This panel seeks to bring together a range of experts and/or graduate students from the humanities and the social sciences to present their work on the popular material and visual traditions that have come to be associated with Mahatma Gandhi for the 35th Conference on South Asia will be held on October 20 - 22, 2006 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The panel seeks papers from scholars working in sociology, anthropology, the history of photography, clothing, art and architecture (among others) that pertain to the Mahatma’s peculiar engagement with popular culture, his afterimage, and the cult that grew around him during his life and after his death. Since Gandhi was a sovereign, political figure in Indian history who never occupied any specific political office, it becomes important to examine the manner in which a charismatic, personality-based approach intersects with popular media and material practices to produce alternative sites of power that cannot be reduced to or confined within the logic of the sovereign nation state. On the one hand, then, this panel seeks to examine the manner in which Gandhi and his followers consciously harnessed specific material and visual practices and imbued them with a political content that pertained to the freedom and the upliftment of a colonized people. On the other hand, the panel also seeks to engage with the manner in which, Gandhi, after his death, was absorbed into a nationalist culture that had its own way of interpreting and publicizing his legacy. The key theme that this panel seeks to address, then, is the manner in which Gandhi resonates as a public icon in media and in material culture, as a political figure without designation, but not without authority.

Presenters contact:

Venugopal Maddipati, Graduate Student
Department of Art History
University of Minnesota
338/ Heller Hall, 271 19th Ave S
Minneapolis
Phone: 612 379 1258
Fax: 612 626 8679