Public Lecture

Gandhi and the Politics of Visual Representation

Date: April 22, 2012
Time: 5:30pm to 7:30pm
Location: Cal Poly Pomona, Bronco Student Center, Ursa Minor

There is but no question that Mohandas Gandhi remains, more than six decades after his assassination, the most iconic figure of modern India. Indeed, he is the only ‘secular’ figure around whom a distinct and complex iconography began to develop in his own lifetime. Gandhi has been a blessing to cartoonists; and nearly every major Indian artist of consequence, from M. F. Husain and Ramkinkar Baij to Ghulam Muhammad Sheikh and Atul Dodiya, over the course of the last half-century has engaged with Gandhi in his or her work. In this talk, Vinay Lal will examine the life and work of Gandhi in the light of various forms of visual representation, from cartoons and public statues to paintings and nationalist prints, and suggest what kind of insights we might be able to derive from a study of these images.

Event Flyer

Vinay Lal

Vinay Lal earned his Ph.D. with Distinction from the University of Chicago in 1992 after undergraduate and masters degrees in literature and philosophy from Johns Hopkins University. He has taught history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) since 1993 and most recently was Professor of History at University of Delhi (2010-11). His dozen books include Deewaar: The Footpath, the City, and the Angry Young Man (HarperCollins, 2011); Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres (ed., Oxford, 2009); The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century, co-edited with Ashis Nandy (Viking Penuin, 2005); Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture (Penguin, 2005); The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2003); and Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2002). His work has been translated into Hindi, Urdu, Kannada, French, German, Spanish, Finnish, Korean, and Persian. He is also honored to have been profiled at some length in David Horowitz’s book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2007).