Iconic India - Part 2

In the name of Ram

Dacoits and bandits The word dacoit (bandit) is probably derived from the Hindi word dakaitee, armed robbery. The most famous Indian dacoit was Chambal’s Phoolan Devi, while the bandit title went to south India’s Veerappan. Devi’s apparel and Veerappan’s moustache are irreplaceable in popular culture but unfortunately their real life exploits were completely eclipsed by Bollywood’s Gabbar Singh.

Ashoka’s legacy Ashoka turned from conqueror to loving father of his people when he converted to Buddhism. And 2,200 years later, the lion capital of his pillar at Sarnath became the emblem of the Indian republic. Four lions in mid-growl sit atop a drum showing the Buddhist chakra and four other animals, all incarnations of the Buddha.

Gods ride chariots. Epic heroes like Arjuna rode war chariots. When BJP leader L K Advani wanted to spread his message of Hindutva in 1990 — by staking the Hindu majority’s claim to the supposed Ram janmabhoomi in Ayodhya — he too rode a “rath”. This one was a decorated minibus, on its way from Somnath to Ayodhya. It hit a roadblock when Advani was arrested. But frenzied kar sevaks brought down the Babri Masjid nevertheless.

A fistful of salt

Political r oles rs These two men are the most successful examples of filmsta crossing over to politics in India. They became trendsetters even while politicking. While N T Rama Rao chose Swam i Vivekananda’s garb in Adhra Pradesh, ostensibly to emphasise his populist policies, M G Ramachandran cultivated his own

Chacha Nehru’s r ose Nehru was occasionally photographed with children: voilà, he became Chacha Nehru. Nehru wore a rose in his second buttonhole, whenever roses were in season: voilà, there are Nehru Rose Gardens around the country. But Nehru’s rose, like his elegant clothes, was a mark of the man’s love for quality of all sorts, and so closely identified with him that few other people in the public eye since have had the courage to attempt similar accessorisation. And these dayys what man will wear a flower?

image with trademark fur cap and dark glasses to mask his balding pate and sunken eyes.

Mother Husain-nama He may no longer be the Indian artist who commands the

highest prices for his canvases but he is India’s face of modern art, the barefoot painter who remains, at 93 years, a rockst ar.

In exile currently, on account of an obscenity case against him, Husain is hardly a stranger to controversy, having first courted it when he painted Indira Gandhi as Durga

After the Congress declared “full independence” from British rule as its goal in 1930, the first issue Gandhi chose to campaign against was the salt tax that hurt the poorest the most. Satyagrahis marched 390 km, from the Sabarmati ashram to the sea at Dandi, to “make salt”, defying the might of the Empire. A symbolic masterstroke.

during the Emergency, earning flak from the intelligentsia.

Partitioned Partition is the original sin of the Indian republic. The word refers not just to the division of territory but to the entire set of experiences set in motion in those hurried pre-Independence months of 1947 (historians will say, much earlier), whose tremors we, in all three countries, still feel each day. Millions were displaced, hundreds of thousands killed, and much suffering undergone. Yet the Indian nation survived — with scars.

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, Mother Teresa to most of us, was called the “angel of mercy” by Calcutta’s poorest and least cared-for. Her charity and drive built one of the world’s largest and best-organised missionary organisations, and also won her the Nobel Peace Prize and a great deal of criticism. Regardless of a formal conferring of sainthood, the blue-bordered sari of her order has itself became iconic, a symbol of selfless love.