Blood! How It Sticks!

An assassination painting of Gandhi at the Rashtrapati Bhavan has long been considered astonishingly prescient. But is it just an exercise in myth-making?

- Sneha Bhura

Right in front of Rashtrapati Bhavan’s new ceremonial hall hangs a most curious painting on Mahatma Gandhi—a giant impressionist oil-on-canvas by Polish-born British artist Feliks Topolski. The description next to the painting offers the most familiar strand of mystique associated with it.

“[The painting] ... shows Mahatma Gandhi bathed in blood leaning on two young women, calmly slumping to the ground. It was painted in 1946, as if in precise premonition of Gandhiji’s assassination two years later. It was later re-worked as part of a large four-panel painting titled, ‘The East 1948’ which Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru acquired on a visit to London in 1949,” it reads. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on January 30, 1948. But could Topolski really have foreseen the precise details of his killing? At the heart of this mystery are two paintings: one done in 1946 and a reworked version in 1948.

The version displayed at the Rashtrapati Bhavan Cultural Centre has a collapsing figure of Gandhi in his blood-stained loin-cloth, being carried by two women, and surrounded by a sea of shocked faces. Prominently, there is another man, with his back facing the onlooker, holding two terracotta pots. The richly detailed painting has an atmosphere of chaos. However, the Rashtrapati Bhavan art collection e-catalogue has titled the painting as ‘Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, 1946’.