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 Chittaprosad had seen or heard enough that in March 1947, he gave vent to his sentiments with a sketch that is at once lurid and bursting with ferocious energy: with daggers drawn, men lunge at each other, tearing apart chunks of the nation. Blood drips, but it could be the tears of a nation; a faceless overlord, a Rhodes-like colossus, hovers over them all. The horrors of the Partition were of a magnitude that India, at least, had not witnessed for some time, and contemporary artists like most common people at that time appear to have been numbed by the violence. For their part, printmakers projected Gandhi, Nehru, Maulana Azad, and Sa