The morning after his assassination; Mahatma Gandhi's dead body decorated at Birla House; New Delhi; January 31; 1948. Original caption: Mahatma Gandhi lying in State - Flowers; symbolising in their transience the perishability of the body and affirmative in their beauty of a realm of immaterial and imperishable values; covered the body which had been the vehicle of one of the greatest efflorescences of the human spirit. Gandhiji's face showed no trace of his violent death and looking at the serenity of his countenance; one could almost imagine that he was llistening with closed eyes to the Scripture which the Sikh priest is reading at left.