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| Edited By: Ornella D'Souza |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 12, 2019, 01:13 PM IST
The 1930s saw the world in a political tumult. USA and parts of Europe had buckled under the Great Depression. Nazism was rife in Germany, fascism in Italy, and communism in Russia. Asia, meanwhile, had two battles slowly brewing. In India, the freedom movement against the British Raj and quest for democracy was picking pace under Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. In China, Mao Zedong and his Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were fighting the Second Sino-Japanese war, while booting out the ruling Nationalist Party. Both men had the heart of the masses, they were yet, though steadily nearing, to evolve into world leaders they finally became.
Perhaps, Swiss photojournalist Walter Bosshard can take some credit in magnifying Gandhi and Mao’s stature to the West. He was the first European photojournalist to gain intimate access to the two, claim Gayatri Sinha – Director of Critical Collective and Peter Pfrunder, Director of Swiss Foundation for Photography (SFP), Winterthur, co-curators of Envisioning Asia: Gandhi & Mao in Photographs of Walter Bosshard.
The photo-exhibition Byculla’s Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, displays Bosshard’s 1930 chronicles of Gandhi, the Dandi March and his ‘barefoot army’ of mainly farmers, and 1936 onward chronicles of Mao, his Red Army (military arm of CCP) also of peasants, but given uniforms. Negatives of the 50 photographs, preserved at SFP’s archives for 90 years now, were restored and digitized to showcase for the first time outside the archives.
Bosshard’s India photographs show Gandhi, days before the Dandi March, typically cocooned in handspun khadi – reading a local daily, sipping onion soup, snoozing, and shaving with a Gillette razor – which sticks out considering his ‘call to use Swadeshi goods’ came just after the March. Given the large scale dissemination of Gandhi’s photographs, it’s Bosshard’s images of Gandhi’s followers that shed new light on ‘Boycott British’ movement, of painting their sloganeering on posters, badges, umbrellas, and selling the Gandhi topi.
He was the first European to gain access to the cavernous, mountainous Yan’an, where Mao’s Red Army recruits were holed up to train to fight off the Japanese. His photographs document them studying communism, indulging in sticky rice, smoking pipes, their political billboards, and traverse through the barren terrains. In comparison, Mao’s men appear to have warmed up more to Bosshard’s lens than the Gandhi’s men. Also noticeable in the silent film on Mao’s China on display here that Bosshard was the first to make.
Walter Bosshard was born in a Swiss village, Samstagem, in 1892. On his first assignment, a German Central Asia expedition to the Himalayas and Taklamakan desert in 1928, he became equipped with film cameras and photojournalism. Magazines were opening up to the idea of photo reportage, “and when he was back, Bosshard found himself at the right place, right time,” says Pfrunder.
Bosshard’s 1930s alternated between the two Asian countries. As a keen observer of world politics, sensed India’s freedom struggle was worth a photo-op, and on an exclusive contract, with Munich Illustrated Press, landed in India in 1930. His photographs caused such a furor in the international press, it brought photo giants like Henri-Cartier Bresson, Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White to India for their moment with the Mahatma.
During his first assignment China in 1931 to cover the First Chinese National Assembly, he got acquainted with the Communist-Nationalist tussle and Japanese invasion. As he didn’t want to associate with the Nazi press, he moved to China for 10 years, and engaged in daily reportage of the changing political climate under Mao for Life magazine, and even learnt the language.
Gandhi and Mao, though confident to face the camera, in their own way also evaded it. Gandhi looked at the camera in his growing years, with Kasturba in England, and Africa, in typical studio setups. But with Bosshard and photographers thereafter – even for grandson Kanu’s sepia-tone images – he purposely disengaged from the lens, as if the photographer was absent, though he let them capture private moments. Mao, however, looks directly into Bosshard’s lens, but allows only one such photograph. “Bosshard captured Gandhi and Mao as two power-seizing heads of seminal movements that led their nations to major transformation. He didn’t believe in the ‘utopia’ state Gandhi and Mao believed in, but he was a critical observer, anthropologically inclined, and did his job without taking sides,” says Sinha, letting on how Bosshard befriended the close ranks of Gandhi and Mao, who put him through the two leaders. A trick even the photojournalist of today will find handy.
