in the years leading up to independence. An extract

Vinay Lal

The martyrdom or shahadat—an idea foreign to Hinduism as such—of Gandhi has been one of the principal subjects of Indian art. Nathuram Godse, let me be bold enough to say, let go off his unacknowledged Muslim self that he had been hosting for so long as if in homage to the very partition of the country that he deplored and for which he felt that the Mahatma had to pay the price. Less than six months before his fatal deed, India had gone through the most cataclysmic upheaval in its modern history. At least a few of the world’s leading photographers, among them Margaret Bourke-White, Sunil Janah, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, were fortuitously at hand to photograph the wrenching scenes bequeathed by the Partition or batwara of India. Some of the images they captured cannot be shown to modern viewers without a warning, advising them of the graphic contents, given the contemporary commonsense about sensitivity to the feelings of others, the societal impulse to steer clear of ‘offense’ and the ease with which we are ‘traumatized’. However, the violence had commenced some months before the Boundary Commission had completed its task and the country was bifurcated, and Chi