How MF Husain immortalised Gandhi striding for India’s freedom

Indeed, the Mahatma in full stride appears to be Husain’s favourite manner of depicting Gandhi, although he has also painted the other iconic image of the father of the nation seated at his spinning wheel. In Husain’s oil on canvas titled Gandhi-Man of Peace, dated ‘Oct’69’ (and signed in Hindi and Urdu), the protagonist is faceless, but even if we did not have the helpful title, there is no mistaking his identity, the lower half of the spare body adorned in a pale dhoti, another piece of cloth flung across his bony shoulders. A brilliant orange staff is suspended in the air, almost with a life of its own, as it seems to elude the grasp of a bony hand, an essential prop that helps the viewer identify the Mahatma for who he was, a mobile man ever on the move.

Similarly, in another work that Husain completed in London in July 1985 as part of his satirical Raj series and titled The Arrival of Gandhi in the 1920s, he painted the bare and spare Mahatma wearing his white dhoti, a white shawl draped around his brown shoulders. He stands poised on the horizon, a staff in hand, a distant – but distinctive – figure in the background. The genius of the work lies in Husain’s pictorial suggestion that this is all it might take to disempower the overdressed men who also populate the canvas: the British monarch, his viceregal representative in India, and his native lackeys – the rulers of Gwalior, Hyderabad and Patiala, the princely props without whom the Raj would have appeared a little less splendid, a little less imperial.

Although these men loom large and dominate the canvas in the foreground, prompted by the title of the work, our eyes are drawn to the figure of Gandhi whose arrival, it is suggested, spells the beginning of the end of British rule. What, then, should we make of such images in which a mobile Mahatma is sketched or painted, armed with nothing more than a walking stick?

I suggest that through such works, Husain contributes with and in his own distinctive style to a cumulative aesthetic of the ambulatory that gathered around Gandhi in the artistic world of India (and beyond) since at least the time of the Salt March. It is this aesthetic that produces the iconic image that we see everywhere, especially in public statuary both in India and globally, of the dhoti- clad Mahatma in a posture of striding, his bare feet thrust into a pair of rudimentary sandals, a wooden stick in hand. The earliest of works to likely inaugurate this aesthetic is Bapuji (linocut on paper, 1930) by the Bengali artist Nandalal Bose, Gandhi’s favoured painter.

Not the least striking aspects of Bose’s linocut on paper – in which the Mahatma is boldly depicted in white lines against a stark black background – is the manner in which the artist has drawn and painted Gandhi’s bare legs – muscled and sinewy, firmly planted on the ground. Although the photographic evidence shows that Gandhi wore sandals to trek the more than 350 kilometres from Sabarmati to Dandi, Bose’s Bapuji walks on his bare feet, a detail to which I will return a little later.

Being on his feet and walking to meet his ends were part of Gandhi’s “disobedient” critique of capitalist and industrial modernity, an emphatic declaration of autonomy from dependence on its machines, and an insistent assertion that satyagraha (lit. ‘cleaving to truth’) or civil disobedience was most definitely not passive but instead a form of active resistance. As American peace activist G Simon Harak suggests, “Walking is such a good means for non-violent ends because it shares so many of the characteristics of non-violence – in its gradual approach to things, in its time for reflection, in its building of community, in its communion with the earth, and in making the walker available, even vulnerable, to others on the road to peace.” Despite his own ambiguous relationship to art practices (on which I have written about elsewhere), there is little doubt that Gandhi realised early in his activist career that there was an art to taking a walk, as well as a politics to pedestrianism.

So, in Tolstoy Farm on the outskirts of Johannesburg – founded in 1910, the second of such communes that he set up over the course of his lifetime – walking was part of the everyday regime of frugality and fitness, but it was also a conscious and conscientious opting out of industrial modernity and the capitalist regulation of the time, indeed a rejection of what has been called the ‘empire of speed’ that was being put in place by the later nineteenth century.

Gandhi and his close companion of those days, the Jewish German architect Hermann Kallenbach, made a regular habit of setting out as early as 4 am to walk twenty-one miles over five and a half hours to their respective offices in the centre of Johannesburg, returning late at night on the same day on foot. Although, in his South African days as well as later in India, Gandhi did use other modes of industrial-age transportation for long-distance travels – the train, the car and the ship – walking remained his favoured mode of mobility, signalling a declaration of independence from everything other than his own body, a form of somatic sovereignty.

Correspondingly, the walking staff – like the spinning wheel – is also a symbol of the Mahatma’s proud declaration of freedom from bodily dependence on mechanical and other contrivances of the industrial age. In turn, Gandhi’s ambulatory penchants may also be read as a form of anti-colonial resistance at a time when the

British overlords with whom he contended moved about on horses or automobiles. In 2000, when Bill Clinton visited India, the president of the Republic, KR Narayanan, reportedly called upon Husain to make a painting of Gandhi that he could gift to the US president. ‘It was Husain’s favourite subject, too,’ his companion Rashda Siddiqui writes. The result is perhaps one of the artist’s most elegant representations of the mobile Mahatma in a work that Husain appropriately titled Gandhi: Spirit of Freedom Forges Ahead. The dhoti-clad Mahatma does indeed forge ahead on Husain’s canvas, staff in hand, his very act of walking propelling him into the future, his pocket watch jauntily swinging from his waistband, a white dove fluttering above his striding figure. Walking, peace and non-violence are all condensed in this lovely canvas – exemplary of what I am characterising as an aesthetic of the ambulatory – which an American president carried back with him to distant Washington, DC.

In his pioneering essay from 1950, “Techniques of the Body”, the sociologist Marcel Mauss reminded us that in the art of using the human body, the facts of education are dominant. ‘The constant adaptation to a physical, mechanical or chemical aim (eg, when we drink) is pursued in a series of assembled actions, and assembled for the individual not by himself alone but by all his education, by the whole society to which he belongs, in the place he occupies in it. Of all the many roles that he was made to take on – activist, nationalist, father (b¯apu), saint (mah¯atma) – the one that Gandhi himself most acknowledged was that of teacher (guru), one tasked with the charge of “educating” his people to stand up to what he perceived as the excesses and outrages of industrial capitalism and its runaway colonisation of the body, mind and soul. I have suggested that his pedestrianism and ambulatory politics was very much part of this pedagogic impulse of living “disobediently” in such a modern world.

Walking for him was far more than a somatic activity; it was as well a way of thinking and being, a declaration of sovereignty. But if this was the case with Gandhi, what is it about the mobile Mahatma on the move, staff in hand, and bare and spare body clad in the meagre folds of a dhoti, that catches the eye of India’s most famous modernist, and repeatedly so? Was it possibly the Mahatma’s declaration of somatic autonomy and sovereignty? Husain, as we know, practised his own form of bodily disobedience by walking everywhere, from the mid-1960s, on bare feet. In several of his full-length self-portraits, he also paints himself standing on bare feet, even when the rest of him is clothed most elegantly. In the evocative Passage into Human Space, likely completed around 1975, and another masterly signpost for the aesthetic of the ambulatory, Husain’s Gandhi is painted in the act of walking, one foot raised but hidden from the viewer, the other, bare and bony, firmly placed on the ground. Yet, this is a rare instance in which the artist shows us Gandhi’s bare feet, almost as if to do so would be to establish equivalence between himself and the father of the nation, undermining the obvious reverence with which Maqbool approached the Mahatma, on canvas and in real life.

This is an excerpt from the essay “Maqbool and the Mahatma” by Sumathi Ramaswamy from the book accompanying the eponymous DAG exhibition, Husain: The Timeless Modernist, that is on display till December 14, 2024, at DAG, New Delhi.