It isn’t often that the settling pages of the canon can be ruffled to allow for a new insertion. Yet photographic history in India, nascent as it is, seems to have entirely written out Walter Bosshard, intrepid Swiss photographer, who came to India at least 16 or 17 years before the more famous Henri Cartier-Bresson and Margaret Bourke-White.
The moment was electrifying — Gandhi had chosen 78 followers who would march with him to the salt flats of Dandi to defy the implementation of the Salt Tax. In distant Munich, a leading paper, the Münchner Illustrierte Presse , saw this as a decisive turn in history and decided to send Bosshard to cover the historic moment.
Intimate portraits
Travelling overland, where he shot the coronation of Nadir Shah in Kabul, Bosshard made his way to the Saurashtra coastline and joined the march from Sabarmati to Navsari and Dandi. The term ‘march’ is, in a sense, deceptive — what Bosshard captures is long, patient lines of thousands of satyagrahis making their way to the coast.
Most walkers have joined in from neighbouring villages, barefeet, some carrying away unfiltered salt in wet, dripping bundles. Among them Gandhi appears unceremoniously, the grandeur of the moment rendered simple and communitarian. Bosshard, however, was tenacious and directly sought out Gandhi as subject.
The more significant images that he arrived at are the portraits of Gandhi, taken in close proximity, intimate portraits that humanise the Mahatma. In 1919, Gandhi had complained about a ‘darshan dilemma’ — of being endlessly viewed through the prism of public adulation. In Navjivan , he had written, “At present, even when people come for darshan , I continue to write and do other work.” In these early pictures by Bosshard, Gandhi’s attitude is the same, of never directly engaging the gaze of the camera — in this case, the darshan seeker — and continuing with his chores, as if the camera lens were a member of his inner circle.
Bosshard in Dandi gained extraordinary proximity to Gandhi, even asking if he could shoot the Mahatma as he slept. Through patience and proximity, what he gained were photographs of the Mahatma as he drank onion soup, shaved, and chatted with his inner circle that included Sarojini Naidu and Mithuben Petit. In the process, and perhaps quite unintentionally, Bosshard sets up an iconic image field for the Mahatma — his extreme dietary fastidiousness, the weaving of suti as a symbol of resistance, and the Mahatma’s relationship with the media, his reading and writing for newspapers, his role as editor and owner. These are the attitudes, and principle areas of action in which Gandhi was to be photographed again and again.
Interestingly, Bosshard had been commissioned by German media, who were already in the throes of a great change. Under the Nazi party, photography had entered a sphere of unprecedented spectacularism.
Led by his personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, newspapers had introduced Hitler at the helm of heavily militarised marches, games, and public meetings. A few years after he photographed Gandhi at Dandi, Bosshard travelled to the difficult terrain of Yan’an, where Mao Zedong was training the 8th Route army.
Creating the trope
Between these poles of a militarised Europe and China’s extended wars, which Bosshard covered extensively, his photographs of Gandhi in Dandi represent an entirely different philosophic and photographic aesthetic. The heavy posturing of Hitler and Mao’s self-conscious appearance before Bosshard’s camera are entirely negated by Gandhi, who appears as if in complete indifference to the camera lens. In this way, Gandhi and Bosshard together alter the document of the heroic leader, inserting something much more vital and identifiable instead.
Bosshard supports this by tracing the non-violent resistance to the British at the level of the street. He captures public displays of khadi sales in every State, being taken around on a bullock-drawn carriage, satyagrahis wearing patches of protest, Congress topis sold at street corners, young children weaving.
What would have aided Bosshard’s political understanding were his extensive travels, covering over 20,000 km by railroad and bullock cart. These would later come together in a publication, Indian Kampft! His photographs of Gandhi’s satyagraha were among the first to alert the Western world to the intense activity that the call to civil disobedience had generated. And it is the postures he recorded, Gandhi weaving, reading or conferring with his inner circle, that became the image tropes of the Mahatma, endlessly repeated over the next two decades. Now, as he enters India’s photography canon, Bosshard helps to fill in vital links to the 1930s, even as we only just begin to discover his archive.
The writer is an art critic and curator who, while preoccupied with her art website www.criticalcollective.in, is also contemplating a book
