Leaving a Stamp (With Gandhi) on Global India’s Image

Mahatma Gandhi’s image is ubiquitous in India. Streets named after him can be found across the country, and his surname was even included in the capital of the state of Gujarat (from where he hailed). Moreover, nearly every rupee banknote carries his image.

The last solution, by the way, probably wouldn’t have been to the Mahatma’s liking. Gandhi, being religiously-minded and socially rather conservative, rejected many aspects of modernity, and a growing focus on material needs was surely one of the trends he opposed. A banknote was thus probably the last type of an object he would have liked his face to be put on. This was not a decision the Mahatma had a chance to overturn, however – Gandhi was murdered by Nathuram Godse in 1948, less than a year after India gained independence, and banknotes with his image began to appear only in 1987.

Gandhi’s image is probably very often associated with India outside the country as well, and, I could risk declaring, the story of this particular person’s life and views are a part of India’s soft power to this day. There are statues of Gandhi, and streets named after him, in various places around the globe (more than 50 countries host Gandhi statues, according to Gandhi World, a website dedicated to collecting such stories). One of the most paradoxical among these instances is a statue in the Parliament Square in Westminster, London. A representation of Gandhi was put there in 2015. The statue neighbors the British Parliament – an institution of the power the Mahatma spent the last decades of his life fighting against.

Here, however, I will focus on the case of Gandhi’s image on stamps as a curious instance of how a country’s soft power may be both a result of that state’s initiative as well as a result of the agency of other actors. A decision to name a street or put up a statue is usually taken by the authorities of a given country. In the case of philately, however, a state may ask other nations to print stamps with a given theme. This, I would argue, is a very delicate and often overlooked aspect of soft power; admittedly one of the softest ones there are. I will thus not argue here that issuing commemorative stamps really gives a state any political leverage or that it is one of the central elements of soft power. Yet I believe that the case of stamps is an instance as good as many others to ponder on the nature of soft power.

Over the past decades, more than 100 countries have printed stamps with the Mahatma’s depiction. A book published in October 2022 by Sushilkumar Agarwal (“Global Collectibles of Mahatma Gandhi”) claims that the countries that issued either Gandhi-related stamps or coins altogether number 135. It is also claimed that around 300 stamps carrying Gandhi’s image were issued outside of India. In India, the very first stamp had been printed already in 1948, the year of his assassination. 

Outside the country, 40 nations printed Gandhi stamps in 1969, on the occasion of the Mahatma’s birth centenary. Yet, as it turns out, many states did so following a polite request from India Post. For instance, according to the National Philatelic Museum in Delhi, such a request was issued again in 2019 (150 years since Gandhi’s birth), and one of the countries to issue a stamp at the time was Poland.

Thus, the case of stamps could be used to make a claim that soft power cannot exist without power – that the image of a country, and the reach of its culture, is not strong and deep without the involvement of its government. While the number of states that published stamps with Gandhi’s image, as well as their span – from a colorful one in the United States to a silk one in North Korea – is impressive, it is easy to claim that this scale would have been much smaller had India Post not been asking other countries to do so.

And yet I believe that the beauty of social sciences is that since they refer to the activities and thoughts of humans, the various subjects of their research are not easily measurable. Soft power is one of many such topics – and with it, the role of government’s agency in expanding this power is equally hard to establish. Among the countries that issued stamps with Gandhi’s image, many traditionally had good ties with India, for various reasons, such as former or current communist countries (like North Korea), some among India’s neighbors (like Myanmar), and states with a sizable Indian diaspora (like Mauritius). And yet the decision to issue a stamp cannot be reduced to a proxy of political relations in all cases.

The first country after India to print a Gandhi-themed stamp was the United States in 1961. This was at the height of the Cold War, and the state of political relations between New Delhi and Washington could hardly be assumed to be the main reason for taking such a decision. The stamp was issued as part of a Champions of Liberty series, thus being an initiative within the U.S., rather than a response to a request from India. The choice of people to depict for that iteration of the series of stamps (1960-1961) certainly crossed the political divides of the Cold War, as it also included both Italy’s Garibaldi and Poland’s Paderewski. In general, a similar point can be made about statues and street names – not all among them are introduced to earn diplomatic points in international relations.

Gandhi was and is seen mostly as one of India’s prominent freedom fighters – both in his country and beyond it. And yet, his image is not only this; again, both in India and elsewhere, he is also viewed as a special case of a leader who took on a colonial power by employing mostly peaceful, non-violent means. This is the aspect of Gandhi that finds particular resonance outside of India – admittedly, not everywhere across the globe, but still in various places. One will often read that both Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, among other important historical figures, took inspiration from the Mahatma.

Thus, I would not accept a claim that Gandhi’s image in the world reached a standing only because of India’s standing – that it is a function and a measure of New Delhi’s political influence. Other prominent aspects of Indian soft power, like yoga and Bollywood, are simply irreducible to the Indian government’s diplomatic actions. Soft power is soft both ways – its influence is not coercive, but because of this it also has a soft appeal. Others can accept it without being asked to do it, and they may do so in ways not entirely coherent with the intentions of those who deliberately enhance this power.