A New Global Icon: Gandhi in the 21st Century

Speaker: Dr. Arundhati Virmani, École des Hautes Étudesen Sciences Sociales, Marseilles

Chair: Smt Varsha Das, former Director, National Gandhi Museum, Rajghat

The globalization of the figure of Mahatma Gandhi received a formal endorsement with the United Nations General Assembly resolution in 2007 to observe October 2, his birth anniversary, as the International Day of Non-Violence. This talk explores the agents, mediums and processes of production, and implications of exporting a national heritage by looking at the installation of Gandhi statues across the world. It presents the features of specific statues and draws out comparisons between different representations