“Sixty five years after his death, the general public knows a good deal more about what Gandhi thought of the world but virtually nothing at all of what the world thought of him.” 

These words, written by Ramachandra Guha in Gandhi Before India, suggest our failure to know Gandhi because of his multidimensional life history. This life history makes it almost impossible for us to contain him in only one image — adding to the problem of knowing anything at all of “what the world thought of him”. 

The iconic status of Mahatma Gandhi has always been a variable subject. He is studied for being both a quintessential Hindu figure and an ideal spokesperson for minority rights and equality in India, a Hindu-majority country. At times he is hailed as the most stubborn Indian leader in South Africa who constantly broke laws against British racial injustices, other times he is cited for his failure to save Bhagat Singh by signing the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of 1931. Despite his assassination in 1948, these stories of Gandhi have kept him alive. 

Gandhi’s standing has constantly shifted over time, not only due to changing historical experiences but also “emotional disparity”, people’s ever-changing way of conceiving their icon. Gandhi the icon becomes all the more difficult to retrieve because his image in contemporary India is imbued with “motifs…carriers of a secondary or conventional meaning…we want to call them stories and allegories. The identification of such images, stories and allegories is the domain of what is normally referred to as ‘iconography’”.

Gandhi today is more an icon than merely a leader who helped India gain freedom. From being a latter-day Rama, an epic hero and deity, to being the leader whose idealism is partly blamed for the bloodbath of Partition, Gandhi has travelled a great deal. The reason for Gandhi’s ever-shifting standing can be traced to the multifarious views he held on almost every matter — “philosophy of truth, nonviolence, village reconstruction, removal of untouchability, fight for social justice, status of women, Panchayati Raj, students, youth and his holistic views of life”, as an inscription at the Gandhi Museum puts it. Because of these broad-based and sometimes contradictory opinions, Gandhi is continuously studied, debated, discussed and analysed, making him a subject worth examining in different lights by different thinkers in different disciplines. 

Gandhi’s position as the “father of the nation” is used to justify or refute one’s claims about this iconic figure, thus offering a new dimension of looking at his life. It seems that Gandhi is time and again asked to provide justifications for the choices he made and the manner in which he governed. Every day, his views are put to some kind of a litmus test. Not only this, a significant part of the Gandhian literature has come about only in response to his views, either defending or deriding him over the experiments he conducted. Scholars, politicians and activists invoke his status as Bapu to comment on whether being in line with him is praiseworthy or not. 

As a result, the meaning of “Who is Gandhi?” is derived from people’s expectations of him and through the passage of time. Today, the real Gandhi is missing in the crowd of many appropriations of Gandhi. Today, the renown and acclaim of Gandhi rests on both the right and wrong usages of his name, something that began to take shape during his lifetime.  

In his own words: “The story of the misuse of my name is a long one. Men have been killed and falsehood propagated in my name; my name has been misused at the time of elections; cigarettes, to which I am totally opposed, are sold in my name, as also medicines! When the evil is so widespread, what can one do against it?”