The Week India – June 30, 2019

74 THE WEEK • JUNE 30, 2019

R

ight in front of Rashtrapati Bhavan’s new cer-

emonial hall hangs a most curious painting

on Mahatma Gandhi—a giant impressionist

oil-on-canvas by Polish-born British artist Fe-

liks Topolski. Th e description next to the painting off ers

the most familiar strand of mystique associated with it.

“[Th e painting] ... shows Mahatma Gandhi bathed in

blood leaning on two young women, calmly slumping

to the ground. It was painted in 1946, as if in precise

premonition of Gandhiji’s assassination two years

later. It was later re-worked as part of a large four-panel

painting titled, ‘Th e East 1948’ which Pundit Jawaha-

rlal Nehru acquired on a visit to London in 1949,” it

reads. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on January

30, 1948. But could Topolski really have foreseen the

precise details of his killing? At the heart of this mystery

are two paintings: one done in 1946 and a reworked

version in 1948.

Th e version displayed at the Rashtrapati Bhavan

Cultural Centre has a collapsing fi gure of Gandhi in his

blood-stained loin-cloth, being carried by two women,

and surrounded by a sea of shocked faces. Prominently,

there is another man, with his back facing the onlooker,

holding two terracotta pots. Th e richly detailed painting

has an atmosphere of chaos. However, the Rashtrapati

Bhavan art collection e-catalogue has titled the painting

as ‘Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, 1946’.

Th e original 1946 painting can be seen as frontispiece

in a 1953 book titled Sketches of Gandhi, compiled by

Gandhi’s youngest son, Devdas, who was managing ed-

itor of the Hindustan Times at the time. It does not have

much blood or chaos. Devdas wrote in the foreword to

the book that the painting shows “a profoundly calm

but limp fi gure of Gandhiji just prevented from falling

by the support of his companions... his right hand, half

raised in doubt and pain.”

Th ere is a black pipe-like object protruding from

the bottom-right of the 1946 painting. Th is has been in-

terpreted as a gun barrel and spawned a premonition

theory. But why is the gun pointed towards the viewer?

“Critics have described it as the artist’s premonition

of the assassination... the artist himself has neither

denied nor confi rmed the theory,” Devdas wrote.

Topolski had been Britain’s offi cial war artist during

World War II. He fi rst visited India in 1944 while

undertaking an extensive tour of China, Burma, the

Middle East and Africa. He penciled a number of

Gandhi sketches during this visit. Gandhi never really

gave any sittings for his sketches. But Topolski eff ort-

lessly captured the cadences of the dynamic leader by

shadowing him around.

But could Topolski have really gotten away with

predicting the Gandhi assassination in 1946 without a

modicum of a controversy? Or, was the intuitive artist

just portraying a tired Mahatma, in the last lap of his

freedom struggle which was not quite panning out in

the way he had hoped, with escalating communal divi-

BLOOD! HOW

IT STICKS!

An assassination painting of Gandhi at the

Rashtrapati Bhavan has long been considered

astonishingly prescient. But is it just an

exercise in myth-making?

BY SNEHA BHURA

PTI