Recasting Gandhi Against The Machinery Of Power

At the India Art Fair this year, amid a wide range of artistic practices on display, Debanjan Roy’s sculpture offers a distinct visual and political proposition. Installed at Aicon Contemporary’s booth, the bronze figure of Mahatma Gandhi is instantly recognisable, but without grandeur. Behind Gandhi looms the arm of a bulldozer, a demolition hammer frozen mid-gesture. The juxtaposition is jarring, deliberate, and deeply unsettling.

The sculpture draws from the visual grammar of the Gyarah Murti, the iconic marching Gandhi monument in Delhi. But Roy fractures that image by introducing an industrial weapon , a machine arm associated today not with development, but with punishment. Asked about the bulldozer, Roy does not hedge. “It represents power,” he said simply.

For Roy, Gandhi is not a distant moral icon. He, as the artist puts it, represents people of India. “Gandhi is an icon for the entire nation and I have been working with his figure as an artist for a long time,” he told Outlook. “But I always contextualise it in contemporary social events. These tools and breakers are meant for progress and development, but are now being used to cause harm.”

The power, Roy insists, is never abstract. “When a machine works, behind it there is always a human,” he told Outlook. “A man is operating it, deciding who stands in front of him. He wants the other to bow. If you don’t bow, he demolishes.” The sculpture, then, is not only about destruction of buildings, but of identity, memory, and belonging - culture, religion, history flattened in the name of authority. 

A graduate of Rabindra Bharati University with years of both national and international exhibitions under his belt, Roy has long used sculpture as both mirror and critique of society. From bronze to fiberglass, his materials depict a deeper seriousness beneath their often-playful surfaces. 

Roy’s engagement with Gandhi is not a one-off stunt or fair-season gimmick , it is a subject he has returned to for well over a decade. First noticed for his 2002 solo The Voyeur in Kolkata, his practice took a decisive turn when he began appropriating Gandhi, not as a saint, but as a cultural surface onto which contemporary anxieties are projected. In the India Shining series, Gandhi appears in trousers and trainers, speaking on a cellphone, using a laptop, wearing headphones. In 2018, Gandhi Taking Selfie with the Cow became one of the fair’s most discussed works, quietly puncturing the politics of symbolism.

In Roy’s hands, Gandhi isn’t just remembered; he’s refracted through everyday life, social media, consumer culture, and political theatre.

To attack Gandhi, Roy argued, is not to insult history, but to expose how the values associated with him are being hollowed out. “When you attack him,” he said, “you are attacking the people of this country.” 

The bulldozer arm does not move, but its presence is heavy enough to be felt. Gandhi keeps walking, but the direction is no longer certain.

What remains is an uncomfortable question, not about art, but about power itself, and who gets to wield it.