Pushbutton Gandhi

“Gandhian values of nonviolence and truth are relevant for all times. The challenge was to get the message across to the younger generation. So we used the medium of technology they are so fascinated with,’’ says Savita Singh, director of the Eternal Gandhi museum and memorial.

The exhibition is an expansion of an older, more solemn memorial, the sprawling colonial-style house where Gandhi spent the last 144 days of his life. It was on its grounds in 1948 that Gandhi, walking to a daily prayer meeting, was shot dead by a Hindu radical.

For many years, the house has been a pilgrimage destination for millions of Indian and foreign visitors. At the entrance, a large statue of Gandhi with two children holding a dove greeted the visitor with a sign saying “My Life Is My Message.’’ Visitors reverently took off their shoes to enter the grassy grounds. The things in his room—his glasses, walking stick, sandals, spinning wheel and wood cot—were preserved as they were when he was alive.

Now the house also has what claims be India’s first hands-on, multimedia museum. But in a society where officials closely guard their authority, it is largely hands-off for visitors. Instead, about 18 young docents, picked from underprivileged families, clad in Gandhi’s trademark handspun clothes, control the buttons and the visitor’s experience.

“We don’t encourage the visitors to touch, because these are sensitive and expensive machines,’’ says Singh. “Our visitors are not as disciplined and sophisticated like those visiting the Smithsonian or the New York museums. A number of our visitors are villagers and are unfamiliar with computers.’’

The museum uses archival film footage extensively in several exhibits. In the first gallery, a small touch-screen computer slides along a mud wall that, in a blend of tradition and the modern, is coated with cow dung that in Indian villages is traditionally viewed as a purifying agent.

Moved along the wall by a docent, the screen presents a tableau of events from Gandhi’s life in film and photographs—his childhood, sepia-toned family portraits, the scene from Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film Gandhi when he is thrown out of a first-class train coach in South Africa, and many others.

In a section about Gandhi’s tireless campaign against India’s caste system, a docent encouraged visitors to form a human chain around a carved pillar. When the visitors held hands, the pillar lit up. The mere act of people touching strangers whose caste was unknown to them was meant to remove biases at this exhibit, called the “Pillar of Castelessness’’, the docent explains.

“The light comes on, and the caste prejudice vanishes,’’ he says.

“Gandhi can be discovered in many ways, this is just one,’’ says Singh. “What makes his message eternal are not these computers anyway.’’ (Rama Lakshmi)