Shiju Narayanan, a wedding photographer from Pangu near Kadampuzha in the district, had set his eyes on the country’s 74th Independence Day which was celebrated on Saturday when he started working on a statuette portraying the historical Dandi March taken out by Mahatma Gandhi.
“Like the famous spinning wheel of Mahatma Gandhi, his Dandi March too had deeply entrenched in my mind from childhood. I wanted to give shape to it sometime. And this year’s Independence Day gave me the right opportunity to give life to the imagery in my mind,” said Mr. Narayanan after finishing his statuette in chemical clay.
The government had chosen the Dandi March as the central theme of this year’s Independence Day celebrations. “Although the march had taken place in March-April of 1930, our Independence Day is the best time to commemorate that historic occasion. What touched me in the Dandi March was the youthfulness of Gandhiji, who was well past 60 years of age then,” he said.
Mr. Narayanan said the lockdown had given him a lot of spare time to vent his artistic imagination. He drew many pictures, sculpted many shapes, and focused on creative expressions of varying nature.
He used thin iron rods as a base for the Dandi March statuette.
Mr. Narayanan has plans to give shape to the famous scene of Mahatma Gandhi being led by his grandson Kanu Gandhi at Mumbai’s Juhu beach in 1937. This picture, taken while Gandhi was recuperating from an illness in Mumbai in December 1937, had recently popped up in the social media wrongly ascribing it to the Dandi March.
