From Mahatma to Saint-Hero: The Global Icon of Gandhi in Korea, 1920-1950

Abstract

My dissertation, titled “From Mahatma to Saint-Hero: The Global Icon of Gandhi in Korea, 1920-1950,” traces the journey of Gandhi’s image across oceans from the Indian subcontinent to the Korean peninsula via newspapers, short stories, and photographs. In colonial Korea, Gandhi was interpreted (and misinterpreted) in variegated ways as a Christ-like saint and a secular political leader; as a London-trained barrister and heir to India’s ancient traditions; and, by turns, as a “leader of our own” and a disappointing failure. I read Gandhi’s image in Korean mass media through his East Asian title of “Saint-Hero” to show how the Korean public negotiated the boundaries between “religious” and “secular” against global modernity and empire; and how a global icon irreversibly transformed the life trajectories of select individuals. I frame Gandhi’s East Asian title “saint-hero” as “modern sanctity” and argue that it linked ascetic virtue to political efficacy, allowing religious and nationalist intellectuals to envision moral authority as a guide to collective life and activism. I define “modern sanctity” as an ongoing project of reimagining goodness and virtue in colonial and post-independence Korea in response to the increasingly secularized political mission of colonial resistance and nation building. In this view, religious and hagiographical concepts of “saintliness” and “heroism” turn into a public and political argument. My project incorporates India and complicates established scholarship on colonial Korea’s experience with modernity. The historiography of modern Korea has adopted a nationalist framework in which the nation-state (with all its trappings of universal modernity) inevitably followed Korea’s independence from Japanese rule in 1945. Such a historiography is particularly prominent when Japan – Korea’s colonizer – was held up as the only mirror against which Korea reflected and reinvented itself. Overall, my dissertation delivers three important contributions to the existing scholarship on colonial Korea, Gandhi, and mass media in the twentieth century. First, it discovers new primary sources that trace Gandhi’s footprints in Korea mass media. Specifically, it documents early uses of the title “Gandhi of Korea,” first around Cho Man-sik and later Ham Sŏk-hŏn. Second, it looks beyond Japan – Korea’s colonizer in the first half of the twentieth century – and uncovers understudied sources of inspiration, including India, in Korea’s search for spirituality in an uneasy encounter with modernity. Finally, through seeing modern saints such as Gandhi as icons magnified by the thriving mass media of the time, the project provocatively redefines celebrity and charisma by rethinking the relationships between religious devotion, political leadership, and popular culture fandom.