Touching Care: Gandhi and the Art of Healing the Leprous Body

What does a haptic history of the most famous Indian of the twentieth century reveal—and occlude?  I explore this question by turning to a set of under-analyzed photographs which show M. K. Gandhi, late in his own life, offering “touching” care to an elderly Brahmin follower afflicted by leprosy. Although I engage with the empire of biomedicine (including resistance to it through nativist strategies), my primary interest lies in opening for scrutiny the politics, ethics, and the aesthetics of touch in Gandhi’s act(s) of caregiving.  This is especially critical because Gandhi’s care for the leprous body coincided with the larger struggles he was carrying out in those very years against “the blight” of “untouchability.”  This was not lost on the Mahatma who drew a parallel between the stigma associated with the leprosy-afflicted body and the stigma that burdened the body of the untouchable—and by extension, all Indians. The photographs – and artworks inspired by them – help me to argue that Gandhi delivers an object lesson on how and why to offer (touching) care for the stigmatized Other in the time of untouchability.

Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of History, and Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University.  She has published on language politics, gender studies, spatial studies and the history of cartography, visual studies and the modern history of art, and more recently, digital humanities and the history of philanthropy in modern India.  She is a co-founder of Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture (www.tasveerghar.net).  Her most recent works are the monograph Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience (2020), the digital project B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child in Modern India (https://sites.duke.edu/bisforbapu/ ) (2020), and a co-edited volume Photographing Disobedience: Bombay 1930-1931 (2025). She is currently completing a new monograph titled Dying to Give: The Accidental Birth of Educational Philanthropy in Tamil India.