Pushbutton Gandhi

Gandhi is now available at the push of a button. The Eternal Gandhi museum seeks to bring the nation’s founding father to people growing up in an India the ascetic never envisioned, one filled with foreign cars, cellphones, fast-food chains, malls and multiplex theatres.

The challenge was to get the message across to the younger generation. The exhibition is an expansion of an older, more solemn memorial, the sprawling colonial-style house where Gandhi spent the last 144 days of his life. It was on its grounds in 1948 that Gandhi, walking to a daily prayer meeting, was shot dead by a Hindu radical.
For many years, the house has been pilgrimage destinations for millions of Indian and foreign visitors. Now the house also has what claims to be India’s first hands-on, multimedia museum.

The musem uses archival film footage extensively in several exhibits. In the first gallery, a small touch screen computer slides along a mud wall which, in a blend of tradition and the modern, is coated with cow dung that in Indian villages is traditionally viewed as a purifying agent. Moving along the wall, the screen presents a tableau of events from Gandhi’s life in film and photographs, his childhood, family portraits, the scene from Richard Attenborough’s 1982 Gandhi when he is thrown out of first-class train coach in South Africa, and many others.

In a section about Gandhi’s timeless campaign against India’s caste system, visitors are encouraged to form a human chain around a carved pillar. When the visitors hold hands, the pillar lights up. The mere act of people touching strangers whose caste is unknown to them is meant to remove biases at this exhibit called the “Pillar of Castelessness”.

Courtesy Sunday Express, August 27, 2006