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In 1907, while travelling from London to South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi began writing a dialogue between two characters, an Editor and a Reader. The imaginary conversation was published in 1909 as the book Hind Swaraj. A hundred years later, the debate hasn’t ended but instead of Reader and Editor, it is between artists and academics. To commemorate Hind Swaraj, Pukar, the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute and Jnanapravaha have organised a series of lectures. They will be accompanied by Detour, curated by Ranjit Hoskote, which is made up of works by Dayanita Singh, Ram Rahman, Samar Jodha, Ravi Agarwal and Sonia Jabbar. “The idea was to show how we’ve come back to the idea of Gandhi through the 100 years that have intervened,” said Hoskote in an interview with Time Out Mumbai. We asked him to give us a sneak peek at Detour.

“These posters are in some sense a graph of a certain phase in the history of the republic. They reflect upon his father Habib Rahman’s architecture [he was a senior architect with Delhi’s Central Public Works Department in the 1950s and ’60s] and on Le Corbusier, whose designs inspired the ISBT building. The Nehruvian thought that dominated Habib Rahman’s works are not the choices of the Editor, who was a stand-in for Gandhi himself, but more that of the Reader, probably modelled on Savarkar. This Nehruvian angle also makes a connect with Dayanita Singh’s photographs of Anand Bhavan”, Jawaharlal Nehru’s family home.

2 Ravi Agarwal’s “Scenes of Crime”

“Ravi Agarwal studied engineering and management and then came into environmental activism. The three works in ‘Scenes of Crime’ were prompted by our discussions. They combine performance and time exposure. It’s a good example of why I wanted Detour to be a show of photographs. The photographic image is a means of going away from reality only to come back to it. There was a danger that Detour might be seen as a Gandhi exhibition or photography exhibition. It’s neither one nor the other. It is a way of looking at five very interesting practices that reflect upon the idea of India.”

“Samar Jodha uses the television to meditate upon how media has spread, how there are different calibrations of economic reality and aspirations. He’s known more as an activist. Most of his work has a strong reportage angle and his practice is driven by the need to communicate what he has learnt and seen, much like the case of Sonia Jabbar, a writer who will show photographs she’s taken in Kashmir. This forges a connection between the practices of these artists and Gandhi, who was also one of our leading journalists and completely on the ball in terms of utilising media and technology to communicate and receive communication.”

The one thing absent in Detour is an image of Gandhi. This is because Hoskote would like to draw attention to Gandhi’s ideology, not his physical image. “Hind Swaraj is Utopic and a redemptive vision of the political as something that can redeem all of the complexities that arise from social life,” he said. “I think that is extremely relevant today. But also, it is an imagining of India from elsewhere. That’s what speaks most wonderfully to me.” See if your image of India is like the one held up to the light by Hoskote and the team of artists.

Among Christopher Pinney’s earliest memories is of walking along a beach in Mumbai with his father when he was six. Pinney, 50, now lives between England and America. He has returned to India many times since then and has established himself as an eminent scholar of South Asian culture. Best known for his books on Indian photography, Pinney, an anthropologist and art historian, will be in Mumbai to deliver a lecture on the trial of Bal Gangadhar Tilak in 1908, a year before the publication of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj.

Hind Swaraj is fundamentally about and against Tilak. Swaraj itself is a term popularised by Tilak (though probably invented by Shyamji Krishnavarma), and Tilak is alluded to many times in the text (though never named). I’m interested in the way it is infected by Tilak’s thought, even at the very moment that it mis-represents it. I mean by this that Gandhi’s arguments for non-violence are dependent upon the spectre of its other – violence (whose embodiment becomes the “extremists” and Tilak in particular). If Gokhale was Gandhi’s guru, I want to stress the equal (or perhaps more important) role of Tilak as Gandhi’s counter-guru. In his trial, Tilak developed philosophical positions as complex as those of Gandhi and I want to draw attention to these.

Tilak was undoubtedly the key focus of British anxiety: he is endlessly pathologised in colonial texts. Tilak is an awkward, dangerous and difficult figure but his importance is enormous in terms of the development of new techniques of mass-mobilisation, the development of a new language of anti-colonial journalism, and also, it has to be said, in providing intellectual justifications for the use of violence, the role of which in India’s freedom struggle is in danger of being underplayed. Gandhi was clearly a beneficiary of the relatively early deaths of Tilak and then Chittaranjan Das and these figures need to be reclaimed for a more complex historiography.

Images have been centrally important in reaching rural non-literate populations, constituting a pan-Indian entity that transcended regional languages, and stoking an intense identification with political possibilities through the richness and vividness of the visual. They were key vectors of “mass-mobilisation”. Images were also key agents in the transmission of “coded” political messages in ways that manage to evade colonial censorship.

Hind Swaraj’s key argument against the “extremists” concerns the threat of contamination through the adoption of “European” strategies. “To arm India on a large scale” in order to defeat British arms, Gandhi argues would be to “Europeanise it”, with the consequence that India’s condition would become “just as pitiable as that of Europe” (chapter XV). Gandhi argues that violence is part of (it implies and sustains) an interconnected system of industrialisation and corrupted ethics (what Heidegger terms “Zeugganzes”). By contrast, and paradoxically, in the Kesari articles that provoked his prosecution in 1908, Tilak focuses on violence as a potentiality of the self separated, for the first time, from this interconnected system. He develops a prescient model of a knowledge economy in which individuals are freed from infrastructural constraints. This is where he unexpectedly converges with aspects of Gandhi’s thought. Just as Gandhi says that Madan Lal Dhingra (who assassinated Curzon-Wylie in London in 1909) “gave his body in a wrong way”, so one can see how Gandhi and Tilak, apparently so wholly opposed, are engaged in a strangely intimate kind of dialogue.

It would be foolish to downplay Tilak’s Chitpavan Brahman exclusivism but seen over the longue durée, these identifications seem to lose their coherence and usefulness. Was Gandhi a friend of Dalits, or the schemer whose blackmail secured the Poona Pact? My position is that you can’t understand early Gandhi without thinking about Tilak just as you can’t understand the later Gandhi without thinking about Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar. Deepanjana Pal