ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that the forgetting and absence, if not betrayal, that the monuments dedicated to Gandhi convey. It argues that the graves of key figures from William Jones to Sri Aurobindo signified a gradual but definite shift from the colonial to the national, from the British contribution to India's modernization to India's own response to it. On the one hand, the monuments are supreme embodiments of the newly independent nation's notion of whom or what it is. This is the first major monument of a leader of independent India, the Father of the Nation no less. The memorial no longer allows itself to code the 'labour of memory' to 'fixed use', as desired by the state or permits the trauma that 'registers throughout the social field as a determinate entity'. This collective repression, as the author have argued, comes from the impossibility of parricide in the Hindu imaginary, a traditional taboo that Nathuram's supremely modern act seems to defy.
