ABSTRACT
In the decades that followed the Indian independence, visuality and visual culture borrowed heavily from the ideas of the nation state and its “makers,” the ideas of nationalism linked with significant personalities of the freedom struggle and the conceptions of a glorious past that existed before the arrival of the British. This chapter focuses on understanding the spectatorship and visuality in the 1960s and 1970s print culture and examines the intersections where the public or the popular domain interacts with the national and domestic sphere of middle class. It aims at studying how popular culture is instrumental in re-engineering the middle-class sensibilities. This chapter also deals with the concept of spectatorship and darshan and how it is visualized in the two biographies of Gandhi in the comic book medium.
