The travails of the modern icon

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The travails of the modern icon-Balance and fairness elude the Indian quartet, whose fate sways between hagiography and hysterical downsizing

Icons have always been a part of memory and heritage, carrying the seal of the sacred.
Classical iconography was, in fact, the study of religious icons, an exploration of symbols and their meaning.
While iconography has a sense of tradition, modern society looks at its icons differently.
The perspective did not always carry the mark of the sacred, but combined folklore and propaganda in interesting ways.

An important plurality

Folklore captures a sense of orality and storytelling in plural ways.
Each locality has its own version of the hero and his exploits, providing a sense of a modern epic.
Yet, the stories can be deeply plural, reflecting different histories and memories.
Mass culture and state propaganda operate differently.
If folklore has a sense of joy, mass culture brings to its icons a sense of frenzy, hysteria, what one can call a modern sense of idolatry.
The narrative possesses an official character which creates a grid of uniformity.
The stories are hyperbolic, following a grid.
Often there is an attempt to rewrite history or give it a caricatured quality.
The fate of the Indian icon has been constructed differently. The poignancy comes from a benign neglect, reducing memory and commemoration to a ritualistic event, an empty marker.

The four pillars

In fact, it is interesting to consider the fate of four great modern Indian icons — Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru (left, in picture), Vallabhbhai Patel (right, in picture) and Subhas Chandra Bose.
Each followed a different narrative and each suffered what we can call the travails of the modern icon.
The Gandhi of the independence movement was every child’s icon, hero and idol.
But Indian officialdom and the historian created a one-sided Gandhi, a saint rather than an experimental politician.
The uncomfortable questions he raised, the controversies around him were forgotten.
From one of the great monuments of the era, he became a memorial and was soon reduced to mnemonic commemorations on birthdays through official clichés.
In 2019, it’ll be 150 years since his birth, and one realises he is being strip-mined for official slogans and programmes, where his great quotations become clerical clichés.
A Gandhian programme combined the political and the ethical, which Swachh Bharat Abhiyan does not — it is a mere act of governance, a spectacle which has still to encounter untouchability and the septic tank.

Nehruvian magic

The fate of Nehru has been the most controversial.
The memory of Nehru has been battered by opponents ever since the war with China.
Nehru has been unfairly constructed as a Pandora’s box of errors since then.
One has to acknowledge that his leadership evoked a different style, a different set of memories from Indira Gandhi’s.
Nehru’s ideas of modernisation still have a political appeal.
Nehru is a perennial icon, whose ability to survive has made a mockery of his critics.

Appropriation of Patel

The recent events around Sardar Patel capture the travails of a modern icon poignantly. .
Patel, like Bose, was labelled one of the ignored men of modern history, even when both were larger-than-life creatures in folklore.
In fact, they did not need the manicuring of history to make them relevant.
The humanity, the vulnerability, the ethical genius of each of these exemplars disappears in these acts of exaggeration or downsizing.
The sadness is that all four icons understood the limits of power and history.
One misses professionalism, the craft of academic scholarship in these moments where contemporary power destroys history for opportunistic reasons.