Political Iconography & the Female Political Leader: The Case of Indira Gandhi, Some Initial Questions
Trina Nileena Banerjee ‘The coming generation will feel extremely proud of the name of Indira Gandhi. They will worship her as the personification of Sita, Lakshmi and Durga. Long live Indiraji,’ ~ Virendra Khanna, General Secretary of National Affairs. [i] From a large portion of the visual, historical and literary material emerging around the National Emergency in India (1975-1977), it could be argued that a strong undertone of religiosity and the sense of a mystical, yet terrifying, female power surrounded the popular perception of Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. Sita[ii], Lakshmi[iii] and Durga[iv], of course, stood for the virtues of chastity, purity, service, prosperity and strength – qualities that were seen to be embodied in Indira’s person during the first years of her government. The influence of religious, especially Hindu religious, iconography had always been a strong determinant in the popular representations of national political leadership in India and had managed to survive from the days of the nationalist struggle into the 1970s, as Christopher Pinney has shown in his book Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India.[v] In an essay called ‘Towards the Space of the Beholder’, Pinney writes: Ramakrishna, as also Swami Vivekananda, initially subjected to photographic regimes, were very soon circulated through the technology of chromolithography – a way of disseminating photos of the gods (bhagwan ke photo) which was more phenomenologically adequate to the task of impressing quasi-divine power. The same would soon also be true of the political pantheon as it merged towards the end of the nineteenth century. Tilak, Gandhi, Ambedkar and numerous others were endlessly photographically documented (many of them by the Bombay based photographer V. N. Virkar), but is as coloured lithographs that they sedimented themselves among the wider populace.[vi] An examination of Indira Gandhi’s representations in popular art during the 1960s and 1970s (as recorded in the prints available in Pinney’s book and various popular cartoons) reveals a continuation of this tradition: an odd visual continuum between the portrayal of godhead and that of political leadership. The element of worship, which had continued to feature prominently in the political and electoral popularity of figures of Indira Gandhi’s stature from the time of Independence, appears to be a strong subterranean current in these popular representations. This strand of religiosity was not a figment of imagination or wishful thinking that emerged from sections of Indira’s loyal coterie, but, arguably, significantly coloured the visual and verbal rhetoric of the dominant political propaganda surrounding her greatness, shaping mass-produced images and popular calendar art, and ultimately putting the final seal on the process of her deification during the nineteen months of the Emergency, when Congress President D. K. Barooah famously claimed “India is Indira, Indira is India.’ Pinney writes in his book about the continuities that existed in the 1960s’ and 70s’ between representations of technological/military advance, political leadership and religious figures: There were also, in the 1960s and ’70s, inevitably a vast number of Indira images; she is shown with Jawaharlal Nehru, with Sanjay, against the national flag. One series, strongly inflected with a Soviet socialist realist aesthetic, depicts scenes from the life of contemporary India within decorative interlocking cogs suggestive of a huge mechanized India. Heroic peasants clutching sheaves of wheat and sickles are juxtaposed with vast hydroelectric projects, the Trombay reactor, heavy engineering works and scenes of high-tech laboratories peopled by whitecoated technicians. Wendy O’Flaherty once commented on the Shivling-like contours of the Trombay reactor, suggesting that a postage stamp that bore its image depicted it within a religious frame. Be that as it may, some Hindu deities have always engaged intimately with modernity. Vishvakarma – a traditional deity of artisan castes – has long been worshipped through special pujas in steel and other factories throughout India…[vii] Impulses towards industrial modernity merged with celebrations of (Hindu) religious tradition the labour-power of ‘heroic peasants’; presiding over these images, yoking together ‘progress’ and the visual grammar of Hindu worship, was the benevolent figure of the then current Prime Minister and the concrete embodiment of the idea of ‘Mother India’. This essay will attempt to examine, through the case of Indira Gandhi, the complex and perhaps perverse imbrications of authoritarian rule, deification, embodiment and femininity in the Indian political context of the 1960s and 1970s. How a female political leader ‘performs her image’ in the post-colonial public sphere and the extra-rational implications of this performance, which tap on to both deep-seated religious and socio-cultural resources for success, would be the primary themes of exploration in this paper. The essay also emerges from my broader investment in a theoretical and historical exploration of women’s relationship to power in the realpolitik, their differential engagements with political violence (not just as victims but also as agents/perpetrators) and their associations with authoritarian/repressive/right-wing regimes and politico-religious movement. The association of a female political leader with perhaps the single-most repressive period in the political history of post-Independence India leads to an inevitable rethinking of the straightforward liberal feminist notion of female political agency as a positive in itself. I am interested in the relationship of this problematic to performance, especially the performance of gender in the public and political sphere. Popular visual representations – for example, the frequently misogynistic cartoons and caricatures in the mainstream media[viii] – of Indira Gandhi that were current during the period of her governance reveal much about the intimate, complex, and sometimes derisive, relationship existing between the iconic female leader and the postcolonial polity she governed. My specific interest is in the relationship of popular critiques, as well as celebrations, of political conservatism to the figure of the exceptionally powerful female. There is, in addition, the difficulty faced by feminists in reading such a figure, one who did nothing historically for the larger interests of marginalized women’s groups, as well as for ‘sisterhood’. This difficulty is addressed by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan in her essay ‘Gender, Leadership and Nation: The ‘Case’ of Indira Gandhi’[ix] in the book Real