Gandhi portraits: India, Hungary seek Unesco tag

It was January 8, 1934, and Mahatma Gandhi had granted young Hungarian artist Elizabeth Brunner exactly 15 minutes.

- Vrinda Tulsian

NEW DELHI: Brunner, undeterred by the Mahatma's scepticism about portrait painting, began sketching his downward gaze — capturing not just his weathered features but what she saw as his inner spirit.

That brief encounter, which Gandhi would later sign and treasure, now anchors an ambitious cultural preservation effort. India and Hungary are jointly seeking Unesco's prestigious Memory of the World status for Brunner's remarkable collection of over 2,000 portraits documenting India's independence era, officials at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts said.

The bid runs parallel to a separate joint application with Nepal to inscribe Emperor Ashoka's ancient stone edicts.

Brunner's path to that fateful veranda began with dreams — literally. Driven by recurring visions of Rabindranath Tagore, she arrived in India from Hungary in 1929 with her artist mother, Elizabeth Sass Brunner. Financial hardship and bureaucratic hostility nearly forced their deportation, but refuge came at Tagore's Santiniketan under master artist Nandalal Bose.